I’ll speak to the police. Anything else, Knave?”
“I want this room sealed off,” I said. “It’s probably too late—when was the theft?”
“Two days ago,” he said, and I stifled a curse. Well, the police would have a lot of details, and perhaps they really could be persuaded to share.
On the other hand, I was going to have to take their word for all those details, many of them now long gone. I have, as it happens, a strong dislike for taking anyone’s word, at any time or place, but my own—but there was no help for it on this job. I was arriving late, the first-act curtain had gone down, and as Act II started I was going to have to do the best I could with my printed program and whatever help I could tease out from the other spectators.
“One more thing,” I said, concluding that I’d also get a better picture of the actual mechanics of the theft from the police, and tucking away sixty or seventy questions for them, later on. “Who handles Berigot assignments for this floor?”
“B’russ’r B’dige,” he said, and I filed the name away. He was certainly around the building—it was nearly two in the afternoon (fourteen, if you have the Scientific Mind), the building was open, he’d be working—and I could locate him through Berigot Services for the library. I wished Ping a polite good-afternoon, took one last look around at the priceless collection—I like Heinlein, however many fashionable people tell me he’s dated—and walked away, heading toward Berigot Services.
And it occurs to me just here that you might not even know what the Berigot are. We’d better get that in first, because we’re going to need it.
CHAPTER THREE
Everything in the universe looks like something we already know, even when it acts very differently—which may be a statement about the universe, and may be a statement about the way we know things. Walking-trees look like trees, though they’re not, and the Berigot—
Well, when you tell someone they’re a race of sailplaners, for some reason the immediate reaction is Bats, and you start hearing a lot about Dracula and other ancients. The Berigot don’t act like bats (except that they do flock—but even people flock), and they don’t look like bats—they look like giant flying squirrels. They’re large, and they’re furry rather than, say, hairy, and their arms do look fairly small and fragile for the size of a Beri. Their heads even seem to be pouched, although the shape isn’t due to a pouch system but to twin air-bladders; that’s how they speak. The whole breathing system is reserved for breathing.
The wingspan is very large, of course, though even so they can’t really fly. They walk at times, with a whole range of mincing gaits that look as though they ought to be very painful, and they swoop and dip at times—they prefer swooping and dipping, and so would I, but that sort of thing needs height and clear space, which are not always available. At home, they live in what some people call nests and other people call perches, and use the ground for large storage buildings; at work they enter and leave from perches set high enough from the ground to allow of some sailplaning.
They come from a planet called Denderus (their name for it; humanity has politely agreed to stick with it, since humanity can pronounce it), which has a Standard gravity of .89, and air as thick as, say, Earth’s—this is possible because the stuff isn’t air, it’s a denser set of compounds. The Berigot can’t breathe our air, and sensibly don’t try; even if you have seen a Beri or two, you’ve never seen one without his transparent head-bubble. The exchange technique isn’t quite beyond human skill, but it is said that only four men on Ravenal, and perhaps two more elsewhere, understand how the bubbles transform Ravenal’s air into stuff a Beri can breathe.
There’s a small human presence on Denderus, and an equally small Berigot presence in the Comity Worlds, almost all either on Earth where the diplomats live or on Ravenal, where the Berigot have found appropriate work. They are probably the best librarians in the galaxy (Kelans might dispute this, but the Kelans aren’t much on really big libraries, preferring to carry their massive knowledge around inside their rather small heads).
People do tend to think of a librarian as someone who will direct you to the spools for Non-human Dance Troupes, and who spends a staggering proportion of his time saying Shhh. This is not quite the whole picture; librarians are a vitally important part of any search for knowledge, though virtually nobody knows this except other librarians, and a scattering of searchers.
I know it because I have had to search for some odd things now and again, in the course of an active life. Ravenal knows it because the Ravenal Scholarte and all its associated cities are always searching, though they seldom have any clear idea of what they’re searching for; if they knew, they’d already have it.
And Berigot know it because collecting facts is what Berigot do.
I’ve said a little while ago that a Survivor—me, for instance—is first of all an information collector, and as an information collector, I’m fairly good—for a human being. For a Beri, I would be classified as Deeply, even Laughably Defective. The Beri collect information the way human beings invent weapons—with constancy, facility and blinding speed. They would make me feel horribly inferior—if they did anything else.
Oh, they eat and sleep and mate (four sexes, two He and two She, all needed not only for reproduction but for a normal social life), but their reproductive (and social) life is passionless and managed pretty well by rote, they have no hobbies except those associated with information-collecting, and they have only very recently begun to wonder whether there is anything in the world at all except information-collecting. Human beings are the bit of information that has started them wondering, and Ravenal has contributed most heavily, since Ravenal is the sample of humanity a Beri is most likely to see.
Someone on Ravenal, about seventy years ago, awoke to the fact that a race of information-collectors would make marvelous librarians, and began talks with the Berigot. And the Berigot have been working on Ravenal ever since.
Well, what does a librarian do, except point you at the spools you need, or tell you to shhh?
He—and if the pronoun has been irritating you, I’m afraid you’ll just have to be irritated; it’s all I can do, and I’m robbing the Berigot of two pronouns as it is—he puts one piece of information together with another piece of information.
I’ve heard of that process as the one absolute definition of intelligence. I agree: the ability to take two facts and make a third fact is intelligence, and everything else is something else. Unfortunately, it would take either the Kelans or an even brighter race to come up with a useful test for it.
But the Berigot are very good at it. It’s what librarians do: they look into Non-Human Dance Troupes for a bit, and remember something they noticed the last time they looked into Molar Physics a bit, and they see that the two things have some common features.
Then they tell people about this—either personally or, much more frequently, by filing a cross-index note. Molar physicists can now get a bit of help from non-human dance troupes, and vice versa.
This goes on all the time, in fields even more widely separated than my examples. Librarians are the great cross-pollinators of the universe, and they make things grow—things like ideas, and inventions, and discoveries, and civilizations.
Ravenal, naturally, has the best librarians known. And I was off to see one.
I’d met a few Berigot, on a previous stopover, but for me the meetings had just been a few minutes of casual chatter. For a Beri nothing is casual (which means that nothing is important, either; if you don’t have
