We hugged, I put on my jacket and left the house, hailing a cab to take me to the Clary-LaMarr Travelport. When I was safely on the bullet train to Saknussemm, I took out my cell phone and keyed in a number. I stared out at the dark Wessex countryside that zipped past so fast the few streetlamps I could see were almost orange streaks. The cell was picked up, and I paused, heart thumping, before speaking.

“My name’s Thursday Next. I’d like to speak to John Henry Goliath. You’re going to have to wake him. It’s a matter of some importance.”

The Austen Rover Roving

The basis for the Austen Rover, I learned much later, was a bus that the Goliath Corporation had bought in 1952 to transport its employees to the coast on “works days out,” a lamentable lapse in Goliath’s otherwise fine record of rampant worker exploitation. The error was discovered after eight years and the day trips discontinued. True to form, Goliath docked the wages of all who attended and charged them for the trip—with back-dated interest.

T he Austen Rover has two separate systems,” explained Dr. Anne Wirthlass, “the transfictional propulsion unit and the book-navigation protocol. The former we have worked out—the latter is something you need to update us on.”

It was almost noon of the following day, and I was being brought up to speed on the Rover’s complexities by the brilliant Dr. Wirthlass, who had thanked me profusely for changing my mind so close to the time before they were to fire themselves off into the unknown.

“It was the least I could do,” I replied, keeping the real reason to myself.

There had been an excited buzz among the technicians in the lab that morning, and I had been introduced to more specialists in an hour than I’d met in a lifetime. John Henry Goliath himself was on hand to smooth over any problems we might have, and there had already been a propulsion test. The Austen Rover had been chained to the floor, and the engines had been spooled up. With a deafening roar, the Rover had flexed at the chains while an inky black void had opened up in front of it. The engines had been throttled back, and the void had closed. It didn’t have the quiet subtleness of Mycroft’s Prose Portal, but it had certainly been impressive.

That had been three hours earlier. Right now we were in the control room, and I’d been trying to explain to them just what form the BookWorld takes, which was a bit odd, as it was really only my interpretation of it, and I had a feeling that if they accepted my way, it would become the way, so I was careful not to describe anything that might be problematical later. I spread a sheet of paper on the table and drew a rough schematic of the various genres that made up the BookWorld, but without too many precise locations—just enough for them to get us inside and then to It Was a Dark and Stormy Night without any problems.