“Commander? It’s Thursday.” [7]

“I’m in a taxi heading toward Moby-Dick via The Old Man and the Sea.” [8]

“Apparently not. How are things?” [9]

“No; I’ve got to destroy something in Hesperus that will hopefully raise the Outlander ReadRates. As soon as I’m done there, I’ll go straight to Jobsworth.” [10]

I looked out of the window. We were over the sea once again, but this time the weather was brighter. Two small whaling boats, each with five men at the oars, were pulling toward a disturbance in the water, and as I watched, a mighty, gray-white bulk erupted from beneath the green water and shattered one of the small boats, pitching the hapless occupants into the sea.

“I’m just coming out the far end of Moby-Dick. Do you have anything for me at all?” [11]

I closed the phone and handed it back. If Bradshaw was short on ideas, the situation was more hopeless than I had imagined. We crossed from Maritime to Poetry by way of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and after hiding momentarily in the waste of wild dunes, marram and sand of “False Dawn” while a foot patrol of Danvers moved past, we were off again and turned into Longfellow by way of “The Light house.”

“Hold up a moment,” I said to Colin, and we pulled up beneath a rocky ledge on a limestone spur that led out in the deep purple of the twilight to a light house, its beam a sudden radiance of light that swept around the bay.

“This isn’t a wait-and-return job, is it?” he asked nervously.

“I’m afraid it is. How close can you get me to the actual wrecking of the Hesperus?”

He sucked in air through his teeth and scratched his nose. “During the gale itself, not close at all. The reef of Norman’s Woe during the storm is not somewhere you’d like to be. Forget the wind and the rain-it’s the cold.”

I knew what he meant. Poetry was an emotional roller coaster of a form that could heighten the senses almost beyond straining. The sun was always brighter, the skies bluer, and forests steamed six times as much after a summer shower and felt twelve times earthier. Love was ten times stronger, and happiness, hope and charity rose to a level that made your head spin with giddy well-being. On the other side of the coin, it also made the darker side of existence twenty times worse-tragedy and despair were bleaker, more malevolent. As the saying goes, “They don’t do nuffing by half measures down at Poetry.”

“So how close?” I asked.

“Daybreak, three verses from the end.”

“Okay,” I said, “let’s do it.”

He released the handbrake and motored slowly forward. The light moved from twilight to dawn as we entered “The Wreck of the Hesperus.” The sky was still leaden, and a stiff wind scoured the foreshore, even though the worst of the storm had passed. The taxi drew to a halt on the sea beach, and I opened the door and stepped out. I suddenly felt a feeling of strong loss and despair, but knowing full well that these were simply emotions seeping out of the overcharged fabric of the poem, I attempted to give it no heed. Colin got out as well, and we exchanged nervous looks. The sea beach was littered with the wreckage of the Hesperus, reduced to little more than matchwood by the gale. I pulled my jacket collar close against the wind and trudged up the shoreline.

“What are we looking for?” asked Colin, who had joined me.

“Remains of a yellow tour bus,” I said, “or a tasteless blue jacket with large checks.”

“Nothing too specific, then?”

Most of the flotsam was wood, barrels, ropes and the odd personal artifact. We came across a drowned sailor, but he wasn’t someone from the Rover. Colin became emotional over the loss of life and lamented how the sailor had been “sorely taken from the bosom of his family” and “given his soul to the storm” before I told him to pull himself together. We reached some rocks and chanced across a fisherman, staring with a numbed expression at a section of mast that gently rose and fell in the sheltered water of an inlet. Lashed to the mast was a body. Her long brown hair was floating like seaweed, and the intense cold had frozen her features in the expression she’d last worn in life-of abject terror. She was wearing a heavy seaman’s coat, which hadn’t done much good, and I waded into the icy water to look closer. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have, but something was wrong. This should have been the body of a young girl-the skipper’s daughter. But it wasn’t. It was a middle-aged woman. It was Wirthlass-Schitt. Her eyelashes were encrusted with frozen salt, and she stared blankly out at the world, her face suffused with fear.

“She saved me.”

It was a little girl’s voice, and I turned. She was aged no more than nine and was wrapped in a Goliath-issue down jacket. She looked confused, as well she might; she hadn’t survived the storm for over 163 years. Wirthlass-Schitt had underestimated the power not only of the BookWorld, the raw energy of Poetry…but also herself. Despite her primary goal of corporate duty, she couldn’t leave a child to drown. She’d done what she thought was right and suffered the consequences. It was what I was trying to warn her about. The thing you discover in Poetry…is your true personality. The annoying thing was, she’d done it all for nothing. A cleanup gang from Jurisfiction would be down later, putting everything chillingly to rights. It was why I didn’t like to do “the rhyming stuff.”

Colin, overcome by the heavy emotions that pervaded the air like fog, had begun to cry. “O wearisome world!” he sobbed.

I checked Anne’s collar and found a small necklace on her cold flesh. I pulled it off and then stopped. If she’d been on the Hesperus, perhaps she had picked up his jacket?

The seaman’s coat was like cardboard, and I eased it open at the collar to look beneath. My heart fell. She wasn’t wearing the jacket, and after checking her pockets I found that she wasn’t carrying the recipe either. I took a deep breath, and my emotions, enhanced by the poem, suddenly fell to rock bottom. Wirthlass-Schitt must have given the jacket to her crewmates-and if it was back at Goliath, I’d have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting to it. Friday had entrusted me with the protection of the Long Now, and I had failed him. I waded back to shore and started sniffing as large, salty tears ran down my face.

“Oh, please dry up,” I said to Colin, who was sobbing into his hankie next to me. “You’ve got me started now.”

“But the sadness drapes heavily on my countenance!” he whimpered.

We sat on the foreshore next to the fisherman, who was still looking aghast, and sobbed quietly as though our hearts would break. The young girl came and sat down next to me. She patted my hand reassuringly.

“I didn’t want to be rescued anyway,” she announced. “If I survive, the whole point of the poem is lost-Henry will be furious.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’ll all be repaired.”

“And everyone keeps on giving me their jackets,” she continued in a huffy tone. “Honestly, it gets harder and harder to freeze to death these days. There’s this one that Anne gave me,” she added, thumbing the thick pile on the blue Goliath jacket, “and the one the old man gave me seventeen years ago.”

“Really, I’m not interested in-”

I stopped sobbing as a bright shaft of sunlight cut through the storm clouds of my melancholia.

“Do…you still have it?”

“Of course!”

And she unzipped the Goliath jacket to reveal-a man’s blue jacket in large checks. Never had I been happier to see a more tasteless garment. I quickly rummaged through the pockets and found a yo-yo string, a very old bag of jelly beans, a domino, a screwdriver, an invention for cooking the perfect hard-boiled egg and…wrapped in a plastic freezer bag, a paper napkin with a simple equation written upon it. I gave the young girl a hug, my feeling of elation quadrupled by the magnifying effect of Poetry. I breathed a sigh of relief. Found! Without wasting a moment, I tore the recipe into small pieces and ate them.