The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [444]
There was a pause.
“But, Thursday,” said Bradshaw slowly, “the storm isn’t going to hit Hemingway.”
“It will if we shut The Scarlet Letter down.”
“Out of the question!” exploded Senator Jobsworth, spontaneously and automatically rejecting any possible infringements of his sacred regulations. “The rules do not permit any book to be shut down without a vote at the Council of Genres—I can quote the rule number if you wish!”
Technically, he was right. Even with a vote, nobody had tried anything so audacious before. It usually took an hour to shut down a book, more to bring it up to full readability again.
“Is that wise?” asked Dr. Howard.
“Not in the least,” I replied, “but I’m out of time and ideas right now.”
“Isn’t anyone listening to me?” continued the senator, more outraged at our lack of respect than at losing The Scarlet Letter.
“Oh, we’re listening all right,” purred the Cat, “we just don’t agree with you.”
“Rules are there for a good reason, Miss Next. We have ordered the demolition of bigger books than The Scarlet Letter. I personally—”
“Listen,” I said, “classics have been lost before but never during my tenure as Bellman. Tomorrow morning you can have my badge if I’m wrong and send me packing. Right now you can sit down and shut up. Cat and Bradshaw, are you with me on this?”
“Appreciate a woman who can make bold decisions!” muttered Bradshaw, repeating my orders to the DanverClones. Senator Jobsworth had gone red with impotent fury, and his mouth was twitching as he sought to find words to adequately express his anger at my insubordination.
“Two minutes to impact.”
I picked up the footnoterphone and asked to be put through to the storycode engine floor.
“Bradshaw, I want you to take a trip to the Outland and set the fire alarm off at Frobisher High in exactly seventy-eight seconds. That will give us a few minutes breathing space. The pleasure readers will just think they’ve got bored and lost concentration when the book shuts down. Hello, storycode floor? This is the Bellman. I want you to divert Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter to an empty storycode engine and shut it down. . . . Yes, that’s quite correct. Shut it down. I don’t have time to issue a written order so you’re going to have to take my word for it. You are to do it in exactly sixty-three seconds.”
“Sieves are going up as requested, Thursday,” reported Bradshaw. “Think they’ll hold?”
I shrugged. There was nothing else we could do. The storm plot ran towards The Scarlet Letter and struck it just as the storycode engine shut down. The book closed. The characters stopped in their tracks as an all-pervading darkness swept over every descriptive passage, every line of dialogue, every nuance, every concept. Where a moment ago there had been a fascinating treatise on morality, there was now only a lifeless hulk of dark reading matter. It was as if The Scarlet Letter had never been written. The storm bounced off, then attracted to the brighter lights of the Hemingway canon next door, struck off on a new course. I breathed a sigh of relief but then held my breath once more as the storm struck In Our Time—and glanced off. The sieve had held. Over the next few minutes the WordStorm ran between the books as planned, the textual sieves slowing it down as it brushed past the collected works of Hemingway.
“Damage report?”
“Slight grammatical warpage in A Farewell to Arms, but nothing serious,” said the Cat. “The Sun Also Rises is reporting isolated bursts of narrative flexations, but nothing we can’t handle. All other books report no damage.