The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [265]
We drove on to a low building with a domed concrete roof. This was of an even higher security than the main entrance, and Chalk, Cheese and Schitt-Hawse had to have their half-windsor tie knots scanned for verification. The guard on duty opened a heavy blast door that led to a brightly lit corridor which in turn contained a row of elevators. We descended to lower ground twelve, went through another security check and then along a shiny corridor past doors either side of us that had brass placards screwed to the polished wood explaining what went on inside. We walked past Electronic Computing Engines, Tachyon Communications, Square Peg in a Round Hole and stopped at The Book Project. Schitt-Hawse opened the door and we entered.
The room was quite like Mycroft’s laboratory apart from the fact that the devices seemed to have been built to a much higher degree of quality and had actually cost some money. Where my uncle’s machines were held together with baler twine, cardboard and rubber solution glue, the machines in here had all been crafted from high-quality alloys. All the testing apparatus looked brand-new, and there was not an atom of dust anywhere. It was chaos—but refined chaos. There were about a half-dozen technicians, all of whom seemed to have a certain pallid disposition as though they spent most of their life indoors, and they looked at us curiously as we walked in—I don’t suppose they saw many strange faces. In the middle of the room was a doorway a little like a walk-through metal detector; it was tightly wrapped with thousands of yards of fine copper wire. The wire ended in a tight bunch the width of a man’s arm that led away to a large machine that hummed and clicked to itself. As we walked in, a technician pulled a switch, there was a crackle and a puff of smoke, and everything went dead. It was a Prose Portal, but more relevant to the purposes of this narrative, it didn’t work.
I pointed to the copper-bound doorway in the middle of the room. It had started to smoke, and the technicians were now trying to put it out with CO2 extinguishers.
“Is that thing meant to be a Prose Portal?”
“Sadly, yes,” admitted Schitt-Hawse. “As you may or may not know, all we managed to synthesize was a form of curdled stodgy gunge from volumes one to eight of The World of Cheese.”
“Jack Schitt said it was cheddar.”
“Jack always tended to exaggerate a little, Miss Next. This way.”
We walked past a large hydraulic press which was rigged in an attempt to open one of the books that I had seen at Mrs. Nakajima’s apartment. The steel press groaned and strained but the book remained firmly shut. Further on a technician was valiantly attempting to burn a hole in another book, with similar poor results, and after that another technician was looking at an X-ray photograph of the book. He was having a little trouble as two or three thousand pages of text and numerous other “enclosures” all sandwiched together didn’t lend themselves to easy examination.
“What do these books do, Next?”
I was in no mood for a show-and-tell; I was here to get Landen back, nothing more.
“Do you want me to get Jack Schitt out or not?”
He stared at me for a moment before dropping the subject and walking on past several other experiments, down a short corridor and through a large steel door to another room that contained a table, chair—and Lavoisier. He was reading the copy of The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe as we entered. He looked up.
“Monsieur Lavoisier, I understand you already know Miss Next?” asked Schitt-Hawse.
“We did some time together,” I replied slowly, staring at Lavoisier, who seemed a great deal older and distinctly ill at ease with the situation. I got the impression he didn’t like Goliath any more than I did. He didn’t say anything; he just nodded his head in greeting, shut the book and rose to his feet. We stood in silence for a moment.
“So go on,” said Schitt-Hawse finally, “do your booky stuff, and Lavoisier will reactualize your husband as though nothing had happened. No one will ever know he had