The Ghostwriter's Words

The Professor: His Secret Room

A month after discovering the stack of crates filled with old tablets, the Professor looked pridefully across his living room. The seams in the far corner of the wall to the left of their bedroom door were visible only because he knew they were there, but he struggled to find them again any time he looked away. But with only a thought, a section of the wall swung out to reveal what appeared to be a cleverly hidden closet. But it was, in fact, an even more cleverly disguised elevator. What had once been an apartment, a floor below, was now an environmentally controlled workspace, with state-of-the-art lighting and ventilation matching the specifications of the university library's document preservation room.

The crates full of old tablets had been waiting in a storage area below, packaged in a large box with labels proclaiming its contents to be a refrigerator. That had been an inspiration. Thinking how best to get the crates out of the library basement and not get caught, it occurred to the Professor that stacked as they were, the crates of tablets probably weighed as much as a:

Refrigerator!

When he'd returned to the library late several weeks earlier, the refrigerator he'd ordered sat next to the loading dock doors; on a pallet, boxed, just as he'd planned. There was a hydraulic lift nearby, with pedals and all kinds of levers, which he'd figured out how to operate with a bit of trial and error. He took the pallet holding the refrigerator down a freight elevator to the library basement then back to the corner next to the crates of ancient tablets. He carefully cut along the bottom, lifted off the top of the box, then pushed the refrigerator off its pallet against the wall, where he expected it would eventually become more ancient, forgotten junk.

With the aid of the lift, he carefully stacked the crates of tablets on the refrigerator's pallet. He wrapped them in shipping blankets, which he banded securely together, lowered the top of the box back in place, stapled it to the pallet, then returned the refrigerator box up the freight elevator to the exact spot near the loading dock where he'd found it. In the morning, he called the appliance company to report that he'd mistakenly had his refrigerator shipped to his work address.

Apologizing profusely, he agreed to pay for the additional shipping and handling for them to pick it up and deliver it to his apartment building instead. He felt like a spy executing a covert operation. It was rather fun and exciting, except that he feared he'd suffer a fate worse than any captured spy ever had if caught, and it discovered what he'd found and stolen. Had any of them endured their torture forever, as he expected he might?