“Are you seeing what I am seeing?” he asked her.
“Yep,” she replied. Their voices echoed in the vast chamber of unrivaled knowledge capacity. By what they could perceive, the place covered more than a square mile just on the level they found themselves on. He pulled out his tablet to take a series of snapshots of the place.
“That is not allowed,” a voice said from somewhere in the limitless darkness around them. Agatha squealed momentarily with fright. Purdue used his pen-like contraption to use as a spyglass in the dark. Through the myriad shelves he scanned, but there was nothing. He looked for an old man, because that was what the voice sounded like, yet he found nothing. “If you make the existence of this library known, there will be trouble.”
“That’s an understatement,” Purdue jested under his breath.
“Yes, it is. I could impart to you of course the full extent of hell you would bring onto your primitive world if you reported this site,” it said again, but from another direction entirely, prompting Purdue and his sister to swing around and resume their search. Purdue put away his tablet.
“Who are you?” Purdue asked.
“And how on earth do you move about in this utterly irritating darkness?” Agatha added casually.
“I don’t need light. The dark has never bothered me,” it replied civilly.
“Would you mind supplying us with some light, though?” Purdue asked. He was amazed that his pounding heart was acting on excitement and not an ounce of fear.
“Certainly,” it said, and before the words were done echoing, the large hall was illuminated with bright light, illuminating the stacks of neatly arranged shelves in all their splendor.
“Aren’t you worried that we might be armed or something? You are rather casual about the level of arcanum you are hoarding here,” Agatha asked. She looked at her brother with a look of enlightenment, “David! That’s what the chiseled ‘ARC’ in the rock wall meant — arcanum.”
“That is correct!” the voice said, but now it had a distinctly female charge to it, although it was without a doubt the same voice.
“May we see you face to face?” Purdue asked. “It’s common courtesy, since you can see us.”
“Your assumptions are truly human,” it said. “The only courtesy I owe you, strangers, intruders, is that I do not kill you in your tracks. Furthermore, you cannot see me… ‘face to face’… because I have none.”
Agatha could feel her skin shiver at the thoughts of what that could mean and she moved closer to her brother. Purdue looked at Agatha with the same unnerved expression, but he laid a hand on her arm to comfort her.
“Now, why are you here? You cannot be too idiotic if you managed to find us the hard way,” the voice informed them.
“The hard way?” Purdue asked.
“Why, yes, the star charts and points of reference by spire and tower. I must commend you. It was well deciphered. For that alone I decided not to rip you limb from limb for the intrusion. You deserved at least an audience for your efforts,” it said conversationally, almost coming across as amicable.
“David, it can rip us limb from limb. Let’s just leave,” Agatha whispered.
“You cannot leave. Once you have seen the Library of Forbidden Books you can never be trusted to go back to your erratic and regressed world with this knowledge,” it said.
We’ll see about that, Purdue’s mind kicked in.
“I only came for referencing, not to remove anything,” Purdue tried his luck, but he was up against an intelligence that surpassed knowledge and mind games. Agatha clasped her hands over her brother’s arm.
“How can you hear everything I say? It really is quite rude, you know!” Agatha barked, while her brother’s terrified stare reprimanded her for her arrogant insinuation.
“I am knowledge. I know all. Secrets are mere whispers of the mind. I can hear everything that is thought,” the voice went male again.
“May we at least ask for a morsel of knowledge about who… or what… you are?” Purdue asked respectfully, secretly pressing his record button on his tablet in his pocket.
“I believe I just told you,” it said bluntly. “I am the librarian.”
“Ha! Just like me,” Agatha chirped.
“But are you a subliminal manifestation? Or do you in fact exist externally?” Purdue persisted.
“Is there a difference?” it asked. “The closest humankind ever came to understanding the bigger scheme of things, was when men experimented with the basic knowledge they possessed to seek out what other men dared not. From what I remember, those wicked men who tested the unified field theory came very close to understanding that not all reality is tangible.”
“Unified field theory?” Agatha asked in a whisper.
“The SS,” Purdue quickly mouthed back to her.
“Unfortunately, the human race is far too inadequate in temperament and wisdom to be allowed this knowledge, save for a few of those men who hid the library here. Others, the magnitude of humankind, lack the insight and ambition to find the truth. They are held back by religion and other fabricated rules that impair their capacity to seek,” the voice explained.
“They put you down here? If you are wisdom, you could surely devise a way to escape,” Agatha challenged the librarian again. Her curiosity was steering her attitude in a dangerous direction.
“Escape from where? I am not restricted to geographical location like you are,” it argued.
“That must be really neat,” Agatha smiled with a nod of approval.
“Oh, it is,” the librarian replied.
“Excuse me,” Purdue interrupted, “what do you mean we came here the hard way?”
“You utilized the physical option, when you could have employed what the Nazis did when they hid the library from the world for their own gain. They used something very similar to unified field theory — physics. Remember the experiment on the USS Eldridge?” the voice asked, sounding a bit like an old woman through its electrical vocal cords. “Only there, the aim was invisibility, while these officers and scientists used a wormhole.”
“Bending space,” Purdue marveled to himself.
“Correct. I suppose you do not possess the information missing from this library, then,” speculated the librarian.
“Missing information?” Purdue asked.
“In 1939 the records contained herein were ransacked by three SS officers and one Allied turncoat, said to be part of some clandestine operation to use the properties of physics and science to commit global genocide and return the Earth to its former masters,” the voice rambled, while Purdue reached into his diving suit for a pod-like device he had invented for situations just like this one. It had but one switch, fitted on a pod the size of a tennis ball, and its deflective materials made it impossible to detect by any tracking device or electrical interference.
“That sounds familiar,” Agatha remarked.
“It is happening again, I assume,” the librarian said, and Agatha affirmed with a nod.
“How did they get away with the information? Why did you not kill them?” Purdue asked.
“They wrote it down in boxes of paper sheets bound together. It was undetectable by the advanced electromagnetic currents of the library, but once they were discovered they used their miniscule acquaintance of the Einstein-Rosen bridge theory to teleport elsewhere,” the librarian revealed.
“Books. Common books foiled your defenses?” Agatha asked with a measure of self-righteous boast for her beloved books versus her brother’s technology.
“Yes, but there was a price, of course. All three German soldiers — Mannheim, Schaub, and Kretz — disappeared without a trace, obviously failing to predict the outcome of their space-time wormhole. They took their books with them to wherever they ended up. But they used the Allied officer to obtain passage through the portal. A sacrifice, if you will,” it continued its sermon to satisfy their curiosity.