Leigh Kimmel says:

Mariko watched the radar screen, looking for evidence of underground voids in the area their drone was passing over. After three days of searching, they’d found nothing bigger than half-collapsed pipes — proof that there’d been buildings here, a civilization sophisticated enough to build a sanitary sewer system. But so far, no hint of the treasure vaults that had convinced the trustees of Tombaugh University to send an archeological expedition down the solar gravity well to Earth.

Find those treasure vaults, and every academic on the team would have their careers made. Even grad students like herself would have the makings of their doctoral dissertations, and their choice of senior scholars for their advisors and committee members. But first they had to find those vaults – which assumed they’d remained intact amidst the turmoils of the past several centuries.

A chime pulled Mariko out of her musings. Yes, the drone’s ground-penetrating radar had located substantial voids – big enough to be the fabled vaults in which the greatest literary treasures of Old Earth had been placed, as civilization was turning its back on technology, rejecting learning along with the people who had chosen the high road and spread throughout the Solar System. It was said that some of the last great scholars of Old Earth had died covering the tracks of the librarians who’d hidden them away and sealed the vaults against a future in which Earthbound humanity would once again embrace knowledge instead of condemning it.

Although the space community had taken a great deal of knowledge with them, not everything had been digitized and transmitted or lifted out of Earth’s gravity well before relations between spacer and earthworm had broken down altogether. There were so many frustrating lacunae in the documents they had, whether it be the original sequence of Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles stories or the motivations of certain major political figures of the later decades of the twenty-first century. For whatever reason, those bits of data had slipped through the cracks, leading to endless argumentation based as much on supposition as actual documentary evidence.

Time to let the big brains know – and hope the drone hadn’t found yet another abandoned Cold War bomb shelter.

Dupin says:

They didn’t say what they were looking for, but their search almost destroyed my library. I have my suspicions as to what was in the half-full duffle.

It will take days to get everything back into the stacks. Time to get the kids involved. They’re old enough to alphabetize, and keep secrets, so it’s time to meet Dewey.

I sighed.

They didn’t find the real library and were content to leave with the fake tomes I’d left semi-hidden. I’m the latest of a long line of our family’s librarians, but not sure yet which kid will be take over.