Yogert smiled at him patronizingly. “If we did that,” she replied, “it would barely be stupid at all, and the Commonsense Party takes the stupidity surplus problem extremely seriously. Prime Minister van de Poste has pledged to not only reduce the current surplus to zero within a year but to also cut all idiocy emissions by seventy percent in 2020. This requires unpopular decisions, and he had to compare the interests of a few die-hard, elitist, dweeby, bespectacled book fans with those of the general voting public. Better still, because this idea is so idiotic that the loss of a single classic—say, Jane Eyre—will offset the entire nation’s stupidity for an entire year. Since we have the potential to overwrite all the English classics to reader choice, we can do really stupid things with impunity. Who knows? We may even run a stupidity deficit—and can then afford to take on other nations’ idiocy at huge national profit. We see the UK as leading the stupidity-offset-trading industry—and the idiocy of that idea will simply be offset against the annihilation of Vanity Fair. Simple, isn’t it?”

I realized I was still holding the phone. “Bowden, are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“This stinks to high heaven. Can you find out something about this so-called Interactive Book Council? I’ve never heard of such a thing. Call me back.”

I returned my attention to the TV.

“And when we’ve lost all the classics and the stupidity surplus has once again ballooned?” asked Webastow. “What happens then?”

“Well,” said Ms. Yogert with a shrug, “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, eh?”

“You’ll forgive me for saying this,” said Webastow, looking over his glasses, “but this is the most harebrained piece of unadulterated stupidity that any government has ever undertaken anywhere.”

“Thank you very much,” replied Ms. Yogert courteously. “I’ll make sure your compliments are forwarded to Prime Minister van de Poste.”

The program changed to a report on how the “interactive book” might work. Something about “new technologies” and “user-defined narrative.” It was all baloney. I knew what was going on. It was Senator Jobsworth. He’d pushed through that interactive book project of Baxter’s. Worse, he’d planned this all along—witness the large throughput conduits in Pride and Prejudice and the recent upgrading of all of Austen’s work. I wasn’t that concerned with how they’d managed to overturn my veto or even open an office in the real world—what worried me was that I needed to be in the Book-World to stop the nation’s entire literary heritage from being sacrificed on the altar of popularism.

The phone rang. It was Bowden again. I made a trifling and wholly unbelievable excuse about looking for a hammer, then vanished into the garage so Landen couldn’t hear the conversation.

“The Interactive Book Council is run out of an office in West London,” Bowden reported when I was safely perched on the lawn mower. “It was incorporated a month ago and has the capacity to take a thousand simultaneous calls—yet the office itself is barely larger than the one at Acme.”