A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  She was right about the overlap. There were a half-dozen rows of shelves marked “Fire-Bombings” and “Incendiaries” and two more that, judging by their dates, could have been either, and then fires that had clearly been civilian—the Windsor Castle fire, 1992; the Capitol Fire in Albany, 1911; Birmingham Central Library in 1879. . . .

  The sections were all small here, too, including sections like “Los Angeles Public Library Fire,” which I remembered as doing major damage. But apparently only a handful of them had been books that were rare enough that they qualified for archiving here.

  Or that was all they’d managed to rescue. I walked down the rows to see if I could find a section with more books in it.

  Here was one. It took up two full shelves and half of a third. I peered at the divider card to see where these books had come from. “St. Paul’s,” it read.

  St. Paul’s? Didn’t these books belong over in the War section with the other London Blitz stuff? That was when Hitler had tried to burn the cathedral down.

  But he hadn’t succeeded. St. Paul’s hadn’t burned. So why was this section here? This must be some other St. Paul’s—St. Paul’s Catholic School or St. Paul’s College or the St. Paul, Minnesota Public Library.

  If the titles were any indication, it must be. The titles weren’t those of religious books—John Ogilbie’s The Carolies, Sir William Dugdale’s Origines Judiciales, The History of Embanking and Draining, Sir Thomas Urquhart’s The Jewel . . . And anyway, what books would St. Paul’s Cathedral have besides hymnals and tourist guides?

  I pulled out the divider card to take a closer look. No, it read, “St. Paul’s Cathedral, London,” and there was only one of those. It must have been hit by some incendiary bomb at some point that caused a minor fire. But that still didn’t explain what all these secular books had been doing in a cathedral.

  “And call Terence,” Cassie’s voice said. “Tell him we’ll pay him double overtime,” and I heard the tap of her heels coming toward me. I went out to meet her.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It never rains but it pours. California just changed the period of time before unclaimed storage units can be legally auctioned off. It used to be three months, which meant the first, but they just changed it to twelve weeks, so now they hold the auctions on the twenty-first.”

  “Storage units? Like on that TV show, Storage Wars?” I asked. “Where dealers bid on the contents and then sell them?”

  “Or try to, can’t find any takers, and then toss them in the dumpster,” she said grimly. She turned to look at the books. “I see you found the Fires section.”

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding. “And I think I found some mis-shelved books.”

  “Mis-shelved?” she repeated in a tone that said clearly, “That’s impossible.” She came over. “Which ones?”

  I led the way down the row to the St. Paul’s section. “These. They’re marked ‘St. Paul’s Cathedral.’ Shouldn’t they be over in the World War II section?”

  “No,” she said, without even looking at the divider. “These are from the Great Fire of London in 1665.”

  “Oh.”

  “The booksellers and publishers in the surrounding area moved their books into the cathedral for safekeeping.”

  Which had obviously been a good idea, considering how much of the rest of London the fire had destroyed. Including, apparently, most—or all—of the other copies of these books, since there were so many of them here. And it made sense that Ozymandias’s would have known they were the last copies when they acquired them—they’d have had hundreds of years to check on their rarity.

  But it didn’t explain how they could afford them—the last extant copy of a book from the 1600s would have been pricey even for a billionaire, and they’d have had to outbid the Folger and the British Library, and there were dozens of them here—or why, if they were as priceless as I thought they had to be, they were just sitting out there on the shelves for the taking instead of being locked in burglar-proof cases.

  And it didn’t explain how they knew the rest of the books here—The Daring Debutante and Follow the Boys and Ambush in Apache Canyon—qualified as endangered, how they knew there weren’t dozens of other copies stashed in barns and hoarders’ houses and storage units people were still paying rent on.

  “How exactly do you select the books for this place?” I said.

  “Select?” Cassie repeated blankly.

  “Yeah. How do you know if a book you find is the last copy of something? Is there a master list of endangered books somewhere or—?”

  Cassie put up her hand to silence me, her head cocked as if listening, and after a couple of seconds I knew what had made her do that. The sound of footsteps.

  “Greg? We’re down here,” Cassie called, and a head appeared around the corner of our row. But not Greg’s.

  It was a young woman who had to be the long-awaited Jude. She looked like a drowned rat, her clothes plastered to her and great drops of water dripping from her black bangs.

  “I’m here,” she told Cassie breathlessly. “What do you want me to do first?”

  Get out of those wet clothes before you drip all over the books, I thought.

  But Cassie didn’t even seem to notice her soaking wet clothes or the puddle she was standing in. “Go down to Manuscripts and ask Jerome if he has any rolling carts he can spare and then start clearing the chute.” She said.

  Jude nodded and left, only to reappear a moment later, saying, “I forgot to tell you. Thaddeus says he needs to talk to you. It’s about Lewis Carroll’s diaries. He wants to know if he should shelve them under Carroll or Dodgson.”

  “Tell him—”

  “And he had a question about Volumes 6 and 7. He said it’s really urgent.”

  Cassie nodded. “All right, tell him I’ll be right there.” She looked regretfully at me. “I’m sorry I have to keep abandoning you like this. If you want to—”

  Call it quits? Not till you tell me how this place works and how you can afford something like Lewis Carroll’s diaries, I thought. And why, in a section devoted to books that were nearly destroyed once in a fire, you don’t have a single fire extinguisher.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve got plenty of time. You go. I’ll entertain myself by looking at bookburnings or something.”

  Which was supposed to be a joke, but it went over as well as my joke about the Library of Alexandria.

  “They’re four rows down,” Cassie said seriously. “Near the middle. Second shelf from the bottom,” and went off with the still-dripping Jude.

  I went off to find the bookburnings section, wondering what I’d find. Probably not Hitler’s infamous bonfires—this was English-language only, and he’d burned mostly German and Polish books. And besides, there’d have been no way to rescue them.

  Then what would they be? Fundamentalist burnings of Harry Potter or the Koran? No, neither one would qualify as endangered. Slave records that would incriminate prominent Southern families? I’d read about a recent case in North Carolina where they’d burned a bunch of those. Or would they be Salman Rushdie’s books? Or Darwin’s?

  It didn’t matter, because I couldn’t find the section at all. It wasn’t anywhere in the fourth row, or the fifth, which was devoted entirely to arson. I backtracked to the third to look, but it seemed to be all garden-variety non-arson fires—schools, houses, businesses: the offices of the Liberty Review, Maysburg Elementary School, Kenyon Dormitory—

  Dormitory. I stopped, frowning at the card, remembering a dorm fire when I’d been in college.

  It hadn’t been a big one. Only a couple of rooms had been damaged before they got it out, but the whole floor (and the one above it) had had to throw everything out. The smell of smoke had penetrated not only the clothes and blankets and mattresses, but everybody’s textbooks, their furniture, even the walls. And not the nice outdoorsy smell you get from a campfire either—an overwhelming, sickening reek. I leaned over the books and sniffed.

  N
othing. I walked back along the row and back up the aisle to the St. Paul’s books, taking periodic whiffs.

  Still nothing.

  The smell of smoke had been impossible to get out. They’d tried everything: washing, dry cleaning, repainting, buckets of industrial strength odor-remover, but nothing had worked. It was still there.

  And yet here I was, supposedly surrounded on all sides by rows and rows of books that had been rescued from fires, and there wasn’t the slightest hint of smoke.

  These people have technologies for de-mudding books and rescuing them from the bottom of the ocean, I told myself. Maybe they’ve got one for getting rid of smoke.

  But even if they had, there should have been a lingering whiff of it left, with all these thousands of books. Just like there should have been a smell of cordite in the War section and of damp over in Water Damage. And in the rest of it, that musty dust-and-decay smell that’s part and parcel of every old bookstore and library. I’d never been in one that didn’t have it. Except this place.

  Okay, so maybe it was temperature- and atmosphere-controlled, which would seem to be a requirement with all these irreplaceable books, but I could see no indication of that, just like there was no sign of any sprinkler system or smoke alarms. Which safety regulations required, along with emergency lighting and exit signs.

  Which I couldn’t see anywhere either.

  Don’t be ridiculous, I thought. They’re just too far away for you to see them.

  Even though we’d come what felt like miles, I was no closer to the end of the facility than I had been. And maybe now, with Cassie gone, would be the perfect opportunity to see exactly how big this place was.

  I took a quick look back to make sure she wasn’t returning yet and set off down the cross-aisle, counting rows so I wouldn’t get lost, and intending to go all the way to the far wall. But thirty rows later I was no closer, and ahead the way was blocked by one of those big warehouse loaders, filled with pallets full of books.

  I had to go over a row to the next aisle, only to run into a grilled-off area filled with what looked like stacks of old ledgers.

  I went down several rows, looking for a way around it, without success, and then decided I’d better go back to Fires before I got lost.

  Too late. I’d thought I’d kept track of the number of aisles and cross-aisles I’d come, but I must have lost track at some point. I couldn’t find Fires or War—the books here were all weather-related disasters—hurricanes, tornados, tsunamis—and in the row I’d have sworn I’d started from, there was a Post-it note stuck to a shelf that read, “Cassandra, these works were donated by a library to a school in Bangladesh. Should they be shelved in culling or typhoon?” that I was positive I’d have noticed if I’d been here before.

  I must have gone over three aisles instead of two. I walked back another, and another, but there was still no Fires section—and no sign of Cassie. And no sound of anybody coming.

  The thought came to me, like it had on the staircase coming down here, that nobody had any idea I was here. And that if this wasn’t a nature preserve for books, if it was something else—a front for drug-smuggling or armaments dealing or something even more bizarre—that they didn’t want anybody to find out about, that they wouldn’t need to cosh me over the head or brick me up in a wall, like a character in an Edgar Allen Poe story. All they had to do was abandon me in the middle of this labyrinth like Cassie just had, with no bread crumbs and no map. And no way to call for help, because this far underground, there couldn’t possibly be any cell phone coverage.

  And there wasn’t, not a single bar. I walked several aisles over and one down, holding the phone up, trying to get some reception, but I didn’t get anything, and it came to me belatedly that by wandering around I was making things worse. If Cassie hadn’t left me here to die, she’d expect me to be where she’d left me or close to it.

  I had no idea where that was or even what direction Cassie had gone in when she left with Jude. Or which way the baggage carousel lay from here. All I could see on every side, stretching away into the distance, was aisle after aisle of bookshelves that all looked exactly alike.

  There must be something I could orient myself by—a book’s distinctive color or its title—but I didn’t see anything I recognized.

  The puddle Jude’s wet shoes and dripping clothes made, I thought, and went quickly along the aisle I was in, and then the next, looking for wetness on the floor of the cross-aisles, but either it had dried or in trying to reach the wall I’d gone farther afield than I’d thought.

  Or I was going in circles. Which was entirely possible, given the sameness of the shelves of books. I needed to find a way to mark my path so I’d at least know where I’d been. I fumbled in my pants pocket, looking for change—or lint or something I could use as bread crumbs, but all my pockets yielded was a dime and two pennies, and there wasn’t anything here to use.

  What was I saying? The shelves were chock full of bread crumbs—Heartbreak Summer and How to Write a Thriller in Five Days and, especially appropriate,

  Following in the Master’s Footsteps. I could leave a trail of them on the floor to mark which direction I was going and where I’d already been.

  I was reaching for Mme. Shirotsky’s Visitations from Beyond the Veil when I thought I heard something. I went out into the cross-aisle to listen and heard the unmistakable click of Cassie’s heels, though I still couldn’t see her. And she wouldn’t be looking for me here, wherever here was.

  “Cassie?” I called, and at the same instant, my phone rang.

  I stared at it. It still wasn’t showing any bars, and I knew there couldn’t be any coverage down here, but there was, and when I answered it, Brooke’s voice was clearer than it had been on the street outside WMNH.

  “I’ve been trying to get you for half an hour,” she said. “Where are you?” and before I could answer, “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you get yourself over to Random House. Your meeting’s back on.”

  “I thought he’d left for London.”

  “They canceled his flight because of the weather. He’s got a seat on the eleven-ten. Which means he can see you. If you can get there in the next fifteen minutes, that is. You can do that, can’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, thinking of how long it would take me to get back to the baggage carousel—assuming Cassie got here to show me the way—and then to run up all those flights of stairs to the bookshop.

  “What do you mean?” Brooke said. “Please don’t tell me you’re out in Brooklyn or at the Statue of Liberty or something.”

  “No, I’m in Midtown,” I said, “but—”

  “Oh, good. I’ll tell him you’re on your way. Bye.”

  “No, wait! Before you hang up, I need to tell you where I am. I stopped in this bookstore called Ozymandias—” but I was talking to dead air. She’d already ended the call.

  Shit, shit, shit. I hit redial. I got a “call cannot be completed” screen, and before I could try again, Cassie appeared at the far end of the cross-aisle.

  “Sorry,” she said. “There was an earthquake in La Jolla. Did you think I was never coming back?”

  “Listen, I’m afraid I’ve got to leave,” I said. “I just got a call from my agent. She set up an appointment for me with a publisher—”

  “Oh, too bad,” she said. “I wanted to show you the Thefts and Vandalism section. Are you sure you don’t have time to—?”

  “Afraid not,” I said. “It’s in fifteen minutes.”

  “I understand,” she said and started briskly back up the cross-aisle the way she’d come.

  I followed her. “It’s at Broadway and 56th,” I said doubtfully. “Do you think I’ll be able to make it in time?”

  “Your appointment’s at four?” she said, turning down a side-aisle. “That shouldn’t be a problem.”

  Good, I thought as she made another turn. That means there’s one of those loaders nearby, but none appeared, and she se
emed to be heading in the opposite direction of the way she’d come.

  “Are you sure—?” I began.

  She nodded. “You can take the elevator.”

  Elevator? I thought, following her. What elevator? There hadn’t been an elevator in the bookstore. But here was one.

  “This’ll take you to street level,” she said, pushing the button on the wall beside it.

  The door opened immediately on a large freight elevator full of rolling carts stacked with books. There was barely space for me to squeeze in.

  “I’m sorry to rush off like this,” I said, wedging myself between two of the carts. “Can I take a raincheck on the rest of the tour? Or I guess it should be a fair-weather check. I really want to see all of this. It’s an amazing place.”

  “Yes,” she said, reaching inside to push one of the buttons on the panel and then stepping back out of the elevator. “It is.”

  “Is there a time that’s good?” I asked. “Some time when you aren’t so busy?”

  She shook her head. “There’s no such time,” she said, and before I could say anything else, the door slid shut and the elevator started moving.

  Let’s hope it’s not as slow as most freight elevators, I thought, and the elevator gave a groan and lurched to a stop.

  Not now, I thought. There went the interview. I reached for the red emergency button.

  There wasn’t one, and none of the buttons on the panel were numbered.

  I looked at my phone—no bars—and it occurred to me, too late, that an elevator would make an even better trap than that labyrinth of books, in which case yelling, “Get me out of here!” wasn’t going to do any good.

  Neither would pushing the buttons, but I jabbed at them anyway, and, after a long, panicky moment, the door began to slide open.

  I peered cautiously out, afraid of what might be out there. More endless rows of shelves? Or something worse?

  No, but it wasn’t the bookstore either. I was in an old-fashioned office-building lobby of greenish marble. This must be the building next door to Ozymandias’s, I thought. Or, considering how long those aisles had been, several doors down.