Time: Nearer into the future than we like

to think. Places: Washington, D.C., and

vicinity and Moscow, with an important

side trip to the zone of superpower con-

frontation, the border between the two

Germanys. The President of the United

States has established a new, super-se-

cret intelligence-collection agency known

as the Library. It supersedes all the oth-

ers--CIA, DIA, FBI, ONI, NSA--and re-

ports directly and only to the Oval Office.

The staff consists of a dozen superb

specialists (the Librarians), to whom every-

thing is known. A normal workday there is a

voyeur s dream.

Harry Dunn, defense intellectual par

excellence, is the brilliant, rotund beget-

ter of this organization. His conundrum:

the discovery by Walter Coolidge--one

of his twelve specialists, known for good

reason as the Garbageman--that some-

one, a mysterious and elusive "Doctor," is

leaking a crucial Pentagon secret. The

Doctor can only be one of the twelve elite

Librarians. Coolidge has endless re-

sources to draw on as he searches for him:

all the data from the other intelligence

agencies along with the most interesting

pictures produced by the Library s but-

ton-sized video microcams, which have

been secretly installed all over Wash-

ington and in selected places around

the world: in bedrooms and board-