The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [103]
“Now!”
Smoke poured off the tires as we careened across the tarmac; Bowden threw the basketball, which seemed to swell in size with the hole, the ball flattening to a disc and the hole stretching out to a line. We saw the basketball hit the hole, bounce once and let us through. I glanced at the watch as we tipped through into the abyss, the basketball shutting out the last glimpse of the world we had left behind as we dropped through to Elsewhere. Up until the point we passed the event, twelve minutes and forty-one seconds had elapsed. Outside it had been closer to seven hours.
“Motorcycle’s gone,” remarked Colonel Rutter. His second-in-command grunted in reply. He didn’t approve of non-Chronos attempting his work. They had managed to maintain the job’s mysticism for over five decades with the wages to suit; have-a-go heroes could only serve to weaken people’s undying trust in what they did. It wasn’t a difficult job; it just took a long time. He had mended a similar rent in spacetime that had opened up in Weybridge’s municipal park just between the floral clock and the bandstand. The job itself had taken ten minutes; he had simply walked in and stuck a tennis ball across the hole while outside seven months flashed by—seven months on double pay plus privileges, thank you very much.
The ChronoGuard operatives set up a large clock facing inward so any operatives within the field’s influence would know what was happening. A similar clock on the back of the helicopter gave the officers outside a good idea of how slow time was running within.
After the motorcycle disappeared they waited another half-an-hour to see what would happen. They watched Bowden slowly rise and throw what appeared to be a basketball.
“Too late,” murmured Rutter, having seen this sort of thing before. He ordered his men into action, and they were just starting to crank up the rotors of the helicopter when the darkness around the hole evaporated. The night slid back and a clear road confronted them. They could see the people in the green sedan get out and look around in amazement at the sudden day. A hundred yards farther on, the basketball had neatly blocked the tear and now stood trembling slightly in midair as the vortex behind the rip sucked at the ball. Within a minute the tear healed and the basketball dropped harmlessly to the asphalt, bouncing a few times before rolling to the side of the road. The sky was clear and there was no evidence that time wasn’t the same as it had always been. But of the Datsun, the motorcyclist and the brightly painted sports car, there was no trace at all.
My car slid on and on. The motorway had been replaced by a swirling mass of light and color that had no meaning to either of us. Occasionally a coherent image would emerge from the murk and on several occasions we thought we had arrived back in a stable time, but were soon whisked back into the vortex, the typhoon raging in our ears. The first occasion was on a road somewhere in the Home Counties. It looked like winter, and ahead of us a lime-green Austin Allegro estate pulled out from a slip road. I swerved and drove past at great speed, sounding my horn angrily. That image collapsed abruptly and fragmented itself into the dirty hold of a ship. The car was wedged between two packing cases, the closest of which was bound for Shanghai. The howl of the vortex had diminished, but we could hear a new roar, the roar of a storm at sea. The ship wallowed and Bowden and I looked at one another, unsure as to whether this was the end of the journey or not. The roaring sound grew as the dank hold folded back into itself and vanished, only to be replaced by a white hospital ward. The tempest subsided, the car’s engine ticking over happily. In the only occupied bed there was a drowsy and confused woman with her arm in a sling. I knew what I had to say.
“Thursday—!” I shouted excitedly.
The woman in the bed frowned. She looked across at Bowden, who waved back cheerily.
“He didn’t die!” I continued, saying now what I knew to be the truth. I could hear the tempest