Rainbows End

"Duì ." The young man leaned forward, and his T-shirt showed a torrent of worried faces. "It's like this. The Librareome Project isn't just the video capture of premille

Object-situational database? This was beyond Robert's newfound nerdliness. He stared over Rivera's head, trying to look up the term. Nothing was coming back. Tommie's deadzone, yeah.

Rivera took his stare as disbelief. "It's really not that much data, Dr. Gu. A few petabytes. The main thing is that it's very heterogeneous compared to similar-size datasets in most applications."

"Of course. Your point?" From the corner of his eye, he saw a smile come to Wi

"So," Rivera continued, "the Huertas collection will contain almost all human knowledge up to about twenty years ago. All correlated and co

"But he has to get the data put together," said Wi

"A regular death spiral!" Tommie's amusement was without malice. He had always been fascinated by how things come apart. Robert remembered in the 1970 brush fires, teenaged Tommie had been out in East County, helping with communications — but also enjoying every minute of the disaster.

"So, unh…" Why does the Stranger want me in on this ? Blount chuckled. "Confused, Robert?"

Back at Stanford, Wi

Blount hesitated, sensing one of the old-Robert traps. "The point is that we're talking about doing Huertas and the Librareome Project serious harm. We're past legal recourse, so anything that depends on delaying the enemy must involve criminal behavior. Got it?"

"Yes. We really are conspirators."

Rivera nodded. "And that by itself is a felony."

Tommie laughed. "So what? I just subverted the DHS snoop layer! That's a national-security rap."

"I don't care if we're talking high treason!" said Robert. If I can get back my song . … "I mean, you know what a lover of books I am."

The others nodded.

"So what is the plan?"

Blount gestured to Tommie. The little guy said, "Do you remember our underground hikes?"

"In the 1970s? Yes, they were fun — in a brain-damaged way."

Tommie's grin broadened.

"You're telling me the steam tu

"Yup. In the nineties that type of construction went out of style. There were lots of new buildings that weren't co

"Even more so, nowadays," said Carlos.

Tommie nodded. "NIR lasers are not for them. They want xlaser and graser gear, trillions of colors per path, and trillions of paths. Nowadays, the 'steam tu

Suddenly, Robert saw why the Mysterious Stranger was interested in the Elder Cabal. Aloud, he said, "What does this have to do with the Librareome Project, Tommie?"

"Ah! Well, you know that Max Huertas made his fortune out of biotech. He owns some of the biggest labs in North America — including one just a few thousand feet northeast of us. It was easy for him to modify his genome software to support the Librareome. Okay, so he's storing the shredda in vaults under the north side of campus."

"And?"

"And he's not done with them! The shredding got him plenty of images, but the coverage is not complete. He's got to scan and rescan where there were problems in the first pass. Now if there weren't this time limit, he'd be better just to wait till the next victim library goes up in shreds and use that for cross-checking, but he's in a rush."

"That storage is also part of the Huertas propaganda," said Wi

"When they're done with the rescans, the shredda will be 'safely preserved in the Huertas vaults, for the sake of the archaeologists of future generations.' Some of our faculty actually bought into that!"

"Well," said Rivera, "there's a small amount of truth to the claim. The paper will last longer in cool nitrogen than it would on library shelves."

Wi

"What? We're protesting the destruction of the library by destroying what's left?"

"Just temporarily!" said Tommie. "I've found an incredible aerosol glue. Spray it on and the shredda will be like a huge chunk of particle-board. But after a few months, the glue will just sublimate away."

Rivera was nodding. "So we are not making things worse. I wouldn't be here if I thought we were wrecking what's left of the books. Huertas's scheme is u

Robert leaned back and pretended to consider what they were saying. "You say the Chinese are about to shred the British Library?"

Rivera gave a sigh. "Yes, and they're going to whack the Museum, too. But the EU is looking for an excuse to stop them. If we make Huertas look bad…"

"I see," Robert said judiciously. He avoided Wi

A grin spread wide across Tommie's face. "Hey, Robert!"

Robert finally looked at Winston Blount. "Now the question is, why do you want me in?"

Blount grimaced. "Another pair of hands. Various errands — "

Tommie rolled his eyes. "The fact is, we couldn't dream of doing this before you showed up."