Curiosity. Orderliness. A passion for understanding.” Patrick Mac looked around at his students. “To become a great librarian, you must have passion and a sense of mission. Because you will have to confront extraordinary challenges, challenges which—”
Jay Oh, one of his top students—but also one of his most disruptive kids—interrupted. “Yeah, like trying not to be bored to death!”
Patrick frowned. “Now, come on, Jay. I’m making a serious point here,” he said. He tried to look as stern as he could.
But the truth was, he sometimes wondered if Jay wasn’t right. Patrick loved teaching, loved working as a researcher in the world’s most important library. And yet sometimes he wondered—was this it? Was this all he’d been put on earth to do? He was good at his job. Very good. But sometimes it seemed like poking around in computers full of ancient facts and figures—or teaching young people how to poke around in computers—just wasn’t all that important.
It wasn’t like the fate of the universe depended on whether you could dig up some old piece of information. He was talking to the class about having a sense of mission. But did he really feel that way himself? He used to think he did. But now he wasn’t so sure. Maybe he was saying all this to convince himself.
As Patrick tried to refocus on the point he’d been making, there was a knock on the door of his classroom. The door opened a crack. Patrick could see one bright green eye looking through the door. There was only one person in the building who had eyes quite that color. It was the director of the New York Public Library herself.
“Mr. Mac?” The director’s voice came through the door. “A word, if I may?”
Patrick took a deep breath. The air in the office of the director of the New York Public Library had a special smell to it—the smell of ancient books, of history, of human achievement. For five thousand years the building in which Patrick sat had been devoted to recording and keeping all the knowledge of humankind. And to sit in the office of the director herself! Well, it was a great feeling.
The director was a small, wizened woman with long white hair. She gave Patrick a wincing smile. “We have a problem.”
Patrick Mac sat up straighter. Had he done something wrong? He had been a teacher at the School of the New York Public Library for several years now and was still one of the junior members of the library staff. Despite having a natural talent for the work, he was frequently made to feel his inexperience by the older members of the organization. “I’m sorry,” he said. “What did I do?”
“You? Who said anything about you?”
“Well, I assumed—”
The director cut him off with a wave of her hand. “Don’t assume.” She pointed at the rows of books on the shelves of her large, wood-paneled office. Most of the library’s real books were kept in rooms deep underground, but a certain group was on display in the director’s office. “Our collection contains many of the most valuable, rare, and magnificent books in the world. The Gutenberg Bible, the Nag Hammadi scrolls, the early Shakespeare folios—I could go on and on.”
Patrick Mac knew this. Of course, all the books had been copied as digital images, and the information they contained was stored in computers. But the books had a value beyond the information they contained. They were an actual, physical connection to the entire history of human beings on Earth.
“Several books have gone missing, Patrick,” the director said.
“Missing?” Patrick frowned. “How is that possible?”
“They’ve been stolen.”
Patrick’s eyes widened. Stolen! The word itself had an old-fashioned sound to it. People didn’t steal things anymore. Sure, occasionally a kid would grab somebody’s lunch as a prank. But this was a world of bounty, a world in which no one was poor, no one wanted for anything. There was literally no point in stealing. “But…why?”
The director shook her head. “I was hoping you would be able to tell us.”
Patrick swallowed. “Do you think that I—”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” the director said irritably.
“Then why me?”
“Two reasons. A long time ago, back when breaking the law was common, there were people who solved crimes.”
“Detectives!” Patrick said excitedly. He’d gone through a phase when he was a boy, reading ancient books about crime solvers. “Sleuths, private eyes, investigators—”
“You don’t have to try to impress me with all the words you know, Patrick,” the director said sharply.
Patrick cleared his throat. “Yes, yes, of course. I’m sorry.”
“You have distinguished yourself as a person with an unusual ability to dig up information.”
“Thank you, Director.”
“That skill may—I repeat, may—be of use to us at some point.”
“Wow!”
The Director narrowed her eyes. She was famous for her dislike of emotional displays.
“I’m sorry!” Patrick said. Then he frowned. “You said there were two reasons you wanted me to investigate the theft.”
“I did.”
Patrick waited.
“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this,” the director said. “But the thief appears to be one of your students.”
“That’s not possible!” Patrick said.
“I’m afraid it is. As you know, your students have pass codes that allow them entry to certain areas of the library. The thief was able to alter his or her code so as to enter and exit the building without being identified. But what the student apparently didn’t realize was that every pass code also contains information about what group or organization they are connected to. The group code points straight at the class you teach.”
“What about video? There are vid scanners in the library, aren’t there?”
“Of course.”
“Then we should be able to see who it is.”
“Unfortunately, however, we are not.”
“Why not?”
“There have been certain…alterations to the hologram video files. The identity of the thief has been masked.”
Masked? How was that possible? Patrick decided not to pursue the matter. “Then what about the books? The thief must be doing something with them, right? Giving them to someone, storing them, selling them, sharing them…”
“No.”
Patrick looked at the director curiously. “Then…”
“They’re burning them.”
A wave of horror flooded through him. Burning books! There wasn’t a book in the library that wasn’t at least two thousand years old. It had been eons since books were actually printed. Even the most trivial books were important artifacts of earlier times. “But that’s sick!” he said.
The director nodded.
“So…I guess you want me to investigate?”
The director looked puzzled for a moment. “Oh!” she said. “My goodness, no. You’ve quite misunderstood me.”
“But I thought you said—”
“I simply called you here today to inform you that a police investigator would be coming to your class today. His name is Sergeant Lane. I wanted to make certain that you extend him every courtesy.”
Patrick’s excitement evaporated. For a moment there, he thought she’d wanted him to take on an exciting assignment—investigator! Sleuth! Detective! But apparently not.
“Oh,” Patrick said.
“You’re disappointed,” the director said.
Patrick sighed. “No, I just…Well, when you started talking about investigators…”
“I understand.” The director smiled kindly. “You’re an excellent teacher and a good librarian. We appreciate that. But let’s not get carried away.”
Patrick saw that it was almost time for his class to start. “Well, I’d better get going.”
“Keep your eyes open, Patrick.”
“I will.”
Patrick walked slowly down the hallway to the elevator that took him down to sublevel twenty-six, where class was about to start. He’d been teaching for about five years now. It was good work, really it was. He liked the kids, he enjoyed the work. But still, he kept feeling like something was missing. There was no excitement, no feeling that anything really huge was at stake.
His students were good kids. Sometimes he felt as if they didn’t need him at all. They all did their work. They logged on to their computers, and the computers fed them assignments at a rate that was determined by tests that were administered and graded by the computers. Sure, Patrick lectured every day. Sure, he tried to help the kids when they had problems that the teaching programs couldn’t get them past.
But really. Did the kids need him? Sometimes he felt as if he were nothing but a high-class babysitter.
He needed a challenge!
But what? He sometimes wished that he could have been born a few thousand years ago, back when bad things actually happened, back when people had real problems that demanded courage and strength and tenacity. Today everything was safe and easy and perfect.
And boring.
As he approached the class, he saw a man standing by the door. The man’s clothes looked normal—except for a thin gold band on each shoulder. It reminded Patrick of the gold braid that soldiers and police had worn years and years ago. As he got closer, Patrick saw that the gold band was formed of tiny numerals—a row of nines.
“My goodness!” Patrick said. “You’re from Unit Nine!”
The man turned and smiled confidently. He had a smooth, handsome face with a square jaw and brown eyes. He looked like an actor from the vids. “Guilty as charged,” he said, winking. “Sergeant Eric Lane, at your service.”
“Unit Nine!” Patrick couldn’t believe it. The vids were full of stories about the supersecret Unit 9 of the Global Police Force. “I always assumed Unit Nine was totally fictional.”
“You’re not the only one,” Sergeant Lane said. “We like it that way. Keeps the villains on their toes.” The Unit 9 investigator threw a mock punch, stopping only inches from Patrick’s face.
“Whoa!” Patrick said, flinching. “For a second I thought you were going to do me harm.”
Sergeant Lane laughed genially. He had a rich baritone voice. “I trust you’ve been briefed?”
“Briefed?” Patrick was momentarily confused. “Oh, sure. The director told me you were coming.”
“Outstanding!” Sergeant Lane said. Then he pointed at the room. “Let’s get the show on the road, shall we?”
Patrick walked into the class and said, “Everyone take your places.”
There were slightly more than a dozen kids in the class, seven boys and seven girls, all of them around fifteen years of age. They grumbled good-naturedly as they sat.
Patrick explained to the students that they had a special guest for the day, Sergeant Lane from Unit 9. This caused a stir in the class.
Sergeant Lane stood at the front of the class and said, “Well, I’m going to ask you some questions. A couple of items have gone missing from the library, and I’ve been tasked to recover them.” He looked around the room expectantly. Patrick wondered what he was waiting for. He assumed that the investigator would be talking to the students individually. “So…anybody, uh, anybody know what I’m talking about? Anybody aware of some missing items?”
The class looked at him blankly.
Sergeant Lane had seemed very confident at first. But now he seemed somewhat uncomfortable. “Hm? Anybody? Anybody want to help me out?”
“What’s missing?” said Em Stickler, a willowy girl with short blond hair.
Sergeant Lane cleared his throat. “Not at liberty to say, I’m afraid.” He looked around the room. “Anybody?”
Patrick Mac was feeling a little puzzled. He’d read a lot of ancient books about crime solving. And no detective he’d ever read about would have done things the way Sergeant Lane was doing them.
“Well…if you don’t tell us what’s missing,” said Jay Oh, “then how can we tell you if we know what happened to it?”
Sergeant Lane looked at Patrick. “Help me out here, Patrick,” he said. “These kids don’t seem like they’ve got a helping attitude.”
Patrick smiled nervously. “Don’t you think it would be a good idea to question them individually?” he said. “Then you could compare their stories and see if they add up.”
Sergeant Lane scratched his face uneasily. “Uh—well, yes, sure, that’s probably—yes, let’s go ahead and do that.” He looked around the room as though searching for a spot to question the students.
“There’s an empty classroom next door. Maybe I could bring them in there one by one?”
“Outstanding!” Sergeant Lane said. “I’ll be next door then.”
He wheeled and walked out of the room.
The students looked at one another with perplexed expressions on their faces.
After the class was over and he’d questioned each of the students, Sergeant Lane said to Patrick, “Well, I thought that went really well! Really well indeed!” Patrick noticed that the detective was sweating heavily, as if he were nervous about something.
“What did you find out?”
“Find out?” The investigator blinked. “Uh…well…not much.” He showed off his straight, white teeth. “Can’t expect too much on the first round of questioning though.”
“Oh, okay.” Patrick was a little surprised. In the crime novels he’d read, the detective usually found out all kinds of stuff when they talked to suspects.
“Good call on the—uh—the separate room thing. I never would have thought of that.”
Patrick frowned. “Really? How do you usually do it?”
Sergeant Lane looked at the floor uncomfortably. “Actually?” He cleared his throat. “Actually this is my first major investigation.”
Patrick was a little surprised. “How long have you been in Unit Nine?”
“Twelve years next month.”
Patrick stared. “And you’ve never investigated anything?”
Sergeant Lane looked insulted. “Of course I have! It’s just this is my first major case.”
“I’m relieved to hear that. I thought—”
“In fact, I’ve made nine arrests!” The investigator nodded sagely. “I’ll never forget my first, though.’” He narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. “Six-year-old boy. Stole a communicator from his teacher. I put in three months on that case. Very instructive. Very instructive indeed.”
Patrick tried not to look appalled. Someone was stealing priceless volumes from the library and the best investigator they could find had never investigated anything more complex than a kid who stole a minor electronic gizmo?
“Of course,” Sergeant Lane said, “I’ve also completed several excellent simulations. There was an outstanding one where I had to crack a ring of gunrunners who were smuggling weapons to terrorists in a…” His smile faded. “Of course, that simulation was several thousand years old. Since we don’t really have weapons anymore. Or terrorists. Or smugglers. Or…”
Suddenly Patrick was not feeling very hopeful about the detective’s ability to solve the crime. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have thought this was a joke. “But you do feel confident you can solve this crime?”
The sergeant smiled broadly. “Unit Nine always gets their man,” he said. His self-possession seemed to be coming back now.
“Great,” Patrick said. He hesitated. There was still a question that had been bothering him. “The library has surveillance vid scanners. Didn’t the scanners capture the theft on video?”
The detective looked at him sternly. “That’s information I really can’t release to you. Strictly need-to-know.”
“I mean, if the theft is on video, you should be able to avoid all this. Right?”
Sergeant Lane said nothing. He was looking increasingly annoyed.
Patrick couldn’t help himself though. He was really curious to know what was going on. “You think it would be helpful if I spoke to the students myself?”
Sergeant Lane held up one hand, palm out. “Okay, okay, stop right there, Pat. I know you’re eager to help. But you need to let the professionals handle this.”
Patrick hated being called “Pat.” “I just thought—”
The investigator’s face hardened. Patrick couldn’t help thinking that the expression looked like something the investigator had practiced a lot in a mirror. “Do me a favor, Pat. Don’t think. Leave the thinking to me.”
Patrick felt his brow furrowing.
Sergeant Lane whirled and began walking briskly off down the hallway.
“Um…Sergeant?” Patrick called.
The policeman stopped, turned.
“That’s a dead end,” Patrick said. “You want to go in the other direction.”
“I knew that!” Sergeant Lane said, marching back the other way. His shoes clicked sharply on the floor until he was gone.
Later that afternoon Patrick knocked on the door of the director’s office.
“Ma’am?” he said, peeking around the door frame. “Sorry to bother you. But…well, I met with the investigator today. And I have to tell you, I wasn’t that impressed.”
The director looked away from the hologram screen she’d been studying and frowned. “He seemed quite professional.”
“Yes,” Patrick said. “Until he actually starts working.”
“He’s from Unit Nine! I’m sure he has his methods.”
“If he does, I can’t see them,” Patrick said.
“What exactly do you want?” the director said, narrowing her eyes.
“I want to help with the investigation.”
The director frowned. “Patrick, you have a lot on your plate. On top of your teaching load and your duties at the library? No, I’m afraid I just can’t authorize it.”
“But—”
The director looked at the clock projected in the air above her desk. “Aren’t you supposed to be auditing the new cataloging program right now?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then you’d better get cracking. The project is already severely behind schedule.” The director looked back at her screen, dismissing Patrick without saying a word.
Patrick closed the door quietly and slunk back to his work space. The public library was a very old organization, very traditional. There was a way to do everything. Authority was respected. Lines were not crossed. You did as you were told.
He slumped down in his chair and sighed. This whole situation just wasn’t right. He’d seen the detective at work. The guy just didn’t know what he was doing. It was no fault of his own, really. There just wasn’t any crime to investigate anymore, so a police officer just didn’t ever have a chance to learn his business.
As Patrick was musing about the situation, two of his students walked in—Em and Jay. “Okay,” Jay said, “so that guy from Unit Nine was a total joke, huh?”
Jay was by far the most sarcastic kid in his class.
As a symbol of authority to the students, Patrick felt obliged to defend the detective. “Well, I’m sure he’s going to get to the bottom of this matter,” he said.
“Yeah, right.” Jay snorted.
“I was a little confused too, I must admit,” said Em. She and Jay were the top students at the School of the New York Public Library. But their personalities couldn’t have been more different. Where Jay was abrasive and quick to argue, Em was soft spoken and easygoing.
“How so?” Patrick asked.
“Well…” She seemed to be trying to find a tactful way to say something. “He just asked a lot of vague, pointless questions. And I couldn’t quite figure out what he was driving at.”
“What she’s saying,” Jay said, “is the guy is an idiot.”
“Now, hold on,” Patrick said. “He’s a member of Unit Nine. I’m sure—”
“All I’m saying,” Em said, “is that I was confused. I never even figured out what he was looking for.”
“Yeah,” Jay said. “What’s missing? What’s the big deal here?”
“I’m not really sure that I’m supposed to say,” Patrick said.
Jay rolled his eyes.
“Maybe we can help,” Em said.
“I can only say,” Patrick replied, “that something has been stolen from the library. And it looks like somebody in your class took it.”
“It had to be a book, right?” Jay said. “Yes? Right? Did somebody steal the Gutenberg Bible?”
“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.
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 leave 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.
He stared at the screen in disbelief. Walking toward him was the silly-looking cartoon character he’d seen on the security footage before.
He had assumed that the security files had been altered in the computer’s memory after the theft occurred. But apparently the thief had managed to alter the program so that his or her own image was being obscured in real time, replacing the real image with that of the crazy cartoon figure.
Closer and closer the cartoon figure came. Occasionally it paused, looked around suspiciously, then continued stealthily forward. On its face was the same taunting smirk as before.
Finally it stopped. Yes! Patrick thought. The computer prediction was right! The cartoon figure had stopped at the row of shelves where The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was situated.
The cartoon figure stood for a moment, head cocked, as though listening. Then suddenly it darted forward and grabbed the book.
Patrick couldn’t see anything but the tiny image on the screen. He realized that if the thief moved fast enough, he might escape without Patrick being able to see his face.
“Lights on full!” Patrick shouted.
Instead of the puddle of red light that had followed him before, the entire ceiling lit up, a bright, blinding white. For a moment Patrick could barely see, his eyes overloaded with the brightness.
The thief’s footsteps resounded loudly. He was sprinting toward the far door.
As his eyes adjusted, Patrick jumped to his feet. To his horror he realized that after sitting for over an hour in the same position, one of his feet had fallen asleep. He had no sensation in his left leg and no ability to hold himself upright.
As he began to fall, he grabbed wildly at the nearest bookshelf. For a moment he thought it would support his weight. But the shelf began to teeter. With a crash Patrick fell to the floor, the shelf smashing down on top of him.
He fell just far enough into the aisle to spot the retreating figure of the thief. He was relieved to see it was a real flesh-and-blood person and not a cartoon. But other than that, he couldn’t make out any features. The thief was dressed in the baggy white clothes that were fashionable among kids that year. The clothes revealed nothing of the person underneath. He couldn’t even tell if it was a boy or a girl. And the thief’s head was covered with something that obscured his or her hair.
Hearing the loud crash, the thief turned to look back. Patrick realized then how the thief had managed to see in the dark. He or she was wearing a black mask made of some kind of smooth, glassy material. Patrick recognized it as a night-vision mask of the sort worn by soldiers and police many hundreds of years ago. A friend’s father had owned one when Patrick was a kid. They used to play games with it in the dark. It was capable of light amplification, infrared detection, sonar, micro-and radio-wave imaging, and other things he had long forgotten about. When you were wearing it, you could see anything, anytime, anywhere.
And no one could see your face.
Patrick pushed himself to his knees, shrugging the heavy shelf of books off his back. By the time he looked up again, the thief was gone.
“Nice try, pal,” Patrick said, smiling.
He picked up his comm, pulled up the security menu. “Theft in progress,” he said. “Seal all exits. Stop all elevators.”
He smiled triumphantly. The thief believed he’d thought of everything. But he hadn’t bargained on Patrick Mac!
“Security malfunction,” the comm said back to him.
Patrick’s face fell. “What!”
“Security malfunction,” the comm said again. Then a list of all kinds of doors and sensors and locks began scrolling rapidly down the screen, the word “FAILED” appearing in red letters next to each one.
Patrick punched his fist angrily into his palm.
He pushed himself slowly to his feet.
“Urgent message, Patrick,” the comm said.
Patrick stumbled slowly forward. Feeling was starting to come back in his foot.
“Urgent message, Patrick.”
Patrick sighed loudly. He’d failed completely. He felt so stupid. The thief had thought of everything! And now the director was about to reprimand him. Maybe even fire him.
“Urgent message, Patrick.”
“Okay,” Patrick mumbled.
“Urgent message, Patrick.”
“Okay, okay, what? Who’s the message from?”
“Pet Tracker Technologies wishes to inform you that your cat, Earnest, has escaped,” the comm said. “Would you like me to track it for you?”
Patrick grinned and began hobbling as rapidly as he could toward the distant door of room 191.
Earnest? No, Earnest was safe and sound back in his apartment.
“Why, yes,” Patrick said, smiling. “Yes, I would like that very much. Forward the tracking data to my comm, please.”
The vast majority of what was once New York City was now underground. There were remnants of the ancient city left—the lions outside the New York Public Library, the silver-clad Empire State Building, other monuments and buildings. But the city was mostly a maze of tunnels and underground chambers that extended hundreds of feet deep and contained thousands of miles of corridors.
For the most part the underground was as bright and cheerfully lit as the outdoors. Beautiful iridescent murals covered the walls, and the nearly unlimited power sources available to society meant that being underground never meant feeling as if you were in a cave.
Well…almost never.
For about an hour Patrick had been tracking the signal from the cat collar he’d stuffed into the spine of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. And during that time the thief had been winding deeper and deeper into the tunnels that composed the city. And now he was beginning to find himself in parts of the city that were, well, pretty cavelike.
They had passed through the sections where most people lived and worked, then into the deeper, darker Maintenance Sector. M-Sector, as it was known, was an old shadow world whose roots went back thousands of years. Back when working underground wasn’t easy or cheap the way it was today. Down here was where the pumps and air ducts and water systems, as well as the geothermal power units that supplied much of the city’s power were located.
Huge metal bracing held up the ceilings of the chambers he passed through, many of which were lit by ancient bulbs whose flickering light threw dark shadows into the corners of every room.
Some of the people Patrick passed in M-Sector clearly worked on the huge machinery that supported the city. But many other people seemed furtive or listless, their clothes dirty and unfashionable, their eyes clouded with fear or anger or mistrust. Patrick was not used to seeing people like that. It made him nervous. Some of the people he passed eyed him as though they were considering attacking him.
As Patrick entered one of the vast, dim, echoing chambers, he spotted the thief again for the first time. The thief was hurrying along, head down, not looking backward. Patrick still couldn’t make out who it was. The thief was no longer wearing the night-vision mask, but instead, one of the large, floppy hats that were currently in fashion, still hiding his or her face and the color and length of hair.
“Hey!” Patrick yelled.
Without looking back, the thief ducked through a small door on the side of the large chamber.
Patrick had noticed that here in M-Section the tracer signal was starting to break up, sometimes disappearing from the screen on his comm. Something to do with the large amounts of electromagnetic energy produced by the generators down here, he supposed.
Patrick broke into a run. The chamber was at least two hundred meters long. By the time he’d covered a hundred meters, the little red circle on his comm screen had flashed a few times and then disappeared.
He was out of breath when he reached the door. It was made of heavy steel, surrounded by thumb-size rivets and covered in chipped greenish paint.
VALVE CHAMBER 7
DANGER!
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
NYC DEPT OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION
The sign on the door was so scarred and worn that it was barely readable. From the looks of it, this part of the tunnel system was almost certainly thousands of years old.
Patrick twisted the massive steel handle and pushed the door open with a deep groan. What he found on the other side amazed him.
Darkness. It was the first time he’d ever seen real darkness in the city. It wasn’t that there was no light at all, but the light was so dim and flickering that for a moment he almost couldn’t see anything. Then he realized what the source of the light was. Fire! Scattered here and there throughout the tunnel were tiny fires.
The chamber he had entered was a long tunnel, maybe ten meters high, carved from solid rock. The floor was wet, the walls oozing and dripping. A thick acrid haze of smoke filled the tunnel.
The thief was nowhere to be seen. Not that Patrick could have seen much of anybody in this smoky gloom.
For a moment Patrick hesitated. But then a voice inside his head said, “You have to find the book!” Patrick couldn’t ignore it. He stepped forward a few feet, trying to see better.
Behind him, the door slammed shut with a great groaning booooooooom.
“Hey!” Patrick called. The sound echoed loudly, repeating and repeating before finally dying away.
As his eyes adjusted, Patrick suddenly realized, to his shock, that he was not alone. Scattered here and there were small clusters of people. They were sitting around the tiny fires. Some of them seemed to be cooking things over the flames.
Patrick felt a sick sensation run through him. Who were these people? There were legends, of course, about people who lived in the deeper reaches of the tunnels. They were called “roaches.” The stories were crazy and unbelievable. People said that roaches stole, fought, killed—that they even ate one another! Patrick had always believed that these were just stories told to scare kids. But now, looking around at the huddled figures in the chamber, he wasn’t so sure.
“Hey!” Patrick called again, his voice cracking a little.
Hundreds of pairs of eyes turned toward him, glinting in the firelight. Every single pair of eyes seemed to be appraising him, as though trying to figure out what they could take from him.
“Don’t you look pretty and clean, Master,” a soft voice said.
Patrick whirled. A dark shape rose from the shadows five or ten meters away. It was a man, his face barely visible in the dark. The man moved toward Patrick with a slow, limping gait.
A limp! It turned Patrick’s stomach. He’d never seen a real person with a limp. It had been thousands of years since medicine had been perfected to such a degree that broken limbs could be fixed in a matter of hours.
The man came out of the shadows. Other than the limp, it was clear he was large and powerfully built. There was something about the way he moved that frightened Patrick, something predatory, like a hyena or a wolf edging toward its prey.
Suddenly a shaft of light revealed the man’s face. It was a horrible mass of scars, like a pile of red worms. He only had one eye.
“Help a sick man, would you, Master?” the man said.
Without intending to, Patrick gasped.
The man extended a large, gnarled hand toward Patrick. A terrible odor accompanied him, like the scent of a rotting deer Patrick had once smelled when he went on a camping trip out West.
“I’m sorry, I—” Patrick stumbled backward, hitting the ground with an impact that shot through his entire body like a lightning bolt. “I must have made a mistake.”
“I think you did, Master,” the man said. His smile, a horrible twisted leer, split his face.
Patrick struggled to his feet. Every eye in the tunnel was on him. Laughter spread through the chamber, echoing eerily.
Patrick staggered backward, feeling for the handle of the huge iron door through which he’d just entered.
“Oh, you don’t like us roaches, do you, Master?” the man said. “Well, maybe we don’t like you so much either, hmm?”
Patrick’s hand closed around the steel door handle. He wrenched it open and stumbled through the door. The big man dove toward him.
The last thing he saw before the big steel door slammed shut was a single bloodshot eye staring at him.
When Patrick stopped running, his chest felt as if it were encircled by bands of red-hot iron. He put his hands on his knees and tried to catch his breath. He felt light-headed, and his legs were trembling so hard he wasn’t sure he was going to be able to remain standing.
“Hey,” a voice said.
Patrick straightened up, his heart banging in his chest.
“You okay, friend?” A smiling man in a green jumpsuit was looking at him inquiringly. Inscribed on his chest was a small sign that read MAINTENANCE—WE MAKE IT HAPPEN!
“I’m—fine,” Patrick gasped.
“You sure?”
Patrick nodded.
“You’re a little off the beaten path, aren’t you?” the man said.
Patrick smiled weakly. “Thanks for your concern. I’m fine. Really.”
“Okay,” the man said dubiously.
After the man was gone, Patrick sat down and put his head between his knees. I’m just not up to this, he thought. I’ve made a big mistake thinking that I had any business getting involved in a thing like this.
When Patrick got home, he slumped down in the chair in his living room and stared at the wall for a while. Failure! Total failure!
Everything had been working until he entered that tunnel. The prediction of which book would get stolen next. The tracking device. Following the thief. It was all perfect. Until he’d lost his nerve.
The man with the scarred face hadn’t threatened him directly. He’d been a little rude. But that was all. What it comes down to? Patrick thought. When the crunch came, I lost my nerve.
Patrick wasn’t even sure what he’d been afraid of. The dirt. The scars. The limp. The fires. The smoke. The strangeness of it all. He still couldn’t believe that in this day and age people lived like that. Why? What were they doing down there? Cooking food with actual fires? It was bizarre.
Patrick sat for a long time, trying to think what he should do next. No one else would know that he had failed. In fact, everybody else seemed perfectly content to leave the matter to the detective from Unit 9. There were millions of books down there in the stacks underneath the public library. At this rate the thief could steal a book every day for the next thousand years and barely make a dent in the collection.
But it wasn’t right! Once those books disappeared, they were gone forever. Sure, there were copies of them lurking someplace in the memory of a computer somewhere. But it wasn’t the same as a real, physical book. The book that had been stolen was a signed first edition. It had actually been touched by L. Frank Baum over three thousand years ago.
Idly Patrick turned toward the far wall of his apartment. Right now it had an iridescent pattern moving around on it.
“Bring up my file of pictures from the ski trip I took to Colorado,” he said.
Instantly the iridescent pattern disappeared, and the first of the security tapes appeared showing the cartoon character the thief used to mask his or her image during the first theft.
“Capture the image of the cartoon,” he said. “Identify.”
“The image mask is three-D model based on a hand-drawn cartoon,” the voice of his computer said. “Based on color application and style, the original cartoon is probably twentieth century. Most likely before 1980.”
“Can you do any better than that?”
There was a brief pause. “There is a ninety-seven percent likelihood that it is based on the work of Dr. Seuss.”
“Who’s he?”
“A children’s book author and illustrator. Real name, Theodor Seuss Geisel, born March second, 1904, in Springfield, Massachusetts. Died—”
“Okay, okay,” Patrick said. “Can you identify the specific character?”
There was a long pause. “Ninety-one percent likelihood the image is based on the Key-Slapping Slizzard of Solla Sollew.”
“The what?”
By way of answer, the computer brought up the image of a book, along with a paragraph of information on the book and author. The title was I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew. Apparently this book was one of the lesser-known publications of the author known as Dr. Seuss. Patrick scanned the list of Dr. Seuss’s most popular books. There was one book called Green Eggs and Ham. That sounded like an interesting one to read! Another time, perhaps. For now, Patrick scrolled through the text of Solla Sollew. It was about a furry creature who lived in an unpleasant place where he got stung and hit in the head. Tired of his life there, he decided to go to a perfect place called “Solla Sollew,” a magical city where people didn’t have problems. Unfortunately, when he got to Solla Sollew, there was a big wall around the town, and only one door in. And hiding in the lock of that door was a tiny mischievous critter that kept slapping away the keys of everyone who tried to enter. As a result, the furry creature had to go back where he came from. He went through all manner of crazy and difficult adventures. When he finally got home he realized that he didn’t mind the place that much after all. The point of the story seemed to be that no matter where you go, there will always be problems.
“Huh,” Patrick said, examining the illustration. “It’s definitely the same character. Can you tell me anything else about it?”
“A little over a thousand years ago, when wars and crime were finally being stamped out by humanity, there was a movement that said humanity would always have problems. They took the Key-Slapping Slizzard as their symbol or mascot. They claimed that making a perfect society was a mistake, that humanity would be more vulnerable to bad things if everyone got out of the habit of struggling with evil and poverty and oppression.”
“What happened to that movement?”
“They went underground. Literally. The people referred to as ‘roaches’ are their descendants.”
“You mean they actually chose to be down there?”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Speculate for me as to why somebody would have chosen this image to mask what they were doing.”
“I’m not good at guessing, Patrick.”
“Try it anyway.”
“Possibly they are attempting to indicate their belief that our current way of life could all fall apart.”
“That’s kind of what I was thinking too.”
“The Slizzard movement claimed that every society had the potential to hit a tipping point that would send it into a death spiral from which it couldn’t easily recover.”
“Like what?”
“It could be anything. A war between competing groups or nations. A failure of some kind of basic technology. Climate change. Crop failures. An energy source that disappeared.”
“And they thought that could even happen to us?”
“Yes.”
He stared at the hologram. The image of the Slizzard, two meters high, rotated slowly in front of him. It seemed to be watching him with its crazy-looking eyes.
If somebody had told him yesterday that the world could ever fall apart, he would have laughed at them. But there was something about those people down there in that tunnel that spooked him. There was no reason for them to live there. Food and shelter were free today. For whatever reason, the roaches chose to live down there. Dirty, hungry, sick, vulnerable to violence. It made no sense at all. And yet…there they were.
And if somebody could choose that…Well, what other terrible things could they choose?
“But why steal books? Why burn them? What’s the connection? And why children’s books?”
“I don’t know, Patrick.”
“Guess.”
“I’m sorry. I cannot.”
“What use are you then?”
“Actually, I am very good at—”
“Rhetorical question,” Patrick interrupted.
“Oh.”
How many thousands of years had they had computers? And they still couldn’t give them a sense of humor.
After a moment a bell dinged, and the wall turned red.
“Your cat is missing,” the computer said.
“No, it’s not,” Patrick said.
“Your cat is missing. Alert detected. Your cat is missing. Alert detected.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” Patrick said. “Where?”
A map appeared on the wall. It read PINE HAVEN WILDERNESS SITE.
“Here,” the computer said.
“What is that?”
“It’s a wilderness preserve one hundred and twelve kilometers north of your current location. It contains over forty miles of trails and a variety of wildlife, including thirty-four species of birds, three species of bats, elks, white-tailed deer, bison, cougars, wolves, red foxes, lynx, bobcats, coyotes—”
“Okay, okay, okay. But where’s my…uh…cat?”
“Your cat has been detected in a cave six kilometers from the entrance to the park.”
“Call an air taxi. I want to go there immediately.”
“I’m sorry, Patrick. That’s not possible.”
“What do you mean it’s not possible!”
“It’s a restricted area.”
“Restricted to what?”
“Tourism is not allowed. Due to its status as a wilderness preserve, it can only be accessed for educational purposes.”
“Educational purposes?”
“Yes, Patrick.”
Patrick thought for a long time. “You know what I think?” he said finally.
“No, Patrick.”
“Time for a field trip!”
The class arrived at the wilderness preserve early the next morning and disembarked from the bus. As soon as they had unloaded their packs full of gear, the bus sped away.
Patrick had realized that a field trip to the preserve was actually the perfect answer. First, by bringing his class in the guise of an “educational field trip,” he would be granted access to the park so that he could recover the stolen book. But even more important, he would have the entire class with him. He hoped that during the course of the field trip, he would be able to figure out who had been to the park before, and that would tell him who had stolen the book. Besides, it would be a nice break for the rest of the students to have some time outside. Often people grew so accustomed to the pace of daily life underground that they stopped coming above the surface to enjoy the beauty to behold there. As far as Patrick was concerned, reminding his students of life up here was a helpful lesson for them.
“Okay, everyone,” Patrick said as soon as each of his students had shouldered their packs. “I want you to listen carefully.” The group was huddled in the chilly morning air next to a small wooden shelter at the edge of the road. “We spend most of our time underground. Some of you might feel a little uncomfortable with all the open space. That’s okay. In fact, it’s a good thing. You need to stay sharp here. This is a wilderness preserve. Em, I asked you to do a little research. Would you be so kind as to tell us about the animals that live here?”
Em stepped forward, brushed her short blond hair back from her forehead. “The preserve contains eleven cougars, nine black bears, and two wolf packs. All these animals are capable of killing and eating humans. As a general rule they will stay away from a group of people. But wolves and cougars, in particular, have no problem attacking and killing individual humans. Four years ago, a doctoral student was killed and eaten by a cougar. All they found was her pinkie finger.”
A chorus of voices murmured surprise and excitement.
“In addition,” Patrick added, “we’ll be crossing a number of streams. The forecast today is for pop-up thunderstorms. A small stream can suddenly turn into a flash flood. There are several high promontories that—”
“What’s a promontory?” one of the students, a boy named Roger, said.
“A cliff,” Jay Oh said, rolling his eyes.
“Hey, everybody here isn’t a genius!” Roger said.
“Two boys snuck in here last year and fell off some high rocks,” Patrick added. “I wouldn’t even call it a cliff. It was only four meters high. But one of the boys died before help arrived.”
“Any other cool fatalities here?” Jay said.
Patrick frowned at him. “Look, you can joke all you want. But this is not your snug little tunnel back home. There are an enormous number of things that can go wrong here. Hypothermia, lightning, trees falling on you, slipping and falling, animal attacks, I mean the list goes on and on. So don’t get separated from the group. And when I ask you to do something, do it.” He knew the likelihood of any real danger to the kids was minute as long as they were careful and followed common sense, but he figured the more he scared them, the safer bet that the students would indeed take care.
“Dr. Discipline!” Jay said.
“We’ve got comms, though, right?” Em said, holding up her silver communicator.
“Sure, of course. You’ve all got your comms. We can track all of you with them. If you run into trouble or get separated from the group, give me a shout on the comm, and I’ll come find you.”
“So…remind me, why are we doing this?” a student named Shana asked. She was a tall, athletic girl who, if anything, was even more rebellious than Jay Oh.
“Education,” Patrick said.
Shana looked at Jay and made a face. Jay laughed.
“All right, let’s go,” Patrick said.
Twenty minutes later it began to rain.
Shana looked up incredulously at the sky. “Wow,” she said, holding out her hands, letting the fat drops smack against her hands. “It feels funny doesn’t it?”
It wasn’t that the kids had never been aboveground. But very few people spent much time outside. And if they did, they certainly didn’t stand around in the rain. She stared up at the angry sky. Wet drops of rain splashed onto her face. Then she began to look fearful. “Are we going to get struck by lightning?”
“Highly unlikely,” Patrick said. “There are two trails. The short trail goes over that ridge over there.” He pointed at a large hill topped by bare rock. “I was planning on taking the short trail. But I think you’re right. It wouldn’t be much fun if we got struck by lightning. We’ll take the long trail. We should be okay.”
“You sure?” Jay Oh said, a note of challenge in his voice.
“Sure,” Patrick said. He wished he felt as sure as he sounded, though. He was an experienced hiker, but thunderstorms still scared him. The boiling clouds above the group looked like a cauldron of gray fire.
The novelty of the rain wore off quickly. Soon it was just uncomfortable and cold. The students grumbled as they filed down the path through the ancient trees.
“Why can’t we go back?” Shana said.
“Yeah!” said Roger. “This stinks.”
“The bus won’t be back until nightfall,” Patrick said. “We’d just be standing there in the rain.”
The grumbling continued as the rain continued to fall.
“How did people stand it before we lived underground?” one of the students said.
“People were different back then,” said another student. “They didn’t feel things the way we do.”
“Not true,” Patrick said. “They just had to endure things we don’t.” He lifted the collar of his coat. It only served to funnel more rain down his neck. He decided to try distracting the kids. “Anyone care to name some things our ancestors had to put up with that we do not?”
“Cancer,” said Em.
“Sunburn,” said Roger.
“Heat and cold.”
“War.”
“Crime.”
“Good,” Patrick said. “Anything else?”
Patrick continued to ply them with questions, but after a while the group sank into a glum silence, refusing to answer.
Finally Shana said, “I’m done.”
“Look, Shana—,” Patrick said.
“Nope. Forget it. I’m going back. I’m getting on the comm and calling for an air taxi.”
She pulled her comm off her belt, frowned, shook the comm. “Crud!” she said. “There’s something wrong with my comm.”
“Shana!”
But Patrick’s headstrong student refused to listen. She simply turned and walked back down the sodden trail, talking angrily to her comm.
“Shana, you get back here right now, or you’ll be repeating this class!” he shouted. He hated teachers who threatened things all the time. But he simply couldn’t have kids wandering around in the woods by themselves.
Shana didn’t even look back.
“Wait at the shelter, young lady,” he shouted. “I’ll deal with you when we get back!”
Shana disappeared around the bend.
Patrick pulled out his comm so he could track Shana. But strangely, his comm wasn’t working right either. SIGNAL STRENGTH ZERO read the display. He’d never even seen a message like that on a comm before. Something must have happened to the satellite uplink. Underground there were low-frequency radio transmitters in every room and tunnel. But aboveground comms had to rely on satellite relays. If something happened to the satellite connection…
“That’s strange,” he said.
“You didn’t hear?” Jay Oh said with an odd little smile. “Sunspots. It’s messing up all aboveground communications satellites right now.” He waved his comm in the air. “Mine’s been offline since we left Manhattan.”
Patrick felt a knot of fear in his gut. This was not good.
“Guess we all have to go back, huh?” Roger said hopefully.
Patrick clamped his jaw shut. “No. She can go back and wait in the shelter until we get there.”
“Oh, because the rest of us are just loving standing out in the rain,” Roger said.
Jay Oh eyed Patrick with a cryptic smile on his face, as though he were watching an interesting science experiment.
“What are you grinning at?” Patrick said, snapping uncharacteristically at the boy. He turned and began walking down the trail. “Let’s move!”
The mood of the class worsened with every stride. Am I doing the right thing? Patrick kept thinking. The book might not even be in the cave. It might be a decoy signal. The thief might have found it and hidden it there. It might be anything.
And even if it really was in the cave, was it worth the risk to the students just to find it?
Oh, don’t be ridiculous. It’s not really dangerous. It’s just uncomfortable. Kids today had it ridiculously easy, he reminded himself. A little discomfort would do them good, and he knew he could keep them safe.
As they continued to thread their way through the canopy of massive trees, Patrick tried to keep a close eye on the students to see if any of them showed any familiarity with the terrain. If the thief was among them, eventually he or she would likely give themselves away. But the students just plodded along listlessly, staring at the ground.
The rain continued for most of the morning. It was late spring and the temperature was relatively mild. But some of the students, used to the constant seventy-two-degree air underground, were starting to shiver.
“Why aren’t we there yet?” Roger said. “I thought you said—”
“We took the longer trail to stay off that exposed ridge,” Patrick said. “I guess it’s taking a little longer than I thought.”
But Patrick was worrying a little now too. It seemed it was taking a good bit longer than he’d expected. The trail had split several times. He had been confident each time that he’d taken the correct route. But now he wasn’t so sure.
He had thought about bringing a map printed on plastic paper, but then he’d decided not to. The comm would work fine. Now that he was here, he found the tiny screen was hard to read. And without the satellite uplink to give them directions, he was beginning to suspect that he’d taken a wrong turn. Even the long trail was only supposed to have been eight kilometers. Surely they had traveled farther than that by now.
At around eleven thirty the rain finally ended, and the sun burst out from behind the clouds. As a shaft of warm light hit them, the students broke into a ragged cheer.
“See?” Patrick said. “This isn’t so bad, huh?”
He decided now that they had a little good news, maybe he’d better break the bad news to them.
“That said, without the satellite uplink, I think I may have, uh…”
There was a loud groan from the group.
“You’re saying we’re lost?” one of the students said.
“We’re not lost. We just…went a little out of the way,” he said. He pointed to the gentle incline rising up from the trail. “Jay and Em, I want you guys to climb up this hill. Look around in all directions until you spot a small lake. That’s where we’re heading. We’ll just figure out a way to get there. Okay?”
Jay and Em shrugged, looked at each other, then began trudging up the hill.
As he watched them go, Patrick studied Jay carefully. Did he show any signs of having been here before? As far as Patrick could tell, he was basically a good kid. But he was also one of those people who resisted authority at every turn. Plus, he was one of the brightest students Patrick had ever had. Whoever had stolen the books had also done some very high-level trickery on the computer to hide what he’d done. Most of the students in the class just didn’t seem to have the mental horsepower to do what this thief had done.
His gaze shifted to Em. She might well have been even smarter than Jay. But she wasn’t a rebel. He just didn’t see her as the type to destroy irreplaceable historical artifacts.
Patrick sighed. If either Em or Jay had been here before, they showed no sign of it.
“What do you think, guys?” Patrick said. “Lunch break?”
While the students perched themselves on a fallen log and began pulling out their lunches, Patrick pulled out his comm again. It was still not working correctly. Then, for a moment, the satellite link strengthened, and he could see the route they should have taken on the tiny map. They were about two kilometers off the trail. There had been a fork, and he’d taken the wrong path. He remembered it clearly and saw his mistake now. Fortunately, it would be easy to get back.
He quickly checked the tracer to see if he could tell where Shana was. He was glad to see that the tiny red circle representing her location showed up brightly on the map. But then—to his dismay—he realized that she wasn’t anywhere close to the shelter by the road. Instead, she was on completely the wrong trail. He zoomed in on her location. The trail she was on, he noticed, actually put her closer to the cave than Patrick and the rest of the class were. He frowned. Why hadn’t she gone back to the shelter? Was she lost? This whole thing was going from bad to worse. Then he noticed shading on the area where Shana was apparently hiking. He could just make out an overlay on the shaded area that read WOLF PACK RANGE. DO NOT ENTER WITHOUT SUPERVISION.
This was not good. Wolves were actually the most effective predators on the American continent. A wolf pack could take down a lone human without even breaking a sweat.
As he was staring at the tiny screen, the red circle wavered and disappeared. DOWNLINK FAILED. SIGNAL STRENGTH ZERO.
Patrick swallowed.
“Em!” he yelled, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Jay! Guys! Get back down here. Now!”
There was no answer.
Suddenly Patrick felt his heart beating and his palms sweating. This was bad. This was really bad.
“Are you okay, Patrick?” one of the students, Casey, said.
“I’m fine,” he said. “I just need Em and Jay to get back here. My comm connected to the satellite for a minute. I know where we are now.”
“I’ll run up and get them,” Casey said, smiling.
“Don’t go too far,” Patrick said.
Casey nodded and ran up the hill.
As he watched her disappear into the trees, something struck him. What if Shana had staged the whole blowup about the rain? What if she was heading for the cave on the shorter trail? Was it possible she was the book thief?
She certainly had the rebellious attitude. The question was, did she have the kind of mind that would dream up a crime like this? And if she did, could she have executed it? She was clever. But she just didn’t seem the type. Whoever had staged the crime was trying to make a point. About what, Patrick hadn’t yet figured out. But this was more than just random vandalism.
Or was it? Maybe this was just a case of an angry teenager taking out her anger by destroying something valuable.
While he was thinking, Casey came running back down the hill breathlessly. “Em fell!” she called. “Em fell!”
“What do you mean, she fell?” Patrick said, snapping out of his thoughts.
“She did something to her ankle. Maybe even broke it!”
“Okay, everybody,” Patrick called. “We’re all going up the hill.”
“I haven’t finished my lunch yet,” Roger protested.
“Eat while you hike,” Patrick said. He clapped his hands. “Let’s go!”
Em was lying in a bare gray outcropping of rock at the top of the small ridge. Her face was twisted with pain. Her pants were red with blood. Jay sat next to her, holding her hand.
As soon as he saw Patrick, he looked up accusingly. “Where were you? I called and called!”
Patrick shook his head. “I’m sorry! We couldn’t hear you.” He ran over and knelt next to Em. “What happened?”
She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I went up on that rock. To see what was around us. Otherwise the view is blocked. By the trees.”
“She slipped and cut her leg,” Jay said. “She may have even broken her ankle.”
Patrick looked around at the somber group of students. “Is anybody’s comm working? We need to call for an air ambulance.”
Everyone pulled out their silver communicators, stared at the screens. Then everyone shook their heads.
“Okay,” Patrick said. For a moment he felt panic welling up inside. But then, to his surprise, his mind went calm, and he began thinking clearly. “Okay, we’re going to have to make a device they used a long time ago. It’s called a ‘stretcher.’ Roger, Casey, go get some sticks. Four centimeters thick, two and a half meters long. Jay, Ken, I’ll need your coats.”
Within ten minutes they were heading down the hill, one student supporting each corner of the makeshift stretcher formed by threading pine poles through several coats.
“I’m sorry, Em,” Patrick said.
Em gave him an odd look. “Well, I can’t say this won’t be a memorable trip, anyway,” she said. She laughed briefly, then winced.
The group headed back down the trail. It didn’t seem to take them very long before they were back on the correct trail again. A small sign pointed in the direction of the shelter.
Patrick headed in the other direction.
“The shelter’s this way,” Jay said.
“I know,” Patrick said. “But we’re not going that way.”
Everyone’s eyes widened. “But we have to get medical attention for her.”
“Well,” Patrick said, “we’ve got another problem….”
“What?” Jay said angrily.
In the distance a high, eerie howl cut through the silence of the forest. Patrick felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck.
“Wolves,” Patrick said.
Once Patrick had explained about Shana going into the area where the wolves were, Jay said, “Why don’t we split up? Four of us can take Em back to the shelter and—”
“Wolves can smell blood from more than three kilometers away. If the smell of Em’s injury attracts them, I want us to have the largest possible group to fend them off.”
“Yeah, but—”
Patrick shook his head. “We’re not separating again. That’s final.”
He wasn’t at all sure this was the right decision. At the speed they were moving carrying Em, he was not completely sure they’d be able to get to Shana and then get back to the shelter by nightfall. Part of him wasn’t sure at all that he was making a good decision. Em’s leg was still bleeding, and she needed medical attention. But he also knew that the worst thing he could do at this moment was to show uncertainty. He was the leader. The kids needed to feel confidence in him. If he wavered, they’d see it. And that would lead to more problems.
“Follow me,” Patrick said. He began heading up the path. According to the map on his comm, which had been working again briefly, the trail he was on would meet up with the trail Shana was apparently following. And by happy coincidence, that would happen only half a kilometer from the cave that was his real destination on this trip.
For a moment no one moved.
“Follow me,” Patrick said again. Then he turned his back on the students.
What if they don’t follow me? he thought. There was really nothing he could do to force them. For a moment he felt as if he couldn’t breathe. He had no choice but to go after Shana. If the kids didn’t follow him, he’d have to do it alone.
Patrick was dying to look back. But he knew he’d look weak if he did. Sweat broke out on his skin. Please follow me, he thought. Please!
Then, just when he thought he’d lost them, Em’s soft voice spoke. “He’s right, guys. Splitting up’s a bad idea. Let’s go.”
For a moment, nothing. Patrick felt his blood pounding in his ears.
Then, as if they were all of one mind, he heard the rustling of feet. They were following him.
Whew! That was close.
The group walked in silence after that. Occasionally they stopped and switched stretcher bearers. Everyone’s hands were getting chafed raw. But nobody complained.
The sun had come out and small puffy clouds floated in a bright blue sky. A gentle wind blew through the trees, cooling everyone just enough so that they didn’t get overheated. It had turned into a perfect day.
Still, Patrick couldn’t help feeling like a fool. All this over a book.
Every now and then he would cup his hands and call, “Shana! Hey, Shana! We’re coming for you!”
Occasionally the wolves would howl. Each time they seemed closer.
The group’s progress was painfully slow. Patrick looked up at the sun now and then. Underground it didn’t matter what time it was. The lights were on all the time. But aboveground the world still moved to the ancient rhythms. Sunrise, sunset. Rain, wind, flood, drought, winter, spring, summer, fall. Once these things had been matters of life and death to people. Now they were just figures of speech.
Except…not up here.
The sun had been high in the sky when they had found Em lying on the rocky ridge. But now it was getting lower, obscured by trees. The world hadn’t exactly gotten dark yet. But Patrick could sense the light subtly changing. The bright, optimistic light of midday was becoming paler, bleaker.
Getting out of the park by nightfall was starting to seem unlikely. They had no tents, no extra food or water, no shelter, no fire.
They reached the junction between the short trail and the long trail at four o’clock.
“Which way?” Jay said.
Patrick looked around. The short trail led toward the wolves. The long trail went back they way they had come. But there was a third trail—the one that led to the cave.
Patrick pulled his comm off his belt and stared at it for about the fiftieth time. There was still no satellite signal. He took a deep breath. What was the right move? With no knowledge of where Shana was, there was no knowing which direction he ought to go. If he took the short trail, there was at least a distant chance that they could make it back to the shelter in time to catch the shuttle back to Manhattan. But if Shana had taken the spur that led off toward the cave, she’d be stuck out here all night. Alone. Unprotected.
Think! Think!
“Mr. Mac?” Alana said.
“Mr. Mac?” Roger said. “What are we going to do?”
“Mr. Mac, Mr. Mac, Mr. Mac—”
Suddenly everyone was talking. Patrick felt as if his head were in a vise.
“We need to go back, Mr. Mac,” Roger said.
“Shana could be out that way!” Jay said, pointing down the trail leading toward the cave. “We can’t leave her here.”
“Maybe we should split up,” a third boy said.
“Yeah,” Jay said. “Me and you and Roger could go to the cave and—”
“I’m not staying out here!” Roger said.
“My mom and dad will panic if we don’t get back tonight,” another voice said.
Everyone began arguing. Patrick felt powerless to stop them. There was simply no good decision here. I’m not some ancient frontier adventurer! Patrick thought hopelessly. I’m a librarian. What do I know about this? He knew he needed to make a decision, needed to show some confidence so the kids didn’t lose hope. But he felt frozen.
And then something hit him. The cave. Jay had just said that they should go to the cave. But Patrick had never even mentioned the cave. So how did—
“Quiet, everybody!” Patrick said. The voices died out. Patrick cocked his head at Jay. “I never mentioned the cave.”
Jay blinked. “Huh?”
“The cave. I never told any of you that we were going to the cave. How did you know about it?”
Jay looked confused. He shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess it was on the map. I just thought—” He broke off and swallowed. “What? What are you looking at me like that for?”
Patrick felt an odd sense of triumph. It was Jay. It had to be. Just as he’d suspected from the very beginning.
The feeling of triumph quickly faded. At this moment it really didn’t matter one bit who the thief was. Patrick looked off into the trees. The sun was getting lower, and the shadows on the ground seemed darker.
“Mr. Mac?” Roger said. “What are we going to do?”
Patrick didn’t have an answer. He looked around at the young faces, staring eagerly at him, waiting for him to give them an answer that would make them feel safe, that would make them believe everything was okay.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I didn’t—when I planned this—I didn’t think…” His voice drifted off.
“Mr. Mac?” Jay said.
“I’m sorry.”
There was a brief, uncomfortable silence.
“All of you. Em. Everybody. I’m sorry.”
Em sat up on her stretcher and looked at him. Then, improbably, she smiled. “It’s okay, Mr. Mac,” she said. “You know what to do.”
And just like that, he did. He knew exactly what they had to do.
“Um, Mr. Mac?” It was Jay talking.
“Okay.” Patrick clapped his hands together decisively. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”
“Mr. Mac?”
“Let me finish.”
“Mr. Mac?” Jay was pointing at something.
“What, Jay?”
Jay didn’t speak. He just kept pointing.
To the left of the trail was a long, rolling meadow full of pink and red flowers. At the top of the meadow was a small rise. Standing at the top of the little hill, silhouetted against the blue sky, was an animal. It stared intently at Patrick with unblinking yellow eyes.
A wolf.
“We’re going to the cave,” Patrick said. “All of us.”
One wolf. Then two. Then five. Then more.
“This way,” Patrick said firmly. “Girls, get the stretcher. Everybody else surrounds it. Jay, Roger, you’re the biggest. I want you in the rear.”
Four girls immediately hoisted Em and began walking briskly down the trail. At the far side of the meadow, the wolves began to move. The lead wolf was snow white. It crept toward them, head down, teeth slightly bared, sniffing the air.
“Eric,” Patrick said sharply, “look for tree limbs on the ground. Two meters, no more than three centimeters thick. And they can’t be rotten.”
Patrick reached into his pack and pulled his camping knife out of its sheath. All potential weapons—even tools like chef’s knives and camping knives—had been outlawed centuries ago. Strictly speaking, the knife was illegal. But every serious camper Patrick knew owned one.
Eyes widened at the sight of the gleaming knife.
“Sticks!” Patrick said, snapping his fingers urgently. “Now.”
“What are the sticks for?” Eric said.
“Spears,” Patrick said. “We’re making spears.”
At the rear of the group, Jay’s face split into a broad grin. “Yeah!” he said. “Mr. Mac, coming through!”
Eric handed a small tree limb to Patrick. Patrick whacked it on a nearby tree. It cracked in half. “You’ve got to do better, Eric.”
Eric nodded, darted into the trees. Patrick looked behind them. The wolves were in no hurry. They were trotting after the students, steadily closing the distance. Maybe two hundred meters? Patrick thought.
“Hurry, Eric!”
Moments later Eric burst out of the trees with several sticks. These were much better. Patrick quickly sharpened a point on the end of the first one, tossed it to Jay. A few quick strokes of his sharp blade and he had a second spear. He threw it to Roger.
“What do we do?” Roger said.
“If they get close, you kill them,” Patrick said. He made a stabbing motion with the remaining stick. Then he turned to Eric. “More sticks.”
Eric ran into the woods again.
Seeing that one of the group had separated, the wolves began picking up the pace, loping into the woods in the direction Eric had gone.
“Hurry, Eric!” Em called. “They’re coming for you.”
Eric didn’t answer. Patrick could hear him tromping around in the brush. But he couldn’t see him. There was thick foliage on the left side of the trail, blocking his view.
The white wolf was now only about seventy-five meters away.
“Eric,” Patrick called. “Let’s go. Time’s running out.”
Just as the white wolf burst into a run, Eric ran out of the trees, four more sticks in his hands. He was laughing and his eyes were wide.
He reached the group only seconds before the white wolf. As he did so, the wolf peeled off, circling back around to join the larger group.
The wolves now slowed, matching their pace to the students’. They weren’t howling or growling, weren’t making any noise at all. They simply shadowed Patrick and the students, heads lowered, eyes fixed on the humans.
Patrick furiously worked on the sticks, sharpening their points with his knife.
“Do you think Shana’s all right?” one of the girls carrying Em said.
“If they’re hunting us,” he said, “they’re hungry. If they’re hungry, then they never…” He searched for the right word. Attacked? Ambushed? Ate? “If they’re hungry, they never…uh…found Shana.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” the girl said, looking relieved.
Patrick hoped he was right.
“How much farther?” Jay said nervously. The wolves had formed a loose half circle around the students.
Now that he had finished making the spears, Patrick moved to the rear of the group. “Not far,” he muttered.
The white wolf darted forward, lunging toward Patrick. Its hair bristled and its teeth were bared. Patrick jabbed furiously at the wolf. It darted this way and that, and he kept stabbing at it. He felt the spear bite. The wolf let out a shrill whimper and retreated.
“Yeah! Mr. Mac!” Roger shouted.
The wolves backed off a few meters. Patrick had a chance to count them now. There were seven adults and three smaller pups.
“Next one to get close,” Patrick said, “the three of us need to jump out and really go after it. We need to show them who’s boss. Otherwise they’ll just keep nipping at us until one of us gets in trouble.”
“They wouldn’t really hurt us, would they?” Eric said.
Patrick had a long answer forming in his mind. He wanted to say that when you lived underground in Manhattan, you never felt unsafe for even a minute. There was no war, no crime, no danger of any sort. And if you did happen to stumble and bang your head, medical care was only minutes away. He wanted to say that only days ago, he too had felt that he lived in a world with no dark places, no threats, no danger, nothing at all to worry about. He wanted to say that his mind was beginning to change, that he was beginning to think that underneath the happy world they lived in, something dark was brewing.
But instead of giving Eric the long answer, Patrick just said, “Give them a chance, they’ll take you by the throat, drag you down, and start eating you before you’re even dead.”
“Huh,” Eric said, frowning. “Interesting.” He scooped up a fist-size rock and hurled it at the wolves. The rock whacked a large gray male on the shoulder. It yelped in pain. “How you like that, wolfie, wolfie? Huh? You want to eat some more of that?”
A nervous burst of laughter rose from the group.
“Nice, Eric!” Patrick said. “Everybody grab some rocks and start thowing. That’ll keep them back.”
It was a standoff. For more than an hour the kids continued to hurl rocks as the wolves circled and probed, probed and circled. The wolves were wary of both the rocks and the spears. But they seemed to be adapting their tactics now, spreading out, probing in pairs and threes, so that Patrick and his students couldn’t concentrate their fire on any single member of the pack.
The sun was getting lower and lower in the trees and the light started fading. Patrick felt sure they’d be safe in the cave. But if they got stuck out here in the open, in the dark, without fire…Well, it would be a long, long night.
And to make things worse, everyone was getting tired. They’d had to stop several times so the stretcher bearers could rest. And each time the wolves had gotten closer and more confident.
Suddenly a cry went up from one of the girls in the front of the group. “Mr. Mac!”
Patrick whirled.
“There!” the girl called. “See it?”
Not more than thirty meters away was a large black crevice in the rock. The cave! They’d made it.
As though sensing that their prey was about to escape, the wolves began to growl and dart closer. They seemed as if they were summoning their nerve for an all-out charge.
“Hurry!” Patrick shouted. The group surged toward the cavern’s entrance.
As they were about to enter the cave, a figure rose up out of the darkness. The group pulled up short. For a moment the same thought ran through the entire group: a wolf.
But then Patrick realized it was a human figure. A girl, waving her arms furiously.
“Hey!” the girl yelled. There was a broad smile on her face, smudges of dirt on her cheeks. But she looked to be in fine spirits. “You guys found me!”
Patrick felt overwhelmed with relief. “Shana!”
“I got bored sitting around that stupid shelter. So I tried to come back and find you. Did I take the wrong trail?” Shana grinned brightly. “Anyway, Mr. Mac, I’m sorry if I got all weird on you this morning. I was in a bad mood, and I took it out on you.”
“No problem,” Patrick said.
Shana pointed over his shoulder. “Hey, look!” Her eyes were shining. “Wolves!”
“We kinda noticed,” Jay said dryly.
“Ohhhhh,” she said in a high voice, clapping her hands in excitement. “They’re so cuuuuuuute!”
Patrick wasn’t sure exactly what he’d expected. That the book would be sitting there in the middle of the cave waiting for him? Maybe.
If that was what he had expected, it didn’t work out that way. The cave was not a large flat-floored room like you always saw in the vids. It was a slanted crease in the stone, no more than three or four feet wide. You couldn’t stand upright in it. You had to lean your back on the slimy rock.
The only good thing was that there was no way for the wolf pack to attack them. It was too narrow for more than one animal to enter at a time. Those were bad odds for the wolves—and the wolves knew it. After a few minutes of trotting back and forth in front of the entrance, the wolves suddenly turned and slunk back into the forest. They obviously felt they’d wasted enough time on the humans and were ready to find something that would be easier to kill.
After the wolves disappeared, Roger said, “So should we head on back, Mr. Mac?”
Patrick shook his head. “It’s already starting to get dark out there,” he said. “There’s no way we’d make it back to the shelter.”
“Maybe we could go by flashlight,” Roger said, pulling a bright flash out of his pack.
“Wolves see a lot better in the dark than we do,” Patrick said. “We’re just going to have to wait out the night here.”
The students didn’t say anything. But it was obvious they were disappointed. As Patrick was readying himself to give them a little pep talk, Em said, “Mr. Mac, can I talk to you for a minute?”
Patrick looked at her curiously.
“Back there,” she said, pointing into the murky depths of the cave.
“I’m not sure it’s a good idea,” he said. “It’s hard to see, and I wouldn’t want you to fall again.”
“I shined my flashlight back there,” she said. “It looks like the space opens up a little.” Without waiting for his assent, she began inching her way back through the crevice.
Patrick followed her dubiously, threading his way through the line of students. It took about ten minutes for them to go fifty or sixty meters deep into the cave. Em should have been in a lot of pain. But she didn’t seem to notice.
Suddenly she stopped and waved her flashlight in front of her. Patrick’s eyes widened. A huge sparkling cavern opened up in front of them. The walls and ceilings and even the floor seemed to be lined with jewels.
“Wow,” he said. “You were right.”
She looked at him for a moment. “I’ve been here before,” she said.
Patrick blinked, then stared at her. “Follow me,” she said. Then she leaped down about two meters.
“Your leg!” he said.
“It’s fine,” she said.
“You mean—” He broke off in the middle of the sentence.
“There’s nothing wrong with my leg. The blood was made of syrup and red dye.”
“You made those kids carry you all this way?”
She nodded. He studied her face. She looked the same as ever—serious, calm, earnest. There wasn’t a sign of shame or mischievousness on her face, no sign that she had done anything wrong at all.
“Come on.” She motioned him to follow her.
Against his better judgment he jumped down into the cavern. As he hit the floor, he saw that the “jewels” on the walls were actually beads of water that had condensed on the rock.
Em was already walking briskly through the cavern. “Wait!” he called. But she didn’t stop. His confusion was turning to anger. “Em, what’s this all about? Did you steal those books?”
She just kept walking.
He followed her through the cavern, into a narrow tunnel, then into a smaller chamber. This one was full of multicolored stalactites and stalagmites. It was brightly lit by a light source that Patrick couldn’t see.
Strangely, a man stood in the middle of the room. Patrick did a double take.
“He did great, Press,” Em said to the man as Patrick entered the room.
“Okay, who are you and what is this about?” Patrick demanded.
The man gave Patrick a big, disarming smile. “Hey, I’m sorry we put you through all this nonsense,” the man said. “But it was for your own good.”
Patrick looked at Em, then at the man whose name, apparently, was Press. “Do you have the book?”
“Oh, we’ve got all of them,” the man said. He pointed to his left. Sitting in a neat stack were the stolen books.
“But—they were burned up!” Patrick said.
Press shrugged. “I guess if you can make it look like they were being stolen by a three-thousand-year-old cartoon, you could make it look like they were getting incinerated, too.”
“We had the director’s full consent and assistance,” Em said. “Without her access codes, Jay would never have been able to rig the security vids.”
“So, wait a minute…Jay was in on this too?”
Patrick heard laughter echoing behind him. He looked up to see Jay sitting on the lip of the path leading down into the cavern, his feet swinging lazily. “I’m Em’s acolyte,” he said.
Patrick was feeling more confused—and maybe even humiliated—by the moment. None of this made any sense at all.
“I’m sorry,” he said, turning to the man who had been waiting for them in the cavern, “but exactly who are you?”
The man laughed genially. “That’s a trickier question than you might think.”
Em said, “Press and I are what’s known as ‘Travelers.’ He’s the Traveler from Second Earth and I’m the Traveler from Third Earth.”
Patrick looked at them blankly.
“You’ve been lucky so far here on Third Earth,” Press said. “So far Saint Dane has yet to operate here. But when he comes, we’ll need to be ready. You’ll need to be ready. You see, in some respects Third Earth is more vulnerable than any other territory in Halla. The people of Third Earth have nearly forgotten what life-and-death struggle is all about.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Patrick said. “What is all this about travelers?”
Press frowned. “I’m sorry. I’m getting ahead of myself.” Press looked at Patrick for a moment, scratched his face, then said, “I’ve got a lot to tell you. You might want to sit down….”
After Press had finished the long explanation about Travelers and Halla and Saint Dane, Patrick said, “Okay, so assuming this isn’t the world’s most elaborate practical joke, why did you steal the books?”
“It’s your destiny to be a Traveler,” Press said. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t need a little push. Your confidence needed a jolt. Finding these books wasn’t a test. Think of it as training. Preparation. Some Travelers are natural—I guess you call them—men of action. Or women of action. The Traveler from Zadaa—her name is Loor—she’s ready to go at the drop of a hat. To prepare her, she needed to learn restraint. You, on the other hand, you needed to see that you have more courage, more strength, than you probably give yourself credit for. You needed to see what you were capable of.”
“What am I capable of?” Patrick said skeptically.
“Look at what you did today. In the face of all kinds of danger, you managed to keep your group safe, and you recovered a hugely valuable artifact, something that’s important both to you and to the world at large. And you did it with a lot of grace and good cheer. You didn’t force those kids to do what they did. They actually had fun. They love you. That’s a harder trick than you might think. Being a Traveler is not just about courage. It’s about leadership. And that’s what you demonstrated today.”
Patrick felt something warm moving inside him. On the face of it this whole story seemed ridiculous. And yet there was something about it that felt familiar. It was like the feeling he had when he came back home after being on a long vacation. As though a part of him had been waiting for this all his life.
“Mission, Patrick,” Press said. “Everybody needs a mission in life. This is yours.”
Patrick took a deep breath. He didn’t know quite how to feel. If what this man was saying was true, then it was very scary and very exciting at the same time.
“This is just the beginning, Patrick,” Press said. “This is just the beginning.” Press paused. Then his smile faded. “But I have to tell you, it’s only going to get harder from here.”
The next day an emergency airlifter arrived and picked up the whole class. The students had slept on the floor of the cave that night, and everyone was looking stiff and bleary as they stepped onto the lifter.
Before they climbed on, Shana ran out of the cave and threw her arms around Patrick. “Thank you for taking us here, Mr. Mac!” she said. “This was the best day of my life! I’m going to remember this forever.”
The whole group cheered. “Yeah, Mr. Mac! This was the best!”
Patrick looked around at the group, smiling and feeling a little stunned. He had expected them to be angry with him for getting them into this mess. But they weren’t angry. They were grateful.
When they got on the plane, Em sat down next to him. She wore a large ring on her finger, with odd writing on the sides.
“Every Traveler has his or her own path to walk,” she said. “My job was to get you ready to be a Traveler in your own right. My work is done.”
Patrick nodded, still trying to make sense of all this in his head. “Why did you go into the tunnels under the city?” he asked. “How did you get out here?”
“The deepest tunnels in the city are connected to the intercity magtrain lines. I took the train up here. There’s a maintenance stop underneath the caves and a maintenance tunnel connects right to it. So I came up inside the cave, placed the books, then went back down into the tunnels and took the magtrain home.”
“Why all that trouble?”
“We knew you’d use the computer to predict the next book. Once we figured that out, we knew you’d put a tracer in it. Tracer signals can only go through a few feet of rock, so we had to go deep underground to break up the tracer signal. Then, once we came back up here, the books were close enough to the surface for a clean signal to get out.”
“It seems like an awful lot of work.”
“On most of the territories, the Travelers run into big challenges all the time. But here on Third Earth, nothing ever goes wrong. We had to be the Key-Slapping Slizzard, see? We had to keep you out of Solla Sollew for a little while.”
As they were talking, Patrick’s comm beeped. “I guess the sunspots must be over,” he said.
The comm beeped again.
He thumbed the talk button and looked at the screen. It was Sergeant Lane, the Unit 9 detective.
“Hello, Pat,” the detective said. “I just wanted to let you know that there’s been another theft.”
Patrick frowned. “What? That’s not possible.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I’ve been lying on the floor of a cave a hundred kilometers from New York all night. Every one of my students has been with me.”
Sergeant Lane looked puzzled. “That’s very odd,” he said. “Very odd indeed. They used the same security codes.” He shrugged. “Well, hey, I’m as puzzled as you are. But I just thought I’d call to let you know. I’m uploading the security vids to your comm. Take a look and see if you spot anything that might help me out.”
“Okay.” Patrick’s comm beeped, signaling the vid feed had been received. “So what book was stolen?”
“Something called the”—Sergeant Lane frowned as if trying to recall something—“The Gutenberg Bible? Does that name ring a bell?”
Patrick’s eyes widened. “But…that’s one of the most important historical artifacts in the whole—”
The screen went blank before Patrick could finish talking.
He turned to Em. “Did you hear that?”
Her brow furrowed. “But it doesn’t make sense. We were right here. Obviously we couldn’t have…” Her voice broke off.
Patrick queued up the security vid and began running it. It showed the Key-Slapping Slizzard, same as before, dashing through the library, stealing a book, taking it out onto the front steps of the library and burning it.
Em’s face was white. “This is not good.”
Patrick felt something clutch in his chest. He replayed the final part of the vid. It was a little different from the earlier vids. This time the Slizzard dumped some kind of chemical on the book and ignited it. The entire book was consumed in seconds. It could have been a fake, too. But in retrospect, the fire in this vid looked much more convincing than it had in the other ones.
Patrick replayed it twice. There was an odd hitch in the vid, a sort of stutter in the image as the book ignited.
“Wait!” Em said. “What was that?”
“I was wondering that too,” Patrick said.
He reran the vid, this time on slow speed. It happened again. One frame was different from all the others, as though something had flashed. It was still too quick to make out what it was.
“Stop!” Em said.
Patrick stopped the vid and began backing it up, frame by frame by frame. And suddenly there it was. One single frame was different from all the others. Instead of the Key-Slapping Slizzard, Patrick could see a flesh-and-blood human standing there, the Gutenberg Bible on the ground before him, a small flame extending from his hand.
It was an extremely tall man, staring toward the camera, with a broad smile on his face. He had pale blue eyes and long gray hair. And despite the fact that he was smiling, there was something vaguely menacing about him.
And then, as quickly as they had found the picture, it began to fade. As the image of the man faded, it was slowly replaced by the image of the Key-Slapping Slizzard. For a moment nothing was left of the man but his smile.
And then that too was gone.
“Who was that?” Patrick asked. “Do you think that was the person who really stole the book? Or was it just some random image that infected whatever program was used to generate the Slizzard?”
Em kept staring at the screen.
“Oh, no,” she whispered finally. “There’s even less time than we thought.”