He stared at the screen in disbelief. Walking toward him was the silly-looking cartoon character he’d seen on the security footage before.
He had assumed that the security files had been altered in the computer’s memory after the theft occurred. But apparently the thief had managed to alter the program so that his or her own image was being obscured in real time, replacing the real image with that of the crazy cartoon figure.
Closer and closer the cartoon figure came. Occasionally it paused, looked around suspiciously, then continued stealthily forward. On its face was the same taunting smirk as before.
Finally it stopped. Yes! Patrick thought. The computer prediction was right! The cartoon figure had stopped at the row of shelves where The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was situated.
The cartoon figure stood for a moment, head cocked, as though listening. Then suddenly it darted forward and grabbed the book.
Patrick couldn’t see anything but the tiny image on the screen. He realized that if the thief moved fast enough, he might escape without Patrick being able to see his face.
“Lights on full!” Patrick shouted.
Instead of the puddle of red light that had followed him before, the entire ceiling lit up, a bright, blinding white. For a moment Patrick could barely see, his eyes overloaded with the brightness.
The thief’s footsteps resounded loudly. He was sprinting toward the far door.
As his eyes adjusted, Patrick jumped to his feet. To his horror he realized that after sitting for over an hour in the same position, one of his feet had fallen asleep. He had no sensation in his left leg and no ability to hold himself upright.
As he began to fall, he grabbed wildly at the nearest bookshelf. For a moment he thought it would support his weight. But the shelf began to teeter. With a crash Patrick fell to the floor, the shelf smashing down on top of him.
He fell just far enough into the aisle to spot the retreating figure of the thief. He was relieved to see it was a real flesh-and-blood person and not a cartoon. But other than that, he couldn’t make out any features. The thief was dressed in the baggy white clothes that were fashionable among kids that year. The clothes revealed nothing of the person underneath. He couldn’t even tell if it was a boy or a girl. And the thief’s head was covered with something that obscured his or her hair.
Hearing the loud crash, the thief turned to look back. Patrick realized then how the thief had managed to see in the dark. He or she was wearing a black mask made of some kind of smooth, glassy material. Patrick recognized it as a night-vision mask of the sort worn by soldiers and police many hundreds of years ago. A friend’s father had owned one when Patrick was a kid. They used to play games with it in the dark. It was capable of light amplification, infrared detection, sonar, micro-and radio-wave imaging, and other things he had long forgotten about. When you were wearing it, you could see anything, anytime, anywhere.
And no one could see your face.
Patrick pushed himself to his knees, shrugging the heavy shelf of books off his back. By the time he looked up again, the thief was gone.
“Nice try, pal,” Patrick said, smiling.
He picked up his comm, pulled up the security menu. “Theft in progress,” he said. “Seal all exits. Stop all elevators.”
He smiled triumphantly. The thief believed he’d thought of everything. But he hadn’t bargained on Patrick Mac!
“Security malfunction,” the comm said back to him.
Patrick’s face fell. “What!”
“Security malfunction,” the comm said again. Then a list of all kinds of doors and sensors and locks began scrolling rapidly down the screen, the word “FAILED” appearing in red letters next to each one.
Patrick punched his fist angrily into his palm.
He pushed himself slowly to his feet.
“Urgent message, Patrick,” the comm said.
Patrick stumbled slowly forward. Feeling was starting to come back in his foot.
“Urgent message, Patrick.”
Patrick sighed loudly. He’d failed completely. He felt so stupid. The thief had thought of everything! And now the director was about to reprimand him. Maybe even fire him.
“Urgent message, Patrick.”
“Okay,” Patrick mumbled.
“Urgent message, Patrick.”
“Okay, okay, what? Who’s the message from?”
“Pet Tracker Technologies wishes to inform you that your cat, Earnest, has escaped,” the comm said. “Would you like me to track it for you?”
Patrick grinned and began hobbling as rapidly as he could toward the distant door of room 191.
Earnest? No, Earnest was safe and sound back in his apartment.
“Why, yes,” Patrick said, smiling. “Yes, I would like that very much. Forward the tracking data to my comm, please.”
FIVE
The vast majority of what was once New York City was now underground. There were remnants of the ancient city left—the lions outside the New York Public Library, the silver-clad Empire State Building, other monuments and buildings. But the city was mostly a maze of tunnels and underground chambers that extended hundreds of feet deep and contained thousands of miles of corridors.
For the most part the underground was as bright and cheerfully lit as the outdoors. Beautiful iridescent murals covered the walls, and the nearly unlimited power sources available to society meant that being underground never meant feeling as if you were in a cave.
Well…almost never.
For about an hour Patrick had been tracking the signal from the cat collar he’d stuffed into the spine of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. And during that time the thief had been winding deeper and deeper into the tunnels that composed the city. And now he was beginning to find himself in parts of the city that were, well, pretty cavelike.
They had passed through the sections where most people lived and worked, then into the deeper, darker Maintenance Sector. M-Sector, as it was known, was an old shadow world whose roots went back thousands of years. Back when working underground wasn’t easy or cheap the way it was today. Down here was where the pumps and air ducts and water systems, as well as the geothermal power units that supplied much of the city’s power were located.
Huge metal bracing held up the ceilings of the chambers he passed through, many of which were lit by ancient bulbs whose flickering light threw dark shadows into the corners of every room.
Some of the people Patrick passed in M-Sector clearly worked on the huge machinery that supported the city. But many other people seemed furtive or listless, their clothes dirty and unfashionable, their eyes clouded with fear or anger or mistrust. Patrick was not used to seeing people like that. It made him nervous. Some of the people he passed eyed him as though they were considering attacking him.
As Patrick entered one of the vast, dim, echoing chambers, he spotted the thief again for the first time. The thief was hurrying along, head down, not looking backward. Patrick still couldn’t make out who it was. The thief was no longer wearing the night-vision mask, but instead, one of the large, floppy hats that were currently in fashion, still hiding his or her face and the color and length of hair.
“Hey!” Patrick yelled.
Without looking back, the thief ducked through a small door on the side of the large chamber.
Patrick had noticed that here in M-Section the tracer signal was starting to break up, sometimes disappearing from the screen on his comm. Something to do with the large amounts of electromagnetic energy produced by the generators down here, he supposed.
Patrick broke into a run. The chamber was at least two hundred meters long. By the time he’d covered a hundred meters, the little red circle on his comm screen had flashed a few times and then disappeared.
He was out of breath when he reached the door. It was made of heavy steel, surrounded by thumb-size rivets and covered in chipped greenish paint.
VALVE CHAMBER 7
DANGER!
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
br /> NYC DEPT OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION
The sign on the door was so scarred and worn that it was barely readable. From the looks of it, this part of the tunnel system was almost certainly thousands of years old.
Patrick twisted the massive steel handle and pushed the door open with a deep groan. What he found on the other side amazed him.
Darkness. It was the first time he’d ever seen real darkness in the city. It wasn’t that there was no light at all, but the light was so dim and flickering that for a moment he almost couldn’t see anything. Then he realized what the source of the light was. Fire! Scattered here and there throughout the tunnel were tiny fires.
The chamber he had entered was a long tunnel, maybe ten meters high, carved from solid rock. The floor was wet, the walls oozing and dripping. A thick acrid haze of smoke filled the tunnel.
The thief was nowhere to be seen. Not that Patrick could have seen much of anybody in this smoky gloom.
For a moment Patrick hesitated. But then a voice inside his head said, “You have to find the book!” Patrick couldn’t ignore it. He stepped forward a few feet, trying to see better.
Behind him, the door slammed shut with a great groaning booooooooom.
“Hey!” Patrick called. The sound echoed loudly, repeating and repeating before finally dying away.
As his eyes adjusted, Patrick suddenly realized, to his shock, that he was not alone. Scattered here and there were small clusters of people. They were sitting around the tiny fires. Some of them seemed to be cooking things over the flames.
Patrick felt a sick sensation run through him. Who were these people? There were legends, of course, about people who lived in the deeper reaches of the tunnels. They were called “roaches.” The stories were crazy and unbelievable. People said that roaches stole, fought, killed—that they even ate one another! Patrick had always believed that these were just stories told to scare kids. But now, looking around at the huddled figures in the chamber, he wasn’t so sure.
“Hey!” Patrick called again, his voice cracking a little.
Hundreds of pairs of eyes turned toward him, glinting in the firelight. Every single pair of eyes seemed to be appraising him, as though trying to figure out what they could take from him.
“Don’t you look pretty and clean, Master,” a soft voice said.
Patrick whirled. A dark shape rose from the shadows five or ten meters away. It was a man, his face barely visible in the dark. The man moved toward Patrick with a slow, limping gait.
A limp! It turned Patrick’s stomach. He’d never seen a real person with a limp. It had been thousands of years since medicine had been perfected to such a degree that broken limbs could be fixed in a matter of hours.
The man came out of the shadows. Other than the limp, it was clear he was large and powerfully built. There was something about the way he moved that frightened Patrick, something predatory, like a hyena or a wolf edging toward its prey.
Suddenly a shaft of light revealed the man’s face. It was a horrible mass of scars, like a pile of red worms. He only had one eye.
“Help a sick man, would you, Master?” the man said.
Without intending to, Patrick gasped.
The man extended a large, gnarled hand toward Patrick. A terrible odor accompanied him, like the scent of a rotting deer Patrick had once smelled when he went on a camping trip out West.
“I’m sorry, I—” Patrick stumbled backward, hitting the ground with an impact that shot through his entire body like a lightning bolt. “I must have made a mistake.”
“I think you did, Master,” the man said. His smile, a horrible twisted leer, split his face.
Patrick struggled to his feet. Every eye in the tunnel was on him. Laughter spread through the chamber, echoing eerily.
Patrick staggered backward, feeling for the handle of the huge iron door through which he’d just entered.
“Oh, you don’t like us roaches, do you, Master?” the man said. “Well, maybe we don’t like you so much either, hmm?”
Patrick’s hand closed around the steel door handle. He wrenched it open and stumbled through the door. The big man dove toward him.
The last thing he saw before the big steel door slammed shut was a single bloodshot eye staring at him.
When Patrick stopped running, his chest felt as if it were encircled by bands of red-hot iron. He put his hands on his knees and tried to catch his breath. He felt light-headed, and his legs were trembling so hard he wasn’t sure he was going to be able to remain standing.
“Hey,” a voice said.
Patrick straightened up, his heart banging in his chest.
“You okay, friend?” A smiling man in a green jumpsuit was looking at him inquiringly. Inscribed on his chest was a small sign that read MAINTENANCE—WE MAKE IT HAPPEN!
“I’m—fine,” Patrick gasped.
“You sure?”
Patrick nodded.
“You’re a little off the beaten path, aren’t you?” the man said.
Patrick smiled weakly. “Thanks for your concern. I’m fine. Really.”
“Okay,” the man said dubiously.
After the man was gone, Patrick sat down and put his head between his knees. I’m just not up to this, he thought. I’ve made a big mistake thinking that I had any business getting involved in a thing like this.
SIX
When Patrick got home, he slumped down in the chair in his living room and stared at the wall for a while. Failure! Total failure!
Everything had been working until he entered that tunnel. The prediction of which book would get stolen next. The tracking device. Following the thief. It was all perfect. Until he’d lost his nerve.
The man with the scarred face hadn’t threatened him directly. He’d been a little rude. But that was all. What it comes down to? Patrick thought. When the crunch came, I lost my nerve.
Patrick wasn’t even sure what he’d been afraid of. The dirt. The scars. The limp. The fires. The smoke. The strangeness of it all. He still couldn’t believe that in this day and age people lived like that. Why? What were they doing down there? Cooking food with actual fires? It was bizarre.
Patrick sat for a long time, trying to think what he should do next. No one else would know that he had failed. In fact, everybody else seemed perfectly content to leave the matter to the detective from Unit 9. There were millions of books down there in the stacks underneath the public library. At this rate the thief could steal a book every day for the next thousand years and barely make a dent in the collection.
But it wasn’t right! Once those books disappeared, they were gone forever. Sure, there were copies of them lurking someplace in the memory of a computer somewhere. But it wasn’t the same as a real, physical book. The book that had been stolen was a signed first edition. It had actually been touched by L. Frank Baum over three thousand years ago.
Idly Patrick turned toward the far wall of his apartment. Right now it had an iridescent pattern moving around on it.
“Bring up my file of pictures from the ski trip I took to Colorado,” he said.
Instantly the iridescent pattern disappeared, and the first of the security tapes appeared showing the cartoon character the thief used to mask his or her image during the first theft.
“Capture the image of the cartoon,” he said. “Identify.”
“The image mask is three-D model based on a hand-drawn cartoon,” the voice of his computer said. “Based on color application and style, the original cartoon is probably twentieth century. Most likely before 1980.”
“Can you do any better than that?”
There was a brief pause. “There is a ninety-seven percent likelihood that it is based on the work of Dr. Seuss.”
“Who’s he?”
“A children’s book author and illustrator. Real name, Theodor Seuss Geisel, born March second, 1904, in Springfield, Massachusetts. Died—”
“Okay, okay,” Patrick said. “Can you identify the specific character??
??
There was a long pause. “Ninety-one percent likelihood the image is based on the Key-Slapping Slizzard of Solla Sollew.”
“The what?”
By way of answer, the computer brought up the image of a book, along with a paragraph of information on the book and author. The title was I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew. Apparently this book was one of the lesser-known publications of the author known as Dr. Seuss. Patrick scanned the list of Dr. Seuss’s most popular books. There was one book called Green Eggs and Ham. That sounded like an interesting one to read! Another time, perhaps. For now, Patrick scrolled through the text of Solla Sollew. It was about a furry creature who lived in an unpleasant place where he got stung and hit in the head. Tired of his life there, he decided to go to a perfect place called “Solla Sollew,” a magical city where people didn’t have problems. Unfortunately, when he got to Solla Sollew, there was a big wall around the town, and only one door in. And hiding in the lock of that door was a tiny mischievous critter that kept slapping away the keys of everyone who tried to enter. As a result, the furry creature had to go back where he came from. He went through all manner of crazy and difficult adventures. When he finally got home he realized that he didn’t mind the place that much after all. The point of the story seemed to be that no matter where you go, there will always be problems.
“Huh,” Patrick said, examining the illustration. “It’s definitely the same character. Can you tell me anything else about it?”
“A little over a thousand years ago, when wars and crime were finally being stamped out by humanity, there was a movement that said humanity would always have problems. They took the Key-Slapping Slizzard as their symbol or mascot. They claimed that making a perfect society was a mistake, that humanity would be more vulnerable to bad things if everyone got out of the habit of struggling with evil and poverty and oppression.”