Джаспер Ффорде - One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

I looked around. The office was roomy, had a large window and was paneled in light pine. The pictures that decorated the walls all depicted a book disaster of some sort, mostly with Lockheed featured prominently in the foreground, grinning broadly. There was little clutter, and the single filing cabinet probably contained nothing but a kettle and some cookies. Jurisfiction had finally managed to commit itself to a paperless office—all files were committed to the prodigious memory of Captain Phantastic, just down the hall.

“Impressive office, eh?” said Lockheed. “We even have a window—with a view. Come and have a look.”

I walked over to the window and looked out. All I could see was a brick wall barely six feet away.

“Very nice,” I murmured.

“If you lean right out with someone hanging on to your shirttails, you can almost see the sky, but not quite. Would you like to try?”

“No thanks.”

“So,” said Lockheed, sitting down on his swivel chair and motioning me to a seat, “something to report to Commander Herring about the accident?”

I swallowed hard. “It was simply that,” I said, an odd leaden feeling dropping down inside me. “An accident.”

Lockheed breathed a visible sigh of relief. “Commander Herring will be delighted. When he hears bad news, he usually likes to hit someone about the head with an iron bar, and I’m often the closest. Are you sure there is nothing to report?”

I wondered for a moment whether to report the epizeuxis worm, scrubbed ISBN and the Vanity roots of The Murders on the Hareng Rouge . Not necessarily because it was the right thing to do, but simply to watch the eye-popping effect it might have on Lockheed.

“Nothing, sir.”

“Unprecedented and unrepeatable?”

“Exactly so.”

I felt the curious leaden feeling again. I didn’t know what it was; I patted my chest and cleared my throat.

“Little cog, big machine,” said Lockheed as he filled out a form for me to sign. “We are here to facilitate, not to pontificate. If we can sew this whole incident shut, the sooner we can get on with our lives and maintain our unimpeachable hundred percent dealt-with rate. Wheels within wheels, Thursday.”

“Wheels within wheels, sir.”

“Did you find out what the book was, by the way?”

“Not a clue,” I lied. “I didn’t find a single ISBN, so I thought ‘Why bother?’ and decided to simply give up.”

I didn’t know why I was suddenly being sarcastic. It might have been something to do with the odd leaden feeling inside. Lockheed, however, missed the sarcasm completely. Most D-3s did.

“Splendid!” he said. “I can see that you and Commander Herring will be getting on very well. You can expect a few more incidents heading your way with this kind of flagrant level of inspired disinterest. Sign here . . . and here .”

He handed the form over, and I paused, then signed on the dotted line. This isn’t what Thursday would have done, but then I wasn’t Thursday.

“Excellent,” he said, rising from his seat. “I’ll take this along to Captain Phantastic for memorizing.”

“Why don’t I take it?” I suggested. The odd leaden feeling in me had released a sense of purpose, but of what I was not sure. “You can stay here and have some tea and cookies or something.”

I nodded my head in the direction of the filing cabinet.

“Goodness me, that is so very kind,” replied Lockheed, condemning the lost souls in the unknown book to eternal anonymity with a ridiculously large rubber stamp before handing me the form. “Fourth door on the left.”

“Right you are.”

I opened the door, thanked him again and found the frog-footman waiting for me in the corridor. I told him I had some filing to do, and he led me past the doors marked PIANO DIVISION, ITALICS, and PEBBLES (MISCELLANEOUS) before we got to a door marked RECORDS. The frog-footman told me he’d wait for me there, and I stepped inside.

The room was small and shabby and had a half dozen people waiting to be seen, so I sat on a chair to wait my turn.

“Thursday Next,” I said to the gloomy-looking individual sitting next to me, who was reading a paper and appeared to have a toad actually growing out of the top of his head. The pink skin of his balding pate seemed to merge with the brownygreen of the toad. “The copy,” I added, before he asked. But the man ignored me. The toad growing out of his head, however, was more polite.

“Ah,” said the toad. “A good copy?”

“I do okay.”

“Humph,” said the toad before adding, “Tell me, do I look stupid with a human growing out of my bottom?”

“Not at all,” I replied politely. “In fact, I think it’s rather fetching.”

“Do you really?” said the toad with a smile.

“Who are you talking to?” asked the man, looking up from his paper.

“The toad.”

The man looked around. “What toad?”

“What did the man just say?” asked the toad.

“I like your books,” said the woman on the other side of me. “When are we going to see some more?”

“Five is all you’ll get,” I said, happy to get away from the man-toad. “What are you seeing Captain Phantastic for?”

“I’m head of the Metaphor Allocation Committee,” she explained. “Once we move to the Metaphor Credit Trading System, those books with excess metaphor will be able to trade it on the floor of the Narrative Device Exchange. Naturally, more complex figurative devices such as hypothetical futures and analogy and simile trust funds will have to be regulated; we can’t have hyperbole ending up as overvalued as it was—the bottom dropped out of the litotes market, which, as anyone will tell you, was most undesirable.”

“ Most undesirable,” I remarked, having not understood a word. “And how will Captain Phantastic help with all this?”

She shrugged. “I just want to run the idea past him. There might be a historical precedent that could suggest collateralized metaphor obligations might be a bad idea. Even so,” she added, “we might do it anyway—just for kicks and giggles. Excuse me.”

While we’d been talking, Captain Phantastic had been dealing with each inquiry at lightning speed. This wasn’t surprising, as the Records Office relied on nothing as mundane as magnetic storage, paper filing or even a linked alien supermind. It had in its possession instead a single elephant with a prodigiously large memory. It was efficient and simple, and it required only buns, hay and peanuts to operate.

When it was my turn, I walked nervously into his office.

“Hello,” said the elephant in a nasally, trumpety, blocked-nose sort of voice. I noticed he was dressed in an unusual three piece pin-striped suit, unusual in that not only did it have a watch fob the size of a saucepan in the waistcoat pocket, but the pinstripes were running horizontally.

“So how can I help?”

“Jurisfiction Accident Investigation Department,” I said, holding up my shield. I paused as a sudden thought struck me. Not about elephants, or even of a toad with a man growing out of its bottom, or of the volatile metaphor market. I suddenly thought about lying . Of subterfuge. It was wrong, but in a right kind of way, because I had finally figured out what the leaden feeling was. It was a deficiency of Right Thing to Do—and I needed to remedy the shortfall, and fast.

“We’re investigating a crashed book out in Conspiracy,” I said, tearing up the accident report behind my back, “and we need some background information on The Murders on the Hareng Rouge by Adrian Dorset.”

“Of course,” trumpeted the elephant. “Take a seat, Miss . . . ?”