Smithy wasn’t, not yet, but there could be no doubt that he was in danger of losing it.

I refuse, he thought. I refuse, I refuse. And realized, to his horror, that he was actually muttering this under his breath.

The Henderson kid, who sat in the first row, had heard it. ‘Mr Smith?’ A hesitation. ‘Sir? Are you all right?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘No. A touch of the bug, maybe.’ Poe’s gold-bug, he thought, and barely restrained himself from bursting into cackles of nutty laughter. ‘Class dismissed. Go on, get out of here.’

And, as they scrambled for the door, he had presence of mind enough to add: ‘Raymond Carver next week! Don’t forget! Where I’m Calling From!’

And thought: What else is there by Raymond Carver in the worlds of Ur? Is there one – or a dozen, or a thousand – where he quit smoking, lived to be seventy, and wrote another half a dozen books?

He sat down at his desk, reached for his briefcase with the pink Kindle inside, then pulled his hand back. He reached again, stopped himself again, and moaned. It was like a drug. Or a sexual obsession. Thinking of that made him think of Ellen Silverman, something he hadn’t done since discovering the Kindle’s hidden menus. For the first time since she’d walked out, Ellen had completely slipped his mind.

Ironic, isn’t it? Now I’m reading off the computer, Ellen, and I can’t stop.

‘I refuse to spend the rest of the day looking into that thing,’ he said, ‘and I refuse to go mad. I refuse to look, and I refuse to go mad. To look or go mad. I refuse both. I—’

But the pink Kindle was in his hand! He had taken it out even as he had been denying its power over him! When had he done that? And did he really intend to sit here in this empty classroom, mooning over it?

‘Mr Smith?’

The voice startled him so badly that he dropped the Kindle on his desk. He snatched it up at once and examined it, terrified it might be broken, but it was all right. Thank God.

‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’ It was the Henderson kid, standing in the doorway and looking concerned. This didn’t surprise Wesley much. If I saw me right now, I’d probably be concerned, too.

‘Oh, you didn’t startle me,’ Wesley said. This obvious lie struck him as funny, and he almost giggled. He clapped a hand over his mouth to hold it in.

‘What’s wrong?’ The Henderson kid took a step inside. ‘I think it’s more than a virus. Man, you look awful. Did you get some bad news, or something?’

Wesley almost told him to mind his business, peddle his papers, put an egg in his shoe and beat it, but then the terrified part of him that had been cowering in the farthest corner of his brain, insisting that the pink Kindle was a prank or the opening gambit of some elaborate con, decided to stop hiding and start acting.

If you really refuse to go mad, you better do something about this, it said. So how about it?

‘What’s your first name, Mr Henderson? It’s entirely slipped my mind.’

The kid smiled. A pleasant smile, but the concern was still in his eyes. ‘Robert, sir. Robbie.’

‘Well, Robbie, I’m Wes. And I want to show you something. Either you will see nothing – which means I’m deluded, and very likely suffering a nervous breakdown – or you will see something that completely blows your mind. Come to my office, would you?’

Henderson tried to ask questions as they crossed Moore’s mediocre quad. Wesley shook them off, but he was glad Robbie Henderson had come back, and relieved that the terrified part of his mind had taken the initiative and spoken up. He felt better about the Kindle – safer – than at any time since discovering the hidden menus. In a story, Robbie Henderson would see nothing and the protagonist would decide he was going insane. Or had already gone. Wesley almost hoped for that, because …

Because I want it to be a delusion. If it is, and if with this young man’s help I can recognize it as such, I’m sure I can avoid going mad. And I refuse to go mad.

‘You’re muttering, Mr Smith,’ Robbie said. ‘Wes, I mean.’

‘Sorry.’

‘You’re scaring me a little.’

‘I’m also scaring me a little.’

Don Allman was in the office, wearing headphones, correcting papers, and singing about Jeremiah the bullfrog in a voice that went beyond the borders of tuneless and into the unexplored country of the truly execrable. He shut off his iPod when he saw Wesley.

‘I thought you had class.’

‘Canceled it. This is Robert Henderson, one of my American Lit students.’

‘Robbie,’ Henderson said, extending his hand.

‘Hello, Robbie. I’m Don Allman. One of the lesser-known Allman brothers. I play a mean tuba.’

Robbie laughed politely and shook Don Allman’s hand. Until that moment, Wesley had planned on asking Don to leave, thinking one witness to his mental collapse would be enough. But maybe this was that rare case where more really was merrier.

‘Need some privacy?’ Don asked.

‘No,’ Wesley said. ‘Stay. I want to show you guys something. And if you see nothing and I see something, I’ll be delighted to check into Central State Psychiatric.’ He opened his briefcase.

‘Whoa!’ Robbie exclaimed. ‘A pink Kindle! Sweet! I’ve never seen one of those before!’

‘Now I’m going to show you something else that you’ve never seen before,’ Wesley said. ‘At least, I think I am.’

He plugged in the Kindle and turned it on.

What convinced Don Allman was the Collected Works of William Shakespeare from Ur 17000. After downloading it at Don’s request – because in this particular Ur, Shakespeare had died in 1620 instead of 1616 – the three men discovered two new plays. One was titled Two Ladies of Hampshire, a comedy that seemed to have been written soon after Julius Caesar. The other was a tragedy called A Black Fellow in London, written in 1619. Wesley opened this one and then (with some reluctance) handed Don the Kindle.

Don Allman was ordinarily a ruddy-cheeked guy who smiled a lot, but as he paged through Acts I and II of A Black Fellow in London, he lost both his smile and his color. After twenty minutes, during which Wesley and Robbie sat watching him silently, he pushed the Kindle back to Wesley. He did it with the tips of his fingers, as if he really didn’t want to touch it at all.

‘So?’ Wesley asked. ‘What’s the verdict?’

‘It could be an imitation,’ Don said, ‘but of course there have always been scholars who claimed that Shakespeare’s plays weren’t written by Shakespeare. There are supporters of Christopher Marlowe … Francis Bacon … even the Earl of Derby …’

‘Yeah, and James Frey wrote Macbeth,’ Wesley said. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think this could be authentic Willie,’ Don said. He sounded on the verge of tears. Or laughter. Maybe both. ‘I think it’s far too elaborate to be a joke. And if it’s a hoax, I have no idea how it works.’ He reached a finger to the Kindle, touched it lightly, then pulled it away. ‘I’d have to study both plays closely, with reference works at hand, to be more definite, but … it’s got his lilt.’

Robbie Henderson, it turned out, had read almost all of John D. MacDonald’s mystery and suspense novels. In the Ur 2171753 listing of MacDonald’s works, he found seventeen novels in what was called ‘the Dave Higgins series.’ All the titles had colors in them.

‘That part’s right,’ Robbie said, ‘but the titles are all wrong. And John D.’s series character was named Travis McGee, not Dave Higgins.’

Wesley downloaded one called The Blue Lament, hitting his credit card with another $4.50 charge, and pushed the Kindle over to Robbie once the book had been downloaded to the ever-growing library that was Wesley’s Kindle. While Robbie read, at first from the beginning and then skipping around, Don went down to the main office and brought back three coffees. Before settling in behind his desk, he hung the little-used CONFERENCE IN PROGRESS DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door.