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know, John. You are here because you are supposed to be here, and you are the Caretakers, after all. You well know that the responsibility is far greater than just looking after a book. Even if you were not the Caretakers, you are still friends of the king and queen—and it is in times of peril that one must call on one’s friends, wherever and whoever they may be.”
    “Even if they are enemies, according to Laura Glue.”
    “Yes,” Bert said. “Even if they are enemies.”
     
    “I can see the smoke coming out of your ears,” Charles said, sitting on the deck next to Jack. “What are you considering so mightily?”
    “Something I’ve been thinking about for nine years,” replied Jack. “When we were trying to keep the Winter King from getting his hands on the Geographica …”
    “Yes?” said John, coming to sit opposite Charles.
    “The first plan was to try destroying it, right?”
    “Correct.”
    “But we couldn’t, because only the Cartographer could destroy the book.”
    “Right again,” said John. “What are you driving at, Jack?”
    “Stay with me here,” urged Jack. “Part of the Caretaker’s job is to annotate maps, add new maps, and also to improve the translations attached to existing maps, right?”
    “Yes,” John said, “although I haven’t yet had the opportunity toadd any maps, only make corrections and notations to the existing ones. What of it?”
    “I’m afraid I don’t see it either,” said Charles.
    “What he’s asking,” Bert said without turning from the wheel, “is why you didn’t simply vandalize the atlas, or scumble in false notations, or simply pour ink all over the pages, effectively destroying its usefulness, if not the book itself.”
    “Well, yes,” said Jack. “That’s exactly what I was wondering.”
    Bert turned his head and squinted at them. “Don’t you think that hadn’t occurred to me, or Jules, or Stellan long before you were ever recruited as Caretakers?”
    “Then why didn’t you do it?” asked John.
    “Would you have been able to?” Bert shot back.
    “We tried,” said Jack. “We threw it on the brazier.”
    “No,” said Bert, “ Nemo threw it on the brazier. And when he’d proven it wouldn’t burn, that was the end of any thoughts you had of destroying, or even damaging, the book.”
    “He’s right,” Charles said. “We never even considered it after that.”
    “Clever,” noted John. “We’d eliminated the idea in principle, so we overlooked other specific aspects of it that may have solved the problem.”
    “ Would have solved the problem,” Jack corrected. “We could have solved a major problem with a relatively minor sacrifice.”
    “Jules and I had a similar discussion once,” said Bert. “He offered me a hypothetical situation. What if a young man, say, a painter from Austria, seemingly normal, absolutely unremarkable, was destined to one day become a terrible ruler, responsible for the death of millions?
    “If, knowing this future, and knowing what might be averted if this single, then innocent artist were to be killed, would you do it?”
    “There’s no way to know a man’s future,” observed John. “Not for certain. So it would be murder.”
    “Jamie told me Nemo was foretold of his death,” said Jack. “And he did nothing to change that event. So is that a reverse-murder? Or a self-murder?”
    “That decision was Nemo’s to make for himself,” said Bert. “It wasn’t someone deciding his future for him. But answer the question: Would you kill the painter who had done no evil, to save the millions from the evil that he might one day become?”
    “No,” John and Jack answered together.
    “I don’t know,” Charles admitted. “Maybe if it were real and not hypothetical, I could make that choice.”
    “Well, in a way, that was the choice you were making with the Geographica ,” said Bert. “A little murder, with pen and ink as the instruments of the death, and you could prevent the book