Tower of Glass

18

The lawyers met three times in the week following the destruction of Alpha Cassandra Nucleus. The first meeting was held in the offices of Krug Enterprises; the second, in the headquarters of Labrador Transmat General; the third, in the board room of the Chase/Krug Building, Fairbanks. The Labrador Transmat people had suggested that Krug simply supply a new alpha, paying the costs of training her. Lou Fearon, acting as counsel for Krug, objected that this might expose his client to expenses of an amount that could not be determined in advance. Labrador Transmat recognized the justice of this position and a compromise was reached under the terms of which Krug Enterprises transferred to Labrador Transmat the title to one Duluth alpha female, untrained, and agreed to pay the costs of her training to a maximum of $10,000 fissionable. The total time consumed in these three meetings was two hours and twenty-one minutes. A contract was drawn and the civil suit was voided. Leon Spaulding initialed an agreement on behalf of Krug, who had gone to Luna to inspect a newly completed gravity pond for hemiplegics at Krug Medical Center in the Sea of Moscow.

19

November 17, 2218.

A delicate tracery of windblown snow lightly covers the area around Krug’s tower; beyond the construction zone, the snow lies deeply mounded, iron-hard. A dry wind buffets the tower. Well ahead of schedule, it has topped 500 meters, and now is overwhelming in its crystalline splendor.

The eight-sided base yields imperceptibly to the planes of the four-sided trunk. The tower is haloed in light: sunglow rebounds from its flanks, strikes the surrounding fields of snow, leaps up again to kiss the glassy walls, is hurled groundward once more. Albedo reigns here; brightness is all.

The lower two-thirds of the existing structure has now been divided into floors, and, as the androids assembling the skin of the tower pile the glass blocks ever higher, those responsible for the interior work follow them up.

Installation of the tachyon-beam system has begun. Five giant rods of brilliant red copper, sixty centimeters thick and hundreds of meters long, will form a quintuple spine, rising inside vertical service cores that span close to half the tower’s height, and the lower sections of these great busbars are going into place now. A circular jacket of translucent plastic a meter in diameter forms the housing for each bar. The workmen slide forty-meter lengths of copper into these jackets, then cu

The tower is already a thing of unparalleled splendor, starkly supple, spectacularly spearing the sky. Visitors drive many kilometers out into the tundra to get the best view of it, for at close range it ca

20

“A new signal,” Vargas said. “Slightly different. We began getting it last night.”

“Wait right there,” said Krug. “I’m coming.”

He was in New York. Almost immediately he was in Vargas’ Antarctic observatory, high on the polar plateau at a point equidistant between the Pole itself and the resorts of the Knox Coast. There were those who said that the transmat era had cheapened life in one way while enriching it in another: the theta force allowed one to flick blithely from Africa to Australia to Mexico to Siberia in a moment’s merry dance, but it robbed one of any true sense of place and transition, of any feel for planetary geography. It transformed Earth into a single infinitely extended transmat cubicle. Krug had often resolved to take a leisurely tour of the world from the air, and see desert shading into prairie, forest into bare tundra, mountains into plains. But he had not managed to find the time.

The observatory was a series of pleasant glossy domes sitting atop an ice-sheet two and a half kilometers thick. Tu

In the main building things hummed and clicked and flashed. Krug did not understand much about this equipment, but it seemed properly scientific to him. Technicians ran eagerly about; an alpha high on a dizzying catwalk called numbers to three betas far below; periodically there was a crimson surge of energy within a glass helix twenty meters long, and numbers leaped on a green and red counting mechanism at every discharge.

Vargas said, “Watch the radon coil. It’s registering the impulses that we’re getting right now. Here — a new cycle is starting — you see?”

Krug contemplated the pattern of surges.

“That’s it,” Vargas said. “Now a six-second pause, and then it starts again.”

“2-5-1, 2-3-1, 2-1,” Krug said. “And it used to be 2-4-1, 2-5-1, 3-1. So they’ve dropped the 4-group altogether, they’ve moved the 5-group to the front of the cycle, they’ve completed the 3-group, they’ve added a pulse in the final group — damn, Vargas, where’s the sense? What’s the significance?”

“We don’t detect any more content in this message than in the last. They’ve both got the same basic structure. Just a minor rearrangement—”

“It’s got tomean something!”

“Perhaps it does.”

“How can we find out?”

“We’ll ask them,” Vargas said. “Soon. Through your tower.”

Krug’s shoulders slumped. He leaned forward, gripping the smooth cool green handles of some incomprehensible device jutting from the wall. “These messages are 300 years old,” he said blackly. “If this planet of theirs is like you tell me it is, that’s like 300 centuries here. More. They won’t even know about the messages their ancestors sent out. They’ll be mutated out of all recognition.”