A Borrowed Man

 

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For my British friend, Nigel Price

 

1

F
ROM
THE
S
PICE
G
ROVE
P
UBLIC
L
IBRARY

Murder is not always such a terrible thing. It is bad, sure, sometimes awfully, awfully bad. But only sometimes. I have been lying here on my shelf trying to figure out why I wrote all this, and I think maybe that is it. The law is not perfect.

You kept reading! All right, here we go.

I am really a young guy behind an older guy's face; you must understand that or you will not understand half the stuff I am going to tell. I was a mystery writer, a good one. You must know about the truckloads of his memories I am carrying from all his brain scans; so please keep them in mind all the time, just like I have to.

I live here, on a Level Three shelf in the Spice Grove Public Library. Our shelves are sort of like furnished rooms, if you have ever lived in one of those. About like furnished rooms, only three walls instead of four. There is a roll-up bed and some chairs, and the little table I have got this screen I borrowed on. I am not supposed to have the screen, but when the library is closed we can do just about whatever we want. There are the 'bots, sure; but sometimes they cannot seem to tell us from you fully humans. Sometimes I wish I could peek inside one and see how it thinks. Not that I believe that would really work. I know it would not.

Have I said there is a curtained-off part with a toilet and a washbowl? No, not yet. Well, there is; only when I want to take a shower I have to go to the shower room, and I am not supposed to until after six.

Unless we are checked out, or at least taken to a table for consultation, we cannot leave our shelves until the library closes. We sleep here, shit here, and wash here. You have caught on to that already, I guess. At first it is not as bad as you might think. One time I saw a girl whose tits read:
EVERYTHING FOR/A PEACEFUL LIFE
. All right, I have got a peaceful life. Also I will get a peaceful death, when they burn me and death comes again. Only after a while you want more, and death comes again way, way too quick for anybody who never gets borrowed. Just the same … Well, you know. Naturally having you, my reader, in the back of my mind so much worries me.

I have been borrowed twice, thanks to all this about Colette, the locked doors, and my old book. Colette will come back next year and borrow me again. I have seen to it. I am called E. A. Smithe, just like I was—I mean, the first me—and I am really just like you. I ought to say that before we get in too deep. We reclones are people, even if we do not count as human beings with you fully human ones. She knew that.

My watch had struck two when she stopped to stare up at me; I sat there trying not to grin and liked looking at her. She was at least as tall as I am, with coal black hair, dream-deep blue eyes, and that paper white skin that burns in five or ten minutes if it is not protected from the sun. When a whole lot of fun and daydreams had passed, she whispered, “You might be the card that opens the book for me.”

I nodded. “There's only one way to find out, madam.” It is not just that I look like him, I talk like him, too. Boy, do I ever! Really, though, I talk the way he wrote exposition. I have to. Only I could not write like that if I wanted to, or nowhere except here when they do not know. They will not let me, just to begin with. Someday I would love to kick the guy who worked out all this business of bringing back writers but not letting them write.

Colette took my hand and I jumped down off my shelf. Then she took me to a table. You can guess how happy that made me. Being consulted is not nearly as good as being checked out, but it is good, too; and in three years I had not gotten consulted more than three or four times. It was July, and so far that year it had only been once, for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. In my dreams I could see the flames and feel the heat.

“Do you know about books?” Colette asked. She sat down, which let me sit, too.

So play it cool. I shook my head. “I don't. I fear you've got the wrong man.”

“Yes, you do!”

“No. I know something about men. I know more about women than most men do, which really isn't saying a great deal. I know a little about children, rather more about dogs, and much less about cats. I'm afraid that's as far as my knowledge goes. Nothing worth mentioning about books or music or cooking or ten thousand other things.”

“I've researched you, Mr. Smithe. You wrote
The Lantern in the Library
, so clearly you know a lot about books.”

Hoping I was teasing her along, I shook my head.

“There's a book that holds an enormous secret.”

I said, “There are thousands upon thousands of books that hold millions upon millions of secrets, madam. A few hundred of those secrets may be enormous. I won't argue the point.”

“Not like this.”

“I see.” I waited; and when she did not speak, I asked, “What is this secret you seek?”

“I don't know,” Colette said; she should have looked put out at the question, but she did not. She just smiled at me, and I felt she sure as hell knew.

So try something else. “What's the title of this mysterious book?”

Still smiling she said, “I'm afraid I don't know that, either.”

“You're being very close-mouthed; I can only hope you have a good reason. With no more information than you've given, do you expect me to tell you the title?”

“No, I don't; but I expect you to help me ferret out the secret.”

“I will—if I can. I am a library resource, after all.” I was still not sure I would be able to wrangle a checkout from her. “Knowing no more than you've told me, how can I be of help?”

“A man wants to change one page of a certain book to incorporate information he needs to conceal. Am I making myself clear?”

So spy novel stuff; I tried to keep a straight face as I nodded. “Perfectly.”

“Very well. How can he do it?”

“In any of a dozen ways, or so I would think. To begin with, paper books are now printed exclusively on demand. You can buy a download from a company that is selling the book you want and have one printed for you. You must know about that.”

“Tell me about it.” Colette was concentrating, so she had stopped smiling.

“There are machines. One can be bought or rented. You download the text. You may design the cover. If you do not, the machine will design its own. Those are very plain, for the most part, and you can save a bit of money by specifying two colors instead of four.”

She nodded, impressed; and silently I blessed a couple of librarians whose conversation I had overheard eight or ten weeks ago. “Say that I want to conceal my information in a standard reference such as
Common Deciduous Trees of Our New America
. I'd download a copy from the publisher, carefully scan the text and illustrations, then insert my information at an appropriate point. That done, I would rent time on a demand printer and binder.” I shut up and waited for a question or a comment, but she did not say a word.

“I would not have to go where the machine was, you understand, just rent the time. I would download the text I had prepared and specify one copy. The machine would print and bind the book in something less than a minute. The exact time would vary, depending upon the length of the text and the number and difficulty of the illustrations. The company that owned the machine would send me the book, with a bill for machine time and postage.” I waited for a question before I added, “In most cases, it would offer to print me additional copies at a reduced price, if I were satisfied and wanted more.”

“You said there were a dozen ways, I believe.”

“There are. Here's a simpler one. Books—books other than textbooks particularly—often contain errors. When they do, the publisher may include an errata sheet correcting the error. ‘On page two twenty-one
store age
should read
storage.
' This library tips those sheets into the back of its books.”

Colette nodded.

“If the information someone wanted to hide were brief, he could easily print up his own errata sheet. ‘On page two twenty-one, the formula such-and-so has been omitted.' Do you like that one?”

She smiled. “You really are the person I need. I don't know how I knew it.”

That was flat-out encouraging. It sounded like she might actually borrow me; so I smiled, too, hoping to hit the next question out of the park.

“Give me another. You said a dozen.”

“I feel sure you've thought of the simplest. He could write something on a flyleaf, or in the margin of a certain page.”

“I don't think it's as obvious as that.”

“There are chemical formulations that will disappear into the paper when they dry, only to reappear if the paper is warmed. When it cools, the writing vanishes again. Say that he writes his secret on a flyleaf. Conceivably it might be warmed by accident and some reader might notice it. But that would be extremely unlikely.”

“I didn't know about the chemicals.”

“A great deal will depend on the nature of the information. The longer it is, the harder it will be to hide. If it can be expressed in text, that's one thing. If it requires diagrams…” I pushed my shoulders up and let them drop.

“Suppose it's solid. A physical object.”

I was not ready for that one, which was limiting and pretty crude. I said, “Ouch!”

“Yes, exactly. But suppose it is.”

Thinking hard, I said, “It would have to be quite small.”

“And flat, right?”

“Wrong. A pin might be pushed into the binding of a clothbound book and go unnoticed. A leatherbound book would be worse still.”