“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.”

“Good. Bring The Scarlet Letter back on-line.”

We watched nervously as the storm slowly subsided. It had littered the Hemingway canon with words and ideas, but nothing violent enough to embed them and change the narrative. As likely as not the residents of the novels would just pick them up and sell them to traveling scrap merchants. But the WordStorm wasn’t quite finished with us yet. After brushing past the preface to For Whom the Bell Tolls, the storm suddenly sped up and, in its last dying throes, embedded a Bride Shot at the Altar plot device right at the end of Blackmore’s Lorna Doone, where it remains to this day. Aside from that minor flexation, no real harm was done by the WordStorm. The senator berated me for a good ten minutes and filed a report on my behavior the following day, which was summarily rejected by the other members of the Jurisfiction oversight committee.