Robert noticed that Tommie Parker was watching with a faint smile. "So you do have a plan?"
"I ain't saying nothing while Sharif is here."
Winnie sighed. "Okay, Tommie. Go ahead and shut him down."
Sharif's rosy glow moved a little ways out from the stacks. "It's all right. I don't want to be a prob — " The glow vanished.
Tommie looked up from his laptop. "He's gone. And I've deadzoned the sixth floor." He pointed at an LED on the edge of his ancient-looking laptop.
Robert remembered some of Bob's claims: "Even the Homeland Security hardware?"
"Don't tell, Robert." He patted his computer. "Genuine Paraguayan inside, shipped just before they shut the fabs down." He gave them a shifty grin. "Now it's just us, unless one of you is wearing dirty panties."
Blount looked pointedly at Robert. "Or unless one of us is a fink."
Robert sighed. "This isn't Stanford, Winston." But what if the Mysterious Stranger were actually a cop? That should have occurred to him before. He pushed the thought away. "So what's your plan?"
"We've been reading the Economist ," said Rivera. "Huertas International is on shaky financial ground. Delays here at UCSD could force him to dump the whole project." He stared at Robert through his thick spectacles. You could see images flickering around in the things.
"Even though they've shredded almost everything here?"
"Duì ." The young man leaned forward, and his T-shirt showed a torrent of worried faces. "It's like this. The Librareome Project isn't just the video capture of premillennium books. It's not just the digitization. It goes beyond Google and company. Huertas intends to combine all classical knowledge into a single, object-situational database with a transparent fee structure."
Object-situational database? This was beyond Robert's newfound nerdliness. He stared over Rivera's head, trying to look up the term. Nothing was coming back. Tommie's deadzone, yeah.
Rivera took his stare as disbelief. "It's really not that much data, Dr. Gu. A few petabytes. The main thing is that it's very heterogeneous compared to similar-size datasets in most applications."
"Of course. Your point?" From the corner of his eye, he saw a smile come to Winnie's face. The guy knew Robert was blowing smoke.
"So," Rivera continued, "the Huertas collection will contain almost all human knowledge up to about twenty years ago. All correlated and connected. It's the reason Huertas is paying the State of California to let him commit this atrocity. Even the first rough compilation could be a gold mine. From the project start six weeks ago, Huertas International has a six-month monopoly on the Librareome they're creating. That's six months with sole access to real insight on the past. There are dozens of questions that such a resource might resolve: Who really ended the Intifada? Who is behind the London art forgeries? Where was the oil money really going in the latter part of the last century? Some answers will only interest obscure historical societies. But some will mean big bucks. And Huertas will have exclusive rights to this oracle for six months."
"But he has to get the data put together," said Winnie. "If Huertas loses a few weeks, there'll be hundreds of organizations that decide they might as well wait till the monopoly runs out — when they can get an even more complete answer for free. It's worse than that. Chinese Informagical has dibs on the British Museum and the British Library, using much better equipment than Huertas has. The Brits have shown more gumption than UCSD, but their digitization is due to begin any time now. If Huertas gets any further behind, he and the Chinese will be in a price war for the sale of first looks."
"A regular death spiral!" Tommie's amusement was without malice. He had always been fascinated by how things come apart. Robert remembered in the 1970 brush fires, teenaged Tommie had been out in East County, helping with communications — but also enjoying every minute of the disaster.
"So, unh…" Why does the Stranger want me in on this ? Blount chuckled. "Confused, Robert?"
Back at Stanford, Winnie wouldn't have dared such an open gibe, at least not after the first year. But now, the only comebacks Robert could imagine were adolescent sarcasm. So he replied mildly, "Yes, I'm still in the dark."
Blount hesitated, sensing one of the old-Robert traps. "The point is that we're talking about doing Huertas and the Librareome Project serious harm. We're past legal recourse, so anything that depends on delaying the enemy must involve criminal behavior. Got it?"
"Yes. We really are conspirators."
Rivera nodded. "And that by itself is a felony."
Tommie laughed. "So what? I just subverted the DHS snoop layer! That's a national-security rap."
"I don't care if we're talking high treason!" said Robert. If I can get back my song . … "I mean, you know what a lover of books I am."
The others nodded.
"So what is the plan?"
Blount gestured to Tommie. The little guy said, "Do you remember our underground hikes?"
"In the 1970s? Yes, they were fun — in a brain-damaged way."
Tommie's grin broadened.
"You're telling me the steam tunnels are still in use?"
"Yup. In the nineties that type of construction went out of style. There were lots of new buildings that weren't connected. But then in the oughts, folks wanted Extremely High-Rate comms. And the bioscience people wanted automatic specimen transport. These guys had lots of money."
"Even more so, nowadays," said Carlos.
Tommie nodded. "NIR lasers are not for them. They want xlaser and graser gear, trillions of colors per path, and trillions of paths. Nowadays, the 'steam tunnel' network is not for power or heat. Now there are branches extending under Torrey Pines Road to Scripps and Salk. I hear you can walk out under the ocean a short ways, though heaven knows what they're doing there. To the east, you can get into every one of the biotech labs."
Suddenly, Robert saw why the Mysterious Stranger was interested in the Elder Cabal. Aloud, he said, "What does this have to do with the Librareome Project, Tommie?"
"Ah! Well, you know that Max Huertas made his fortune out of biotech. He owns some of the biggest labs in North America — including one just a few thousand feet northeast of us. It was easy for him to modify his genome software to support the Librareome. Okay, so he's storing the shredda in vaults under the north side of campus."
"And?"
"And he's not done with them! The shredding got him plenty of images, but the coverage is not complete. He's got to scan and rescan where there were problems in the first pass. Now if there weren't this time limit, he'd be better just to wait till the next victim library goes up in shreds and use that for cross-checking, but he's in a rush."
"That storage is also part of the Huertas propaganda," said Winnie.
"When they're done with the rescans, the shredda will be 'safely preserved in the Huertas vaults, for the sake of the archaeologists of future generations.' Some of our faculty actually bought into that!"
"Well," said Rivera, "there's a small amount of truth to the claim. The paper will last longer in cool nitrogen than it would on library shelves."
Winnie waved his hand dismissively. "The point is, the books have been destroyed, and Huertas is going to destroy more libraries if he's not stopped. Our plan is — " He looked around, and seemed to realize that he was on the edge of prison time. "Our plan is to break into the steam tunnels and go to where Huertas is storing the shredda. Tommie has come up with a way to make that shredda unreadable."