“Why, you, of course,” replied the lad.

“I’m not.”

“Then why are you a-wearin’ the cap?”

I put up my hands to check, and strangely enough, I was wearing the captain’s cap. I took it off and stared at it stupidly.

“What book is this?”

“No book I knows of, Cap’n. What be your orders?”

I looked out of the wheel house ahead but could see nothing except a gray sea meeting a gray sky. The light was soft and directionless, and for the first time I felt a shiver of dread. Something about this place was undeniably creepy, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I went to the navigation desk and looked at the chart. There was nothing on it but the pale blueness of open ocean, and a cursory look in the drawers of the desk told me that every chart was the same. What ever this place was, this was all there was of it. I had to assume I was somewhere in the Maritime genre, but a quick glance at my mobilefootnoterphone and the absence of any signal told me that I was several thousand volumes beyond our repeater station in the Hornblower series, and if that was the case, I was right on the periphery of the genre-as good as lost. I tapped my finger on the desk and thought hard. Panic was the mind killer, and I still had several hours to figure this out. If I was no further on in ten hours’ time-then I could panic.

“What are your orders, Cap’n?” asked the lad at the wheel again.

“What’s your name?”

“Baldwin.”

“I’m Thursday. Thursday Next.”

“Good to know you, Cap’n Next.”

“Have you heard my name? Or of Jurisfiction?”

He shook his head.

“Right. Tell me, Baldwin, do you know this ship well?”

“As well as I know meself,” he replied proudly.

“Is there a core-containment room?”

“Not that I knows of.”

So we weren’t in a published work.

“How about a Storycode Engine anywhere on board?”

He frowned and looked confused. “There’s an ordinary engine room. I don’t know nuffin’ ’bout no Storycode.”

I scratched my head. Without a Storycode Engine, we were either nonfiction or something in the oral tradition. Those were the upbeat possibilities: I might also be in a forgotten story, a dead writer’s unrealized idea or even a handwritten short story stuck in a desk drawer somewhere-the dark reading matter.

“What year is this?”

“Spring of 1932, Cap’n.”

“And the purpose of this voyage?”

“Not for the likes of me to know, Cap’n.”

“But something must happen!”

“Oh, aye,” he said more confidently, “things most definite happen!”

“What sort of things?”

“Difficult things, Cap’n.”

As if in answer to his enigmatic comment, someone shouted my name. I walked out onto the port wing, where a man in a first officer’s uniform was on the deck below. He was in his mid-fifties and looked vaguely cultured, but somehow out of place, as though his ser vice in the merchant navy had been to remove him from problems at home.

“Captain Next?” he said.

“Yes, sort of.”

“First Officer William Fitzwilliam at your ser vice, ma’am. We’ve got a problem with the passengers!”

“Can’t you deal with it?”

“No, ma’am-you’re the captain.”

I descended and met Fitzwilliam at the foot of the ladder. He led me into the paneled wardroom, where there were three people waiting for us. The first man was standing stiffly with his arms folded and looked aggrieved. He was well dressed in a black morning coat and wore a small pince-nez perched on the end of his nose. The other two were obviously man and wife. The woman was of an unhealthy pallor, had recently been crying and was being comforted by her husband, who every now and then shot an angry glance at the first man.

“I’m very busy,” I told them. “What’s the problem here?”

“My name is Mr. Langdon,” said the married man, wringing his hands. “My wife, Louise, here suffers from Zachary’s syndrome, and without the necessary medicine she will die.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” I said, “but what can I do?”

“That man has the medicine!” cried Langdon, pointing an accusatory finger at the man in the pince-nez. “Yet he refuses to sell it to me!”

“Is this true?”

“My name is Dr. Glister,” said the man, nodding politely. “I have the medicine, it is true, but the price is two thousand guineas, and Mr. and Mrs. Langdon have only a thousand guineas and not the capacity to borrow more!”

“Well,” I said to the doctor, “I think it would be a kindly gesture to lower the price, don’t you?”

“I wish that I could,” replied Dr. Glister, “but this medicine cost me everything I possessed to develop. It destroyed my health and damaged my reputation. If I do not recoup my losses, I will be forced into ruin, my property will be repossessed, and my six children will become destitute. I am sympathetic to Mrs. Langdon’s trouble, but this is a fiscal issue.”

“Listen,” I said to the Langdons, “it’s not up to me. The medicine is Dr. Glister’s property for him to dispose of as he wishes.”

“But she needs the medicine now,” pleaded Mr. Langdon. “If she doesn’t get it, she will die. You are the captain on this ship and so have the ultimate authority. You must make the decision.”

I sighed. I had a lot more important things to deal with right now.

“Dr. Glister, give him the medicine for a thousand guineas. Mr. Langdon, you will work to repay Dr. Glister no matter what. Understand?”

“But my livelihood!” wailed Glister.

“I place Mrs. Langdon’s definite death above the possibility of your penury, Dr. Glister.”

“But this is nothing short of theft!” he replied, outraged at my words. “And I have done nothing wrong-only discovered a cure for a fatal illness. I deserve better treatment than this!”

“You do, you’re right. But I know nothing of you, nor the Langdons. My decision is based only on the saving of a life. Will you excuse me?”

Baldwin had called from the wheel house, and I quickly scooted up the stairs.

“What is it?”

He pointed to something about a mile off the starboard bow. I picked up a pair of binoculars and trained it on the distant object. Finally some good luck. It looked like a “turmoil,” the name we gave to a small, localized disruption in the fabric of the written word. This was how heavy weather in the BookWorld got started: A turmoil would soon progress into a powerful WordStorm able to uproot words, ideas and even people, then carry them with it across the empty darkness of the Nothing, eventually dumping them on distant books several genres distant. It was my way out. I’d never hitched a ride on a WordStorm before, but it didn’t look too difficult. Dorothy, after all, had no real problems with the tornado.

“Alter course to starboard thirty degrees,” I said. “We’re going to intercept the WordStorm. How long do you think it will take for us to get there, Baldwin?”

“Twenty minutes, Cap’n.”

It would be a close thing. Turmoils increase their pace until a rotating tube rises up into the heavens, filled with small sections of plot and anything else it can suck up. Then, with a flurry of distorted sense, it lifts off and vanishes. I wouldn’t get this chance again.

“Is that wise, Captain?” asked First Officer Fitzwilliam, who had joined us on the bridge. “I’ve seen storms like that. They can do serious damage-and we have forty passengers, many of them women and children.”

“Then you can lower me in a lifeboat ahead of the storm.”

“And leave us without a lifeboat?”

“Yes…no…I don’t know. Fitzwilliam?”

“Yes, Captain?”

“What is this place?”

“I don’t know what you mean, Captain.”

“I mean-”

“Cap’n,” said Baldwin, pointing off of the port side of the ship, “isn’t that a lifeboat?”

I turned my attention to the area in which he pointed. It was a lifeboat, with what looked like several people, all slumped and apparently unconscious. Damn. I looked again, hoping for confirmation that they might already be dead, but saw nothing to tell me either way. I frowned to myself. Had I just hoped for them to be dead?