The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [672]
In the center of the room and looking resplendent in the blue-and-yellow livery of some long-forgotten bus company was a flat-fronted single-decker bus that to my mind dated from the fifties. Something my mother, in her long-forgotten and now much-embellished youth, might have boarded for a trip to the seaside, equipped with hampers of food and gallons of ice cream. Aside from the anachronistic feel, the most obvious feature of the bus was that the wheels had been removed and the voids covered over to give the vague appearance of streamlining. Clearly, it wasn’t the only modification. The vehicle in front of me now was probably the most advanced piece of transport technology known to man.
“Why base it on an old bus?” I asked.
John Henry shrugged. “If you’re going to travel, do it in style. Besides, a Rolls-Royce Phantom II doesn’t have enough seats.”
We walked down to the workshop floor, and I took a closer look. On both sides at the rear of the bus and on the roof were small faired outriggers that each held a complicated engine with which I was not familiar. The tight-fitting cowlings had been removed, and the engines were being worked on by white-coated technicians who had stopped what they were doing as soon as we walked in but now resumed their tinkering with a buzz of muted whispers. I moved closer to the front of the bus and ran my fingers across the Leyland badge atop the large and very prominent radiator. I looked up. Above the vertically split front windshield was a glass-covered panel that once told prospective passengers the ultimate destination of the bus. I expected it to read BOURNEMOUTH or PORTSMOUTH but it didn’t. It read NORTHANGER ABBEY.
I looked at John Henry Goliath, who said, “This, Ms. Next, is the Austen Rover—the most advanced piece of transfictional technology in the world!”
“Does it work?” I asked.
“We’re not entirely sure,” remarked John Henry. “It’s the prototype and has yet to be tested.”
He beckoned to the technician who seemed to be in charge and introduced us.
“This is Dr. Anne Wirthlass, the project manager of the Austen Rover. She will answer any questions you have—I hope perhaps you will answer some of ours?”
I made a noncommittal noise, and Wirthlass gave me a hand to shake. She was tall, willowy and walked with a rolling gait. Like everyone in the lab, she wore a white coat with her Goliath ID badge affixed to it, and although I could not see her precise laddernumber, she was certainly within four figures—the top 1 percent. Seriously important.
“I’m pleased to meet you at last,” she said in a Swedish accent. “We have much to learn from your experience.”
“If you know anything about me,” I responded, “you’ll know exactly why it is that I don’t trust Goliath.”
“Ah!” she said, somewhat taken aback. “I thought we’d left those days behind us.”
“I’ll need convincing,” I returned without malice. It wasn’t her fault, after all. I indicated the tour bus. “How does it work?”
She looked at John Henry, who nodded his permission.
“The Austen Rover is a standard Leyland Tiger PS2/3 under a Burlingham body,” she began, touching the shiny coachwork fondly, “but with a few…modifications. Come aboard.”
She stepped up into the bus, and I followed her. The interior had been stripped and replaced with the very latest technology, which she attempted to explain in the sort of technical language where it is possible to understand only one word in eight, if you’re lucky. I came off the bus ten minutes later having absorbed not much more than the fact that it had twelve seats, carried a small thirty-megawatt fusion device in the rear and couldn’t be tested—its first trip would be either an utter failure or a complete success, nothing in between.
“And the probes?”
“Yes, indeed,” replied Wirthlass. “We’ve been using a form of gravity-wave inducer to catapult a small probe into