They detoured around the elevators and staff rooms that occupied the middle of the floor. Now they were moving at right angles to the stacks. Far down the book-lined shelves he glimpsed the sky beyond the windows. "You said there was chance that Max Huertas might show up today."
"Duì . Yes. There's some chance he might come. Several libraries begin the project this week, but UCSD is the star." Huertas was more than just the money behind the Librareome. He was also a major investor in the biotech labs near campus. He had turned the university scene upside down with his Librareome insanity, ultimately greasing it past an administration that should have fought him to the death.
Blount's jog slowed as they approached the windows. The UCSD campus had suffered a revolution in the last decades. The vibrant building campaign of his time as dean had been swept away by the Rose Canyon quake and the facile logic of the modern university administrations. The campus had reverted to a woodsy, low-density style, with buildings that might just as well have been prefab Quonsets. In a sad, sad way it reminded him of the campus's earliest years, of his grad-school years. We built such a beautiful place here, and then we let opportunism and remote learning and the damn labs dissipate it all . What shall it profit a university, if it shall enroll five hundred thousand, and lose its own soul?
He reached the northeast windows and looked down. The sixth floor was at the building's maximum overhang. You could see almost straight down — to a stretch of cracked concrete, the library loading dock. And there was a guy down there, furtively looking around. Carlos Rivera caught up with Blount and for a moment they were both staring downward. Then Blount noticed that the younger man was actually staring through the floor; he'd found some camera on the lower levels. "That's not Max Huertas," said Carlos. "He'd come with a gang of lackeys."
"Yeah." But it was someone who could persuade the Library rent-a-cops to let him go down there. Blount tapped the glass. "Look up here, you jerk!" It was amazing what little he could see from straight up. The stranger carried himself with a twitchy awkwardness, like an old-timer coping with a regrown nervous system… Blount was beginning to get a very bad feeling. And then the stranger turned his gaze upward. It was like finding a large rat at your feet.
"Oh, Christ." A strange combination of disgust and curiosity forced him to say: "Just get him up here."
After the sunny loading dock, the hallway seemed very dark. Robert hesitated, adjusting to the light. The walls were streaked with scuff and scrape marks. The floor was naked concrete. This was not a public area. It reminded him of years ago when he and certain undergrads would sneak around in the utility cores of these buildings.
Epiphany hung tiny labels on the doors and ceiling, and even the cracks in the walls. They weren't terribly informative, ID numbers and maintenance instructions, the sort of thing that might have been paint-stenciled in the old days. But — if he wanted to take the time — he could search through the signs and get background information. And there were mysteries. A large, silver-puttied crack in the wall was marked "cantilever-LimitCycle < 1.2mm:25s." Robert was about to search on that when he noticed a door decorated with a larger banner, one that ticked out the seconds:
00:07:03 Librareome Equipment in Operation: KEEP OUT!
What the hell, this door was open too.
On the other side, the power-saw racket was louder. He walked fifty feet, past plastic crates — "Rescued Data," the labels said. At the end, behind some kind of legged forklift, there was another unlocked door. And now he was on familiar ground: he was at the bottom of the library's central stairwell. He looked up and up, into the foreshortened spiral of steps. Tiny flecks of white floated and swirled in the column of light. Snowflakes? But one landed on his hand: a fleck of paper.
And now the ripping buzz of the saw was still louder, and there was also the sound of a giant vacuum cleaner. But it was the irregular ripping buzz that echoed down the stairwell and beat him about the head. There was something familiar about that, but it wasn't an indoors kind of sound.
He started up the stairs, pausing at each landing. The dust and the noise were worst at the fourth floor, labeled "Catalog Section PZ." The door opened smoothly. Beyond would be the library stacks. All the books you could ever want, miles of them. The beauty of ideas waiting in ambush.
But this was like no stacks he had ever seen. The floor was draped in white tarpaulin. The air was hazy with drifting debris. He took a breath, smelled pine pitch and burnt wood — and for a moment he couldn't stop coughing.
Brap , painfully loud now, coming from four aisles to his right. There were empty shelves here, a littering of paper scraps and deep dust.
Brrap . Against logic, sometimes recognition comes hard. But finally, Robert remembered the exact sound which that abrupt roar must be. He had heard it occasionally throughout his life, but always the machine had been outdoors.
Brrrapl A tree shredder!
Ahead of him, everything was empty bookcases, skeletons. Robert went to the end of the aisle and walked toward the noise. The air was a fog of floating paper dust. In the fourth aisle, the space between the bookcases was filled with a pulsing fabric tube. The monster worm was brightly lit from within. At the other end, almost twenty feet away, was the worm's maw — the source of the noise. Indistinct in the swirling haze, Robert could see two white-suited figures, their jackets labeled "Huertas Data Rescue." The two wore filter masks and head protectors. They might have been construction workers. In fact, this business was the ultimate in deconstruction: first one and then the other would pull books off the racks and toss them into the shredder's maw. The maintenance labels made calm phrases of the horror: The raging maw was a "NaviCloud custom debinder." The fabric tunnel that stretched out behind it was a "camera tunnel." Robert flinched from the sight — and Epiphany randomly rewarded his gesture with imagery from within the monster: The shredded fragments of books and magazines flew down the tunnel like leaves in tornado, twisting and tumbling. The inside of the fabric was stitched with thousands of tiny cameras. The shreds were being photographed again and again, from every angle and orientation, till finally the torn leaves dropped into a bin just in front of Robert. Rescued data.
BRRRRRAP ! The monster advanced another foot into the stacks, leaving another foot of empty shelves behind it. Almost empty. Robert stepped into the aisle and his hand caught on something lying on a shelf. It wasn't dust. It was half a page, a remnant of all the thousands of books that had already been sucked into the "data rescue" equipment. He waved it at the white-suited workers and screamed words that were lost in the noise of their shredder and the worm tunnel fans.
But the two looked up and shouted something back.
If the body of the glowing worm hadn't been between him and them, Robert might have rushed the pair. As it was, they just waved impotently at each other.
Then a third guy appeared, behind Robert. This one was an overweight thirty-something wearing Bermuda shorts and a huge black T-shirt. The young man was shouting at him in — what, Mandarin? He waved pleadingly for Robert to follow him back toward the stairwell, away from the nightmare.
The sixth floor of the library was not part of the nightmare. In fact, it looked pretty much as Robert remembered from the early 1970s. The guy with the big T-shirt led him through the stacks to a study area on the south side of the building. There was a short fellow with an ancient laptop computer, sitting right by the windows. The little guy stood and stared. Then suddenly he laughed, and stuck out his hand. "I'll be damned. You really are Robert Gu!"