The Northbridge lobby is the hub of the New York startup scene: anywhere two or more people are sitting together, Neel says, it’s probably a new company proofreading its articles of incorporation. Huddled together around a low table made from old magnetic-tape canisters, I guess we might qualify—not as a company, but at least as something newly incorporated. We’re a little Rebel Alliance, and Penumbra is our Obi-Wan. We all know who Corvina is.
Neel hasn’t let up on the First Reader since we emerged:
“And I don’t know what’s going on with that mustache,” he continues.
“He has worn it since the day I met him,” Penumbra says, mustering a smile. “But he was not so rigid then.”
“What was he like?” I ask.
“Like the rest of us—like me. He was curious. Uncertain. Why, I am still uncertain!—about a great many things.”
“Well, now he seems pretty … self-confident.”
Penumbra frowns. “And why not? He is the First Reader, and he likes our fellowship exactly as it is.” He bats a thin fist into the soft mass of the couch. “He will not bend. He will not experiment. He will not even let us try.”
“But they had computers at the Festina Lente Company,” I point out. In fact, they were running a whole digital counterinsurgency.
Kat nods. “Yeah, they actually sound pretty sophisticated.”
“Ah, but only above,” Penumbra says, wagging a finger. “Computers are fine for the worldly work of the Festina Lente Company—but not for the Unbroken Spine. No, never.”
“No phones,” Kat says.
“No phones. No computers. Nothing,” Penumbra says, shaking his head, “that Aldus Manutius himself would not have used. The electric lights—you would not believe the arguments we had over those lights. It took twenty years.” He harrumphs. “I am quite sure Manutius would have been delighted to possess a lightbulb or two.”
Everyone is silent.
Finally, Neel speaks: “Mr. P, you don’t have to give up. I could fund your store.”
“Let us be done with the store,” Penumbra says, waving a hand. “I love our customers, but there is a better way to serve them. I will not cling to familiar things as Corvina does. If we can carry Manutius back to California … if you, dear girl, can do what you promise … none of us will need that place.”
We sit and we scheme. In a perfect world, we agree, we would take the
“Bolt cutters,” Neel says. “We need bolt cutters.”
Penumbra shakes his head. “We must do this in secrecy. If Corvina becomes aware of it, he will pursue us, and the Festina Lente Company has tremendous resources.”
They know a lot of lawyers, too. Besides, to put Manutius at Google’s mercy, we don’t need the book in our hands. We need it on a disk. So I ask, “What if we took the scanner to the book instead?”
“It’s not portable,” Kat says, shaking her head. “I mean, you can move it around, but it’s a whole process. It took them a week to get it up and running at the Library of Congress.”
So we need something or someone else. We need a scanner custom-built for stealth. We need James Bond with a library science degree. We need— Wait. I know exactly who we need.
I grab Kat’s laptop and click over to Grumble’s book-hacking hub. I dig back through the archives—back, back, back—back to his earliest projects, the ones that kicked it all off … There it is.
I swivel the screen around for everyone to see. It shows a sharp photo of the GrumbleGear 3000: a book scanner made out of cardboard. Its pieces can be harvested from old boxes; you run them through a laser cutter to carve slots and tabs at all the right angles. You lock the pieces together to make a frame, then break them down flat when you’re done. There are two slots for cameras. It all fits into a messenger bag.
The cameras are just crappy tourist point-and-shoots, the kind you can get anywhere. It’s the frame that makes the scanner special. With one camera alone, you’d be stretching to hold the book at the right angle, fumbling with every page-turn. It would take days. But with two cameras mounted side by side on the GrumbleGear 3000, controlled by Grumble’s software, you get a two-page spread in one snap, perfectly focused, perfectly aligned. It’s high-speed but low-profile.
“It’s made from paper,” I explain, “so you can get it through a metal detector.”
“What, so you can sneak it onto a plane?” Kat asks.
“No, so you can sneak it into a library,” I say. Penumbra’s eyes widen. “Anyway, he posted the schematics. We can download them. We just need to round up the materials and find a laser cutter.”
Neel nods and waves a finger in a circle, circumscribing the lobby. “This is the nerdiest place in New York. I think we can get our hands on a laser cutter.”
* * *
Assuming we can get a GrumbleGear 3000 assembled and working, we’ll need time undisturbed in the Reading Room. Manutius’s
