The Steam-Driven Boy by John Sladek

from behind. The accompanying photos are of Miss Thwart’s shoulder bruises. If … ’
    There was a crash of glass, and Sankey came to his feet. Moving almost automatically to the closet, he selected a golf club and crept to the library door. He turned out the light behind him, slipped an arm inside the door and switched on the library light. In one movement, he kicked the door back and ducked.
    There was no one in the room. One pane high in the French windows had been broken, but they appeared to be still locked. Four or five bound volumes of early quarterlies were missing from one end of the shelf, he noticed, including the first volumes of
Dial
and
Transition
. They would be costly to replace, he thought, glancing around.
    Something struck him in the back of the head, hard. He fell, recalling for no reason the photos of Miss Thwart’s bruises.
    Mr Tone of the Library of Congress was speaking.
    ‘We seem to have a correlation between the migrants and the rate of book usage – a negative correlation, I might add,’ he said in a pompous voice. ‘We thus find that the rare book collections are hardest hit. It is no surprise to learn that the “remaindered” shelves of bookstores are being picked clean.’ He handed out Mimeographed sheets of statistics.
    ‘But isn’t it a fact, Mr Tone, that the rate of migrations has actually increased? And wouldn’t this imply that more books of all types are disappearing?’
    Tone licked papery lips with a pale tongue. ‘Yes. And in fact, the books now disappearing are progressively more well-used types. According to our latest estimates, the entire book output of the world will be gone by’ – he checked a notebook – ‘by the twenty-second of this month.’
    ‘That’s Friday, isn’t it?’ asked Preston.
    ‘Yes, I believe so.’
    ‘Right. We’ll put it into the record as Friday, the twenty-second ofApril.’
    Sankey felt he had not been unconscious for more than a few seconds, yet the entire shelf of quarterlies was now missing. Re staggered to his feet, the useless mashie still gripped in his fist, and looked about for his assailant.
    There was a noise down behind the desk, as of a bird beating its broken wing against the floor. He yanked the desk back and raised the iron.
    Volume I of Gibbon’s
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
flopped back and forth, fanning its leaves madly. The binding was broken and torn – no doubt from smashing his window or knocking him down! So this was what had helped the quarterlies escape! Sankey tried to think of his blood pressure, but suddenly all his thought was concentrated in the fingers that held the golf club. Savagely he whipped it down at the fluttering thing on the floor, again and again, watching its thrashing cover pulp and shred …
    The witnesses, amateur and expert, had strong views on the causes of the migrations. While many of the amateurs gave supernatural explanations or referred to rats leaving a sinking ship, the
deformation professional
was clearly no less responsible for many distorted opinions. A psychologist insisted that cold war hysteria and the stress of modern living were producing mass hallucinations; people were unknowingly destroying or hiding books, he said.
    A meteorologist tried to relate the migrations to atmospheric disturbances caused by sunspot activity. Even when his ‘peculiar wind’ theory was proven inadequate, he clung to it childishly.
    Bates of the Wildlife Commission hazarded a guess that the books were trying to return to a state of nature. ‘It makes sense,’ he insisted. ‘They came from trees. Who knows but what they’ve been conscious, if only on some chemical level, of their origins? They’ve been longing to return to the jungle, and now they are doing it.’
    Mr Tone wondered if books felt unloved and rejected.
    ‘These educational materials,’ he said. ‘They stand there, week after week, unread. How would you feel? You’d commit suicide. And that is just what