Nevertheless, in an hour I had a double handful of selector cards. I handed them to the vestal virgin at the desk and waited while she fed them into the hopper. Presently she said, “Most of the films you want are in use. The rest will be delivered to study room 9-A. Take the south escalator, puhlease.”
Room 9-A had one occupant—who looked up as I came in and said, “Well! The wolf in person—how did you manage to pick me up again? I could swear I gave you a clean miss.”
I said, “Hello, Mary.”
“Hello,” she answered, “and now, good-by. Miss Barkis still ain’t willin’ and I’ve got work to do.”
I got annoyed. “Listen, you conceited little twerp, odd as it may seem to you, I did not come here looking for your no-doubt beautiful white body. I occasionally do some work myself and that is why I’m here. If you will put up with my unwelcome presence until my spools arrive, I’ll get the hell out and find another study room—a stag one.”
Instead of flaring back, she immediately softened, thereby proving that she was more of a gentleman than I was. “I’m sorry, Sam. A woman hears the same thing so many thousand times that she gets to thinking that no other topic is possible. Sit down.”
“No,” I answered, “thanks, but I’ll take my spools to an unoccupied room. I really do want to work.”
“Stay here,” she insisted. “Read that notice on the wall. If you remove spools from the room to which they are delivered, you will not only cause the sorter to blow a dozen tubes, but you’ll give the chief reference librarian a nervous breakdown.”
“I’ll bring them back when I’m through with them.”
She took my arm and warm tingles went up it. “Please, Sam. I’m sorry.”
I sat down and grinned at her. “Nothing could persuade me to leave. I did not expect to find you here, but now that I have, I don’t intend to let you out of sight until I know your phone code, your home address, and the true color of your hair.”
“Wolf,” she said softly, wrinkling her nose. “You’ll never know any of them.” She made a great business of fitting her head back into her study machine while ignoring me. But I could see that she was not displeased.
The delivery tube went thunk! and my spools spilled into the basket. I gathered them up and stacked them on the table by the other machine. One of them rolled over against the ones Mary had stacked up and knocked them down. Mary looked up.
I picked up what I thought was my spool and glanced at the end—the wrong end, as all it held was the serial number and that little pattern of dots which the selector reads. I turned it over, read the label, and placed it in my pile.
“Hey!” said Mary. “That’s mine.”
“In a pig’s eye,” I said politely.
“But it is—I read the label when it was faced toward me. It’s the one I want next.”
Sooner or later, I can see the obvious. Mary wouldn’t be there to study the history of footgear through the Middle Ages. I picked up three or four more of hers and read the labels. “So that’s why nothing I wanted was in,” I said. “But you didn’t do a thorough job; I found some that you missed.” I handed her my selection.
Mary looked them over, then pushed all the spools into a single pile. “Shall we split them fifty-fifty, or both of us see them all?”
“Fifty-fifty to weed out the junk, then we’ll both go over the remainder,” I decided. “Let’s get busy.”
Even after having seen the parasite on poor Barnes’s back, even after being solemnly assured by the Old Man that a “flying saucer” had in fact landed, I was not prepared for the monumental pile of evidence to be found buried in a public library. A pest on Digby and his evaluating formula! Digby was a floccinaucinihilipilificator at heart—which is an eight-dollar word meaning a joker who does not believe in anything he can’t bite.