It would be a close thing. Turmoils increase their pace until a rotating tube rises up into the heavens, filled with small sections of plot and anything else it can suck up. Then, with a flurry of distorted sense, it lifts off and vanishes. I wouldn’t get this chance again.

“Is that wise, Captain?” asked First Officer Fitzwilliam, who had joined us on the bridge. “I’ve seen storms like that. They can do serious damage—and we have forty passengers, many of them women and children.”

“Then you can lower me in a lifeboat ahead of the storm.”

“And leave us without a lifeboat?”

“Yes…no…I don’t know. Fitzwilliam?”

“Yes, Captain?”

“What is this place?”

“I don’t know what you mean, Captain.”

“I mean—”

“Cap’n,” said Baldwin, pointing off of the port side of the ship, “isn’t that a lifeboat?”

I turned my attention to the area in which he pointed. It was a lifeboat, with what looked like several people, all slumped and apparently unconscious. Damn. I looked again, hoping for confirmation that they might already be dead, but saw nothing to tell me either way. I frowned to myself. Had I just hoped for them to be dead?

“You can pick them up after you’ve dropped me off,” I said. “It’ll only mean an extra forty minutes for them, and I really need to get out of here.”

I saw Fitzwilliam and Baldwin exchange glances. But as we watched, the lifeboat was caught by a wave and capsized, casting the occupants into the sea. We could see now that they were alive, and as they scrabbled weakly to cling to the upturned boat, I gave the order.

“Turn about. Reduce power and stand by to pick up survivors.”

“Aye-aye, Cap’n,” said Baldwin, spinning the wheel as Fitzwilliam rung up “slow ahead” on the engine-room telegraph. I walked out onto the starboard wing and watched despondently as the turmoil developed into a WordStorm. Within the twenty minutes it took to intercept the lifeboat, the whirling mass of narrative distortion lifted off, taking part of the description of the ocean with it. There was a ragged dark hole for an instant, and then the sea washed in to fill the anomaly, and in a few moments everything was back to normal. Perhaps I should have left the lifeboat. After all, the Long Now and the classics were more important than several fictional castaways. Mind you, if I’d been on that lifeboat, I know what I would have wanted.

“Captain!”

It was Dr. Glister.

“I don’t want to know about your arguments with the Langdons,” I told him.

“No, no,” he replied in something of a panic, “you cannot pick up these castaways!”

“Why not?”

“They have Squurd’s disease.”

“They have what?”