“No, sir. The journal tapes. We were just finishing our daily backup.”
“I see. You were just
“The backups can’t be done during peak hours, sir. [173] We have special permission to come in at six in the morning.”
“Lucky you. And you heard these noises where?”
“They were coming from the Electrical Room.”
“And that is—?”
“The door to the left of the MP-3. That’s the computer, sir.”
“I saw two doors in there.” D’Agosta said. “What’s behind the other one?”
“Oh, that’s just the lights-out room. It’s on a carded-entry system, nobody can get in there.”
D’Agosta gave the man a strange look.
“It contains the diskpacks, things like that. You know, the storage devices. It’s called a lights-out room because everything’s automated, nobody goes in there except for maintenance.” He nodded proudly. “We’re in a zero- operator environment. Compared to us, DP’s still in the Stone Age. They still have operators manually mounting tapes, no silos or anything.”
D’Agosta went back inside. “They heard the noises on the other side of that door to the left, there in the back. Let’s take a look.” He turned around. “Keep them out here,” he said to Thrumcap.
The door to the electrical room swung open, releasing a smell of hot wiring and ozone. D’Agosta fumbled along the wall, found the light and snapped it on.
He did a visual first, by the book. Transformers. Grillwork covering ventilation ducts. Cables. Several large air- conditioning units. A lot of hot air. But nothing else.
“Take a look behind that equipment,” D’Agosta said.
The officers nosed around thoroughly. One looked back and shrugged.
“All right,” said D’Agosta, walking out into the computer room. “Looks clean to me. Mr. Thrumcap?”
“Yes?” He poked his head in.
“You can tell your people to come back in. Looks okay, but we’re gonna post a man for the next thirty-six hours.” He turned to one of the policemen emerging [174] from the electrical room. “Waters, I want you here till the end of your shift. Pro forma, all right? I’ll send your relief.”
“Right,” said Waters.
“That’s a good idea,” said Thrumcap. “This room is the heart of the Museum, you know. Or rather, the brain. We run the telephones, physical plant, network, mini-printing, electronic mail, security system—”
“Sure,” said D’Agosta. He wondered if this was the same security that didn’t have an accurate blueprint of the subbasement.
The staff began filing back into the room and taking up their places at the terminals. D’Agosta mopped his brow.
“Rog,” he heard a voice behind him. “We got a problem.”
D’Agosta hesitated a moment.
“Oh, my God,” said Thrumcap, staring at a monitor. “The system’s doing a hex dump. What the hell—?”
“Was the master terminal still in backup mode when you left it, Rog?” a short guy with buck teeth was asking. “If it finished and got no response, it might have gone into a low-level dump.”
“Maybe you’re right,” said Roger. “Abort the dump and make sure the regions are all up.”
“It’s not responding.”
“Is the OS down?” Thrumcap asked, bending over bucktooth’s CRT. “Lemme see this.”
An alarm went off in the room, not loud, but high-pitched and insistent. D’Agosta saw a red light in a ceiling panel above the sleek mainframe. Maybe he’d better stick around.
“Now what?” said Thrumcap.
“What’s this code we’re getting?”
“I don’t know. Look it up.”
[175] “Where?”
“In the manual, fool! It’s right behind your terminal. Here, I’ve got it.”
Thrumcap started flipping pages. “2291, 2291 ... here it is. It’s a heat alarm. Oh, Lord, the machine’s overheating! Get maintenance up here right away.”
D’Agosta shrugged. The thumping noise they’d heard was probably air-conditioner compressors failing.
Like most modern supercomputers, the Museum’s MP-3 was better able to withstand heat than the “big iron” mainframes of ten or twenty years before. Its silicon brain, unlike the older vacuum tubes and transistors, could
