Nowhere by Thomas Berger Page B

remembered that the normal passenger on an airplane never feels really secure. Most of us have our hearts in our mouths from the moment we take off until the landing is made, for though accidents might be rare statistically speaking, when one does happen, it’s terrible, often resulting in hundreds of deaths...
    I turned to the librarian. “Would you know who wrote the entries in this work?”
    “Yes indeed. The original edition was a product of a committee of Sebastiani scholars at the turn of the century, but the Encyclopaedia is ever in the process of being revised.”
    “By contemporary scholars?”
    The man’s smile became smug. “The finest. Perhaps you would like to observe them at work? They are just upstairs.”
    With a certain eagerness I said I would, and he led me up a narrow staircase to the next floor. I had expected here at least to see a collection of shelved volumes that might reasonably be called a library, but I encountered none in the room to which my guide conducted me.
    This chamber, which fronted on the street, was furnished with a large table around which sat a dozen or so men, each of whom was reading in a green-bound volume of the sort that was in the bookcase downstairs. “Our visitor would like to learn how the Encyclopaedia is edited.”
    The nearest scholar smiled at me. “Quite simply, really. Every morning each of us picks out one of the books and reads in it until he comes to a passage with which he does not agree, and then, using a red pen, he rewrites that portion between the lines or in the margins, then tears the pages out and sends them upstairs to the typists, who prepare clean manuscripts for the printer.”
    “May I assume,” I asked, “that in such cases you have come upon some information that is outmoded? Which must happen all the time with scientific subjects. For example, the entries on the exploration of space.”
    Another of the scholars chuckled. His fringe of hair was sandy in hue, and his spectacles were pince-nez from which dangled a grosgrain ribbon. “As it happens, we have no entry whatever on that subject, not having been able as yet to find anyone amongst us who knows anything about it.”
    A whitehaired man spoke up from farther along the table. “Perhaps you would like to do it.”
    “Me?”
    “Or you might choose any other subject, if you don’t want to do one from scratch, which can be quite taxing. I tried my hand at that as a young fellow, but soon gave it up. There was virtually nothing that interested me sufficiently to warrant the effort of writing an original article upon it. But revising what’s there can often be very entertaining.”
    “Yes,” I murmured. “You have interesting and, so far as I know, unique criteria for this enterprise. In the outside world, if I may use that term, scholarship is expected to be, anyway to have a go at being, objective. Yours would seem greatly conditioned by the personality, the character, of him who does it. Am I putting that fairly?”
    “Yes, you are,” said the whitehaired man. “But why are you concerned with being fair?”
    I chuckled. “That’s true. Why, indeed? I don’t know any of you, and you all look utterly incapable of doing me either good or ill.”
    They all joined in good-natured laughter, and one of them said, “Be assured that we are absolutely inconsequential and that what we do has no value whatever. Only two copies of each volume are printed: one goes in the bookcase downstairs and the other is used up here. Furthermore, no one ever consults the downstairs set.”
    “No?”
    “Well, if you think about it, why would they? The Encyclopaedia contains simply the arbitrary opinions of a number of individuals: anyone else’s would be as good on any subject.”
    “Then of course,” I said, “the question is obvious: why have such an encyclopedia?”
    “The answer,” the whitehaired man said genially, “is that we are the scholars of Saint Sebastian. What else could we