Jobsworth, a small and weedy-looking man, didn’t look comfortable nor regal in his senatorial robes. As part of the regime change after the Ultra Word debacle, it was deemed that a senator should be present at any unusual event. He looked shifty and I took an instant dislike to him.

“Senator,” I said, bowing slightly as protocol dictated.

“Miss Next,” he said dryly, “I must tell you right now that I didn’t vote for you. I will be keeping a close eye on your behavior.”

“Good,” I replied noncommittally, then added, “What’s up, Dr. Howard?”

He motioned us towards the center of the room where beneath us in a recessed pit there was a large map of the BookWorld.

“We plot everything,” he explained as the staff below moved marker tags with long sticks to the orders of the controllers above, “from the largest unconstrained narrative flexation to the smallest tense distortion. Then, by plotting the size of the changes and their positions, a rough map of the BookWorld’s weather can be constructed.”

I looked down at the sea of small markers, which seemed, indeed, to have a sort of swirling pattern to them. He pointed to a mass of reports.

“About two hours ago an outbreak of anomalous plot flexations began in Riders of the Purple Sage.”

“The Minotaur was reported in Zane Grey last week,” I commented.

“That’s what we thought at first,” replied Dr. Howard, “but the slight flexations were moving too fast to be a PageRunner. Within twenty minutes a cloud of grammatical oddities had joined the weather front, and together they left the Western genre. The front brushed the southeast corner of Erotica and vanished ten minutes later into Stream of Consciousness.”

“Vanished?”

“Difficult to spot, perhaps. It’s been quiet in SOC ever since. But that’s not all. At pretty much the same time a cloud of mispunctuation arose in Horror, circled twice and then developed into a pretty stiff breeze of split infinitives and jumbled words before traveling through Fantasy into Romance. Unchallenged, it hit the Farquitt series and split in two. One storm front headed north into Steel, the other along the Collins ridge just east of Krantz. We expect the two fronts to merge just past Cooper in a few minutes.”

“So we can safely say it’s over then?” asked the senator, staring at the plotting table with more than a little confusion.

“Up to a point, Senator,” replied Dr. Howard diplomatically. “As you so expertly point out, it just might dissipate into the Taylor Bradford canon harmlessly.”

“Oh, good!” said the senator with relief.

“However,” continued Dr. Howard, “and far be it from me to contradict Your Grace, it’s equally probable they will strengthen and then careen off on a destructive course towards Drama.”

“Boss!” said a technician who had been staring at a list of recent anomalies. “I think you better see this.”