"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.
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