The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [443]
“Well,” said Senator Jobsworth, “this is all quite exciting, isn’t it? And what is a textual sieve, anyway?”
We all ignored him and moved to a table in Dr. Howard’s office where one of his team had unrolled a more detailed map of the threatened area of Drama. It was essentially one of Bradshaw’s booksploring charts overlaid with the footnoterphone conduits in red ink. The map looked like a giant spiderweb of interconnections, the books that remained unexplored standing alone and unprotected. If we couldn’t get in to warn them, they certainly wouldn’t be able to see it coming.
We waited patiently as the minutes ticked by, the plotters updating the course of the two storm fronts on the chart as they merged, gathered speed and hurtled across the emptiness of intergenre space, directly towards Drama. Bradshaw had relayed my orders to the DanverClones; all we needed was the title of the books most likely to be hit by the coming storm.
“Why don’t we set up those textual sieves across this area here?” suggested Senator Jobsworth, waving a hand at the chart.
“We mustn’t spread our sieves too thin,” I explained. “We need them concentrated at the place the storm hits to do any good at all.”
As if to confirm its waywardness, the storm changed direction. It had been heading almost straight for the Satire end of Drama when it veered away and headed instead for Novel.
“Which one do you think, old girl?” asked Bradshaw, footnoterphone in hand. It was one of those moments where leadership has a lonely, hollow emptiness to it. The wrong decision now and we could be mopping up the mess for years. Give my order too early and the storm might veer again and cut an ugly swath through Trollope; give the order too late and the textual sieves might not be up in time to stop the storm in its tracks. A half-unfurled sieve would be broken like matchwood and carried with the storm to who knows where.
“What shall we do, Bellman?” asked the Cat. He wasn’t smiling.
A technician updated the plot. The storm had moved slightly to the west and was now four minutes from hitting Drama. Would it hold that course or veer off again?
“Dr. Howard,” I said, “I need your best estimate.”
“It’s almost impossible to say—!”
“I know that!” I snapped. “Like it or not, you are the best guesser and I’m going to go with your hunch—that’s my decision. Now, where do you think it will hit?”
He sighed resignedly and stabbed a finger on the map. “I think about here. Page two hundred fourteen of The Scarlet Letter, give or take a chapter or two.”
“Hawthorne,” I murmured, “not good.”
No one had ever traveled into any of his books before, so the DanverClones would be working on the books closest to it—never a satisfactory alternative.
“Right,” I said, drawing a deep breath, “do we have an updated report on the size of this WordStorm?”
“It’s now a five-point-seven,” replied the technician in a voice tinged with fear, “and it’s heavy with ideas and plot devices picked up on its journey so far.”
“Compact?”
“I’d say,” replied the technician, reading the latest weather report, “barely three paragraphs wide but with a density over six-point-four. It’s currently moving at eight pages a second.”
“It could tear a hole straight through The Scarlet Letter at that rate,” exploded Bradshaw, “and litter the whole book with dramatic events!”
The consequence of this was terrible to consider—a new version of The Scarlet Letter where things actually happen.
“Impact time?”
“Three minutes.”
I had an idea. “How many people are reading Scarlet Letter at present?”
“Six hundred and twenty-two,” replied the Cat, who as librarian had these figures at his paws twenty-four hours a day.
“Pleasure readers?”
“Mostly,” replied the Cat, thinking hard, “except for a class of thirty-two English students at Frobisher High School in Michigan who are studying it.”
“Good. Bradshaw? I want you to set up textual sieves in every book