Some of the rats were colliding with his legs. He lowered the Sceptre so that the flasher was between his ankles, and, guiding himself by sound and touch, moved away from the obstructed intersection and down the unmapped passageway. He opened his eyes and began to run, holding the flasher out in front of him like a blind man's cane. From time to time he encountered a rat who had approached the source of the sound and fury and then gone into convulsions upon encountering the sprinting electronics technician with his Sceptre. Soon, though, there were no more rats, and he turned it off.
Something was tugging at his belt. Feeling cautiously, he found that it was the power cord of the headlamp, which had been knocked off his head and had been bouncing along behind him ever since. He found that the lens, once he had wiped crud from it, cast an intermittent light– a connection was weakened somewhere– that did, however, enable him to see.
This unmapped tunnel was relatively narrow. Its ceiling, to his shock, was thick with bats, while its floor was clean of the stinking glom that covered most of the tunnels in varying depths. Instead there was a thin layer of slimy fluid and fuzzy white bat guano which stank but did not hinder. This was probably a good sign; the passage must lead somewhere. He noted the position of the Sceptre's dial that had caused the rats to blow their stacks, then slung the weapon over his shoulder and continued down the passage, his feet curiously light and free in the absence of deep sludge.
Before long he discerned a light at the end of the tunnel. He broke into a jog, and soon he could see it clearly, about a hundred and fifty feet away: a region at the end of the passage that was clean and white and fluorescently lit. Nothing in the blueprints corresponded to this.
He was still at least a hundred feet away when a pair of sliding doors on the right wall at the very end of the tunnel slid open. He stopped, sank to a squat against the tunnel wall and then lay on his stomach as he heard shouting.
"Ho! Heeeeyah! Gitska!" Making these and similar noises, three B-men peeked out the door and up the passageway, then emerged, carrying weapons– not just pistols, but small machine guns. Two of them assumed a kneeling position on the floor, facing up the tunnel, and their leader, an enormous B-man foreman named Magrov, stood behind them and sighted down the tunnel through the bulky infrared sight of his weapon. About halfway between Virgil and the B-men, a giant rat had turned and was scuttling toward Virgil. There was a roar and a flickering light not unlike that of Virgil's Sceptre, and two dozen automatic rounds dissolved the rat into a long streak on the floor. Magrov shone a powerful flashlight over the wreckage of the rodent, but apparently Virgil was too small, distant and filthy to be noticed. Magrov belched loudly in a traditional Croto expression of profound disgust, and the other two murmured their agreement. He signaled to whoever was waiting beyond the sliding doors.
A large metal cylinder about a foot and a half in diameter and six feet long, strapped to a heavy four-wheeled cart, was carefully pushed sideways into the passage. Magrov walked to a box on the wall, punched a button with the barrel of his weapon and spoke. "Control, Magrov once again. We have put it in normal place like usual, and today only one of those goddamn pink-tailed ones, you know. We taking off now. I guess we be back in a few hours."
"That's an A-OK. All clear to reascend, team." came the unaccented answer from the box. The B-men walked through the sliding doors, which closed behind them, and Virgil was barely able to make out a hum which sounded like an elevator.
After a few seconds, the end wall of the tunnel parted slowly and Virgil saw that it wasn't the end at all, it was a pair of thick steel slabs that retracted into the floor and ceiling. Beyond the doors was a large room, brightly lit, containing several men walking around in what looked like bright yellow rainsuits and long loose hoods with black plastic windows over the eyes. Three of these figures emerged and quickly slid cart and cylinder through the doors while two others stood guard with submachine guns. Then all retreated behind the doors, and the steel slabs slid back together and sealed the tunnel.
He remained motionless for a few minutes more, and noticed some other things: wall-mounted TV cameras that incessantly swiveled back and forth on power gimbals; chemical odors that wafted down the tunnel after the doors were closed; and the many gnawed and broken rat bones scattered across the nearby floor. Then Virgil Gabrielsen concluded that the wisest thing to do was to go back and mess with the giant rats.
Several days into the second semester, the Administration finally told the truth about the Library, and allowed the media in to photograph the ranks upon ranks of card catalog cabinets with their totally empty drawers.
The perpetrators had done it on Christmas Day. The Plex had been nearly deserted, its entrance guarded by a single guard at a turnstile. At eight in the morning, ten rather young and hairy-looking fellows in B-man uniforms had arrived and haltingly explained that as Crotobaltislavonians they followed the Julian calendar, and had already celebrated Christmas. Could they not come in to perform needed plumbing repairs, and earn quadruple overtime for working on Christmas Day? The skeptical guard let them in anyway; if he could not trust the janitors, whom could he trust?
As reconstructed by the police, the burglars had gathered in the card catalog area all the canvas carts they could find. They had taken these through the catalog, pulling the lock-pins from each drawer and dumping the contents into the carts. The Library's 4.8 million volumes were catalogued in 12,000 drawers of three-by-five cards, and a simple calculation demonstrated that all of these cards could be fitted into a dozen canvas carts by anyone not overly fastidious about keeping them in perfect order. The carts had been taken via freight elevator to the loading docks and wheeled onto a rented truck, which according to the rental agency had now disappeared. Its borrower, a Mr. Friedrich Engels, had failed to list a correct address and phone number and proved difficult to track down. The only untouched drawer was number 11375, STALIN, JOSEPH to STALLBAUM, JOHANN GOTTFRIED.
The Library turned to the computer system. During the previous five years, a sweatshop of catalogers had begun to transfer the catalog into a computer system, and the Administration hoped that ten percent of the catalog could be salvaged in this way. Instead they found that a terrible computer malfunction had munched through the catalog recently, erasing call numbers and main entries and replacing them with knock-knock jokes, Burma-Shave ditties and tracts on the sexual characteristics of the Computing Center senior staff.
The situation was not hopeless; at any rate, it did not deteriorate at first. The books were still arranged in a rational order. This changed when people began holding books hostage.
A Master's Candidate in Journalism had a few books she used over and over again. After the loss of the catalog she found them by memory, carried them to another part of the Library, and cached them behind twelve feet of bound back issues of the Nepalese Journal of Bhutaruan Studies. A library employee from Photoduplication then happened to take down a volume of Utah Review of Theoretical Astrocosmology, shelved back-to-back with NJBS, and detected the cache. She moved it to another place in the Library, dumping it behind a fifty-volume facsimile edition of the ledgers of the Brisbane/Surabaya Steam Packet Co. Ltd., which had been published in 1893 and whose pages had not yet been cut. She then left a sign on the Library bulletin board saying that if the user of such-and-such books wanted to know where they were, he or she could put fifty dollars in the former stash, and she, the employee, would leave in its place the new location. Several thousand people saw this note and the scam was written up in the Monoplex Monitor; it was so obviously a good idea that it rapidly became a large business. Some people took only a few volumes, others hundreds, but in all cases the technique was basically the same, and soon extra bulletin board capability was added outside the entrance to the Library bloc. Of course, this practice had been possible before the loss of the card catalog, but that event seemed to change everyone's scruples about the Library. The central keying system was gone; what difference did it make?