Lost in a Good Book

‘Keep it to yourself, though, won’t you?’ he urged. ‘Now, about the Gravitube?’

‘Well,’ I replied, gathering my thoughts, ‘in a few minutes the shuttle will have entered the airlock and depressurisation will commence—’

‘Depressurisation? Why?’

‘For a frictionless drop. No air resistance—and we are kept from touching the sides by a powerful magnetic field. We then simply freefall the eight thousand miles to Sydney.’

‘So all cities have a DeepDrop to every other city, then?’

‘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 neighbour from behind his magazine, ‘give or take. We’ll fall with increasing velocity but decreasing acceleration until we reach the centre of the earth, at which point we will have attained our maximum velocity. Once past the centre 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 neighbour. ‘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 sombrely. ‘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 great 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 watched as my hair floated languidly in front of my face, and turned to Snell.

‘You okay?’

He nodded.

‘So I’m charged with a Fiction Infraction, yes?’

‘Fiction Infraction Class II,’ corrected Snell. ‘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. We thought he’d be sent packing back to Henry IV Pt 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 Verde or Vaughan Williams, have you?’

‘No’

‘Pity.’

The feeling of weightlessness was odd but it didn’t last long, the increasing deceleration once more gently returning weight to us all. At 40 per cent 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. 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 the 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 neighbour in a conspiratonal whisper. ‘Secret government experiments in space travel have already constructed a base on the far side of the moon where transmitters have been set up to control our thoughts and actions from repeater stations atop the Empire State Building using interstellar wireless communications from extraterrestrial life forms intent on world domination with the express agreement of the Goliath Corporation and a secret cabal of world leaders known as SPORK.’

‘And don’t tell me,’ I added, ‘Diatrymas are living in the New Forest.’

‘How did you know?’

I ignored him, and only thirty-eight minutes after leaving London we came in for a delicate dock in Sydney, the faintest click being heard as the magnetic locks held on to the shuttle to stop it falling back down again. After the safety light had been extinguished and the airlock pressurised we made our way to the exit, avoiding the technobore, who was trying to tell anyone who would listen that the Goliath Corporation were responsible for smallpox.

Snell, who genuinely seemed to enjoy the DeepDrop, walked with me until Passport Control, looked at his watch and announced:

‘Well, that’s me. Thanks for the chat. I’ve got to go and defend Tess for the umpteenth time. As Hardy originally wrote it she gets off. Listen, try and figure some extenuating circumstances as to your actions. If you can’t, then try and think up some stonking great lies. The bigger the better.’

‘That’s your best advice? Perjure myself?’

Snell coughed politely.

‘The astute lawyer has many strings to his bow, Miss Next. They’ve got Mrs Fairfax and Grace Poole to testify against you. It doesn’t look great, but no case is lost until it’s lost. They said I couldn’t get Henry V off the war crimes rap when he ordered the French POWs murdered, but I managed it—the same as Max DeWinter’s murder charge; no one figured he’d get off that in a million years. By the by, can you give this letter to that gorgeous Flakky girl? I’d be eternally grateful.’

He handed me a crumpled letter from his pocket and made to move off.

‘Wait!’ I said. ‘Where and when is the hearing?’

‘Didn’t I say? Sorry. The prosecution has chosen the examining magistrate from Kafka’s The Trial. Not my choice, believe me. Tomorrow at nine twenty-five. Do you speak German?’

‘No.’

‘Then we’ll make sure it’s an English translation—drop in at the end of Chapter Two; we’re on after Herr K. Remember what I said. So long!’

And before I could ask him how I might even begin to enter Kafka’s masterpiece of frustrating circuitous bureaucracy, he was gone.

I caught the Overmantle to Tokyo a half-hour later. It was almost deserted, and I hopped on board a Skyrail to Osaka and alighted in the business district at one in the morning, four hours after leaving Saknussum. I took a hotel room and sat up all night, staring out at the blinking lights and thinking about Landen.