I stared at him in surprise and he laughed.

‘We needed some time to talk and I’ve never been on one of these before. How does it work?’

‘The Gravitube? It’s a tunnel running through the centre of the earth. We freefall all the way to Sydney. But… but… how on earth did you find me?’

‘Jurisfiction has eyes and ears everywhere, Miss Next.’

‘Plain English, Snell—or I could turn out to be the most difficult client you’ve ever had.’

Snell looked at me with interest for a few moments as a stewardess gave a monotonous safety announcement, culminating with the warning that there were no toilet facilities until gravity returned to 40 per cent.

‘You work in SpecOps, don’t you?’ asked Snell as soon as we were comfortable and all loose possessions had been placed in zippered bags.

I nodded.

‘Jurisfiction is the service we run inside novels to maintain the integrity of popular fiction. The printed word might look solid to you, but where I come from movable type has a much deeper meaning.’

‘The ending of Jane Eyre,’ I murmured, suddenly realising what all the fuss was about. ‘I changed it, didn’t I?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ agreed Snell, ‘but don’t admit that to anyone but me. It was the biggest Fiction Infraction to a major work since someone futzed so badly with Thackeray’s Giant Despair we had to delete it completely.’

‘Drop is D minus two minutes,’ said the announcer. ‘Would all passengers please take their seats, check their straps and make sure all infants are secured.’

‘So what’s happening now?’ asked Snell.

‘Do you really not know anything about the Gravitube?’

Snell looked around and lowered his voice.

‘All of your world is a bit strange to me, Next. I come from a land of trench coats and deep shadows, complex plot lines, frightened witnesses, underground bosses, gangsters’ molls, seedy bars and startling six-page-from-the-end denouements.’

I must have looked confused for he lowered his voice farther and hissed:

‘I’m fictional, Miss Next. Co-lead in the Perkins & Snell series of crime books. I expect you’ve read me?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ I admitted.

‘Limited print run.’ Snell sighed. ‘But we had a good review in Crime Books Digest. I was described as “a well-rounded and amusing character… with quite a few memorable lines”. The Mole placed us on their Read of the Week list but The Toad were less enthusiastic—but listen, who takes any notice of the critics?’

‘You’re fictional? I said at last.

‘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.