1. The Closing Notice
Ivo arrived through the covered passage just as Sel was hanging a notice on the library door. Outside the glass dome, the red hills looked peaceful. Inside, every public screen carried the same storm warning. The settlement expected several days of strict power limits. Air, water and medical systems came first. The library had to close at four that afternoon. Its exhibition, planned for the following evening, was cancelled.
This was the last library on Mars that still lent printed books. The other reading rooms used screens. Ivo liked those rooms, but he loved the sound of a real page turning. He was only three months into his apprenticeship, and the cancelled exhibition was his first big project. For a week, he had arranged photographs and checked captions. Now he took the invitation cards off the counter while Sel called the volunteers.
They could keep the collection safely in storage during the closure. The difficult question was what readers could take home before four. Sel brought out a large community book with a repaired green cover. It held recipes, drawings and short stories from the settlement's first families. Residents had added notes over many years. Several families wanted a digital copy for the days indoors, but the library had only one printed original.
The scanner had a thirty-minute power allowance left. Ivo checked its standard setting. It could capture the printed pages within that time, leaving a few minutes for difficult pages. A more detailed setting would take much longer. "Then we make the quick copy," he said. Sel opened the green book beside him. "First, let us see exactly what a quick copy gives us." They placed the first page under the scanner and watched the preview.
2. A Missing Line
The soup recipe looked clear on the screen. Its title and printed instructions were easy to read. Ivo was ready to turn the page, but Sel pointed to the original. A pencil line ran along the bottom. On the screen, it was almost invisible. Ivo leaned closer to the paper. Someone had written that the soup needed less salt when shared with Omar's sister. Beneath it was a date from the settlement's first winter.
The next page had the opposite problem. Its dark pencil marks appeared, but a fold hid the ends of two words. Ivo had assumed that all the useful information was in the printed text. Now he noticed arrows, corrections and small stories in the margins. One family had changed a bread recipe after their child tested it three times. A reader had drawn a tiny birthday cake beside an account of a difficult journey from Earth.
"We could use the detailed setting tonight," Ivo suggested. "Most people will be asleep." Sel turned the power notice towards him. The limit did not disappear when the reading room was empty. There was no extra allowance for the exhibition or its archive. Ivo looked at the display he had spent a week preparing. He wanted to argue, then stopped. "What can we do with the time we already have?" he asked.
Sel suggested a printed scan with a separate transcript of the handwritten notes. Volunteers could work in daylight at the tables beside the dome. Their charged tablets would hold the text without running the scanner again. Ivo offered to lead the work, but Sel added two conditions. They must not pretend to understand unclear words, and they must check whether personal contributions were meant for a widely shared copy. The original book would remain unchanged.
3. Words Worth Checking
By ten, four volunteers had arrived. Lina, who usually organised children's readings, sat across from Ivo with a tablet. They worked in pairs: one read a line, the other typed it, and then they checked it together. Sel kept a list of pages and contributor names. A paper sign showed which pages were finished, so nobody copied the same note twice. At first Ivo worked quickly. Soon he discovered why Sel had asked for pairs.
In a note about a greenhouse supper, he read the word "basil" as "basic". Lina pointed out that the final letter curved beneath the line. They compared it with another word by the same writer. Basil fitted the sentence, but they marked it as uncertain until the contributor could confirm it. Ivo erased his first confident version. The mistake was small, yet it made him slow down enough to notice the next difficult letter.
One contributor answered Sel's call from the room next door. She was happy to share her recipe changes, but a sentence beside them mentioned a private family argument. It had been added during a small club meeting, before the book became popular. She asked them to leave that sentence out of the digital edition. Sel recorded her choice. The scan would need that line covered too; removing it only from the transcript would not protect it.
Ivo checked the remaining scan previews for the same problem. Two pages needed another image, with removable paper covering private lines as their writers requested. Nothing was glued to the original pages. For contributors they could not reach, the team left personal additions out of this first edition and recorded the omission. Their neat page plan became full of small changes. By lunch, Ivo accepted that a shorter, clearly explained edition was better than a complete-looking one they could not justify.
4. Before Four
There were still six minutes left on the scanner's allowance. The team used them for the two corrected pages and a fragile fold-out drawing that could not be flattened safely. Sel handled that page while Ivo checked the preview. This time he looked beyond the dark print. The drawing's faint labels were readable at the detailed setting, and the remaining time was enough. At three, he switched the scanner off and wrote its final reading in the log.
Sel reviewed the digital edition with him. Each typed note referred to its original page, and uncertain words were marked. The introduction explained which additions were absent and why. Ivo found Omar in the indoor market passage and asked about the soup note. Omar agreed to its use and laughed at the old instruction about salt. His sister had written the little correction herself. Omar called his sister, who also agreed that her words could appear in the copy.
At a quarter to four, residents collected the files on their own devices. The cancelled exhibition photographs went into a box. Ivo felt the loss again when he folded the last invitation, but Lina had arranged a daylight reading in a shared room after the closure. It would use the new edition and the room's usual opening hours. They could hear the stories together without reopening the library or asking for another power allowance.
Before locking up, Sel put the green book into storage. Ivo paused over the soup page. The digital scan could not show every movement of the pencil, and the transcript did not try to imitate the handwriting. Together, however, they kept the recipe and the words its writers wanted to share. He checked that the storage box was closed, turned out the reading-room lights and followed Sel into the covered passage. Beyond the dome, the red hills were still catching the last daylight.
