the edge of a desk, a dazzling refraction of light, and suddenly the stars have all been stretched out thin and it’s gone. This was exactly like that, except that instead of a gleaming twelve-mile-long spaceship, it was an off-white twenty-year-old motor scooter. And you didn’t have the special rainbow effects. And it probably wasn’t going at more than two hundred miles an hour. And instead of a pulsing whine sliding up the octaves, it just went putputputputput …
VROOOOSH.
But it was exactly like that anyway.
WHERE THE M25, NOW a screaming frozen circle, intersects with the M40 to Oxfordshire, police were clustered around in ever-increasing quantities. Since Crowley crossed the divide, half an hour earlier, their number had doubled. On the M40 side, anyway. No one in London was getting out.
In addition to the police there were also approximately two hundred others standing around, and inspecting the M25 through binoculars. They included representatives from Her Majesty’s Army, the Bomb Disposal Squad, MI5, MI6, the Special Branch, and the CIA. There was also a man selling hot dogs.
Everybody was cold and wet, and puzzled, and irritable, with the exception of one police officer, who was cold, wet, puzzled, irritable, and exasperated.
“Look. I don’t care if you believe me or not,” he sighed, “all I’m telling you is what I saw. It was an old car, a Rolls, or a Bentley, one of those flash vintage jobs, and it made it over the bridge.”
One of the senior army technicians interrupted. “It can’t have done. According to our instruments the temperature above the M25 is somewhere in excess of seven hundred degrees centigrade.”
“Or a hundred and forty degrees below,” added his assistant.
“. . . or a hundred and forty degrees below zero,” agreed the senior technician. “There does appear to be some confusion on that score, although I think we can safely attribute it to mechanical error of some kind,50 but the fact remains that we can’t even get a helicopter directly over the M25 without winding up with Helicopter McNuggets. How on earth can you tell me that a vintage car drove over it unharmed?”
“I didn’t say it drove over it unharmed,” corrected the policeman, who was thinking seriously about leaving the Metropolitan Police and going into business with his brother, who was resigning his job with the Electricity Board, and was going to start breeding chickens. “It burst into flames. It just kept on going.”
“Do you seriously expect any of us to believe … ” began somebody.
A high-pitched keening noise, haunting and strange. Like a thousand glass harmonicas being played in unison, all slightly off-key; like the sound of the molecules of the air itself wailing in pain.
And Vrooosh.
Over their heads it sailed, forty feet in the air, engulfed in a deep blue nimbus which faded to red at the edges: a little white motor scooter, and riding it, a middle-aged woman in a pink helmet, and holding tightly to her, a short man in a mackintosh and a day-glo green crash helmet (the motor scooter was too far up for anyone to see that his eyes were tightly shut, but they were).
The woman was screaming. What she was screaming was this:
“Gerrrronnnimooooo!”
ONE OF THE ADVANTAGES of the Wasabi, as Newt was always keen to point out, was that when it was badly damaged it was very hard to tell. Newt had to keep driving Dick Turpin onto the shoulder to avoid fallen branches.
“You’ve made me drop all the cards on the floor!”
The car thumped back onto the road; a small voice from somewhere under the glove compartment said, “Oil plessure arert.”
“I’ll never be able to sort them out now,” she moaned.
“You don’t have to,” said Newt manically. “Just pick one. Any one. It won’t matter.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if Agnes is right, and we’re doing all this because she’s predicted it, then any card picked right now has got to be relevant. That’s logic.”
“It’s nonsense.”
“Yeah? Look, you’re even here because she predicted it. And have you thought what we’re going to say to the colonel? If we get to see him, which of course we won’t.”
“If we’re reasonable—”
“Listen, I know these kinds of places. They have huge guards made out of teak guarding the gates, Anathema, and they have white helmets and real guns, you understand, which fire real bullets made of real lead which can go right into you and bounce around and come out of the same hole before you can even say ‘Excuse me, we have reason to believe