Sub-Zero

by Robert W. Walker

  “2-1O-b,” blurted out Tim. “What?”

  “What are you talking about, Crocker?” asked Wertman.

  “On the blueprints from Gordy’s office. He’d circled something labeled 2-1O-b. It might have something to do with the fresh air flow. Maybe Gordy knew there was something malfunctioning.”

  “And maybe the heat,” said Walsh, rising to his feet. “It’s getting cold in here.”

  “Let’s get downstairs,” said Tim.

  “You’d better stay with the young lady, Mr. Wertman. When she comes to, she’ll need you,” Walsh said.

  Tim clenched his teeth. He wished he could be there when Joanna awoke.

  “Where are the prints, Tim?”

  “I’ve got a stringer downstairs in the library looking up the legend on the prints, to tell us what 2-1O-b is.”

  16

  “Some god damn library,” Gary Hornell said aloud, and heard the reverberations of his own voice off the stone-block walls that stared back at him with their charcoal gray lines. Between the sound of the squealing, complaining reels of microfilm which he inserted into the large-screened viewer, there was perfect silence in the room. But for some reason Gary had the feeling he wasn’t alone. He kept reaching around himself to try and warm up. It was cold in the stacks, but it was freezing back here. He was angry, too. Microfilm should be accessible, not hidden away in a dungeon! That’s what you did with the hard stuff.

  He inserted another reel and punched the button for forward, glad to hear the sound of the threading tape. Somehow the noise blocked the spooky feeling that he was being watched. The microfilm readers sat in a long row down the length of the room, on two sides, perhaps twenty in all. Each had a screen that stood blank in anticipation. They made Gary think of store manikins. They might come to life any moment.

  Even at the busiest of times, Gary told himself, the microfilm room was isolated, except for a few reporters and weirdoes out to dig up something. The main library was located on the 11th floor of the building, with the stacks located at levels that went all the way to the basement. The only way to get to the Microfilm room was through the main library and down the narrow ladders of the stacks, or in a tiny elevator at the rear of the building.

  Gary had had to take the narrow steps all the way down. The elevator, as usual, was either tied up by the library workers re-shelving books, locked by the overprotective librarian, or out of order. He arrived at the Microfilm room exhausted and short of breath.

  Gary located the tapes he needed with little difficulty.

  He’d used the Microfilm room as much as he could and it was paying off. Few people understood the way things were categorized and filed here. Many people went away from the room with less information than they’d come with, and Gary learned if he were to master the reporter’s trade well, he must learn microfiles. He was anxious to impress the hell out of Tim Crocker. The tapes he wanted he found under Building Maintenance—Fieldcrest. The categories included space coordination, measurements, layout, materials, and systems. Gary saw immediately that each of these categories had subcategories. He looked under layout and found blueprints. But that was what he had in his hands and the legend was as cryptic and helpful as a group of hieroglyphics. He searched down to systems, his eyes moving quickly over the words, reading hydraulic, heating, cooling, electrical. He pulled both heating and cooling which were on the same reel as the others, noting the index number at which the information would be found.

  The light in the room was dim so that the light behind the screen on the viewer would be effective. As Gary popped in the reel he wanted, a sensation that someone had stepped in between him and what little light he had was powerful enough to cause him to turn and look behind his chair. The effort was futile. No one else was there. He shook his head and for the first time realized he had a painful headache growing between his tightly squinting eyes and a nauseating feeling welling up from his stomach. He wondered if it was repressed fear. He’d always hated closed-in places. How many fights had he gotten into at the fraternity with people during the long winter days when he was trapped there? How often had he thought he was going to go mad watching the frat house walls moving in on him? There too, the lights were low, the dark corners filled with unseen and perhaps unhappy creatures. There were so many unhappy creatures in Gary’s past. His special needs brother, his divorced sister, his parents.

  Gary tried to get a hold on himself. He tried to shake off the sick fee1ing coming over him. He tried to think of his goals in life and how close he was to them. He went back to the reel and started it on its dizzy flight to the screen before him. Watching it made him feel a little disoriented. It always did.

  He was glad when he finally could stop it to the exact information he needed with a few false stops, the forward and back buttons being alternately pressed. He was staring at a layman’s explanation and illustration of the building’s heating system. He read it word for word and he scanned the illustration. There was nothing on it to indicate the circled 2-10-b that Crocker was so damned hot to know about. It was either not important enough to mention, or it was directly related to cooling. He sent the tape reel back, stopping and starting until he found similar information on the cooling system, which for all intents and purposes was the same system. Whatever 2-lO-b was, it was not here.

  Tim Crocker was certain it had something to do with one of the systems. Gary ran the reel to hydraulic to check there. Nothing. He sent the reel to electric with the same results.

  His final conclusion was that the 2-1O-b was unimportant in the overall working of the system to which it belonged, hence not cataloged for the layman. They would need someone who could read blueprints to get an answer. Gary did the next best thing. He ran a complete set of blueprints, including the legend.

  He noticed as he ran out the systems reel that all systems were subject to periodic inspections for structural damage and stress. These stress checks, he guessed, were conducted by the city.

  Then something happened to the light again. Gary spun around to see who was there. He thought he saw some movement in the stacks, through the doorway. Who else knew where he was?

  Gary shouted, summoning his voice, his hands going to his temples. The headache had grown to unbearable pain. When he stood up he felt a sharp pain in his abdomen. “Is that you, Crocker?”

  There was no answer.

  “If anyone’s here, please come forward.”

  Still, there was no answer. Gary cocked his head. He heard footsteps, light, whispering footsteps. Whoever it might be, she was taking the steps. Gary was certain it was a woman. He could smell her perfume, Chanel No.5 or was it 19?

  Libraries are full of weirdos, Gary told himself, not the least being female hermits: shy, frightened girls who spent life avoiding ever having to see, or speak to, or be spoken to by another human being. He shrugged off the visitor and returned to the work he’d come to do.

  17

  The stillness of the empty stacks leading into the depths of the library and to the microfilm room was absolute, broken now and again by George Walsh’s coughing. Tim, feeling a little contagion, coughed in answer to Walsh’s last, on the lowest level of the stacks.

  “Cold,” repeated Walsh.

  Tim agreed with a nod. “Low use area.”

  Walsh nodded. He was well acquainted with the notion of conserving energy in modern buildings by cutting off heat in such areas. The Microfilm room, laid out on a chart in a maintenance check, would probably reveal the least use, so the place was stuffy and cold from a lack of ventilation and heat. Walsh coughed again, thinking about it.

  Tim passed the shelves of books, glancing at titles as he went. He loved browsing in a library but cared little for library research. He knew he was an undisciplined library user who went in search of one thing, soon became bored and stumbled onto something he truly wanted to read about. A job like the one he’d given Gary Hornell interested him only when it was done by someone else.

  That was the
sort of legwork he despised. But from the looks of things, he thought, he should have done it himself. It appeared that young Hornell was not even here. There was no sound coming from the Microfilm Readers. The place was stone dead. Hornell was off somewhere else.

  But when Tim reached the room, he realized he’d been wrong. Gary layover a Microfilm reader which droned like an angry bee, left on, it appeared, though the light was out. Tim and Walsh grabbed Gary from both sides, and set him upright. The moment they touched him, he screamed and jumped away from the swivel chair, tearing free of them.

  “Let go of me! Let me alone!” he shouted repeatedly. “Easy, take it easy!” shouted Tim.

  But Gary stared at them as if he might do something desperate or try to run past them. “What’s the big idea,” he said suddenly, regaining himself.

  “Didn’t mean to scare you,” said Tim. “The hell you didn’t,” the boy sneered.

  Walsh and Tim stared at one another a moment. “Hey, Tim,” said Walsh, staring again at Gary, “he doesn’t look so good. He’s been down here too long, I think. Let’s get him out of here.”

  “There’s an emergency exit out that way,” Tim pointed toward the northeast corner of the stacks. “I think it’ll land us in the basement, near where we want to be anyway.”

  “The quicker, the better,” answered Walsh, taking Gary firmly by the arm and ushering him in the direction which Tim pointed. Gary seemed to sense Walsh’s professionalism and offered no resistance to him. He’d calmed considerably. Tim grabbed the many blueprints he saw lying about and followed. In a moment they stood in a bare hallway, breathing easier. Walsh pulled out some smelling salts from his black bag and as he applied it to Gary’s nostrils, he talked to Tim.

  “I don’t think it’s anyone’s imagination, or just my chills, which I picked up while pulling you out of that frozen room of the security officer’s-not anymore. This boy is not in any danger but he was getting close in there. Something’s wrong with the air flow or the heating system.”

  Tim only stared into Walsh’s eyes and said, “It could get downright deadly.”

  “Maybe it has already,” answered Walsh.

  Gary, standing between them, shook his head away from the smelling salts. “I don’t feel so good.” His eyes were vacant. He pushed hair away from his forehead, making a horrible face as though he’d just swallowed a dose of medicine. His arms were covered with goose pimples and his teeth chattered in the quiet corridor. He coughed intermittently.

  “We’d better waste no time locating the source of the problem,” Tim said. “Can you walk, Gary?”

  Gary nodded. “Sure, I’ll be all right.”

  “Good. On the way you can tell us what you found.”

  18

  “I don’t think this is the right corridor, Tim,” said George Walsh as he, Gary Hornell, and Tim Crocker searched the labyrinthian halls of the Lower Level. “I think the boiler room is this way.”

  Tim looked in the direction Walsh was pointing, then glanced down the stone gray corridor ahead of him. He looked at Gary. Gary hunched up his shoulders, saying, “I’ve never been down here before.”

  “How do you know, Walsh?” Tim asked, a trace of the reporter’s accusatory tone in his voice.

  Walsh had no difficulty picking up the innuendo. The two men stared for some time. Walsh’s flat, colorless, doctor’s voice rose out of its usual calm as their eyes met. “Earlier, if you recall, I had occasion to pull your half-frozen self out of a frozen office, where one man was already dead! I passed a door on that corridor with a directional sign on it, reading Boiler Room. At the end of that corridor, left of Harold Gordon’s office, there is another, and this is it. I’d stake my life on it!”

  Tim looked down the corridor again. “You’re very observant then.”

  “Yes. I am that.” “Well, I have to admit, below the ground, my sense of direction stinks,” Tim confessed.

  They proceeded in the direction Walsh indicated, Gary and Tim following Walsh now. “Sure of himself, isn’t he,” Tim whispered to Gary.

  “Most doctor types are,” answered Gary. “Tim, how long were you and Walsh outside, in the stacks? Didn’t you hear me call out?”

  Tim slowed his pace and looked at Gary. “Call out to who?”

  “I don’t know.” “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not sure, but it seemed that someone was there, in the stacks, hiding and maybe watching me.”

  “Hallucinating perhaps,” said Walsh who had stopped and returned to Tim and Gary.

  “It seemed so real, like I could smell someone, a presence.”

  “There and yet not there,” said George Walsh. Gary nodded several times.

  “Not unusual under the circumstances,” said Walsh clinically. “You were suffering a lack of fresh, clean air.” Tim pointed out that the library was dark, too quiet. “Spooky is the word,” said Gary. “But it seemed so real.”

  Gary’s voice carried the insistence of truth and certainty. Tim almost let it drop but asked, “In what sense, Gary?”

  “Like when a light bulb flickers and you’re sure it’s going to blow, but in a split second it’s okay again. Then you sit there and wonder if it was your eyes all along. You wonder if the bulb dimmed at all. You know what I mean?”

  “Yea, I know,” said Tim. “Did you hear anything?”

  “Not much. Thought I heard footsteps on the stairs. Smelled something. I saw a shadow go over the screen of the microreader. I sort of froze up. When I turned to look, there was no one.”

  “You smelled something? What?” asked Tim.

  “Tim, the whole place smelled of old books, musky and damp,” began George Walsh, irritated and strident. “We’ve got to find out what’s happening with the damned air in this building. You two are wasting time. Come on!”

  Walsh stalked away from the other two. Gary and Tim watched him as he went ahead. “Come on, Gary. We better stay together.”

  Gary agreed and they jogged to catch up to Walsh who had turned a corner ahead and disappeared. As they jogged alongside one another, Gary said, “It was a smell like flowers, Tim.”

  Tim thought Walsh was probably right. Flowers were a well known symbol in dreams and hallucinations. It could mean that Gary was afraid of death, afraid of life, or a thousand other things!

  They found Walsh shivering outside the door which led to Harold Gordon’s office. It was pulled shut. He pointed to a door beyond and said, “It’s through there, Tim.”

  Tim went ahead of Walsh and pushed open the door. The room was pitch black, but the noise was the unmistakable rumble of elephant-sized machines, the boilers and the flush and tumble of moving water through pipes. Tim searched the wall for the light switch. He cursed when he had trouble finding it. With ease and a seeming knowledge of the locality, Walsh stepped through the door and flicked the switch on.

  “The reporter’s dilemma,” joked Walsh with a smile. “How to find the light switch.”

  Tim let the remark pass. Walsh was beginning to get on his nerves.

  Walsh continued, obviously amused with himself. “The postman has the dog to contend with, the investigative reporter, the button!”

  “Look at this place,” said Gary Hornell, eyes wide, mouth agape.

  The three men stood on a catwalk which extended around the entire room, bordered by black, wrought iron railings. The boiler room took up two floors. Tim thought it looked like something from a science fiction movie. N one of it made any sense to him.

  The room was vast, filled with steam which welled up from somewhere below. At every turn there was another mammoth, pachyderm-gray tank or drum. One looked like a hippopotamus, another a rhinoceros. Each bellowed out its own unmistakable cry for oil and attention. Each stood stolid, thick-skinned and insensitive to the pipes, valves, and electrical conduit rammed into the sides like spears. The pipes and conduit went in and out, over and under, and between the giant drums—adding another dimension to the confusion of the metallic and concre
te maze over which the three men stood.

  The noise coming from the room was deafening. Tim tried to shout above it. “Everything appears to be working down here!”

  “Sounds like it!” shouted Gary.

  “Must be 110 decibels,” Walsh shouted, putting his hands over his ears. “I’ve seen noisier construction jobs, but this place comes close to thirty jackhammers playing at Carnegie Hall!”

  “What?” asked Gary. “Can’t hear you.”

  Tim’s eyes were led in several conflicting directions at once. He glanced at the blueprints in ‘his hands. Nothing made sense and, as Gary had told him, the 2-1O-b thingamabob was nowhere to be found on the explanatory legend. They would have to go to it to find out what it was. Tim was certain it was the answer to the poor circulation. He only hoped they could get the air in the building circulating again. But looking from the blueprint-the very one he’d pulled from Harold Gordon’s dead hands-and up to the fantastically complicated room, he knew this was going to be more difficult than looking for treasure at the bottom of the ocean.