The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [157]
“How is it possible for both tires to go within ten seconds of each other?”
I shrugged. I didn’t have an answer for this. It was a new car, after all, and I’d been driving all my life and never had a single blowout, much less two. With only one spare wheel we were stuck here for a while. I suggested he call SpecOps and get them to send a tow truck.
“Wireless seems to be dead,” he announced, keying the mike and turning the knob. “That’s odd.”
Something, I felt, wasn’t quite right.
“No more odd than a double blowout,” I told him, walking a few paces to a handy phone booth. I lifted the receiver and said: “Do you have any change—”
I stopped because I’d just noticed a ticket on top of the phone. As I picked it up a Skyrail shuttle approached high up on the steel tracks, as if on cue.
“What have you found?” asked Bowden.
“A Skyrail day pass,” I replied slowly, replacing the receiver. Broken images of something half forgotten or not yet remembered started to form in my head. It was confusing, but I knew what I had to do. “I’m going to take the Skyrail and see what happens.”
“Why?”
“There’s a neanderthal in trouble.”
“How do you know?”
I frowned, trying to make sense of what I was feeling.
“I’m not sure. What’s the opposite of déjà vu, when you see something that hasn’t happened yet?”
“I don’t know—avant verrais?”
“That’s it. Something’s going to happen—and I’m part of it.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“No, Bowden; if you were meant to come I would have found two tickets.”
I left my partner looking confused and walked briskly up to the station, showed my ticket to the inspector and climbed the steel steps to the platform fifty feet above ground. I was alone apart from a young woman sitting by herself on a bench, checking her makeup in a mirror. She looked up at me for a moment before the doors of the shuttle hissed open and I stepped inside, wondering what events were about to unfold.
4.
Five Coincidences, Seven Irma Cohens and One Confused Neanderthal
The neanderthal experiment was conceived in order to create the euphemistically entitled “medical test vessels,” living creatures that were as close as possible to humans without actually being human within the context of the law. Using cells reengineered from DNA discovered in a Homo Llysternef forearm preserved in a peat bog near Llysternef in Wales, the experiment was an unparalleled success. Sadly for Goliath, even the hardiest of medical technicians balked at experiments conducted upon intelligent and speaking entities, so the first batch of neanderthals were trained instead as “expendable combat units,” a project that was shelved as soon as the lack of aggressive instincts in the neanderthal was noted. They were subsequently released into the community as cheap labor and became a celebrated tax write-off. Infertile males and an expected life span of fifty years meant they would soon be relegated to the reengineerment industries’ ever-growing list of “failures.”
GERHARD VON SQUID,
Neanderthals: Back After a Short Absence
COINCIDENCES ARE strange things. I like the one about Sir Edmund Godfrey, who was found murdered in 1678 and left in a ditch on Greenberry Hill in London. Three men were arrested and hanged for the crime—Mr. Green, Mr. Berry and Mr. Hill. My father told me that for the most part coincidences could be safely ignored: They were merely the chance discovery of one pertinent fact from a million or so possible daily interconnections. “Stop a stranger in the street,” he would say, “and delve into each other’s past. Pretty soon an astounding-too-amazing-to-be-chance coincidence will appear.”
I suppose he’s right, but that didn’t explain how a twin puncture outside the station, a broken wireless which led directly to the discovery of a valid Skyrail ticket and the Skyrail itself approaching at that precise moment can all happen out of the blue. Some things