I'm standing in for Angleton's junior private secretary, who is on sabbatical down at the funny farm or taking a year out doing an MBA or something. And therein lies my problem.
"Mr. Howard!" That's Angleton, calling me into the inner sanctum.
I stick my head round his door. "Yes, boss?"
"Enter." I enter. His office is large, but feels cramped; every wall-it's windowless-is shelved floor-to-ceiling in ledgers. They're not books, but microfiche binders: each of them contains as much data as an encyclopaedia. His desk looks merely odd at first sight, an olive-drab monolith bound with metal strips, supporting the TV-sized hood of a fiche reader. It's only when you get close enough to it to see the organlike pedals and the cardhopper on top that, if you're into computational archaeology, you realise that Angleton's desk is an incredibly rare, antique Memex-an information appliance out of 1940s CIA folklore.
Angleton looks up at me as I enter, his face a blue-lit washout of text projected from the Memex screen. He's nearly bald, his chin is two sizes two small for his skull, and his domed scalp gleams like bone. "Ah, Howard," he says. "Did you find the material I requested?"
"Some of it, boss," I say. "Just a moment." I duck out into my office and pick up the hulking dusty tomes that I've carried up from the stacks, two basements and a fifty-metre elevator ride below ground level. "Here you are. Wilberforce Tangent and Opal Orange."
He takes the tomes without comment, opens the first of them, and starts sliding card-index sized chunks of microfilm into the Memex input hopper. "That will be all, Howard," he says superciliously, dismissing me.
I grit my teeth and leave Angleton to his microfilm. I once made the mistake of asking why he uses such an antique. He stared at me as if I'd just waved a dead fish under his nose, then said, "You can't read Van Eck radiation off a microfilm projector." (Van Eck radiation is the radio noise emitted by a video display; with sophisticated receivers you can pick it up and eavesdrop on a computer from a distance.) Back then I hadn't learned to keep my mouth shut around him: "Yeah, but what about Tempest shielding?" I asked. That's when he sent me off to the stacks for the first time, and I got lost for two hours on sublevel three before I was rescued by a passing vicar.
I go into my outer office, pull out the file server's administration console, log on, and join the departmental Xtank tournament. Fifteen minutes later Angleton's bell dings; I put my game avatar on autopilot and look in on him.
Angleton positively glowers at me over his spectacles. "Check these files back into storage, sign off, then come back here," he says. "We need to talk."
I take the tomes and back out of his office. Gulp: he's noticed me! Whatever next?
The elevator down to the stacks is about to depart when I stick my foot in the door, holding it. Someone with a whole document trolley has got her back to me. "Thanks," I say, turning to punch in my floor as the door closes and we begin our creaky descent into the chalk foundations of London.
"No bother." I look round and see Dominique with the doctorate from Miskatonic: Mo, whom I last saw stranded in America, phoning me for help on a dark night. She looks surprised to see me. "Hey! What are you doing here?"
"It's a long story, but to cut it short I was shipped home after you phoned me. Seems those goons who were watching you picked me up. What about you? I thought you were having trouble getting an exit visa?"
"Are you kidding?" She laughs, but doesn't sound very amused. "I was kidnapped, and when they rescued me I was deported! And when I got back here-" Her eyes narrow.
The lift doors open on subbasement two. "You were conscripted," I say, sticking my heel in the path of one door. "Right?"
"If you had anything to do with it-"
I shake my head. "I'm in more or less the same boat, believe it or not; it's how about two-thirds of us end up here. Look, my Obergruppenführer will send his SS hellhounds after me if I'm not back in his office in ten minutes, but if you've got a free lunchtime or evening I could fill you in?"
Her eyes narrow some more. "I'll bet you'd like that." Ouch! "Have some good excuses ready, Bob," she says, rolling her file cart toward me. I notice absently that it's full of Proceedings of the Scottish Society of Esoteric Antiquaries from the nineteenth century as I dodge out of the lift.
"No excuses," I promise, "only the truth."
"Hah." Her smile is unexpected and enigmatic; then the lift doors slide shut, taking her down farther into the bowels of the Stacks.
The Stacks are in what used to be a tube station, built during World War Two as an emergency bunker and never hooked up to the underground railway network. There are six levels rather than the usual three, each level built into the upper or lower half of a cylindrical tube eight metres in diameter and nearly a third of a kilometre long. That makes for about two kilometres of tunnels and about fifty kilometres of shelf space. To make matters worse, lots of the material is stored in the form of microfiche-three by five film cards each holding the equivalent of a hundred pages of text-and some of the more recent stuff is stored on gold CDs (of which the Stacks hold, at a rough guess, some tens of thousands). That all adds up to a lot of information.
We don't use the Dewey Decimal Catalogue to locate volumes in here; our requirements are sufficiently specialised that we have to use the system devised by Professor Angell of Brown University and subsequently known as the Codex Mathemagica. I've spent the past few weeks getting my head around the more arcane aspects of a cataloguing system that uses surreal number theory and can cope with the N-dimensional library spaces of Borges. You might think this a deadly boring occupation, but the ever-present danger of getting lost in the stacks keeps you on your toes. Besides which, there are rumours of ape-men living down here; I don't know how the rumours got started, but this place is more than somewhat creepy when you're on your own late at night. There's something weird about the people who work in the stacks, and you get the feeling it could be infectious-in fact, I'm really hoping to be assigned some other duty as soon as possible.
I locate the stack where the Wilberforce Tangent and Opal Orange files came from and wind the aisles of shelving apart to make way; they are both dead agent files from many years ago, musty with the stench of bureaucratic history. I slide them in, then pause: next to Opal Orange there's another file, one with a freshly printed binding titled Ogre Reality. The name tickles my silly gland, and in a gross violation of procedure I flip it out of the shelves and check the contents page. It's all paper, at this stage, and as soon as I see the MOST SECRET stamp I move to flip it shut-then pause, my eyeballs registering the words "Santa Cruz" midway down the first page. I begin speed-reading.
Five minutes later, the small of my back soaked in a cold sweat, I replace the file on the shelf, wind them back together, and head for the lift as fast as my feet will carry me. I don't want Angleton to think I'm late-especially after reading that file. It seems I'm lucky enough to be alive as it is…
"PAY ATTENTION TO THIS, MR. HOWARD. YOU ARE in a privileged position; you have access to information that other people would literally kill for. Because you stumbled into the Laundry through a second-floor window, so to speak, your technical clearance is several levels above that which would be assigned to you if you were a generic entrant. In one respect, that is useful; all organisations need junior personnel who have high clearances for certain types of data. On another level, it's a major obstacle." Angleton points his bony middle finger at me. "Because you have no respect."