Book Three of the Travelers Read online

  “I can’t say.”

  Em’s eyes widened. “Somebody stole the Gutenberg Bible? Really?”

  “Don’t be silly,” Patrick said.

  “Then what?” Jay said. “First edition of The Sun Also Rises? Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence?”

  “No, it was just some books.”

  “Aha!” Jay said. “So it was a book!”

  Patrick flushed. “I really can’t say.”

  “We’d just like to help,” Em said. “That’s all we’re saying.”

  “Sure,” Patrick said.

  “The more we know, the more we can help.”

  Patrick felt as if he were playing the director’s role now. “It’s being handled,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Em and Jay looked at each other skeptically.

  “I’ve got lots of work to do,” Patrick said.

  “Okay, okay, okay!” Jay said. “We can see when we’re not wanted.”

  The two left Patrick’s work space. He expanded the hologram screen and started running the audit program. But he just couldn’t concentrate. It was routine, unchallenging work. He didn’t want to admit it, but he was bored stiff.

  Finally he looked around to make sure nobody was watching. Then he spoke to the screen. “Pull up all library security files.”

  The computer told him that he didn’t have authorization. No matter what the older members of the staff said about his inexperience, it was generally acknowledged that if you wanted to find information, Patrick Mac was your man. There was no corner of the NYPL’s system that Patrick couldn’t reach. It didn’t take him three minutes to find a route into the library’s security files.

  “Pull up security cameras.”

  Several views of the library appeared, floating in the air above his desk.

  “Review for unauthorized use of books in the past thirty days.”

  The screen flashed the names of three books. Under each was a list of dates, times, and camera views.

  “Show sequential views for the first book,” Patrick said.

  A view of a room full of books appeared in the air. For a moment nothing happened. Then a figure strolled into the room, took a book, and walked out of the room. Patrick blinked. Wait a minute! he thought. That’s not possible!

  A second view popped up, this time showing a large hallway. A woman Patrick didn’t recognize appeared. Patrick breathed a sigh of relief. That was more like it. A real person. And it wasn’t a student from his class. But then, to his shock, the original figure appeared again, walking briskly down the hallway.

  “Fast forward!” Patrick said.

  The same figure appeared in a rapid succession of hologram videos, zipping through the library at high speed with the stolen volume under its arm.

  “Show all,” Patrick said, “fast speed.”

  Again the same figure appeared. In each of the three vids, the figure stole a book, took it out the front door onto Fifth Avenue. And set it on fire.

  “Freeze!”

  In the last frame of the most recent video, the projection froze. Patrick stared at the image for a long time. This didn’t make a bit of sense.

  The figure with the book tucked under its arm wasn’t human. In fact, it wasn’t even real. It was a cartoon.

  Based on his study of history and art, Patrick identified the figure in the video as being a cartoon that would have been drawn somewhere in the twentieth century. It was a squat, bowlegged creature with a mischievous face and silly-looking tuft that might have been feathers sticking up on top of its head.

  “View three hundred sixty degrees,” he said.

  The hologram scanners in the library were capable of filming an object from any direction. They weren’t like ancient cameras—a lens stuck on the front of a sensing device. Instead, they were small sensors planted throughout a room that stored image data on everything in the room. As a result, images could be assembled by computer and viewed from almost any angle. They also scanned all frequencies from infrared to ultraviolet, so they could record images even in total darkness.

  The image of the room rotated slowly in the air. Strangely, the cartoon figure seemed absolutely three dimensional, appearing just as solid and real as everything else in the room.

  “Somebody has hacked the security files,” Patrick whispered. Somehow every single image of the real thief had been replaced by this silly-looking cartoon figure.

  “Run hack scan?” the voice of the computer said.

  “Yes,” Patrick said.

  There was a long pause. Then a message flashed on the screen. “No hack found.”

  “Run a level-six scan,” Patrick said.

  “I am required to inform you that a level-six scan will require unusual resources from the central processing—”

  “I know all that,” Patrick snapped. “Do it anyway.”

  “Director-level authorization required.”

  Patrick took a deep breath. He knew a way of invoking the director’s authorization. The computer was supposed to only accept the director’s own voice. But Patrick had stored a work-around. Just in case.

  His hands felt shaky. This wasn’t something he could do by speaking to the computer. This had to be typed in. Hardly any librarians bothered to learn how to type anymore. They just talked to the computer.

  Patrick brought up the hologram keyboard and typed in a series of commands.

  “Level-six hack scan authorized,” the computer said. The lights dimmed suddenly and the hologram projection shrank to a tiny, bright point in the air, then blinked off. Patrick’s eyes widened. He had never run a level-six hack scan before. They really weren’t kidding when they said it ate up a lot of resources. The whole building was powering down. Patrick swallowed. This was not good. Somebody was going to notice what he’d just done. And when they did, Patrick was going to get in big trouble.

  The lights slowly went back up, but the projection remained dark. Patrick counted off the seconds. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty…thirty!

  Suddenly the projection popped up again.

  “No hacks found,” the calm voice of the computer said.

  “Not possible,” Patrick said. “Somebody altered the video!”

  “No,” said the computer. “All three videos are unaltered.”

  “Come on!” Patrick said. “That’s a cartoon with a fringy doohickey on its head. It’s not possible. It’s not real.”

  “I’m not sure how to respond,” the computer said.

  “Of course you aren’t,” Patrick said. “That’s because you’re a stupid computer.”

  “I’m not sure how to respond,” the computer said.

  “Someone hacked the computer,” Patrick said. “Somebody really good.”

  The image of the cartoon figure hovered over Patrick’s work space, leering right at Patrick’s face.

  Well, he thought, no wonder Unit 9 got called in. This really was puzzling. It was too bad that Unit 9 didn’t seem to know what they were doing.

  He looked at the names of the three volumes that had been stolen from the library. “Run a correlation on the three books,” he said.

  “All three books are first editions, written and printed in the early twentieth century in the United States of America. They are generally considered to be among the most popular children’s books of their period.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Each is printed on paper made of cotton fiber and contains more than one hundred fifty and fewer than two hundred pages. Their average sentence length lies between—”

  “Okay, okay, okay, that’s enough,” Patrick said. He thought for a minute. “Expand the group. Assume that the thief is going to steal another book. What would the next book be?”

  “Assuming the factors mentioned earlier are decisive in the thief’s decision-making process, there is an eighty-nine percent probability that the next theft will be The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.”

  “Where is that book
located?”

  “Floor sub thirty-nine, section E, room nineteen, shelf two hundred thirty-one.”

  “Is there any pattern to the times of the thefts?”

  “All took place between seven and eight o’clock on either a Wednesday or a Thursday night.”

  Patrick raised an eyebrow. Wednesday. That was tonight!

  He drummed his fingers on his desk. Finally he spoke. “Close window. Store all video data in a file called ‘My Skiing Trip to Colorado.’ Falsify the date to fit my last trip to Colorado. Erase all transactions from this session.”

  “That is not authorized.”

  “Do it anyway.”

  “I am not sure how to respond.”

  “Override. Utilize key sequence nine-seven-seven-one-three.”

  There was a brief pause. Then the computer said, “Transaction files erased. Session terminated.”

  Patrick stood. His hands were trembling.

  What am I doing? he thought. This is crazy! This is not me. This is not me at all.

  Then his legs got wobbly for a moment, and he had to sit down.

  He sat silently for a while. He could hear a roaring noise in his ears, and his vision started going gray. He put his head between his legs.

  After a minute his vision started to clear and the roaring noise went away. He looked up at the clock: 6:45! How had it gotten so late?

  As he stood, a small bell chimed on his comm. He took his silver communicator off his belt and looked at the tiny screen. It was the director calling. Red letters flashed on the screen. URGENT. URGENT. URGENT. Patrick took a deep breath. What do I do? After a moment he thumbed the off button.

  “Oops,” he said. “I guess I turned off my communicator. By accident.”

  His heart was pounding as he jumped up and hurried down the hallway to the elevator. He stopped, turned, ran back to the office.

  Sitting on his desk was a small red band of flexible material, a collar he had just bought for his cat, Earnest. The old collar had gotten worn and frayed, so he’d bought a new one. He stuck the collar in his pocket, then turned and ran out of the room again.

  I can’t believe I’m doing this, he thought. I really can’t believe it.

  FOUR

  The upper floors of the New York Public Library had a grand, ancient feel that reflected the age and importance of the institution. But once you got down into the area underground where all the books were stored, it became as bland, featureless, and cramped as a warehouse. Each low-ceilinged room contained row on row of shelves crammed with ancient books.

  The air was cool and bitter smelling. Under normal circumstances books decomposed over time. But here the highly filtered air contained chemicals that suppressed the molds, bacteria, and insects that would otherwise eventually eat and destroy the old paper. In this environment books could theoretically last forever. Even the light was kept intentionally dim, only coming on when people entered a room, so that the rays wouldn’t degrade the paper or the bindings of the books. In rooms where especially valuable books were stored, the light was a creepy red color, the lower wavelengths being less damaging to paper.

  Patrick had come to love the odd smell of the stacks, the dim light, the cramped conditions. But now that he suspected a crime was about to be committed, the stacks seemed a little frightening. All of these books were kept mostly for historical reasons, not because they were sources of information. If you just wanted to read them, it was much more convenient to pull them up on the holo screen So many parts of the library might go years without anybody entering them.

  Patrick felt very alone.

  He walked swiftly through the stacks toward room 191. It was called a “room,” but it was as big as a catchball field. It took a while, but eventually Patrick found it. The door whooshed open. On the other side of it was total inky darkness.

  Patrick entered. The dim red lights in the section of the room closest to him switched on. He began walking slowly through the stacks. Wherever he went, the lights switched on—switching off a few strides behind him—so that he walked in a pool of bloodred light, while around him stretched acres of silent blackness. His shoes moved silently on the soft floor.

  As he walked past the ends of the shelves, small screens lit up, giving him the LC numbers of the shelves. Finally, after what seemed an enormously long walk, he reached the correct shelf. He had to hurry! It was almost seven.

  Standing in the pool of eerie red light, he pulled the cat collar out of his pocket and felt it with his fingers. There was a slightly thicker part right in the middle. Like any normal pet collar, it had a tracking device for recovering wandering pets. He could feel the tracking chip with his fingers. He tore the cat collar in half with his teeth, then pushed and prodded until the tracking device came out. It was a small, flat gray disk.

  Using the writing stylus from his comm, he jammed the little gray disk down into the spine of the book. There was a ripping sound as he forced it through the old binding material. It made him feel almost sick to desecrate the book. But it was all for a good purpose, right? He doubted anyone had touched this particular volume in centuries. Maybe not even for a thousand years. Who’d notice?

  A small, irritating bell began to chime. “Alert, alert, alert,” a computer voice said, emanating from the ceiling. “Library employee Patrick Mac, you have improperly handled volume number seven-nine-four-six-three-dash-one. Please have it repaired immediately.”

  “Noted,” Patrick said. “Now could you please be quiet.”

  “Yes, Patrick Mac.”

  The silence that followed felt numb, deafening. Patrick looked at the book. There was a definite small lump in the spine, where the pet locator chip was situated. He hoped the thief wouldn’t notice.

  Patrick retreated four or five shelves away from the book and sat on the floor, his back against a shelf. He situated himself so that he could peer out through the gap between two rows of books. He could see the entrance to the row of shelves where The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was located. But unless the thief was looking right at him, Patrick would be impossible to see.

  He sighed. There was nothing to do now but wait. Would the thief even come? The computer had predicted that this was the next volume that would be stolen. But what if the computer was wrong? He’d defaced an ancient historical object…and all for nothing!

  He looked around. In the red light that had followed him to where he sat, everything looked strange and menacing, like something out of a horror vid. He felt nervous and shaky.

  Suddenly, after he’d been sitting for a minute, something occurred to him: If the thief did come, the red light would be a dead giveaway that Patrick was sitting there.

  He had a choice. He could leave the room and rely on the tracking device. Or he could sit in the darkness and wait.

  He decided he’d better wait. If the thief discovered the tracking device, then he would have defaced the book for nothing. And he’d have no more idea who the thief was than he’d had before.

  “Turn off lights,” he said.

  The pool of red light disappeared. Deep underground, with no windows and no access to light, room 191 of the New York Public Library became as dark as a tomb. There was literally not a single ray of light in the entire place.

  Patrick felt a shiver run down his spine. For the umpteenth time in the past few hours, he wondered why he was doing this. He had never been a brave person. When he was a boy, he’d known kids who were always taking risks, climbing walls, exploring tunnels, falling and breaking their arms. But not Patrick. He’d always been careful, thoughtful, calm—even a little timid. It was no accident he’d ended up a librarian and teacher. He felt safe and secure when he was reading, studying, holed up in a small place where he could study and think.

  He was not a tracking-down-criminals kind of guy.

  He sat in the dark, listening to his heartbeat. Ka-kshhhh, ka-kshhhh, ka-kshhhh. Every moment or two he considered standing up and walking out of the room. Everyone was telling him to lea
ve it to the pro from Unit 9. But there was something about the crime that offended him. Burning books! When you burned a book, you were spitting in the face of knowledge, of understanding, of history. A person who burned a book was pretty much capable of anything.

  But that man from Unit 9? Jay Oh was right—the guy was just plain stupid. And besides, Sergeant Lane probably didn’t understand what these books represented. This was the inherited knowledge of all mankind! If this wasn’t stopped here, where would it stop? Only a librarian could really understand just how important this was.

  Suddenly in the distance Patrick heard a sound. The soft whoosh of an automatic door opening. For a moment a shaft of pale light cut through the gloom. As quickly as it had appeared, it was gone.

  Patrick frowned. If the thief had entered the room, the lights should be coming on. But they weren’t.

  Maybe it wasn’t the thief after all. Maybe someone had walked by and the door had opened automatically. Or maybe the thief had started to enter, but somehow sensed Patrick’s presence. There was no way to know. Whoever it was, was gone.

  Patrick took his comm off his belt to check the time. He had forgotten about turning it off. He switched it back on. The urgent message from the director was still blinking. He erased it without listening, then looked at the clock. It was past eight. Maybe the thief wasn’t coming. Patrick put the comm back on his belt.

  Suddenly the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. He heard something! A soft, stealthy scraping sound. Footsteps!

  But…why weren’t the lights coming on? Whoever it was, they were getting closer. The thing Patrick couldn’t figure out, though, was how the thief could see. Obviously they didn’t want anyone to see them. But if no one could see them, then how could they see where they were going?

  Patrick’s heart started beating faster as the furtive footsteps grew closer and closer. Then something occurred to him. If he could log into the security channel, he could watch the person on the tiny screen of his comm.

  He pulled out his comm, used his writing stylus to navigate quickly through the menus until he reached the security sensors. Within seconds a ghostly image appeared on his screen. The sensors didn’t use light here. Because there was none. But that didn’t matter. The scanners could pick up infrared light. The infrared image didn’t look like the normal visible-light vids though. It had a ghostly, transparent quality.