The Big U by Neal Stephenson

Author:Neal Stephenson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Humorous Stories, Humor, Political Freedom & Security, Humorous, College Students, Fiction, College Stories, Political Science, Terrorism, General, Universities and Colleges
ISBN: 9780380816033
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1984-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Several days into the second semester, the Administration finally told the truth about the Library, and allowed the media in to photograph the ranks upon ranks of card catalog cabinets with their totally empty drawers.

The perpetrators had done it on Christmas Day. The Plex had been nearly deserted, its entrance guarded by a single guard at a turnstile. At eight in the morning, ten rather young-and hairy-looking fellows in B-man uniforms had arrived and haltingly explained that as Crotobaltislavonians they followed the Julian calendar, and had already celebrated Christmas. Could they not come in to perform needed plumbing repairs, and earn quadruple overtime for working on Christmas Day? The skeptical guard let them in anyway; if he could not trust the janitors, whom could he trust?

As reconstructed by the police, the burglars had gathered in the card catalog area all the canvas carts they could find. They had taken these through the catalog, pulling the lockpins from each drawer and dumping the contents into the carts. The Library’s 4.8 million volumes were catalogued in 12,000 drawers of cards, and a simple calculation demonstrated that all of these cards could be fitted into a dozen canvas carts by anyone not overly fastidious about keeping them in perfect order. The carts had been taken via freight elevator to the loading docks and wheeled onto a rented truck, which according to the rental agency had now disappeared. Its borrower, a Mr. Friedrich Engels, had failed to list a correct address and phone number and proved difficult to track down. The only untouched drawer was number 11375, STALIN, JOSEPH to STALL-BAUM, JOHANN GOTTFRIED.

The Library turned to the computer system. During the previous five years, a sweatshop of catalogers had begun to transfer the catalog into a computer system, and the Administration hoped that ten percent of the catalog could be salvaged in this way. Instead they found that a terrible computer malfunction had munched through the catalog recently, erasing call numbers and main entries and replacing them with knock-knock jokes, Burma-Shave ditties and tracts on the sexual characteristics of the Computing Center senior staff.

The situation was not hopeless; at any rate, it did not deteriorate at first. The books were still arranged in a rational order. This changed when people began holding books hostage.

A Master’s Candidate in Journalism had a few books she used over and over again. After the loss of the catalog she found them by memory, carried them to another part of the Library, and cached them behind twelve feet of bound back issues of the Nepalese Journal of Bhutanian Studies. A library employee from Photoduplication then happened to take down a volume of Utah Review of Theoretical Astrocosmology, shelved back-to-back with NJBS, and detected the cache. She moved it to another place in the Library, dumping it behind a fifty-volume facsimile edition of the ledgers of the Brisbane/Surabaya Steam Packet Co. Ltd., which had been published in 1893 and whose pages had not yet been cut. She then left a

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