* * *
Putputputputputput, went Madame Tracy's motor scooter down Crouch End High Street. It was the only vehicle moving on a suburban London street jammed with immobile cars and taxis and red London buses.
“I've never seen a traffic jam like it,” said Madame Tracy. “I wonder if there's been an accident.”
“Quite possibly, ” said Aziraphale. And then, “Mr. Shadwell, unless you put your arms round me you're going to fall off. This thing wasn't built for two people, you know.”
“Three,” muttered Shadwell, gripping the seat with one whiteknuckled hand, and his Thundergun with the other.
“Mr. Shadwell, I won't tell you again.”
“Ye'll have ter stop, then, so as I can adjust me weapon,” sighed Shadwell.
Madame Tracy giggled dutifully, but she pulled over to the curb, and stopped the motor scooter.
Shadwell sorted himself out, and put two grudging arms around Madame Tracy, while the Thundergun stuck up between them like a chaperon.
They rode through the rain without talking for another ten minutes, putputputputput, as Madame Tracy carefully negotiated her way around the cars and the buses.
Madame Tracy found her eyes being moved down to the speedometer.. rather foolishly, she thought, since it hadn't worked since 1974, and it hadn't worked very well before that.
“Dear lady, how fast would you say we were going?” asked Aziraphale.
“Why?”
“Because it seems to me that we would go slightly faster walking.”
"Well, with just me on, the top speed is about fifteen miles an hour, but with Mr. Shadwell as well, it must be, ooh, about
“Four or five miles per hour,” she interrupted.
“I suppose so,” she agreed.
There was a cough from behind her. “Can ye no slow down this hellish machine, wumman?” asked an ashen voice. In the infernal pantheon, which it goes without saying Shadwell hated uniformly and correctly, Shadwell reserved a special loathing for speed demons.
“In which case,” said Aziraphale, “eve will get to Tadfield in something less than ten hours”
There was a pause from Madame Tracy, then, “How far away is this Tadfield, anyway?”
“About forty miles.”
“Um,” said Madame Tracy, who had once driven the scooter the few miles to nearby Finchley to visit her niece, but had taken the bus since, because of the funny noises the scooter had started making on the way back.
“. . . we should really be going at about seventy, if we're going to get there in time,” said Aziraphale. “Hmm. Sergeant Shadwell? Hold on very tightly now.”
Putputputputput and a blue nimbus began to outline the scooter and its occupants with a gentle sort of a glow, like an afterimage, all around them.
Putputputputputput and the scooter lifted awkwardly off the ground with no visible means of support, jerking slightly, until it reached a height of five feet, more or less.
“Don't look down, Sergeant Shadwell,” advised Aziraphale.
“...” said Shadwell, eyes screwed tightly shut, gray forehead beaded with sweat, not looking down, not looking anywhere.
“And off we go, then.”
In every big.. budget science fiction movie there's the moment when a spaceship as large as New York suddenly goes to light speed. A twanging noise like a wooden ruler being plucked over 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, M 15, M 16, 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, [This was true. There wasn't a thermometer on earth that could have been persuaded to register both 700° C and .. 140° C at the same time; which was the correct temperature.] 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!”