'But Kaine is a real danger to our world,' I exclaimed.

Considering Kaine's righter-than-right politics, this was a fresh limit to the word understatement.

'He has stolen from the Great Library once,' I continued. 'How can we suppose he won't do the same again? Don't we have a duty to the readers to protect them from fictionauts hell-bent on—'

'Ms Next,' interrupted the Bellman, 'I understand what you are saying but I am not going to sanction an operation in the Outland. I'm sorry, but that is how it is going to be. He goes on the PageRunners' register and we'll set up textual sieves on every floor of the Library in case he plans to come back. Out there you may do as you please; here you do as we tell you. Is that clear?'

I grew hot and angry but Miss Havisham squeezed my arm, so I remained quiet.

'Good,' carried on the Bellman, consulting his clipboard again. 'Item four. Text Grand Central have reported several attempted incursions from the Outland. Nothing serious but enough to generate a few ripples in the Ficto-Outland barrier. Miss Havisham, didn't you report that an Outlander company was doing some research into entering fiction?'

It was true. Goliath had been attempting entry into the BookWorld for many years but with little success; all they had managed to do was extract a stodgy gunge from volumes one to eight of The World of Cheese. Uncle Mycroft had sought refuge in the Sherlock Holmes series to avoid them.

'It was called the Something Company,' replied Havisham thoughtfully.

'Goliath,' I told her. 'It's called the Goliath Corporation.'

'Goliath. That was it. I had a look round while I was retrieving Miss Next's TravelBook.'

'Do you think Outlander technology is that far advanced?' asked the Bellman.

'No. They're still a long way away. They'd been trying to send an unmanned probe into The Listeners but, from what I saw, with little success.'

'Okay,' replied the Bellman, 'we'll keep an eye on them. What was their name again?'

'Goliath,' I said.

He made a note.

'Item five. All of the punctuation has been stolen from the final chapter of Ulysses. Probably about five hundred assorted full stops, commas, apostrophes and colons.'

He paused for a moment.

'Vern, weren't you doing some work on this?'

'Indeed,' replied the squire, stepping forward and opening a notebook. 'We noticed the theft two days ago. I spoke to the Cat and he said that no one has entered the book, so we can only assume that the novel was penetrated through the literary interpretation of Dublin – which gives us several thousand suspects. I surmise the thief thought no one would notice as most readers never get that far into Ulysses – you will recall the theft of chapter sixty-two from Moby-Dick, which no one ever noticed? Well, this theft was noted, but initial reports show that readers are regarding the lack of punctuation as not a cataclysmic error but the mark of a great genius, so we've got some breathing space.'