Below us on the plotting table we could see a small bulge emerge on the western flanks of Stream of Consciousness.

“How fast?” asked Dr. Howard.

“About three pages a second.”

“Give me a projected route.”

The technician picked up a slide rule and scribbled some notes on a pad of paper. Unluckily for us, the front that had begun in Western had traversed Stream of Consciousness and emerged four times as strong.

“I knew we hadn’t seen the last of it,” muttered Howard. “Damn and blast!”

But that wasn’t all. In the next two minutes we watched nervously as the split storm fronts coursing through Romance rejoined, grew stronger and diverted off towards Drama, as feared.

“And that’s why we called you,” said Dr. Howard, gazing at me intently. “In under ten minutes the Romance and Stream of Consciousness frontal systems will merge and strengthen. We’ve got a WordStorm brewing of magnitude five-point-four or more heading straight for Drama.”

“Five-point-four?” echoed the senator. “That’s good, right?”

“In storm terms, it’s very good,” replied Dr. Howard grimly, “make no mistake about that. A two-point-three might only scramble text and change tenses; a three-point-five can muddle chapters and remove entire words. Anything above a five has enough power to tear whole ideas and paragraphs out of a book and dump them several shelves away.”

“O-kay,” I said slowly as Commander Bradshaw appeared, looking a bit bleary-eyed.

“Glad you could make it, Trafford. We’ve got a potential WordStorm brewing.”

“WordStorm, eh?” he mused. “Reminds me of a typhoon that struck The French Lieutenant’s Woman ten years back. By gad, we were picking superfluous adjectives out of the book for a month!”

“And that had been a small one,” added Dr. Howard, “barely a two-point-one.”

“Cat,” I said, “issue a storm warning to the residents of all books on the storm’s path. Trafford, we need every single Danver-Clone we have on thirty-second readiness. I want textual sieves ready and standing by.”

“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.