Vellum Read Online Free

to the Roman or Cyrillic alphabets, but again not quite the same. Strangely—in retrospect—it never occurred to me that this book might actually be nothing more than mere invention, a work of fancy: perhaps the accuracy of the blueprint of the library held that idea from my mind; perhaps it was the power of the old family legends engrained so deep within me. All I know is what I felt: a growing conviction that this book spoke somehow of a larger truth.
    The Tower of Bible
    â€œJack.”
    He didn’t answer.
    â€œJack,” I said again.
    â€œFor fuck’s sake, Jack,” called Joey. “Let us in.”
    â€œCome on. Please,” I said.
    We’d been there for maybe half an hour and all we’d got from the other side of the door was silence. I was worried myself, but I could hear from the fury in Joey’s voice, the way he swore at Jack, insulted him, told him again and again how stupid and pointless all this was, that he was really terrified. If you didn’t know him you’d have thought that he was more concerned about this…waste of time he had to suffer, more bothered about his own inconvenience than anything else. But I could hear the edges and points in his voice, the tightness in his throat. Joey was coming to hate Jack because he couldn’t stand what he was doing to himself; it hurt too much.
    â€œOpen the fucking door, ya fucking bastard. Just fucking open the fucking door, fucking…
fucker!”
    And he exploded at the door, kicking, snarling, spitting.
    After a while, after a long while, when Joey had fallen silent, there was a click, and the door opened.

    Jack sat back down on the floor, a Gideon’s Bible in front of him together with a printout of—I looked closer—columns of numbers, letters, other characters—colons, semicolons, question marks—each with a numeric value beside it. It was the ASCII values for the keys on a computer keyboard, I realized, the set of numbers between zero and 255, used in a computer to represent text in the binary form that a machine could work with, language boiled down to zeros and ones, to a series of electronic on and off values. Text was stored as
bytes,
each byte made up of eight bits, eight binary places representing 1s, 2s, 4s, 8s and so on up to 128, the same way decimal places represent 1s, 10s, 100s and so on…00000000 to 11111111, zero to 255. Jack was using it as reference.

    On one side of him, he had a stack of paper, reams still wrapped or torn open, sheets scattered, piled on top of each other. I watched as he took a fresh sheet from the top of the pile, looked at the Gideon’s, finding his place with the point of his pen, then found the character in the printout of ASCII values and started working out, on the fresh sheet, what its binary representation was. There were sheets of these workings scattered behind him where he’d discarded them and I crouched down to pick one of them up. He’d scrawled out columns for the places, scribbled numbers—45, 37, 56—down the left-hand margin and then ticked off places in the columns: 37, that was 1 plus 4 plus 32…10100100 in binary. Looking at other sheets, I realized that he’d worked out some of these numbers over and over again. He could have just put together another reference sheet of all the binary values for the letters and numbers he needed, but instead he was working them out each time. Every letter, every colon, every full stop, he was looking up on the sheet of ASCII values and calculating the binary for it, even when he’d worked it out just moments before.

    As I watched, he took another sheet, already almost full of ones and zeros, each byte of eight places separated by a dash, and transferred a number from his workings to this page. And then went back to the Bible, back to the sheet of ASCII, back to his scraps of workings, to find the next value. When the page was full, he stood up and walked