“The craze for shabby chic,” he replied, “people like stuff that looks old, but they don’t have the time to wait, and ‘distressed’ stuff looks such shit, don’t you think? I have a business called Age-Fast that specializes in making things old. It’s the same with those sports cars. All those idiots who restored their cars to factory condition now realize that they’ve stolen the cars’ very soul—but down here I can put sixty years back on them in a little under a week. Nice patina, although I do have to keep them rotated to avoid overaging one side. We have more than a million of bottles of whiskey, too—twelve years in only three weeks. Vintage Château Latour in six months? No problem. Wine, whiskey, counterfeit Vermeers—we do the lot down here. I’ve seen the future, and it’s old.”

“So the core really is running close to D=.82?” I asked.

“Two minutes in there is almost four months,” he said, “and the gradient is getting steeper by the second. In thirty-seven years, it should be about ready to pop.” And he gave a soft, knowing chuckle.

“Who are you anyway?” he asked.

“Thursday Next,” I said, “and this is my son, Friday.”

“Ah,” he said, “you must have come about the Letters of Destiny.”

Friday and I exchanged looks, and he asked the Manchild what he knew about them. It was, it transpired, just one of several jobs he had been asked to do after he’d stayed on, but he didn’t know why. All he had was a timescale to stick to and instructions to pass them on if he became old, incapacitated or dead.

“There must be something you can tell us,” said Friday. “I’m going to kill someone for no reason on Friday morning, and I need to know why.”

The Manchild blinked his mismatched eyes at Friday and thought for a few seconds.

“I saw you drawing an elephant earlier,” he said. “Your mother was demonstrating a simple cause-and-effect reversal, yes?”

“Yes?”

“Okay, tell me this: Whose decision was it to make it an elephant? Thursday because she saw you draw it or you because you did draw it?”

We said nothing; there didn’t seem to be an answer.

“The truth is that you both did and neither of you did—which leaves only the drawn elephant, who seized an opportunity to exist through a chink in the tightly enmeshed cause-and-effect paradigm.”

“A drawn elephant has a desire to exist?”