[172] D’Agosta turned to the two cops. “Let’s check it out.”
He fumbled at the door knob and someone produced a key, explaining, “We locked it. We didn’t want anything coming out—”
D’Agosta waved his hand. This was getting ridiculous. Everyone was spooked. How the hell could they be planning a big opening party for the following night? They should have shut the damn place down after the first murders.
The room was large, circular, and spotless. In the center, standing on a large pedestal and bathed in bright neon lights, was a five-foot-tall white cylinder that D’Agosta supposed was the Museum’s mainframe. It hummed softly, surrounded by terminals, workstations, tables, and bookcases. Two closed doors were visible on the far walls.
“You guys poke around,” he told his men, popping the unlit cigar in his mouth. “I wanna talk to this guy, do the paperwork.”
He went back outside. “Name?” he asked.
“Roger Thrumcap. I’m the Shift Supervisor.”
“Okay,” D’Agosta said wearily, making notations. “You’re reporting noises in Data Processing.”
“No, sir, Data Processing’s upstairs. This is the Computer Room. We monitor the hardware, do systems work.”
“The Computer Room, then.” He scribbled some more. “You first noticed these noises when?”
“A few minutes after ten. We were just finishing up our journals.”
“You were reading the paper when you heard the noises?”
“No, sir. The journal tapes. We were just finishing our daily backup.”
“I see. You were just finishingat ten o’clock?”
“The backups can’t be done during peak hours, sir. [173] We have special permission to come in at six in the morning.”
“Lucky you. And you heard these noises where?”
“They were coming from the Electrical Room.”
“And that is—?”
“The door to the left of the MP-3. That’s the computer, sir.”
“I saw two doors in there.” D’Agosta said. “What’s behind the other one?”
“Oh, that’s just the lights-out room. It’s on a carded-entry system, nobody can get in there.”
D’Agosta gave the man a strange look.
“It contains the diskpacks, things like that. You know, the storage devices. It’s called a lights-out room because everything’s automated, nobody goes in there except for maintenance.” He nodded proudly. “We’re in a zero-operator environment. Compared to us, DP’s still in the Stone Age. They still have operators manually mounting tapes, no silos or anything.”
D’Agosta went back inside. “They heard the noises on the other side of that door to the left, there in the back. Let’s take a look.” He turned around. “Keep them out here,” he said to Thrumcap.
The door to the electrical room swung open, releasing a smell of hot wiring and ozone. D’Agosta fumbled along the wall, found the light and snapped it on.
He did a visual first, by the book. Transformers. Grillwork covering ventilation ducts. Cables. Several large air-conditioning units. A lot of hot air. But nothing else.
“Take a look behind that equipment,” D’Agosta said.
The officers nosed around thoroughly. One looked back and shrugged.
“All right,” said D’Agosta, walking out into the computer room. “Looks clean to me. Mr. Thrumcap?”
“Yes?” He poked his head in.
“You can tell your people to come back in. Looks okay, but we’re gonna post a man for the next thirty-six hours.” He turned to one of the policemen emerging [174] from the electrical room. “Waters, I want you here till the end of your shift. Pro forma, all right? I’ll send your relief.” A few more sightings and I’ll be fresh out of officers.
“Right,” said Waters.
“That’s a good idea,” said Thrumcap. “This room is the heart of the Museum, you know. Or rather, the brain. We run the telephones, physical plant, network, mini-printing, electronic mail, security system—”
“Sure,” said D’Agosta. He wondered if this was the same security that didn’t have an accurate blueprint of the subbasement.
The staff began filing back into the room and taking up their places at the terminals. D’Agosta mopped his brow. Hot as balls in here. He turned to leave.
“Rog,” he heard a voice behind him. “We got a problem.”
D’Agosta hesitated a moment.
“Oh, my God,” said Thrumcap, staring at a monitor. “The system’s doing a hex dump. What the hell—?”
“Was the master terminal still in backup mode when you left it, Rog?” a short guy with buck teeth was asking. “If it finished and got no response, it might have gone into a low-level dump.”
“Maybe you’re right,” said Roger. “Abort the dump and make sure the regions are all up.”
“It’s not responding.”
“Is the OS down?” Thrumcap asked, bending over bucktooth’s CRT. “Lemme see this.”
An alarm went off in the room, not loud, but high-pitched and insistent. D’Agosta saw a red light in a ceiling panel above the sleek mainframe. Maybe he’d better stick around.
“Now what?” said Thrumcap.
Jesus, it’s hot, D’Agosta thought. How can these people stand it?
“What’s this code we’re getting?”
“I don’t know. Look it up.”
[175] “Where?”
“In the manual, fool! It’s right behind your terminal. Here, I’ve got it.”
Thrumcap started flipping pages. “2291, 2291 ... here it is. It’s a heat alarm. Oh, Lord, the machine’s overheating! Get maintenance up here right away.”
D’Agosta shrugged. The thumping noise they’d heard was probably air-conditioner compressors failing. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out. It must be ninety degrees in here. As he began moving down the hall, he passed two maintenance men hurrying in the opposite direction.
Like most modern supercomputers, the Museum’s MP-3 was better able to withstand heat than the “big iron” mainframes of ten or twenty years before. Its silicon brain, unlike the older vacuum tubes and transistors, could function above recommended temperatures for longer periods of time without damage or loss of data. However; the hardwired interface to the Museum’s security system had been installed by a third party, outside the operating specifications of the computer manufacturer. When the temperature in the computer room reached ninety-four degrees, the tolerances of the ROM chips governing the Automatic Disaster Control System were exceeded. Failure occurred ninety seconds later.
Waters stood in a corner and glanced around the room. The maintenance men had left over an hour before, and the room was pleasantly chilly. Everything was back to normal, and the only sounds were the hum of the computer and the zombies clicking thousands of keys. He idly glanced at an unoccupied terminal screen and saw a blinking message.
EXTERNAL ARRAY FAILURE
AT ROM ADDRESS 33 B1 4A 0E
It was like Chinese. Whatever it was, why couldn’t they just say it in English? He hated computers. He couldn’t think of one damn thing computers had done for him except leave the s off his last name on bills. He hated those smart-ass computer nerds, too. If there was anything wrong here, let themtake care of it.
= 27 =
Smithback dumped his notebooks beside one of his favorite library carrels. Sighing heavily, he squeezed himself into the cramped space, placed his laptop on the desk, and turned on the small overhead light. He was only a stone’s throw from the oak-panelled reading room, with its red leather chairs and marble fireplace that hadn’t seen use in a century. But Smithback preferred the narrow, scuffed carrels. He especially liked the ones that were hidden deep in the stacks, where he could examine documents and manuscripts he’d temporarily liberated—or catch forty winks—in privacy and relative comfort.