Michael Guillebeau - MAD Librarian - You Gotta Fight for Your Right to Library

Doom said, “Cattle thermometer.”

He dropped the box and shrieked. The chair collapsed and he was dumped on the ground. Doom giggled and helped him up. After he was safely upright, he pushed her away and waved a finger at Serenity. “I’m going to get to the bottom of this.”

Doom picked up the box and held it out to him. She opened her mouth to say something but Serenity pointed at her and said, “Don’t.”

Bentley waved a finger at Serenity. “We are going to make sure you are doing things by the book.”

Serenity smiled sweetly. “Councilman Doctor, we are the ones who keep the books. All of them.”

“Something’s going on down here, and I’m going to find out what. We’re coming for you, Serenity, girl.”

As he reached the door, Serenity said, “Councilman Doctor.”

He turned around.

“Call me Hammer.”

SERENITY PUT HER HAND on the doorknob and took a deep breath. The whole building was empty, dark, and cold like almost every city building was at night. Dark, except for the light coming out from under the door to the planning board’s conference room. She exhaled, opened the door and stepped in to a room full of men sitting around a long table. They all turned and glared.

Seth Burroughs said, “Who calls a meeting for goddamn midnight? Should at least have had cots instead of chairs.”

There were no cots in the planning board’s conference room. Just office chairs around a table and a glassed wall with the darkened city behind it. The room had that eerie, dissipated energy that seems to permeate spaces like theaters and schools in the dark hours when they sit empty, useless and waiting.

“Blame me if you want to, Seth. I called this meeting to get this train rolling,” Powell nodded at the Maddington City Architect sitting next to him. “Or, blame Steve Breaney here. I tried to make it for six, but he asked that I give him a few hours to do his homework.”

Burroughs snorted. “Could have saved us all some time and sleep. Won’t take ten minutes to bury this bat-shit crazy idea.” He hesitated and looked at Serenity. “Although I wish it were real, Ms. Hammer.”

Serenity was pacing. “Seth, not ten hours ago you were telling me how much you wanted to do something big.”

“My ex-wife wanted angels to fly out of my butt, but that never happened, either.”

“Angels would be asleep now anyway,” Powell said.

There was a thump at the open door. A dark-haired woman with an apron that read liberated bakery was holding a big pot of coffee and kicking the doorjamb with her foot. “Maybe this’ll convince the angels to wake up.”

Seth stood and walked slowly to the side table where the woman was setting down the pot. “First good idea I’ve heard all day.” He took one of the Styrofoam cups off the top, filled it, took a sip, and made a mock horrified look.

“That’s high-test,” he said, “but damned good.”

“Everything we do at Liberated is damned good,” the woman said. “No point in second best. Expect you boys to finally do the same thing here.”

“Guys, meet Stacey,” Serenity said, “She agreed to bring us coffee to keep us going.”

Stacey brushed back a wisp of hair. “Serenity promised me that we were going to do something big in our sleepy little town. About time. I promised to supply the food and coffee.”

“Fine.” Burroughs walked back to his seat. “Let’s do something big. Get your one-story library expansion done in a month. Give your kiddies a new place to read Doctor Seuss.” He took another sip, then said, “Damned good. But this plan—hell, this ain’t even a plan—ain’t got a chance in hell of ending with anything but seven stories of shit piled up next to your library. Even if we can build it—and we can’t—nobody would be crazy enough to set foot in it.” He nodded at the architect. “You tell them, Steve.”

Breaney had been scribbling on a legal pad in the middle of a pile of printed pages and scrawled notes. “Actually, Seth, I told Ron the same thing when he first called me. Ron said, ‘seven floors’ and I said, ‘seven ways crazy.’ By the way, Ms. Hammer, how did you come up with the number seven?”

She hesitated, “Well, if we’re going to build Maddington around the library, we can justify a lot of space.”

They waited.

“Okay, I pulled it out of my butt. Seven stories in seven days. Who knows? But I guarantee you we’ll use every square foot.”

Powell said, “I thought it was because the biggest building in Maddington right now is six stories. Give us a way to do something bigger than ever.”

“Yeah. That was it.”

“Whatever,” said Breaney. “A few hours ago I’d have said it was six floors too many, and six months too few. I looked at the current expansion plans. There’s no way to turn that into seven floors.

“Then I called the guy in China who did the thirty-stories-in-fifteen-days building. Wouldn’t give me the time of day.”

Burroughs said, “Don’t blame him. We’re done here.”

“Should be,” Breaney said, “but that’s where we got lucky. You know how the world has changed in the last fifty years, and we used to rely on places like China for cheap components that we could use our brainpower to make into something great? Well, now the Chinese get their stuff from us. And, they use our engineering.” He turned to Seth. “You know where the components for these modular skyscrapers come from?”

“Vietnam?”

“More of a third-world backwater than that. Jasper, Alabama. One hour away.” He looked at Serenity. “And that is the only reason this is possible. Barely. Maybe. I talked to them with rough numbers. First the guy grumbled that there wasn’t enough money in the world to get all this done. I told him we had money and lots of it.” He looked at Powell. “That’s what you told me.”

Powell nodded and sipped his coffee.

“So the man got quiet, and then he told me the back story,” said Breaney. “This technology was developed right here at the Army Corps of Engineers in Jericho, as replacement buildings after a natural disaster. It’s all metal and glass and plastic boxes the size of rail cars, designed to be snapped together like Legos, all with AC and power and Ethernet conduits. Because it might be used in an area prone to earthquakes, it’s stronger and lighter than conventional buildings. Our army developed it, but the US never exploited it. The Chinese did.”

“So how long will it take them to build these modules?” Serenity asked.

Breaney actually grinned, which was hard to do at midnight. “That’s where we got lucky. The army keeps a stash of these in Jasper for when they need them.”

Powell said, “Yeah, but will the current slab support it?”

“I know the answer to that,” Burroughs said. “Back when we laid the slab, the concrete supplier was the congressman’s brother-in-law. Somehow the slab was specced to hold two floors rather than one, and we poured even more concrete than needed for that. King Kong could dance on that slab.”

Breaney looked around the room. “He’s right. Gentlemen, the punchline is this: if we can have plans to the Jasper plant by six a.m.—and money up front and use components he already has available—he can have the first floor components here by eight, along with engineers who know how to do this.”

He looked around the table. Everyone was silent.

Serenity said, “Stacey, we’re going to need a lot of coffee.”

“I’ll call Lynnea for another pot now, and food.”

Burroughs hoisted his cup. “That’s just the start. If we’re going to work three full shifts, we’ll need a tanker of this rocket fuel every day.”