Professor Mathias hobbled over the arid city ruins which would soon become a black, burbling swamp. He stopped and sighed downward at his engineering assistant, the beefiest man in coveralls he could handpick on such short notice. Leblanc crouched and heaved bricks away from the steely door he should have spotted days ago. It peeped from the mountain of rubble like a big dirty coin. The whole irrigation project seemed like a coin toss now, slow and unforgivably chancy.
“We’ll probably find nothing,” Mathias said. His white goatee framed an even older-looking frown. “But at least you’ll have checked the damn place properly.”
He gazed at the new irrigation pipeline his crew had snaked over the nearby hills of rubble. It looked like a giant corrugated worm deflating in the sun. The membranous fabric, however, could either swell up and flood the whole region or compress to fit onto the back of a single truck--whichever task Mathias wanted. Today he wanted both, a one-two punch: irrigate the land and ship his pipes off to another barren.
“You can’t allow these sorts of embarrassments,” Mathias said over Leblanc’s panting. “I spotted this door last minute with my old-school binoculars. All your advanced scanning gear failed to find it. Modern engineers should know not just the latest technology, but the older, basic tools as well.”
Leblanc grunted continuously through half the lecture. He hauled open the door, stretching the dried-out vines that spanned it. They snapped and fell like the city’s dead power lines from long ago. He stood back and let the doyen of engineering studies stride through first. Mathias hurried down the cement stairs beyond, brushing a sprinkle of dust off his puffy suit. As for the musty smell, he inhaled every molecule he could. It wafted from an ancient material called paper.
What waited in the basement seemed far more golden than even the sunlight. Mathias and Leblanc beheld a secondhand bookstore, a treasure trove abandoned by fools and untouched by flood or fire. Thousands of hardcovers still crammed every wall a full century after the citizens had fled to cooler climes. Even the softcovers remained orderly and preserved, merely dog-eared in a city that had utterly crumbled.
“Wonderful.” Mathias’s frown never flinched. “The irrigation will save the nearby town from dust storms, but it will also destroy these archaeological treasures worth more than the whole damn town. You can thank the old binoculars that we still have 20 minutes to stop the flooding. That seawater will turn blacker than the ink on these pages.”
With one long sigh, Mathias took a dignified gaze at the book spines all around him. Rescuing so many artifacts would cost him a day. It would also earn him decades of praise from historians.
“Hand me your cell phone,” he said. “I’ll have to shut off the irrigation program from here. I won’t have my own machinery make a fool of me.”
“My battery died,” Leblanc said.
He held up a device which rivaled the whole store with one terabyte. For now, though, it only displayed a grayed-out screen.
“Leblanc…” Mathias closed his eyes. “Not one of you engineers thought to bring an old-fashioned bicycle. It could have easily remedied this problem. It could get these old bones of mine back to the desalination plant where I can temporarily shut things down. A simple bicycle can speed through the rubble-strewn streets where our trucks can’t go.”
“Yes, Professor.” Leblanc looked around, perhaps for a book on coping with shame.
“You must fully understand and employ the older technologies in order to appreciate them.”
“Yes, Professor.”
“Now, we shall use the simplest technology of all.” Mathias pointed at Leblanc’s forehead. “Human labor. A brawny lad like you can jog to the plant and shut off the scheduled flooding in time.”
“Yes! But…” Leblanc started talking--and sweating--faster. “I’ll need the access code to log in as you. And I don’t have anything to record it on.”
Mathias paced, searching for a book himself. “For Want of a Nail,” however, just didn’t jump out of the shadows.
“Indeed,” he finally said, “you could not possibly memorize the access-slash-security code in time. But if you had brought a simple solar-powered calculator, I could key everything in for you to take back to the plant. The older, humbler technology often surpasses our fancy new devices. Remember that, Leblanc.”
“I will, Professor.”
While eyeing Leblanc, Mathias pulled a tome of illustrated children’s stories off a shelf. Leblanc’s eyes widened like those of the jolly toddler on the cover.
“I’ve got it!” Leblanc dared to announce. “We’ll carry out as many books as we can, like firewood in the olden days. We’ll stack them on a high mound of bricks, away from the water. Human labor, like you said.”
Mathias never looked up as he flipped through the children’s book. “Leblanc, people will pass your tombstone on the way to visit mine. Why? Because you can only solve a fraction of the problem.”
Mathias laid the book on the store counter, leaving it opened to a picture of a child seated at a schoolhouse desk. The boy sat straight and smiley, engaged in the archaic practice called writing.
Still ignoring Leblanc, Mathias flipped through a ledger on the counter. He smirked at the same 26 letters and 10 digits the clerk had handwritten hundreds of times over. Given the symbols’ uniformity, the extreme ease of handwriting must have felt tedious to even the laypeople. Mathias stopped on a blank page as beautiful as new snow.
He took a pencil from under the counter, and after careful study, grasped it just as the child did in the picture.
“You must fully grasp the old technology,” he said, “even in a literal sense, to realize its problem-solving potential. Now watch how one old piece of paper will save these thousands of others.”
Mathias wrote the first long line of the access code, the pencil coming alive like an awakened pet. He smiled childishly, and his scribbles likewise resembled something only a toddler would produce. Precious seconds ticked away with every digit he tried to draw. Leblanc, thankfully, looked ready to run with the written message.
He looked over Mathias’s shoulder. Perhaps standing so close to the doyen caused some of that famous disdain to rub off. After days of getting belittled, Leblanc finally sounded a tad condescending himself.
“Professor,” he said, “those vine drawings look lovely, but I really need the access code.”
END
Author's Bio: Nicholas Stillman writes science fiction with medical themes. His work has appeared in The Colored Lens, Bards and Sages Quarterly, The Martian Wave, Page & Spine, and Zooscape.
