The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [201]
“Only London and New York connecting to Sydney and Tokyo. If you wanted to get from Buenos Aires to Auckland, you’d first take the overmantle to Miami, then to New York, DeepDrop to Tokyo, and finally another overmantle to Auckland.”
“How fast does it go?” asked Snell, slightly nervously.
“Peaks at fourteen thousand miles per hour,” said my neighbor from behind his magazine, “give or take. We’ll fall with increasing velocity but decreasing acceleration until we reach the center of the earth, at which point we will have attained our maximum velocity. Once past the center our velocity will decrease until we reach Sydney, when our velocity will have decreased to zero.”
“Is it safe?”
“Of course!” I assured him.
“What if there’s another shuttle coming the other way?”
“There can’t be,” I assured him. “There’s only one shuttle per tube.”
“What you say is true,” said my boring neighbor. “The only thing we have to worry about is a failure of the magnetic containment system that keeps the ceramic tube and us from melting in the liquid core of the earth.”
“Don’t listen to this, Snell.”
“Is that likely?” he asked.
“Never happened before,” replied the man somberly, “but then if it had, they wouldn’t tell us about it, now would they?”
Snell thought about this for a few moments.
“Drop is D minus ten seconds,” said the announcer.
The cabin went quiet and everyone tensed, subconsciously counting down. The drop, when it came, was a bit like going over a very large humpback bridge at a great deal of speed, but the initial unpleasantness—which was accompanied by grunts from the passengers—gave way to the strange and curiously enjoyable feeling of weightlessness. Many people do the drop for this reason only. I turned to Snell.
“You okay?”
He nodded and managed a wan smile.
“It’s a bit . . . strange,” he said at last, watching as his tie floated in front of him.
“So I’m charged with a Fiction Infraction, yes?”
“Fiction Infraction Class II,” corrected Snell, swallowing hard. “It’s not as though you did it on purpose. Even though we could argue convincingly that you improved the narrative of Jane Eyre, we still have to prosecute; after all, we can’t have people blundering around in Little Women trying to stop Beth from dying, can we?”
“Can’t you?”
“Of course not. Not that people don’t try. When you get before the magistrate, just deny everything and play dumb. I’m trying to get the case postponed on the grounds of strong reader approval.”
“Will that work?”
“It worked when Falstaff made his illegal jump to The Merry Wives of Windsor and proceeded to dominate and alter the story. We thought he’d be sent packing back to Henry IV, Part 2. But no, his move was approved. The judge was an opera fan, so maybe that had something to do with it. You haven’t had any operas written about you by Verdi or Vaughan Williams, have you?”
“No.”
“Pity.”
The feeling of weightlessness didn’t last long. The increasing deceleration once more gently returned weight to us all. At 40% normal gravity the cabin warning lights went out and we could move around if we wanted.
The technobore on my right started up again.
“—but the real beauty of the Gravitube is its simplicity,” he continued. “Since the force of gravity is the same irrespective of the declination of the tunnel, the trip to Tokyo will take exactly the same time as the trip to New York—and it would be the same again to Carlisle if it didn’t make more sense to use a conventional railway. Mind you,” he went on, “if you could use a wave induction system to keep us accelerating all the way to the surface at the other end, the speed could be well in excess of the seven miles per second needed to achieve escape velocity.”
“You’ll be telling me that we’ll fly to the moon next,” I said.
“We already have,” returned my technobore neighbor in a conspiratorial whisper. “Secret government experiments have already constructed a base on the far side of the moon where transmitters control our thoughts and actions from atop the Empire State Building using interstellar communications from