Dr. Victor Corvo adjusted his Carl Zeiss jeweler’s loupes with two steady, gloved fingers.
Through the double-ground quartz lenses, the descending swarm did not look like harmless office stationery. It looked like a cloud of high-speed surgical blades whistling through the sub-zero darkness of the crypt.
The ambient temperature in the rotunda had plunged to minus two point one four degrees Fahrenheit. The moisture in Corvo’s graying mustache froze into stiff white bristles within seconds. Across the ten vertical tiers of the vault wall, the pneumatic exhaust of four hundred thousand vacuum lines shrieked like an express locomotive venting steam in a sealed mountain tunnel.
Ten thousand resin-impregnated IBM 80-Column census cards circled the cavern at sixty miles per hour.
They flew with unnatural, predatory precision. Driven by the magnetic fields pulsing from Magistrate Silt’s exposed tabulator, the cards banked and wheeled in tight, synchronized formations. Their stamped nickel-plated perimeters caught the crisp lunar-white glow of the brass dwarf-signal lantern, flashing like the metallic scales of a feeding school of barracuda.
“Keep your collars sealed tight!” Corvo bellowed. His deep baritone cut through the roar of the pneumatic wind with the practiced authority of a chief surgeon managing a hemorrhaging trauma bay. “Do not let a single card lodge inside your clothing! Look at the brass rail!”
