Tower of Glass

The twisted face grew even more taut. “I have nothing but sympathy for this project. You injure me with these suspicions. Don’t you think making contact with an extrasolar civilization is as important to me as it is to you?”

“Oughtto be important to you. Your field; your study. Me? Businessman. Maker of androids. Owner of land. Capitalist, exploiter, maybe a little bit of chemist, know something about genetics, yes, but no astronomer, no scientist. It’s a little crazy, eh, Vargas, for me to care about a thing like this? Squandering of assets. Non-productive investment. What kind of dividends do I get from NGC 7293, huh? You tell me. You tell me.”

Nervously Vargas said, “Perhaps we ought to go downstairs. The excitement—”

Krug slapped his chest. “I’m just turned sixty. I got a hundred years to live, more, maybe. Maybe two hundred, who knows? Don’t worry about me. But you can admit it. You know it’s crazy for an ignoramus like me to get so interested in something like this.” Krug shook his head vehemently. “I know it’s crazy myself. I have to explain me to me all the time. I just tell you, this is something has to be done, and I do it, this tower. This hello to the stars. I was growing up, they kept telling us, We’re all alone, We’re all alone, We’re all alone. I didn’t believe it. Couldn’t. Made the billions, now I’ll spend the billions, get everybody straight in the head about the universe. You found the signals. I’ll answer them. Numbers back for numbers. And then pictures. I know how to do it. One and zero, one and zero, one and zero, black and white, black and white, keep the bits going and they make a picture. You just fill in the boxes on your chart. This is what we look like. This is water molecule. This is our solar system. This is—” Krug halted, panting, hoarse, taking note for the first time of the shock and fear on the astronomer’s face. In a more peaceful tone he said to Vargas, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t shout. Sometimes I run off at the mouth.”

“It’s all right. You have the fire of enthusiasm. Better to get carried away sometimes than never to come alive at all.”

Krug said, “You know what started it? This planetary nebula you threw at me. Upset me, I tell you why. I had a dream I’d go to the place the signals were coming from. Me, Krug, in my ship, under deepsleep, sailing a hundred, even two hundred light-years, ambassador from Earth, a trip nobody ever took before. Now you tell me what a hell-world the signals come from. Fluorescent sky. O-type sun. A blue-light furnace. My trip’s off, eh? Got me worked up, the surprise of it, but don’t worry. I adapt. I absorb good stiff jolts. Knocks me to a higher energy state, is all.” Impulsively he gathered Vargas to him in a fierce bear-hug. “Thank you for your signals. Thank you for your planetary nebula. Thank you a million, you hear, Vargas?” Krug stepped back. “Now we go downstairs. You need money for the laboratory? Talk to Spaulding. He knows it’s carte blanche for you, any time, any size money.”

Vargas left, talking to Spaulding. Alone in his office, Krug found himself ablaze with surplus vitality, his mind flooded with a vision of NGC 7293. Indeed, he resonated at a higher energy state; his skin itself was a fiery jacket for him.

“Going out,” he grunted.

He set the transmat coordinates for his Uganda retreat and stepped through. A moment later he was seven thousand miles to the east, standing on his onyx verandah, looking down at the reedy lake beside his lodge. To the left, a few hundred meters out, a quartet of hippos floated, nothing showing but pink nostrils and huge gray backs. To the right he saw his mistress Quenelle, lolling bare in the shallows. Krug stripped. Rhino-heavy, impala-eager, he pounded down the sloping shore to join her in the water.

6

It took Watchman only a couple of minutes to run to the accident site, but by then the lift-beetles had moved the fallen block and the bodies of the victims were exposed. A crowd had gathered, all betas; the gammas lacked authority and motivation for interrupting their work programs, even for something like this. Seeing an alpha approach, the betas faded back, hovering on the edge of the scene in an uneasy conflict. They did not know whether to return to work or to remain and offer assistance to the alpha, and, thus caught unprogrammed, they stood by wearing the dismal expressions of android bewilderment.

Watchman quickly surveyed the situation. Three androids — two betas and a gamma — had been crushed by the glass block. The betas were beyond easy recognition; it was going to be a chore just to peel their bodies out of the permafrost. The gamma beside them had almost avoided being killed, but his luck had not quite been good enough; he was intact only below the waist. His had been the legs Watchman had seen sticking out from under the block. Two other androids had been struck by the falling scooprod. One of them, a gamma, had taken a fatal blow on the skull and was lying in a sprawl a dozen meters away. The other, a beta, had apparently received a glancing but devastating swipe in the back from a corner of the rod’s grip-tread; he was alive but seriously injured, and plainly in great agony.

Watchman selected four of the beta onlookers and ordered them to transport the dead ones to the control center for identification and disposal. He sent two other betas off to get a stretcher for the injured one. While they were gone he walked over to the surviving android and looked down, peering into gray eyes yellow-rimmed with pain.

“Can you talk?” Watchman asked.

“Yes.” A foggy whisper. “I can’t move anything below my middle. I’m turning cold. I’m starting to freeze from the middle down. Am I going to die?”

“Probably,” Watchman said. He ran his hand along the beta’s back until he found the lumbar neural center, and with a quick jab he shorted it. A sigh of relief came from the twisted figure on the ground.

“Better?” the alpha said.

“Much better, Alpha Watchman.”

“Give me your name, beta.”

“Caliban Driller.”

“What were you doing when the block fell, Caliban?”

“Getting ready to go off shift. I’m a maintenance foreman. I walked past here. They all started to shout. I felt the air hot as the block came down. I jumped. And then I was on the ground with my back split open. How soon will I die?”

“Within an hour or less. The coldness will rise until it gets to your brain, and that will be the end. But take comfort: Krug saw you as you fell. Krug will guard you. You will rest in the bosom of Krug.”

“Krug be praised,” Caliban Driller murmured.

The stretcher-bearers were approaching. When they still were fifty meters away, a gong sounded, marking the end of the shift. Instantly every android who was not actually hoisting a block rushed toward the transmat banks. Three lines of workers began to vanish into the transmats, heading for their homes in the android compounds of five continents, and in the same moment the next shift began to emerge from the inbound transmats, coming out of leisure periods spent in the recreation zones of South America and India. At the sound of the gong Watchman’s two stretcher-bearers made as if to drop the stretcher and rush for the transmats. He barked at them; and sheepishly, they hustled toward him.

“Pick up Caliban Driller,” he commanded, “and carry him carefully to the chapel. When you’re done with that you can go off shift and claim credit for the time.”

Amid the confusion of the changing shift, the two betas loaded the injured android on the stretcher and made their way with him to one of the dozens of extrusion domes on the northern perimeter of the construction site. The domes served many uses: some were storage depots for materiel, several were kitchens or washrooms, three housed the power cores that fed the transmat banks and the refrigeration tapes, one was a first aid station for androids injured on the job, and one, in the heart of the irregular clutter of gray plastic mounds, was the chapel.