“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 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.”
“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.