Read Online The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell, Dustin Thomason - Free Book Online

room,” Gil says. “You’ll be back in time for Taft’s lecture at nine?”
    “Yes,” Paul says. “Of course.”
    Gil waves and turns. Paul and I continue down the path toward Firestone.
    Once we’re alone, I realize that neither of us knows what to say. Days have passed since our last real conversation. Like brothers who disapprove of each other’s wives, we can’t even manage small talk without tripping over our differences: he thinks I gave up on the
Hypnerotomachia
to be with Katie; I think he’s given up more for the
Hypnerotomachia
than he knows.
    “What does Bill want?” I ask as we approach the main entrance.
    “I don’t know. He wouldn’t say.”
    “Where are we meeting him?”
    “In the Rare Books Room.”
    Where Princeton keeps its copy of the
Hypnerotomachia
.
    “I think he found something important.”
    “Like what?”
    “I don’t know.” Paul hesitates, as if he’s looking for the right words. “But the book is even more than we thought. I’m sure of it. Bill and I both feel like we’re on the cusp of something big.”
    It’s been weeks since I’ve caught a glimpse of Bill Stein. Wallowing in the sixth year of a seemingly endless graduate program, Stein has slowly been assembling a dissertation on the technology of Renaissance printing. A jangling skeleton of a man, he aimed at being a professional librarian until larger ambitions got in his way: tenure, professorships, advancement—all the fixations that come with wanting to serve books, then gradually wanting books to serve you. Every time I see him outside Firestone he looks like an escaped ghost, a purse of bones drawn up too tight, with the pale eyes and strange curled-red hair of a half Jew, half Irishman. He smells of library mold, of the books everyone else has forgotten, and after talking to him I sometimes have nightmares that the University of Chicago will be inhabited by armies of Bill Steins, grad students who bring to their work a robotic drive I’ve never had, whose nickel-colored eyes see right through me.
    Paul sees it differently. He says that Bill, impressive as he is, has one intellectual flaw: the absence of a living spark. Stein crawls through the library like a spider in an attic, eating up dead books and spinning them into fine thread. What he makes from them is always mechanical and uninspired, driven by a symmetry he can never change.
    “This way?” I ask.
    Paul leads me down the corridor. The Rare Books Room stands off in a corner of Firestone, easy to pass without noticing. Inside it, where some of the youngest books are centuries old, the scale of age becomes relative. Upperclassmen in literature seminars are brought here like children on field trips, their pens and pencils confiscated, their dirty fingers monitored. Librarians can be heard scolding tenure-track professors to look without touching. Emeritus faculty come here to feel young again.
    “It should be closed,” Paul says, glancing at his digital watch. “Bill must’ve talked Mrs. Lockhart into keeping it open.”
    We are in Stein’s world now. Mrs. Lockhart, the librarian time forgot, probably darned socks with Gutenberg’s wife in her day. She has smooth white skin draped on a wispy frame made for floating through the stacks. Most of the day she can be found muttering in dead languages to the books around her, a taxidermist whispering to her pets. We pass by without making eye contact, signing a clipboard with a pen chained to her desk.
    “He’s in there,” she says to Paul, recognizing him. To me she gives only a sniff.
    Through a narrow connecting area we arrive before a door I’ve never opened. Paul approaches, knocks twice, and waits for a sound.
    “Mrs. Lockhart?” comes the reply in a high, shifting voice.
    “It’s me,” Paul says.
    A lock clicks on the other side, and the door opens slowly. Bill Stein appears before us, a half-foot taller than either Paul or me. The first thing I notice is the gunmetal eyes, how