Douglas Preston - Relic

He did a visual first, by the book. Transformers. Grillwork covering ventilation ducts. Cables. Several large air-conditioning units. A lot of hot air. But nothing else.

“Take a look behind that equipment,” D’Agosta said.

The officers nosed around thoroughly. One looked back and shrugged.

“All right,” said D’Agosta, walking out into the computer room. “Looks clean to me. Mr. Thrumcap?”

“Yes?” He poked his head in.

“You can tell your people to come back in. Looks okay, but we’re gonna post a man for the next thirty-six hours.” He turned to one of the policemen emerging [174] from the electrical room. “Waters, I want you here till the end of your shift. Pro forma, all right? I’ll send your relief.” A few more sightings and I’ll be fresh out of officers .

“Right,” said Waters.

“That’s a good idea,” said Thrumcap. “This room is the heart of the Museum, you know. Or rather, the brain. We run the telephones, physical plant, network, mini-printing, electronic mail, security system—”

“Sure,” said D’Agosta. He wondered if this was the same security that didn’t have an accurate blueprint of the subbasement.

The staff began filing back into the room and taking up their places at the terminals. D’Agosta mopped his brow. Hot as balls in here . He turned to leave.

“Rog,” he heard a voice behind him. “We got a problem.”

D’Agosta hesitated a moment.

“Oh, my God,” said Thrumcap, staring at a monitor. “The system’s doing a hex dump. What the hell—?”

“Was the master terminal still in backup mode when you left it, Rog?” a short guy with buck teeth was asking. “If it finished and got no response, it might have gone into a low-level dump.”

“Maybe you’re right,” said Roger. “Abort the dump and make sure the regions are all up.”

“It’s not responding.”

“Is the OS down?” Thrumcap asked, bending over bucktooth’s CRT. “Lemme see this.”

An alarm went off in the room, not loud, but high-pitched and insistent. D’Agosta saw a red light in a ceiling panel above the sleek mainframe. Maybe he’d better stick around.

“Now what?” said Thrumcap.

Jesus, it’s hot , D’Agosta thought. How can these people stand it?

“What’s this code we’re getting?”

“I don’t know. Look it up.”

[175] “Where?”

“In the manual, fool! It’s right behind your terminal. Here, I’ve got it.”

Thrumcap started flipping pages. “2291, 2291 ... here it is. It’s a heat alarm. Oh, Lord, the machine’s overheating! Get maintenance up here right away.”

D’Agosta shrugged. The thumping noise they’d heard was probably air-conditioner compressors failing. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out. It must be ninety degrees in here . As he began moving down the hall, he passed two maintenance men hurrying in the opposite direction.

Like most modern supercomputers, the Museum’s MP-3 was better able to withstand heat than the “big iron” mainframes of ten or twenty years before. Its silicon brain, unlike the older vacuum tubes and transistors, could function above recommended temperatures for longer periods of time without damage or loss of data. However; the hardwired interface to the Museum’s security system had been installed by a third party, outside the operating specifications of the computer manufacturer. When the temperature in the computer room reached ninety-four degrees, the tolerances of the ROM chips governing the Automatic Disaster Control System were exceeded. Failure occurred ninety seconds later.

Waters stood in a corner and glanced around the room. The maintenance men had left over an hour before, and the room was pleasantly chilly. Everything was back to normal, and the only sounds were the hum of the computer and the zombies clicking thousands of keys. He idly glanced at an unoccupied terminal screen and saw a blinking message.

EXTERNAL ARRAY FAILURE

AT ROM ADDRESS 33 B1 4A 0E

It was like Chinese. Whatever it was, why couldn’t they just say it in English? He hated computers. He couldn’t think of one damn thing computers had done for him except leave the s off his last name on bills. He hated those smart-ass computer nerds, too. If there was anything wrong here, let them take care of it.

= 27 =

Smithback dumped his notebooks beside one of his favorite library carrels. Sighing heavily, he squeezed himself into the cramped space, placed his laptop on the desk, and turned on the small overhead light. He was only a stone’s throw from the oak-panelled reading room, with its red leather chairs and marble fireplace that hadn’t seen use in a century. But Smithback preferred the narrow, scuffed carrels. He especially liked the ones that were hidden deep in the stacks, where he could examine documents and manuscripts he’d temporarily liberated—or catch forty winks—in privacy and relative comfort.

The Museum’s collection of new, old, and rare books on all aspects of natural history was unrivalled. It had received so many bequests and privately donated collections over the years that its card catalogue was always hopelessly behind. Yet Smithback knew the library better even than most of the librarians. He could find a buried factoid in record time.

[178] Now he pursed his lips, thinking. Moriarty was a stubborn bureaucrat, and Smithback himself had come up empty with Kawakita. He didn’t know anyone else who could get him into the accession database. But there was more than one way to approach this puzzle.

At the microfilm card file, he started flipping through the New York Times index. He backtracked as far as 1975. Nothing there—or, as he soon discovered, in the relevant natural history and anthropological journals.

He checked the back issues of the Museum’s internal periodicals for information on the expedition. Nothing. In the 1985 Who’s Who At NYMNH , a two-line bio of Whittlesey told him nothing he didn’t already know.

He cursed under his breath. This guy’s hidden deeper than the Oak Island treasure .

Smithback slowly put the volumes back on their racks, looking around. Then, taking some sheets from a notebook, he strolled nonchalantly up to the desk of a reference librarian, first making sure he hadn’t seen her before.

“Gotta put these back in the archives,” he told the librarian.

She blinked up at him severely. “Are you new around here?”

“I’m from the science library, just got transferred up last week. On rotation, you know.” He gave her a smile, hoped it looked bright and genuine.

She frowned at him, uncertain, as the phone on her desk began to ring. She hesitated, then answered it, distractedly handing him a clipboard and a key on a long, blue cord. “Sign in,” she said, covering the mouthpiece with her hand.

The library archives lay behind an unmarked gray door in a remote corner of the library stacks. It was a gamble in more ways than one. Smithback had been [179] inside once before, on legitimate business. He knew that the bulk of the Museum’s archives were stored elsewhere, and that the library’s files were very specific. But something was nagging him. He closed the door and moved forward, scanning the shelves and the stacks of labeled boxes.

He had progressed down one side of the room and was starting up the other when he stopped. Carefully, he reached up and brought down a box labeled CENTRAL RECVG/SHPG: AIR CARGO RECEIPTS. Squatting down, he rustled quickly through the papers.

Once again, he went back as far as 1975. Disappointed, he rustled through them again. Nothing.

As he returned the box to its high perch, his eye caught another label: BILLS OF LADING, 1970-1990. He couldn’t risk more than another five minutes, tops.