"I wanted something he didn"t have."
"What was that?"
"Pages," the addict said.
"I need some pages," "You carrying?"
The addict shook his head.
"Lemme check."
The addict lifted his hands and fell forward against the wall while the man frisked him.
"Okay," the man said. He turned slightly and looked up the street.
"Hill ... see anything? That other guy gone?" he said. The addict looked up at the figure at the top end of the street and saw it walking down towards them. Clearly, they were communicating by some sort of shortwave system.
The figure with the weapon turned to the other end of the street. The deep voice said, "How "bout you Brooks? Things look okay?"
The addict turned and saw the third figure walking toward them from the lower end. It waved an arm.
"Seems you okay," the deep voice said.
The addict nodded, fighting back his excitement.
"I.
am. I just need some pages."
The man hefted the weapon onto his shoulder and said, "Okay. Walk through the wall." He raised an arm and pointed.
"Merry .. . switch it on. Our guest is coming through."
The addict stepped up to the wall, hesitated and then stepped forward.
There was a brief blurring and the addict was inside .. . in another world.
He looked ahead and he looked upward.
He looked to the left and he looked to the right.
He even looked down.
And he breathed in the smell.
Around him and above him and below him were metal gantries, walkways similar to the one on which he now stood, stretching forward and crisscrossing each other, layer upon layer, tier upon tier, with each one traversed by silent people, men and women, each dressed in a similar garb of green and white, sweater and pants. To either side of them, be they up or down or to left or right, set back behind protective rails, were huge piles of paper sheets, littered with colored marking cards jutting out sometimes at angles and sometimes straight ahead or at 90 degrees to one side.
Each pile was held in place by what appeared to be plastic sidings, their sides a graffiti mosaic of scribbled writing and accompanying numbers, the numbers occasionally crossed through and new numbers scribbled alongside.
"Anything in particular you have in mind?"
The first man had followed the addict through the wall and was standing just behind him to the left. He had removed his helmet and was standing with his weapon propped against his right shoulder.
The addict shook his head, unable to speak.
He breathed in again, closed his eyes, and a.n.a.lyzed the smell.
It was simply paper, aging paper, and maybe the sweet underlying waft of metal and oil and wood and plaster.
But it was more than that to the addict, much more.
The smell was an olfactory amalgam of words and phrases, knowledge and ideas, dialogue and thoughts.
It was the largest collection of history the addict had ever seen, larger even than he had ever dreamed about, dreamed about in the quietest moments of the loneliest days and nights huddled tightly in his cot.
Here were snippets of stories and articles, sections of treatises and criticisms, chapters of opinion and belief.
Vowels and consonants, prefixes and suffixes, prepositions and adverbs, nouns and adjectives.. ..
The acc.u.mulated smell of the words came at him in a tumult, soared up his nostrils into his brain in a flood of imagined images.
The vast emptiness of s.p.a.ce .. . the swirling cold depths of the oceans ... the ancient monuments long forgotten to today"s diluted version of humankind.
Though he had not yet stepped forward to glance at even one of the millions--perhaps billions--of pages torn from the old books, the addict knew it was all here: d.i.c.kens, Homer, Tolstoy, Shakespeare ..
Melville, Bradbury, Updike, King. The great literary minds of every century in the planet"s history gathered together under the one roof--he looked up again and saw that it was a composite of roofs, d cavernous coverings that had, at one time, protected perhaps a whole range of warehouses.
"Wow!" he said, unable to think of anything else.
"Quite a collection," the man ventured.
"Quite a collection," the addict agreed. He pushed his tongue against the back bicuspid on the right and swallowed the fractured enamel. Then he bit down on the tiny microchip b.u.t.ton, felt the brief tingle of vibration of the homing signal.
The man stepped forward and looked at him, frowning.
"You okay?"
The addict swallowed and smiled, thumped his chest as though he had indigestion, eyebrows raised in apology.
"It always gets people, the first look," said the man.
nodding that he understood.
"Hey, I"m fine. Absolutely fine."
"So, what"s your poison?" The man smiled and nodded to the walkway straight ahead of them.
"That way is mostly twentieth-century literature. Same for the next two tiers down. Most come at twenty credits a page, six for one hundred- You buy more, we can do a deal."
"Right," the addict said.
"A deal. We"ll definitely have to do a deal."
"The next three tiers up are nonfiction, philosophy, science, religion.
The two after that have cla.s.sical works, including poetry, and sheet music."
"Sheet music?"
The man shrugged.
"The words and notes to the old songs? I dunno. Not my bag. Not any of it," The addict looked puzzled.
"You don"t .. . you don"t use any of this stuff?"
"Nan." The man shook his head vehemently to emphasize the point.
"Don"t see the attraction. Just words and stuff. Doesn"t mean anything."