"What? We're protesting the destruction of the library by destroying what's left?"
"Just temporarily!" said Tommie. "I've found an incredible aerosol glue. Spray it on and the shredda will be like a huge chunk of particle-board. But after a few months, the glue will just sublimate away."
Rivera was nodding. "So we are not making things worse. I wouldn't be here if I thought we were wrecking what's left of the books. Huertas's scheme is unnecessary brutality, trying to grab everything when a slower approach would be just as good. Maybe we can derail him long enough so that the old-time book-friendly digitizers can catch up — and no more libraries will be wrecked." Now his T-shirt was touting the American Library Association.
Robert leaned back and pretended to consider what they were saying. "You say the Chinese are about to shred the British Library?"
Rivera gave a sigh. "Yes, and they're going to whack the Museum, too. But the EU is looking for an excuse to stop them. If we make Huertas look bad…"
"I see," Robert said judiciously. He avoided Winnie's eyes. Blount was already suspicious enough. "Okay. The plan seems pretty feeble… but I guess it's better than nothing. Count me in."
A grin spread wide across Tommie's face. "Hey, Robert!"
Robert finally looked at Winston Blount. "Now the question is, why do you want me in?"
Blount grimaced. "Another pair of hands. Various errands — "
Tommie rolled his eyes. "The fact is, we couldn't dream of doing this before you showed up."
"Me? Why?"
"Ha. Think what we're talking about: breaking into the steam tunnels, walking a mile across one of the most secure bio labs on Earth. I bet I could get us in. But could I hike us undetected across the bio labs? No way. That only works in old Star Trek shows, where the Ventilation system' was designed mainly to drive idiot plots. This is the real world — and real-world security guys know about tunnels too."
"That still doesn't answer the 'Me? Why?'"
"What? Oh. I'm getting to that! Anyway, after our protest tactics fizzled, I began to do some research." Tommie patted his laptop. "Newsgroups, chat, search engines — I used them all, along with crazy stuff that looks more like online betting than anything else. Maybe the hardest part was to do it all without alerting the feds. That slowed me up, but eventually I got a pretty good picture of the labs' security. It's what you'd expect of a critical national security site. Serious stuff, but clunky. The system is password– and user-intrinsic-oriented, and mostly automatic. The intrinsic is a standard biometric — from certain officers in the U.S. protective services. And guess who happens to be nearby and on the access list?"
"My son."
"Not quite. Your daughter-in-law."
Alice. "That's ridiculous. She's some kind of Asian-affairs expert." When she's not a mental basket case . And then he thought about the Mysterious Stranger. "This is all too pat."
Winnie: "Since when are you the security expert, Robert?"
I should keep my mouth shut. They're going in the direction I want ! But he'd lost his old skills at verbal maneuver, and he blundered ahead: "Information like this doesn't turn up in a Google search ."
Tommie shook his head. But there was a look of pity in his eyes. "The world has changed, Robert. Nowadays, I can get answers in ways that would have been impossible twenty years ago. A hundred thousand people all over the world collaborated in my search, in little bitty parts of it that no one ever recognized. The biggest risk is that my results are simply bogus. Disinformation is king nowadays. Even when the lies are not deliberate, there are the various fantasy groups out there trying to torque reality around to their latest adventure game. But if we're getting fooled, it's not an ordinary con job. There are details and corroboration that come from too many independent sources."
"Oh." Robert made that sound impressed. In fact, he was impressed. Maybe the Stranger could deliver.
They talked for another half hour, but nothing more specific was said about the betrayal expected of Robert. Tommie had other tasks for them: They needed some university passwords and some voice fakery. The entrances to the steam tunnels were embedded in concrete now. There was no ground-level entrance as there had been fifty years ago, when construction was under way. And there was a problem with Tommie's "aerosol glue."
"The glue?" Tommie looked faintly embarrassed. "It doesn't exist yet. But it's almost been invented." Tommie had broached the concept on an ornamental gardening forum, crossed that with some VCs. The Ornamental Shrub Society of Japan was even now working with some Argentine biologists to create the final form of the aerosol. The product should exist in less than two weeks, its first showing to be in a Tokyo plant-training exhibit. A liter of advance product was to be UP/Exed to Tommie shortly before that. He looked back at Robert's incredulity. "Hey, this is just what hacking is like nowadays."
It was past 3:00 p.m. The shadow of the library had stretched into the east, drowning nearby buildings. The four conspirators were done for the day.
Tommie stood. "We can do it! We may not even be caught. But if we are, so what? It'll be just like the old days."
Carlos Rivera got up more slowly. "And it's not like we're harming anything."
Tommie put a finger to his lips. "I'm lifting the deadzone, gentlemen." He typed on his laptop, and the LED on the top edge of the case was extinguished.
They were all silent for a moment, trying to think of safe things to say.
"Ah, okay." Rivera glanced at Robert. "Would you like see what we — what the library has done with the empty stacks?"
"You mean, what Tommie said was propaganda?"
Rivera gave a wan smile. "Yes, but it's beautiful in a way. If it had been done after a gentler digitization, I would love it without reservation."
He led them around the floor, past the elevators. "The stairway entrance has the best ambience."
Winnie Blount grimaced, but Robert noticed that he was tagging along.
The stairwell was dimly lit. The naked-eye view showed concrete walls, seamed here and there with the silvery lines he had seen from the outside. As he stepped through the doorway, Robert's view shifted to some kind of standard enhancement: now the lighting came from gas mantle lamps set in the walls. The shadowed concrete was gone. These walls were built from large stones, squared with chisels, fitted together with scarcely room for mortar. Robert reached out to touch the wall, snatched his hand back as he felt slippery stone — not clean concrete!
Rivera laughed. "You're expecting the usual disappointment, right, Dr. Gu?" When touch contradicted visual illusion.
"Yeah." Robert let his hand trail over the stone blocks, trace out the softer patches of lichen.
"University administration has been very clever about this. They enlisted the belief-circle community — and encouraged them to install touchy-feely graffiti. Some of the props are impressive even without the visual overlays."
They went down two flights of stairs. This must be the landing for the fifth-floor entrance, but now the door was carven wood, gleaming darkly in the gaslight. Rivera pulled at the pitted brass handle and the eight-foot-tall door swung open. The light from beyond was actinic violet, wavering from dim to painfully bright. There were sparking sounds. Rivera stuck his head through and chanted something unintelligible. The lighting became more civil and the only sounds were distant voices.
"It's okay," said the librarian. "Come on."
Robert stepped through the half-opened door and looked around. This was not the fifth floor of the Geisel Library, Planet Earth. There were books, but they were oversized things, set on timbered racks that stretched up and up. Robert bent back. The violet lights followed the stacks upward, limned their twisted struts. It was like one of those fractal forests in old graphics. At the limits of his vision, there were still more books, tiny with distance.