The piece of computer equipment occupied a low table next to a copier, located directly across from the main desk, all of which was just a short walk from the elevator. A few feet beyond the office equipment was the far corner of the information counter. There, the room made a sharp turn, wrapping around the rear of the empty courtyard.

Perpendicular to the wall opposite the windows, shelves stacked with genealogical records and census data stood at attention, lined outward in perfect formation. At the far end of that dogleg, which terminated the L-shaped room, a man was hunched over, barely visible behind the back-to-back rows of chest-high metal cabinets.

He straightened upward and gently placed a hand-sized, square box atop the cabinets then peered back downward over the rim of his eyeglasses. After a moment he began moving slowly to his right, fixed gaze scanning intently. A few seconds later he came to a halt and tugged at the front of the sheet metal cube before him.

A drawer rolled out on full suspension slides, the decrepit ball bearings rattling complaints into the relative quiet of the room. Stepping backward, he extended it fully and then began carefully running his index finger across the contents. It took only a few seconds before he selected yet another of the cardboard boxes and extracted it from the shallow bin. Then, elbowing the drawer shut once again, he gathered the first container along with a tattered steno pad and headed back toward the center of the dogleg where the microfilm readers were set up in short rows.

Activity had been minimal in the archives earlier in the day. Other than himself, there had only been what appeared to be a few students researching projects and an elderly couple who were obviously on a quest for a lost ancestor. What that had meant was that there were plenty of readers to go around.