The Tower

1

The police barricades had been stacked in the Tower Plaza since dawn that Friday morning. Now city employees were setting them out in neat straight lines. As yet no crowd had gathered.

The sky was clear, blue, limitless. A gentle harbor breeze swept the plaza, salt-smelling, fresh. The plaza flags rippled, two on-duty patrolmen—more would be arriving during the next hour—stood by the arcade.

“At least,” Patrolman Shannon was saying, “we’ve nothing political to cope with today, thank God for that. A political rally—” He shook his head. “The way some people in this country get stirred up over politics is a sin and a shame and a waste.” He glanced upward at the towering, gleaming building. “It reaches almost to Heaven,” he said. “Way above men’s little squabbles.” Patrolman Barnes said, “Dig the uninvolved man.” Patrolman Barnes was black. “To hear him tell it, all Irishmen are peaceable, loving, patient, unexcitable kind, considerate, and totally nonviolent.” Barnes had his master’s degree in sociology, was already marked down for promotion to sergeant, and had his sights set on a captaincy at least. He grinned at Shannon. “Those love-ins they stage over in Londonderry, friend, are not what you might call church socials.”

“Only when provoked,” Shannon said. He allowed himself a faint answering smile. “But I’m not saying that sometimes the provocation doesn’t have to be looked for. Sometimes it hides, like a mouse in a hole.” The smile disappeared as a man approached. “And where do you think you’re going?”

It was established later that the man’s name was John Connors. He carried a toolbox. In testimony Barnes and Shannon agreed that he had worn work clothes and a shiny aluminum hard hat and the kind of arrogance a skilled workman is tempted to show toward those who ask silly questions.

“Where does it look like I’m going? Inside.” Connors paused. His smile pitied them. “Unless you’re going to try to keep me out?” There was challenge in the question.

“There’s no work today,” Barnes said.

“I know it.”

“Then?’

Connors sighed. “Where I ought to be is home. In bed. A day off for everybody while they make speeches here and go upstairs to drink champagne. Instead, here I am because the boss called me and told me to haul my ass down to the job.”

“To do what?” This was still Barnes.

“I’m an electrician,” Connors said. “Would you understand what I’m supposed to do if I told you?”

Probably not, Barnes thought. But that was not the governing factor. The trouble was orders, or lack of them.

“You and Shannon,” the duty sergeant had said, “get on down there and keep an eye on things. They’ll be setting up the lines and we don’t expect any trouble, but—” The sergeant had shrugged with a you-know-how-it-is expression.

And they did know how it was these days: every gathering seemed to generate its own unrest. All right, they would keep an eye on things, but that scarcely included keeping a workman away from his work.

“Do you carry a union card, friend?” Barnes said gently.

“So what are you?” Connors said. “An NLRB inspector? Yes, I carry a union card. I’m no scab.” He pulled out his wallet and waved it. If it contained a card, it could not be seen. “Satisfied?” Connors put the wallet away again.

Shannon’s temper was rising fast. “Let him go.”

Still Barnes hesitated. As he testified later, he had had no reason for the hesitation, merely a feeling, and actions based on feelings are always suspect.

“Well?” Connors said. “Make up your goddam mind. Just standing here, I’m already costing the boss—”

Shannon said, “Beat it.” There was a vein throbbing in the side of his neck. He looked at his partner. “We don’t have any orders to keep people out, Frank. Let the son of a bitch go. Maybe he’ll electrocute himself.”

That was the way they remembered it, and told it later.

Months in advance the date for the dedication ceremonies had been set. It has always been so, and there is no other way, because building-completion dates are elastic; and the invited guests for the ceremonies were coming from Washington and from state capitals, from City Hall, from the UN, from head offices of radio and TV networks and worldwide wire services; those who wanted to appear and be seen, and those who would rather have stayed away but had been caught by the inexorability of an early invitation.

In Nat Wilson’s office, facing the walls covered with thumbtacked drawings of the great building, Will Giddings said, “There are fifty things I want cleaned up. A hundred.”

“So do I,” Nat said. Simple truth. You live with a job for a matter of years, and, as with an artist completing his master work, you see here and there little touches you would like time to make. But there was no time today.

“And, goddammit,” Giddings said, “I don’t want stuffed shirts wandering around like a flock of goddam tourists.” He paused. “We aren’t ready. You know it. I know it.”

When the opening-night curtain goes up, Nat thought, is there always this lament? Where had that thought come from? “We aren’t ready,” he said. “Agreed. So?” He was the younger man, architect-engineer, middle-sized, solid, rarely excitable.

“The hundred and twenty-fifth floor,” Giddings said, “just under the mast. Drinks, backslapping, congratulations, and a view of how many hundreds of square miles of water and country, and it can’t be postponed because the characters who are coming are so goddam important, senators, congressmen, the governor, the mayor, UN types, movie stars, that kind of crap?”

“That kind of crap,” Nat said.

Giddings was a big man, sandy-haired, blue-eyed, filling that ancient position of clerk of the works, owner’s representative on the job. He was in his early forties. Somewhere, probably in the back of a forgotten drawer, he had an engineering degree, and now and again over their years on the job Nat had seen him, slide-rule in hand, doing his paperwork, but he always seemed more in character in his hard hat, riding an open hoist or walking a steel girder or prowling tunnels and subbasements to see that the job was done right. “I don’t drink cocktails,” he said, “and I don’t eat little things with toothpicks in them. Maybe you do.” There was tension in him plain to see.

“Beside the point,” Nat said. “Grover Frazee set the day. Your boss.”

Giddings sat down at last. He stretched out his legs, but there was no relaxation in the movement. “My boss,” he said, and nodded. “We have to have businessmen, but we don’t have to like them.” He was studying Nat. “You must have been still wet behind the ears when you started, on this job—how long ago? Seven years?”

“Close enough,” Nat said. Back at the start of preliminary design, the conceptual thinking, he following but also flying along with Ben Caldwell’s soaring visions. He could not resist glancing out the window at the distant Tower itself, clean and pure and beautiful against the sky: the result of those years of work. “So?”

“My building, sonny, goddammit,” Giddings said. “Oh, it’s part yours too, but I watched the start of excavation that went down eighty feet to bedrock, and I watched them top out the steel fifteen hundred and twenty-seven feet above grade, and I know every grillage, every column, every truss, every spandrel beam as well as I’d know my own kids if I’d ever had any.”

There was nothing that required comment. Nat was silent.

“You’re a self-contained son of a bitch,” Giddings said. “Is it a case of still waters running deep? Never mind.” His eyes went briefly to the distant tower. “I lost some friends too. On any big job you always do.” He looked back at Nat. “Remember Pete Janowski?”

Nat shook his head faintly.

“Walked out into air sixty-five floors up and splattered himself on a concrete ramp down in the batheub.”

“That one,” Nat said, remembering.

“Big Polack,” Giddings said, “a good man, never seemed to hurry, but he got the job done the right way, the safe way, and that was what shook me. When you can’t put a cause to it, that’s when you worry.”

There was something in Giddings’s voice, his manner—uptight was the word. Nat said slowly, “Are you making a point?”

It was as if he had not spoken. “Usually,” Giddings said, “you can figure out why a man does something. I read where somebody robs a bank, and I think, ‘The poor silly bastard wanted the money, maybe had to have it, and couldn’t see any other way.’ That’s not an excuse, but it is some kind of explanation.” He paused only briefly. “Take a look at these.”

He took a manila envelope from the inside pocket of his corduroy jacket, tossed it on the desk, and then sat expressionless while he watched Nat pick the envelope up, open it, and spill its contents onto the blotter. Folded papers, the crisp paper of Xerox reproduction, covered with lines and figures and neat engineering lettering.

Nat looked up.

“Take a good look,” Giddings said.

One by one Nat studied the papers. At last he looked up. “Design-change authorization,” he said. His voice was quiet and he hoped that his face showed nothing. “My signature on all of them.” Surprisingly his voice held steady. “All electrical changes. Not my bailiwick.”

Giddings said, “But nobody would question your signature. Caldwell Associates, Supervising Architects—you’re their man on the job, you say something’s okay, that’s the way it is.” He heaved himself out of his chair, walked two paces, and went back to drop into the chair again. He watched Nat and waited.

Nat still held one of the change orders. His hands were steady; the paper did not even tremble, but it was as if his mind had gone numb. “Were these changes made?”

“I don’t know. I never saw those before last night.”

“How did you miss them?”

“I can’t be every place at once,” Giddings said, “any more than you can. I have records, work signed off as done according to spec. Where there are deviations from original specifications I have legitimate approvals.” He paused. “But I don’t have those or any others like them, and I’d have raised hell if I’d seen them.”

“So would I,” Nat said. The office was still.

Giddings said at last. “That means what?’

“Not my signatures,” Nat said. “I don’t know who signed them or why, but I didn’t.”

Giddings got out of his chair again, walked to the windows, and stood looking downtown at the jagged skyline dominated by the Tower. “I figured you’d say that.” Nat’s faint smile was crooked, unamused. “Of course.” After the initial shock, your mind begins to work again, clearly, logically as it has been trained—like a bloody little computer, he thought. “If I had signed those changes, naturally I’d deny it, at first anyway. I didn’t sign them, so I deny it too, but for a different reason. Either way my answer has to be the same, doesn’t it?”

Giddings had turned back to face the desk. “Logical bastard, aren’t you?”

Behind the shock now came the beginnings of anger. “I’ll carry it further,” Nat said. “Why would I have signed them? What reason would I have had?”

“I don’t know. That,” Giddings said, “is why I’m not beating the truth out of you right here and now.”

“Don’t even try,” Nat said. His voice was quiet. With a steady hand he picked up one of the papers, looked at it, dropped it again on the pile.

Giddings said in a new, quieter voice, “What kind of rot have we got buried in the walls of my building? How many comers did we cut without knowing it? How deep does it go?”

Nat’s hands rested on the desktop. “I don’t know the answer,” he said, “but I think we’d better try to find it.” Giddings took his time, his eyes steady on Nat’s face. “You try your way,” he said at last. “I’ll try mine.” He indicated the papers. ‘Keep those. I had copies made.” He paused. “Your boss already has a set, in case you were wondering whether to plug him in.” He walked to the door and stopped there, his hand on the knob. “If I find out those are your signatures,” he said, “I’ll be coming after you.” He walked out.

Nat stayed where he was and looked again at the papers, poked them idly with one forefinger. The signatures were plain enough: N H Wilson. Nathan Hale: the names had been his father’s idea. The original Nathan Hale was hanged. And from the looks of things somebody was trying to hang this one too. Well, if they thought he was going to walk meekly up the gallows steps, they were mistaken.

He picked up his phone and called Jennie at the switchboard. “Give me Mr. Caldwell’s office, honey.” And to Mollie Wu, Caldwell’s secretary, “Nat here, Mollie. I have to see the boss. It’s urgent.”

“I was just going to call you.” Mollie’s voice held nothing “He’s, expecting you.”

Caldwell’s office was the comer room, immense, impressive Caldwell himself was a small man, slight, with slicked-down sparse gray hair, pale-blue eyes, and small, almost dainty hands. He was neat, quiet, precise, and in matters having to do with art, engineering, or architecture implacable. He was standing at the windows, facing the downtown skyline, when Nat knocked and came in. “Sit down,” Caldwell said and remained at the windows, motionless, silent.

Nat sat down and waited.

“The great lighthouse at Alexandria, the Pharos,” Caldwell said. “For almost a thousand years it guided ships into the Nile.” He turned then to face the office. Backlighted by the windows, he was merely a shape, small against the immensity of the sky. “I met the captain of the France one day a few weeks ago,” he said. “He told me that the first bit of America they see on their westward crossing is the top of that tower building we designed and supervised during construction. He called it the modern Pharos.” Caldwell walked to his desk and sat down. His face now was clearly visible, expressionless. On the blotter in front of him Xerox copies were strewn. “What have we done to it, Nat?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

Caldwell indicated the papers. “You have seen these?”

“Yes, sir. And I’ve talked to Giddings.” Pause. “Correction: I’ve listened to Giddings.” Another pause. “For the record, those are not my signatures. I wouldn’t have messed with electrical changes without Lewis’s approval.” Joseph Lewis & Co., Electrical Engineers. Nat had the absurd feeling that he was talking to himself.

“‘Wouldn’t have,’” Caldwell said, “is a meaningless phrase in this context. Theoretically, nobody would have made changes without Lewis’s approval. But somebody wrote those change authorizations, and on the face of it, it was with the authority of this office as supervising architects.” Clear, logical, precise.

“Yes, sir.” Like a small boy in the principal’s office, but what else was there to say? The anger was banked now, a strong, steady force. “But why my name?” Nat said. Caldwell studied him quietly. “Explain that question.”

“Why not Lewis’s or one of his people’s? It would be more logical, less open to question.”

“According to Will Giddings,” Caldwell said, “there was no question. These”—he pushed at the pile of copies—“did not come to light until now.”

“Then,” Nat said, “we don’t even know that the actual changes were made, because if they were, a change authorization would have had to be shown—”

“‘Would have,” ‘ Caldwell said, “‘wouldn’t have.’ I repeat: the phrases are meaningless.” He was silent for a few moments, thoughtful. “I agree,” he said at last, “we don’t know that the changes were actually made. Neither do we know how serious they might be.” He was watching Nat’s face. “We would do well to find out, wouldn’t we?”

“Yes, sir. Nat paused. “And there are other things to find out. too.”

“Such as?”

“Why these change authorizations were written in the first place Why my name was put on them. Who—”

“Those are questions that can wait,” Caldwell said. “I appreciate your personal concern, but I don’t share it. My concern is for the building and the integrity of this architectural firm.” He paused. “Is that understood?”

It was almost like a chanted response: “Yes, sir,” Nat said.

He walked out of the great office and past Mollie Wu’s desk. Mollie watched him, tiny, pretty as a doll, bright and quick. “Problems, friend?”

“Problems.” Nat said. “In batches.” The implications were beginning to appear now, the almost endless possible permutations and combinations that could arise from deviations from the impeccably considered and intricately woven electrical design. “And at the moment,” he said, “I don’t know where to begin solving them.” Simple truth.

“The longest journey begins with but a single step,” Mollie said, “and whether that’s Confucius or Chairman Mao, I haven’t the foggiest notion, but I offer it for what it’s worth.”

Nat walked back to his own office and sat down to stare at the drawings thumbtacked to the wall and at the heap of design-change-authorization copies lying on his desk. The two formed an explosive mixture, and whether he had signed the changes or not was unimportant. What was important was that they had been issued and perhaps followed, comers cut, as Giddings had said, where no comers ought to have been cut, substitutions made where no substitutions ought to have been allowed. Why? Wrong question, he told himself. Right now his concern was properly with effect, not cause. And there was only one place where the effects could be discovered, and that was not here at his desk.

He gathered the change-order copies, stuffed them into the manila envelope, and tucked the envelope in his pocket. Out at the reception desk he paused only long enough to tell Jennie where he was going. “To the Tower, honey. I doubt if you’ll be able to reach me. I’ll call in.”

2

The sun was high enough now to penetrate the cluster of downtown buildings and reach the floor of the Tower Plaza where the police barricades were in place, breaking the area into two great halves separated at the center by a passageway from the temporary platform against the arcade to the street.

“Where the VIPs will get out of their cars,” Patrolman Shannon said, “and smile at the little people and walk like kings and queens to the platform—”

“Where the speeches will all be the same,” Barnes said. “They will praise motherhood, the United States of America, and man’s unquenchable spirit. One or two of the pols will slip in a little pitch for votes—” He stopped. His smile was apologetic.

“It’s only,” Shannon said smiling to himself, “that you are against kings and queens and such, and I glory in them. Think how it would be if there were only little gray people, no giants to dream and to do, no great tales to remember, no grand buildings like this one that even shut out the sun. What about that, Frank?”

“Maybe better.”

“You,” Shannon said, “have seen the insides of too

many books, and in them too many confused ideas.” His gesture took in the entire shining building. “How would you like to have had a hand in building this? A great gleaming tower reaching to the sky, and your name on the bronze plate to say forever that you were a part of it? How about that?”

“‘General Contractor,’” Barnes read, “‘Bertrand McGraw and Company.’” He was smiling again, this time with open amusement. “The Irish do get around, don’t they? Do you suppose McGraw worked his way up from hod carrier honestly?”

“Did you work your way up from slave honestly, you black rascal?”

“Yassuh. boss.” They smiled at each other.

“I have met Bert McGraw,” Shannon said, “and a fine gentleman he is. On Saint Pat’s Day on Fifth Avenue—”

“Playing his pipes, no doubt.”

“Skirling,” Shannon said. “You skirl pipes. You play pianos and fiddles and other lesser instruments.” He paused. “Ben McGraw will be here this afternoon. In his place I would be too, to take my share of the glory.”

“I think I’d go somewhere and hide,” Barnes said. He paused. “I’d be afraid of hubris.”

“You and your big words.”

“A challenge to the gods,” Barnes said, “and the feeling that they might lower the boom. The same thing that makes you knock on wood when you talk of something good that’s* going to happen.”

For a moment Shannon was thoughtful. Then he smiled. “Like I said, Frank, the insides of too many books. What could your gods possibly do to this lovely structure?”

The building is alive, John Connors thought, its presence is almost palpable. His footsteps echoed in the empty hallway, and corridors, and only black closed doors stared at him as he passed; but through the air-conditioning ducts he could hear the building’s respiration, and deep in its core he could feel the life force throbbing, and he wondered if in its heart of hearts the living building was afraid. Of him? Why not? It was a pleasant concept; it lifted his spirits. He was only a tiny speck against the immensity of the structure, but the power was his, and he savored the knowledge as he walked, toolbox in hand, hearing the echoes of his own footsteps and the turbulence of his thoughts.

Nat walked the thirty blocks from the Caldwell offices to the World Tower building, in the exercise finding some relief from anger and stress.

“I guess some men play games for the same reason,” he had told Zib once, “to get their minds off a problem and let it chum around down in the subconscious. I walk instead. I’m not anti-game. It’s just that when I was growing up, we did other things. We fished, we hunted, we packed into the mountains on foot or on horseback; in the winter we skied and snowshoed.” The sense of not belonging here in the East still made itself felt. “A primitive life,” he said. “All the things you had, I hadn’t. I’m not a very good swimmer. I don’t know a thing about sailing. No golf, no tennis.”

And Zib had said, “Maybe those things were important to me once, but they aren’t now. I married you for other reasons. Maybe because I was sick and tired of the prep-school stereotypes I grew up with.” She smiled suddenly, devastatingly. “Or maybe it was because you didn’t try to get me into bed on our first date.”

“Backward of me. Would you have gone?”

“Possibly. No, probably. I found you attractive.”

“I found you stunning and a little frightening, so very sure of yourself here in-your own surroundings.”

True then, still true after almost three years of marriage. He walked steadily, pausing only for traffic. He disliked the city, but it was where, as they said, the action was; and if the dirt and the noise and the crowding, the snarling, snapping attitudes, the unhappy faces were all around, why, so were the ferment and the excitement, the satisfaction of finding and being able to talk with your peers.

But most important, there was Ben Caldwell with his artist’s eye and his infinite attention to detail which some called genius. The seven years spent under that man made up for anything else.

Oh, one day Nat would leave the city; that knowledge was sure and deep. Back to the big country where he belonged. And when that time came, he wondered, would Zib go with him or choose to stay behind in her own familiar scene? Hard to tell, and not pleasant to contemplate.

There were police scattered in the Tower Plaza. Nat looked at them with surprise, which was foolish, he told himself, because of course in the city, where bombing threats and violence are not unknown, there would be cops to handle an event such as the Tower opening. It just went to show that he didn’t think.

There was a black cop near the door, listening to a big uniformed Irishman. The black cop looked at Nat and smiled politely. “Can we help you, sir?”

Nat took out the badge he wore on the job. “Architect,” he said. “Caldwell Associates.” He nodded at the bronze plaque beside the doorway. “Just going in to have a look around.”

The black cop was smiling no longer. “Is anything wrong?” His dark eyes were quick on the badge, and he added, looking up again. “Mr. Wilson?” He studied Nat’s face.

“Routine,” Nat said, and thought, for God’s sake, that he sounded like nothing so much as a character straight out of Dragnet.

“It was right then that I really began to wonder,” Patrolman Barnes said later, “but it was still only a kind of hunch that maybe we ought to have stopped that fellow with the toolbox. And you know what a stink that kind of unauthorized action can cause. The Department exceeding its authority, throwing its weight around at innocent citizens, that kind of thing.” Pause. “Still, I should have followed that hunch.”

Now he said, “If there is anything wrong, Mr. Wilson—I mean, if there’s anything we can do—”

“What he means,” the Irish cop said, “is that we aim to please, we boys in blue. Never let it be said that we refused to rescue a drowning man or help an old lady to cross the street. Be our guest,” the big Irish cop said, and went on with what he was saying, which had to do with off-track betting—if you were a betting man, that was.

I am not a betting man, Nat thought as he walked inside. Another lack, he supposed, because Zib loved the horses and a point-spread bet on football games and things like tailgate picnics up at West Point before the game at Michie Stadium. I am a dull boy, Nat told himself.

Inside the concourse he hesitated. He had no real destination. Coming to the building where he had spent almost every working day during the last five days was an automatic act, arising from the kind of impulse that forces you to see for yourself the empty stall after you have been told that the horse is missing—not that there was really anything he could do until work crews were on the job again and specific change authorizations could be checked out by tearing into the structure to see what changes, if any, had actually been made.

But he was here, and the same impulse was still at work, and he walked the empty concourse around the core of the building to the banks of elevators and pushed the button for a fourteenth-floor local.

He heard the soft whir of the high-speed cable as the elevator began to move. Simultaneously the fourteenth-floor light showed on the indicator panel and floor by floor began to drop. Nat stepped inside as the doors opened, and there, his finger poised over the button, he stood motionless.

Faintly, within the hollow core of the building that housed the multiple elevator shafts, he could hear another cable whirring, an elevator rising or dropping at its swift pace.

The doors of his elevator closed automatically, and he was in total darkness. He found the light switch on the panel, turned it on, and stood for a few moments listening. The whirring of the cable continued to echo softly within the building’s core. And then it stopped and there was silence.

All you can do is guess, he told himself, it could be anybody, and he could be on any floor between here and the mast, a hundred and twenty-five floors up. So? You are jumpy, Nathan Hale; those fake change authorizations have unstrung you. Forget it, he told himself. He pushed the button and the elevator began to rise smoothly.

He left the elevator on the eighth floor, and walked back down a single flight of stairs to the second of the building’s five mechanical-electrical floors.

It was here, as belowground, and on the forty-fifth, eighty-fifth, and one-hundred-twenty-third floors, that even an unknowledgeable stranger would begin to comprehend some of the building’s vastness and complexity.

Here the cables thick as a man’s leg brought up from the bowels of the building primary power from the nearby Con Edison substation, fourteen thousand volts—far above electrocution strength.

And here the brooding transformers stepped down the voltage to usable levels for the heating, cooling, breathing, and electric-service needs of each of the building’s vertical sections.

The odor of the walled-off floor area was the odor of a ship’s engine room of heated metal and oil, of rubber and paint, of filtered air and wiring insulation and softly whirring machinery obeying the master, electricity.

Electricity made no sound—although transformers themselves gave off a faint hum—and it could not be seen. But it was the raw stuff of power, even more, of life itself for the building.

Without electricity the great structure for all its cunning complexity was merely a lump, a dead thing composed of hundreds of thousands of tons of steel and concrete, of tempered-glass windows and aluminum column covers, of cables and ducting and wiring and mechanisms complicated beyond belief—useless.

Without electrical power the building was without heat, light, ventilation, operable elevators or escalators, computer monitors and their overseeing controls.

Without electrical power the building was blind and deaf, unable to speak or even to breathe—a dead city within a city, a monument to man’s ingenuity, vanity, intelligence, and doubtful wisdom; a Great Pyramid, a Stonehenge, or an Angkor Wat, a curiosity, an anachronism.

Nat stared at the main electrical cable neatly spliced to give off its enormous power here and yet carry that same power, undiminished, to the next higher mechanical floor, and so on to the building’s top. Here was the building’s life center exposed—open-heart surgery came to mind.

He was conscious of the envelope with the bogus change authorizations in his pocket, and again his anger was steady and deep, pushing at his thoughts.

He could understand Giddings’s controlled rage because its roots were in him too, and for the same reason a job of work was a sacred thing.

Oh, many people, perhaps most people these days, didn’t see it that way—Zib for one—but what those people thought in this area was unimportant.

To those who conceived and built the enduring structures—buildings, bridges, aqueducts, dams, nuclear power plants, massive stadia—the form was not important; to them the work was its own reward and it was not to be flawed, profaned by carelessness or, worse, by intent. It was to be as nearly perfect as man could make it or it was not a finished job, and what ought to have been a source of pride became instead a matter of shame.

Thinking of this now, for the first time even in his thoughts Nat let the anger loose. “Some son of a bitch,” he said slowly, quietly to the great spliced cable and the brooding transformers, “has messed with this job, and whether what he did is serious or not, we’ll have to find out, and we will. And we’ll find him too, and hang him up by his balls.”

Talking to inanimate things was silly, of course. Talking to trees and birds and chattering squirrels or soaring hawks was silly too, and he had done that most of his life. So I’m silly, Nat thought as he walked back to the stairs; but somehow, the promise given, he felt a little better. He took the elevator to the next mechanical-electrical floor.

He found nothing; he had expected no more. His visit to each ship’s engine-room area was merely a gesture, automatic as a householder’s stroll in his patio each night. The floors between were empty and echoing; they smelled faintly of the newness of their materials—tile, wall paint, varnished wood door surfaces—as a new car driven from the showroom smelled of its new-car odor.

As he rose within the building, local elevator after local elevator, the city’s skyline began to drop beneath him until on the hundred-and-twenty-third floor he could look down on even the flat tops of the twin Trade Center towers nearby.

He went on, stepping out at last into the Tower Room on the top floor, just beneath the communications mast. The elevator doors closed and immediately he heard the whir of the high-speed cables as the elevator began to drop. He frowned at the lighted down arrow, puzzled. Summoned by whom? he wondered, and found no answer.

He watched the red light and listened to the cable’s whir as he tried to estimate how many floors the elevator dropped before the cable was silent. Ten? Fifteen? Impossible to tell.

He listened as the cable sound resumed. This time there was a long period of waiting before the cable was again silent. All the way to the concourse? So? Forget it, he told himself again, and turned away.

The view from this top floor was unobstructed. There lay the harbor, the Narrows Bridge, the shining ocean beyond. Nat thought of what Ben Caldwell had told him: the first piece of America an incoming ship sees is the shining communications mast directly above this floor. He could understand the sea captain’s thinking that had jumped immediately to the ancient Pharos, for a thousand years guiding ships into the Nile.

Northward the city lay in its even rectangular pattern of streets and avenues, the mid-town towers from this distance and height looking like building blocks in someone’s tabletop model. Unreal, even after all this time of familiarity.

He turned from the windows as the faint sound of an elevator started up again. This time the green light over the doors was on. He watched it and waited, wondering at his sudden sense of tension.

The cable sound stopped. The green light went out. The doors opened and Giddings stepped out. Behind him the doors closed quietly, but no light went on. “I wondered if I’d find you here,” Giddings said.

“And why not?”

Giddings shrugged. He looked around the Tower Room. Tables wert already set out along one core wall. Trays of canapés bottles, glasses, bowls of nuts and chips, all of the paraphernalia of the standard cocktail party would be along shortly, together with waiters and bartenders, maids to empty ashtrays and take away dirty glasses while the talk went on and on and on. Giddings looked again at Nat. “Looking for something?” Giddings said.

“Are you?”

“Look sonny—” Giddings began.

Nat shook his head. “Not that way. If you want to ask a question ask it. If you want to say something, say it. I’ve just decided that after five years, I don’t much like you, Will I don’t think I ever did.”

“And now,” Giddings said, “since I waved the change authorizations at you, you’ve found a reason, is that it?”

“Is that what you think?”

“And if it is?”

“Then screw you,” Nat said.

Giddings’s expression turned reflective. “Not very elegant language for an architect,” he said. His voice was mild.

The moment of conflict was past. But, Nat thought, it would return; it was inevitable. “I wasn’t always an architect.” Horse wrangler, paratrooper, fire jumper, student. In the meantime, “You just came up from the concourse?” Giddings took his time. “Why?”

“Wert you in the building before?”

“I said why.”

“Because somebody was.” All along it had puzzled him; now he brought it out in the open for examination. “I heard elevators,” Nat said. He paused. “Cops all over the plaza. Did they stop you?”

Giddings was frowning now. “They did.”

“They stopped me too.” Not strictly true, but there had been that conversation.

“And you’re asking who else is in the building,” Giddings said, “and why?”

“Exactly.”

“Maybe,” Giddings said slowly, “you made it up. Maybe there isn’t—”

Giddings stopped and turned, and both men looked at the red light that had come on over the elevator doors; both heard the sound of the elevator moving. They looked at each other.

“I don’t make things up,” Nat said.

“This time,” Giddings said, “I believe you.”

“Remember it next time too.”

All the way down to the empty concourse and out into the plaza. Nat found the same black cop with his big Irish mate. Giddings stood by watching, listening. “He and I,” Nat said, pointing at Giddings. “Anyone else go in while you’ve been here?”

Barnes, the black cop said, “Why do you ask, Mr. Wilson?”

Shannon, the Irishman, said, “Big building. Other doors.” He shrugged. “Maintenance men, other poor working stiffs.”

Nat said, “Did anyone go in?”

“One man,” Barnes said. “An electrician. He said there was a trouble call.”

“Who made it?” This was Giddings.

“I thought of that,” Barnes said. He hesitated. “Maybe a little too late.” He paused. “Is it important, Mr. Wilson?”

“I don’t know.” Simple truth. He was conscious again of the change-order copies in his pocket and he knew that it was the fact of their existence that was making him jumpy. But there could be no connection between them and whoever had gone into the building because the change orders applied only to work in progress, and work was finished, or near enough. “He’s riding the elevators,” he said.

Shannon’s face opened in a huge grin. “Now where’s the harm in that, will you tell me? A man gets the yearning to ride an elevator, does the sky fall like Chicken Little said?” The brogue was heavy.

Giddings said, “An electrician. What was he carrying? Anything?”

Barnes said, “A toolbox.”

Shannon said, “Oh, no, Frank, you forget. It was a bright shiny atomic bomb.” He spread his hands to show its size. “Green it was on the one side and purple on the other with sparks shooting out, lovely to see—”

“Easy, Mike,” Barnes said. He spoke to Nat. “Just a toolbox. And he was wearing his hard hat.”

“Has he come out?”

“If he has,” Barnes said, “it was by a different door.” He hesitated. “And they are locked. Right, Mr. Wilson?”

“If they aren’t,” Giddings said, “they damn well ought to be.” He looked at Nat. “We’d best check.

The doors around the great building were locked. Nat said, “No watchmen? No security people?’

“On any ordinary day,” Giddings said, “by now this place would be crawling with work crews. As you damn well know. And anybody who didn’t belong in the building—”

“I wonder,” Nat said. At least he was thinking again. “I never thought of it before, but in something as big as this, with as many people milling around—” He shook his head. “Fish in the sea, inconspicuous.” He was silent for a few moments, staring up at the arched vaulting of the concourse. “It never even occurred to me,” he said at last, looking again at Giddings. “Don’t you see it?” Giddings shook his head slowly. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

Nat said slowly, “We design a building to be open, for people to come and go easily.”

“So?”

“So,” Nat said, “by its very nature it is—vulnerable.”

“To what?”

Nat lifted his hands and let them fall. “Anything. Anybody.”

3

For John Connors riding the silent elevators was an interesting, even pleasurable business; slick smooth-functioning machinery had always fascinated him. And if anybody was looking for him, as sooner or later they would be, riding the elevators and sending empty cars up and down the multiple shafts was probably the best way to confuse a search.

He was familiar with the building by day—ordinary workday, that was. What he had not realized was what the building would be like empty and echoing, just himself and the living, breathing structure.

It was like a cathedral when nobody else was there—only more so. He tried to think of an analogy. Imagine an empty Yankee Stadium, he told himself.

Hearing only his own footsteps echoing in a corridor, looking out of the rows of windows, the world beneath him, and seeing only the immensity of the sky, thinking that he had one chance and only one to do what had to be done, was like being on his knees in prayer, just himself in His presence, and echoing through his mind the hush and the expectation of something great about to happen.

Something he had heard once, perhaps at a rally, he didn’t really remember, but the statement had stuck in his mind “A few determined men changing the course of great events.” He liked that. It had a grand ring. Determined men. Heroes. Like hijacking a plane and getting clean away. Like terrorizing the entire Olympic Village. A few determined men. Or one man alone. They listen to you then. Trudging along corridors with his toolbox, riding the elevators—it was almost like being inside an immense funhouse.

Electricity, of course, was the key here. Electricity seemed to be the key to everything these days. Connors remembered that grid blackout a few years back, and how everything, but everything, had come to a full stop and some people had even thought the end of the world had come. Not everybody, of course, because nine months later almost to the day there had been that crush in the city’s maternity hospitals to testify that some had spent the darkened hours profitably. But at first there had been near-panic, and that was the thought to cling to.

He was no electrical engineer nor even an experienced electrician, despite what he had told that black cop, but he had worked in the building and he knew in a general way how the power distribution was handled. On each of those electrical-mechanical floors was what is called a splicing chamber, and whenever he could, Connors had spent a little time watching the subcontractor’s men at work, peeling back the steel-wire armor encasing the electrical cables and then peeling back the vinyl jacket under that, and finally getting to the heart of the matter, the big inside wires that actually carried the current.

He knew that through step-down transformers each mechanical-electrical floor furnished usable electrical power for a vertical section of the building, and that each also passed along in original strength to the next higher mechanical-electrical floor the electricity coming in from the substation outside the building. He didn’t know what the strength of that primary current was, but it had to be high, maybe as much as five hundred volts, because why, otherwise, would they bother to step it down?

His first thought had been to attack the electrical installation that serviced the upper stories of the building, thereby isolating the Tower Room, where the reception was to be held. He had in his toolbox an eighteen-inch wrecking bar and some stolen plastic explosive, and with them, he figured, he could stir up a considerable fuss and send sparks flying all over the place just like the Fourth of July.

But the more he thought about it, the more he wondered why he limited his efforts to the top floors. Why not attack the basic installation down in the bowels of the building where the power cables led directly in from the substation? Why bunt, when a triple would clear the bases? It was an appealing thought.

In the meantime, all he had to do was stay out of sight, and that ought to be easy. But just in case luck played him foul, it would be well to be prepared.

He opened the toolbox and took out the wrecking bar, hooked at one end, splayed and canted at the other. It was a weapon a man could use, and he had no qualms about using it if necessary.

They were setting up the low platform for the ceremony in the plaza when Nat and Giddings came out of the building Giddings looked at it with distaste. “Speeches,” he said. “The governor congratulating the mayor and the mayor congratulating Grover Frazee and one of the senators saying what a great thing the building is for humanity—” He stopped.

“Maybe it is, at that,” Nat said. He was thinking again of Ben Caldwell’s reference to the Pharos. “A world communications center—”

“That’s crap and you know it. It’s just another big goddam building and we already have too many of them.”

It was a love-hate relationship Giddings had with the building he had helped create, Nat thought. Well, as far as that went, he vacillated himself between pride and admiration on the one hand and on the other a resentment that the inanimate structure had long ago taken on a personality of its own, dominating all who served it. “You stay here and swear at it,” he said.

“And where are you going?”

The friction between them was threatening to break out into open hostility. Well, let it, if that was what had to be, but Nat would not precipitate it. “Where somebody ought to have gone earlier,” he said. “To see Joe Lewis about these changes.” He walked off across the plaza, unpinning his badge as he went.

This time, in the interest of speed, he took a subway uptown to Grand Central, walking only the two blocks back along Park to the Architects Building, and rode on the elevator to the tenth floor, where the sign on the glass door read: Joseph Lewis, Electrical Engineer. The offices and drafting rooms occupied almost the entire floor.

Joe Lewis was in shirtsleeves in his big cluttered office. He was a small man, quick, sharp, direct. “If it’s a new project,” he said, “tell Ben I’m up to my ass in work for the next six months. If he can wait—”

Nat tossed the manila envelope on the desk. He watched Joe look at it, pick it up, and empty the change-order copies onto his blotter. One by one he read them swiftly, dropped them as if they were live things. He looked at Nat at last, anger plain. “You issued these? Who in hell gave you the right?”

“I never saw them before this morning?”

“That’s your’ signature.”

Nat shook his head. “My name, but somebody else wrote it.” Like a word too often repeated, the truth was beginning to lose its meaning. I’ll end up not believing it myself, he thought.

“Then who?” Joe said.

“I haven’t any idea.”

Joe tapped the papers with his finger. “Were these changes actually made?”

“We’ll have to see.” It was a conversation without point so far, but the groundwork had to be established.

“And what do you want from me? I gave you the drawings, the whole electrical design. If the job was done according to them, and not these—”

“Nobody’s blaming you.” At the moment, Nat thought, but nobody is really in the clear yet. “What I want from you is an order of priority. Which of these do we look at—”

“All of them. Every single goddam one, even if you have to tear the building apart. I’m going to insist on it. Damn it, man, the electrical design of that building is in my name.”

“And ours. I realize it.” Why couldn’t intelligent people see what was right in front of them? “But which do we look into first? And second? And so on? You’re the expert. Give us a list in order of importance and we’ll get McGraw’s people on it.”

Lewis sat down abruptly. “McGraw,” he said. “Bert wouldn’t have anything to do with this. He shook his head. “Impossible. You try cutting comers on a Bert McGraw job, fishing for kickbacks, bribing inspectors—and you get your head handed to you on a platter.”

Nat sat down too. “I had heard that, but I had no way of knowing whether it was true.” It could put a different light on matters.

“Next to building highways,” Lewis said, calmer now, “there is probably more room for hanky-panky in the big building construction business than any other. The rackets boys have moved in and out for years. Longer. Usually, but not always, public buildings. Over in Jersey—” He shook his head. “Certain Jersey counties, I wouldn’t take an electrical-engineering job if it had diamonds hanging on it. Over here is better. Most times. Far as I know, the fast-buck boys only tried once on a McGraw job.” He smiled. It was a bitter smile, strangely contented.

So Jot Lewis was one of those to whom the job was sacred Nat thought, one of the good ones. He said, “What happened?”

“They sent around some persuaders,” Lewis said. “All McGraw said was that he wouldn’t deal with small fry. The big boy or nobody.” He paused: “It was a big building, lots of money that might be plucked, and maybe only a beginning, so the top boy came himself.” He paused again. “McGraw took him up where they could talk in private—up as far as the steel had gone, forty, forty-five floors, nobody around, and the street a long, long way down. ‘Now, you son of a bitch,’ McGraw said after the rackets bum had had a good look and hadn’t liked what he saw, ‘do you want to ride back down in the hoist and walk away and never come back, or do you want to go down the fast way, right off the steel, right now, and they pick you up off the street with blotting paper? Make up your goddam mind.” Lewis paused a third time. “They never bothered him again. Some men you can’t push, you know, and it isn’t worthwhile even to try.”

Food for thought. Nat sat quiet for a little time, setting what he knew of Bert McGraw against the tale he had just heard. It fit. There was in the old man an instant willingness to shoot the works, roll the dice for whatever was on the table. It showed, unmistakable. The racketeer may have been as close to death on other occasions, but Nat was willing to bet never as openly. Leave McGraw out of the puzzle.

“Have you ever worked before with Paul Simmons?” he said.

“Ever since he married McGraw’s daughter and McGraw set him up.”

“Is that how it was? I never knew.”

“Paul’s a bright boy.” Lewis stared thoughtfully at the change orders. “You think he might have issued these? Put your name on them?” Slowly he shook his head. “It doesn’t figure. Sooner or later these would turn up, as they have, and then everybody asks, ‘Who benefits?’ The electrical subcontractor is the obvious man: he gets his bid price for doing substandard work, money in his pocket. But it’s too obvious, too easy. And why does he need it anyway? He’s got a going business and Bert McGraw as a father-in-law, and an obvious Ivy League pedigree, so there was probably money to begin with. Why mess with something like this?”

“So,” Nat said, and his smile was without amusement, “nobody else had any good reason to issue change authorizations—and my name is on them. Dandy. Will you have that list made out for me? First things first, no matter how deep we have to go. It’s got to be right.”

Again he walked; it was the automatic reaction. Up Park to Forty-second, across to Fifth, and again uptown. He saw none of those who passed him; he saw only traffic lights and automobiles that might threaten. And he saw his thoughts.

The change orders were real. That was point one.

Either they had been acted upon—substitutions had been made and work avoided, with substandard performance’ the result—or they had to be ignored. That was point two.

Computers, using binary numbers, break a problem down tilt same way—either/or, yes/no—at each step. The method is almost foolproof—assuming that the right questions are asked, the right steps taken—but the difficulty that the steps multiply exponentially, and the simple harmless-looking 1,2,4, series rapidly turns into a horror whose possibilities run into the millions.

And that, he thought almost angrily, is precisely why they have computers, which did him no good at all. It was the kind of random thinking that frequently interfered when you tried to concentrate.

He crossed Fifty-ninth Street into the park, and at once for him everything changed. His pace slowed and lengthened, his mind seemed to ease, and he began to notice his surroundings. Here there were trees and grass and bare rock and even the sky seemed different, bluer, less tortured by civilization. Oh, there were no vistas such as he had once known, no distant mountains perpetually snow-capped no clear dry air to breathe, no real silence. But it was better, and his thoughts ran more easily.

If the change orders had never been acted upon, then there was no reason for their existence—true or false?

Not necessarily true, because they could have been issued, could they not, for a different purpose from the obvious one of cutting comers? Such as? Such as pointing a finger of suspicion at one Nat Wilson. How about that?

Why Nat had no idea. As far as he knew, nobody would want to go to that length merely to discredit him.

Was he so sure of that?

He stopped at a vending wagon and bought a bag of peanuts then he walked on, away from the zoo area, into the depths of the park. He sat down on a rock and waited with a mountain man’s patience until one of the park squirrels came over to check him out. “Here you are,” Nat said and tossed a peanut. “You’re welcome,” he added as the squirrel dashed off with his loot.

Was he so sure that nobody would try to booby-trap him? It was, he told himself, a pretty damn big assumption.

He had come, in effect, out of nowhere, the mountain West, with no friends here in the big time, no letters of introduction, no handles to grasp for leverage. And he had walked in with his portfolio and waited until he could see Ben Caldwell—it took four days—and had walked out with a job any number of young brushed-up well-recommended architects would have given their eyeteeth for. Seven years ago, the preliminary thinking just beginning on the World Tower.

The squirrel was back. He sat up and studied Nat. Nothing happened. Cautiously, he lowered his forepaws, rushed forward eighteen inches, and sat up again.

“Okay,” Nat said, “it’s a good act. Here.” Another peanut.

“Did I step on toes then?” Nat asked aloud. “Have I stepped on toes since?” And the answer, was probably, even if he hadn’t realized it. So the possibility existed that the change orders had been issued merely to point a finger at him. Uncomfortable thought.

But suppose they had been acted upon, something he could not know until work of investigation actually began.

Then, of course, the immediate inference was the profit motive: reducing the quality of material and workmanship, thus increasing the profit margin between cost and payment for someone. Who? Paul Simmons was still the obvious candidate. But if Simmons had all going for him that Joe Lewis had mentioned, why would he take the chance of exposure? Nat had no answer.

There was a third possibility. Suppose the orders had been issued (by whom?) and acted upon, but innocently? What if Paul Simmons or his people had thought that these change orders represented an actual change in thinking on the part of the architects and engineers, and, theirs not to question why, they had gone ahead without any taint of avarice? That kind of thinking led in different directions.

Nat cracked, opened, and ate a peanut. It tasted good. It occurred to him that he had had no lunch. He ate another peanut and then was aware that the squirrel was back, with a friend, and both were sitting almost at his feet, watching, waiting, “Sorry, fellows,” Nat said, and tossed down two peanuts, left and right.

One more possibility, he told himself, and this one he had apparently tried to push down into the ooze of his subconscious in order to forget it, but here it came bubbling to the surface. What if the changes were aimed not at him and not at profit, but at the building itself? Did that make any kind of sense? Unfortunately, nauseatingly, it did. Or could.

Without calculations, which Nat could make but Joe Lewis and his people, the experts, could make faster, there was no telling how vital, or lethal, the changes were.

Buildings were not designed, as aircraft or space vehicles were, right down to the ultimate tolerances of their materials. Rather, because weight was not the basic problem, there was a safety factor calculated into every structural member, every cable, every wiring specification. Programmed right into the design calculations were remote contingencies such as winds of 150 miles an hour, far in excess of anything the city had ever known, or massive surges of electrical power almost impossible to conceive.

Because of the Tower’s height, lightning strikes were accepted as normal; the mammoth steel skeleton would carry the charge harmlessly into the ground, as it had already done often enough during construction.

Earthquakes were the remotest of possibilities: no fault area lay nearby. Nevertheless, the foundations of the building went down to bedrock, that tortured schist that is the city’s backbone, and with its firm grip on the solid base and its strong flexible structure, the building could ride out a quake of more than moderate intensity without damage.

In short, every menace that could be imagined had been anticipated, and defenses prepared. Computerized calculations had been made. Models had been built and tested. The great building, as designed, was as durable as man’s ingenuity could make it.

AS DESIGNED.

But change a little here, a little there in the wrong places—and durability, function, even safety can become mere illusion.

Why would anyone threaten a building’s integrity in that fashion? Nat had no idea, but in a world where violence seems to be the norm and irresponsibility is exalted, mere sabotage of a building seems far from impossible.

The two squirrels were back again, and here came a third, zeroing in on the easy human mark. “There are times.” Nat said, “when I think we ought to give the world back to you fellows. Like lemmings, we could walk into the sea. Here.” He emptied the bag of peanuts at his feet and stood up.

4

Bert McGraw was in his office high above the street with all those windows looking out at the city’s buildings, a number of which he had had a hand in constructing. Usually he enjoyed the view. Right now he was not sure, because sticking up in the center of the skyline was the World Tower, and what Giddings had been telling him and showing him about that structure was enough to curdle a man’s enthusiasm even on as bright and shining a late-spring day as this.

McGraw glared at the copies of the change authorizations on his desk. He looked again at Giddings. “Just what do we know?” he demanded. He had a deep-seated feeling that his hope was forlorn; that if examined carefully, the unpleasant appearances would not go away. But all a man could do was try. “Pieces of paper,” McGraw said, “and not even originals at that.”

“You’re fancy-footing, Bert,” Giddings said, “and it isn’t like you. Those are honest Xerox copies of hanky-panky that’s been going on under your nose—and, yes, I admit it, undermine as well. How many of the changes were carried out I don’t know yet. How serious they are I don’t know yet. Why the changes were issued I can only guess.”

McGraw heaved himself out of his chair and went to stand at the windows. Time was when he might have taken a thing like this in stride, or near enough. Now it was like a sneak punch to the kidney, and the world he looked out at tended to blur. It was not the first such experience, and it worried him.

“You’re overweight,” his Mary had told him, “and overworked and you aren’t as young as you were, and that’s what’s the matter with you, Bert McGraw. Once upon a time, you could spend all night drinking and being a terrible grand fellow and come home bright as a daisy, almost. But you aren’t that young any more. Neither am I, more’s the pity. So stop your worrying.”

The world swam back into focus. McGraw turned away from the windows. “Young Nat Wilson’s name,” he said. “Did the damn fool actually sign them?”

“He says no.”

“And what do you say?” There was force in the old man yet.

“I don’t see why he would,” Giddings said. “What does he gain? He can stand by the drawings and say no changes allowed and be well within his rights. So why would he stick his neck out?”

McGraw walked to his chair and dropped into it. “All right,” he said. “At the least what we’ve got is confusion. On the face of those pieces of paper, the building, that great goddam beautiful building isn’t up to specifications, and that puts a foot in the door for all sorts of trouble—even, God help us, legal trouble.”

“And work,” Giddings said. “Walls are going to have to be opened up. Circuits are going to have to be checked out.” He shook his head.

“We’ll do what has to be done,” McGraw said sharply. He paused, and the belligerence disappeared. “It isn’t that I’m thinking of.” Was he being mystical, even superstitious, as Mary, bless her, sometimes said he was, the bog Irish in him coming out? “You’ve seen it yourself,” he said. “Little things go wrong on a job, accidents happen, shortages hold you up, weather turns bad, you’re caught by a strike—” He spread his hands and rolled them into fists, studied them as if they were enemies. “And sometimes,” he said at last, “the string of bad luck doesn’t end. It’s as if, God help me, some kind of bad spell has been laid on and not even a priest’s blessing can lift it.” He paused again. “Do you know what I mean, Will?” Giddings was thinking again of Pete Janowski walking off the steel at the sixty-fifth floor for no reason at all. “I know what you mean,’ he said.

McGraw sighed heavily. “I hate to admit it,” he said, “but there are two buildings in this town—I won’t put a name to either one but I built them both—I wouldn’t even walk into, let alone ride an elevator in.” He shook away the thought. “Let it go. It’s neither here nor there.” He sat up straight in his chair and his voice turned brisk. “Why the changes were issued you can only guess?” he said. “All right, guess away.”

“You aren’t going to like it,” Giddings said.

“Be damned to that.” It was honest anger the old man felt now, solid and deep and strong. “We’ve been diddled, you for the owners, me for myself. By God, I want to know who and why.”

Giddings shrugged. “The changes are all electrical.”

“So?”

“With what I’ve seen,” Giddings said, “all the changes call for lesser material or simplified circuitry.” He paused. “What does that say to you?”

There was no hesitation. “That somebody was trying to save money,” McGraw said. He heaved himself out of his chair again and walked to stare at a blurred world through the windows. Over his shoulder he said, “And the man who saved money, you’re saying, are you not, is the man who holds the electrical contract?” As before, the world swam slowly back into focus. McGraw turned. He kept his hands behind his back lest they demonstrate the tension that was in him. “Paul Simmons—it’s him you’re pointing a finger at, is it?”

“I told you I was just guessing.”

“So you did.”

-“And,” Giddings said, “I told you you weren’t going to like it.”

“No,” McGraw said in a new, quiet voice, “I don’t like it. I don’t like you thinking it, and I don’t like thinking it myself.” He brought his hands into view at last, fingers spread and hooked, and he studied them for a long time in silence. When he looked at Giddings again, his face was almost gray. “We’ll find out, Will,” he said. “If I have to pick him up with these two hands and bend him until he breaks, we’ll find out. I promise you. In the meantime—” The words stopped suddenly as if the old man had forgotten what he was going to say. He rubbed one hand wearily along his jaw.

“In the meantime,” Giddings said as if he had seen no lapse, “I’ll try to find out what has to be done.”

McGraw lowered himself into his chair. He nodded “You do that, Will. And let me know.” He took a deep breath. His voice was strong again. “We stand behind our jobs. We always have.”

“I never doubted it,” Giddings said.

McGraw sat motionless in his big chair long after Giddings was gone. He felt old and tired and reluctant to do what had to be done. Time was when he would have gone roaring out of his office at the merest whiff of suspicion that someone had been doing the dirty, whoever it was, in-law, kin, saint, or devil. But age changes a man, some of the certainties become less sure, the boundary lines blur, and McGraw’s temptation was to refuse to believe that someone near, someone in the family had transgressed.

The old man was proud of Paul Simmons, his son-in-law. For one thing, Simmons was what used to be called a gentleman—Andover, Yale, that kind of thing, not McGraw’s breed of alley cat at all. And Patty fit right into Paul’s circle too, and that was further cause for pride.

McGraw and Mary lived still in the house in Queens that McGraw had bought with the earnings from his first sizable construction job thirty years and more ago. Paul and Patty lived in Westchester, only a few miles but an entire culture away from the McGraw house. You cherish the American Dream that your children will have it better than you ever did. And when it happens, you get down on your knees and thank the good Lord for His favor.

Now, McGraw told himself, pick up the phone and call your grand son-in-law a cheat and a thief. Bitter thought.

The copies of the change authorizations were still on his desk. He pushed at them with one big hand. They rustled like dry dead leaves.

It couldn’t have happened, McGraw thought, not on one of his jobs, not under Giddings’s nose, or Nat Wilson’s. And how about the inspectors? Bought? Or simply diddled by the bogus engineering changes?

But it had happened. He knew that in his bones. Oh, it wasn’t the first time on a big construction job that somebody had thimblerigged his part of the work, shifted things around like the man at the carnival with the halfshells and the pea that is never where you thought it was.

Invoices and bills of lading, work orders, specifications, even drawings themselves can all be altered or faked and work signed off that was never done, money passed under the table or left sticking to somebody’s fingers—there are tricks galore, and at one time or another McGraw had encountered them all, and somebody had left the job at a stumbling run with his ass kicked right up between his shoulder blades and maybe a few teeth loosened in the bargain.

The telephone on the desk roused the old man, and he stared at it with distaste for a moment before he picked it up.

“Mrs. Simmons is calling,” his secretary said.

Patty couldn’t know, McGraw told himself. And, goddammit, neither did he know yet for sure that Paul was the kind of scum who would foul up an honest job of work. That, like they said, remained to be proved, and a man was innocent until the proof was in. The hell he was. “Hi, honey,” McGraw said into the phone.

“You wouldn’t like to buy me lunch, would you, Daddy?” Patty’s voice, like Patty herself, was young, fresh, enthusiastic. “I’m at Grand Central, and Paul’s tied up with a business appointment.”

“And none of your friends are available,” McGraw said, “so finally you think of your old man, is that it?” Just the sound of her voice brought a smile to his mind to counteract some of the mental pain.

“That will be a day,” Patty said. “You know I would have married you myself if it hadn’t been for Mother.” And I almost wish I could have, she thought, but left that part unsaid. “Don’t be stingy.”

“All right, honey,” McGraw said. “I have a couple of phone calls to make.” One, anyway. “You get a table at Martin’s. I’ll be along shortly.”

“I’ll have a drink waiting.”

McGraw hung up and buzzed for his secretary. “Get me Paul Simmons, Laura.” He made himself wait quietly.

The secretary came back on the phone almost immediately. “Mr. Simmons is busy on the phone. I’ll try again in a few minutes?”

Reprieve? McGraw thought. Nothing of the goddam sort. It can’t be put off, he told himself. “No,” he said, “let me talk to his secretary.” And when the new pleasant voice came on, “Tell Paul,” McGraw said, “that I want to see him here in my office at one-thirty sharp.”

The secretary hesitated. “Mr. Simmons has a rather full schedule,’ Mr. McGraw. He—”

“Honey,” McGraw said, “you tell him to be here.” He hung up, hoisted himself out of his chair and started for the door. A short pleasant time with Patty, he thought, and then—what was the current word that was so popular?—confrontation. So be it. He squared his shoulders automatically as he walked through the doorway.

In his office Paul Simmons, on the phone, was saying, “I’ve booked a table and I’ve told Patty I had a business engagement, so I do think you owe me your company at lunch.”

“Do you indeed?” Her name was Zib Wilson, Zib Mariowe-that-was. “I was expecting a call from Nat.” Not quite true: she had been hoping for a call from Nat. “But,” she said, “I suppose he’s all tied up with the Tower opening.” She paused. “Come to think of it, why aren’t you?”

“I’m not wedded to my work the way some are. Your loving husband, for example.” Simmons paused. “Lunch, my sweet. Over the first drink I’ll tell you how much I love you. Over the second I’ll tell you in whispers what I’m going to do to you the next time I get you into bed.”

“It sounds fascinating.” There were piles of manuscripts on her desk, the August issue of the book was not yet locked up, nor could it be until she had at least one more piece of usable fiction. On the other hand, a BLT and a cup of bad coffee at her desk did not appeal. “You’ve convinced me,” Zib said. “Where? And when?” Funny, she no longer even thought about Nat and what his reaction would be if he knew she was straying from the fold. Bad fiction, she thought as she jotted down restaurant name and address. “Got it,” she said. “Ciao. And I’ll pay my share. As usual.”

Governor Bent Armitage, down from the capital for the Tower opening, met Grover Frazee for an early lunch at the Harvard Club on Forty-fourth Street. Over his martini the governor said, “The corporation reports you’ve been sending out haven’t really said much, Grover. How are rentals going at the Tower, or is it too early to tell?”

When he chose, Frazee thought, the governor could put on a diffident, baffled, bucolic act that would fool almost anyone. What was it they had called Wendell

Wilkie? The barefoot boy from Wall Street? Same thing. “The picture is still a trifle confused,” Frazee said.

The governor sipped his martini with appreciation. “It used to be,” he said, “that when you ordered a martini, that was it. Now you have to fill out a questionnaire: on the rocks or straight up? vodka or gin? olive, onion, or twist?” And then, with no change of expression, “I asked a question, Grover. Stop serving up ambiguities.”

It was a sore troublesome point. “Rentals,” Frazee said, “are going as well as can be expected under the circumstances.”

The governor could smile like a Disney wolf, white fangs showing. “Twelve words that say exactly nothing. You’d have made a splendid politician. Rentals are not going well. Tell me why.”

“A variety of factors—” Frazee began.

“Grover. You are not addressing a formal stockholders meeting. You are talking to one interested stockholder in the World Tower Corporation. There is a difference. Prospective tenants are staying away in droves? I want to know the reasons. Too much space available? Rentals too high? Money tight? Uncertainty in the business community?” The governor was silent, watching Frazee’s face.

Frazee hesitated. The governor was a self-made man, and there were times, as now, when he set aside his jovial friendly front and allowed you to see some of the force that had carried him, almost, to the presidency of the United States. “All of those reasons,” Frazee said. He hoped that his unconcerned shrug was convincing. “Things will change. They have to. The Trade Center is feeling the same pinch.”

“The Trade Center,” the governor said, “is Port Authority. Do I need to list the Port Authority’s other assets? For them a less than full building complex can be tolerated almost indefinitely. We are a private corporation, and I keep thinking back to the Empire State Building sitting half-empty during the Depression.”

Frazee said nothing.

“What it means,” the governor said, “is that we seem to have picked a piss-poor time to build our shining great goddam building, no?” He finished his drink. “I promised myself two martinis,” he said, and crooked his forefinger at the nearest waiter.

Frazee sat quiet, vaguely depressed. He was not a fearful man, nor did he consider himself less than responsible. When problems arose, he was accustomed to dealing with them and not, like some, sweeping them under the rug. On the other hand, he did not rush into trouble as the governor was prone to do, because if you do not deliberately seek it, sometimes trouble passes you by. The rental situation in the World Tower was not happy-making, but neither was it critical. Yet.

“Cost overrun in construction?” the governor said.

There at least Frazee was on solid ground. “No,” he said. “We’ve held very tight to estimates.” It was a source of pride. “Careful design, careful planning.”

“All right. That’s a plus.” The governor smiled suddenly. “An unexpected plus. It gives a little room for maneuver, no?”

Frazee did not see how. He said as much with some asperity. His depression had turned to resentment at the apparent implication that he was overlooking the obvious.

“In some circles,” the governor said, “it is called wheeling and dealing. In others it is considered merely sensible accommodation to the facts of life. First, you survive, Grover. Remember that. It is true in politics and it is also true in building management. Since we have not run over in construction costs, we can afford to take a little smaller income on our rentals without hurting ourselves, no?”

“We have published our schedule of rates,” Frazee said stiffly. “We have signed leases on the basis of those rates.”

“Good-o,” the governor said. “Now where you think it expedient, let our agents sign some leases at a little less than our published rates and suggest to the tenants that they would do well to keep their mouths shut about it.”

Frazee opened his mouth and shut it again carefully.

The governor produced that wolf grin. “You’re shocked? It’s what comes of a Racquet Club background.” He beckoned the waiter again. “We’ll order,” he said, “while I still have a little martini left. It’s going to be a long dull afternoon.” He consulted the menu, wrote out his order, and leaned back in his chair. “There are a lot of marbles involved, Grover,” he said. “Maybe you don’t care about yours, but I do care a great deal about mine. Gentlemanly ethics are all very well in yachting and golf and other harmless pursuits, but we built that building to make money.” He paused. “Let’s get on with it.”

5

Paul Simmons was already in a small booth in the rear of the restaurant when Zib arrived. He rose as she came toward him smiling, skirt short on regal legs, long hair gleaming, unbrassiered breasts jouncing gently. She slid into the booth with the grace he always associated with her. “I shouldn’t be here,” she said, and brushed the long hair back with both hands. “I ought to be going through piles of slush to try to find a piece of fiction we can use without too much shame.” She wrinkled her nose in distaste.

“So I am all the more flattered.” Paul beckoned the waiter and ordered drinks—gin martinis, straight up, very dry, very cold, with a twist. Then he leaned back and smiled at Zib. “When am I going to see you?”

“You are seeing me.”

“Not the way I want to. Shall I explain that?”

“You are a male chauvinist pig.”

“And you love it.”

Her smile was secret, inscrutable. It lifted the corners of her mouth and brought tiny lights into her eyes. “There is more to us than sex,” she said.

“Is there?”

Zib smiled again. The subject of sex was pleasurable, fun to spar about in a civilized way. It had been so as long as she could remember. “You’re running true to type,” she said.

“There are times when I wonder what my type is.”

His secretary had caught him on the way out with Bert McGraw’s message. He had listened and said easily. “Call him back, honey, and tell him I’m tied up—”

“I tried,” the girl said. “But all he said was, ‘Tell him to be here.’”

And what in the world did that kind of peremptory summons mean?

Now, “Once,” he said, “I thought I was a pretty average sort of fellow—school, college, then probably some corporation where I could serve my time without too much strain.”

Zib watched him steadily. “And?” Her voice was quiet. The drinks arrived. Paul lifted his in salutation and sipped slowly. “You haven’t met my father-in-law, have you?”

“Nat speaks of him.”

Simmons set his glass down and studied it. He nodded slowly and looked up. “Nat would speak of him. They’re not unalike. Bert is a brawling two-fisted Irishman—”

“Nat isn’t. Nat is a lamb, sometimes too much of a lamb.” Zib frowned. “Don’t look at me like that. He is.”

“The last thing I want,” Simmons said slowly, “is to quarrel with you.”

“Then don’t say things like that.”

“We’re touchy today, aren’t we?”

“He’s my husband.”

“And you know him well.” Simmons nodded. But the fact is, he thought, she doesn’t know her husband well. In Simmons’s opinion, she didn’t know him at all, which was, perhaps, all for the best. “So,” he said, “we’ll stick to Bert McGraw, my revered father-in-law.”

Zib had one of her rare flashes of insight. “You’re afraid of him, aren’t you?”

He sipped his martini while he considered the question and at last said, “Yes.” He had no wish to appear heroic; there was more to be gained by appearing otherwise, in effect throwing himself on Zib’s mercy. It was an approach he had used before with success. “You and I,” he said, “are anachronisms. We were raised to believe that all men were gentlemen and all women ladies. No cheating, no gouging no butting in the clinches, life played strictly by Marquis of Queensberry rules.” He was silent, watching for effect.

Zib was not sure that she understood exactly what he meant, but she was flattered that he would speak seriously to her about serious matters. Few men did. And she and Paul did come from similar backgrounds, so with that at least she could agree. She nodded. “Go on.”

“I think kids today see it more clearly than we ever did,” Paul said “They listen to the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments and they say they’re crap because nobody believes them any more. Well, that isn’t exactly true, but the people they point to, the ones we look up to, the ones who have been what we call successful, it is true that they haven’t always played by those rules if they’ve ever played by them.”

Zib thought she followed him now. “Your father-in-law?” she said.

“Exactly. Bert is a street fighter in a gutter neighborhood; he’s that much in tune with his environment. He’s in a tough trade, and because he’s tougher than most, he gets along fine.”

Zib looked across the table with fresh interest. “And you don’t?”

He shrugged, modest now. “I stagger along.” His smile was appealingly wry. “With Patty pushing me every step of the way.”

In a sense, he thought, he had been accurate when he said that he wondered what his type was. He was and always had been a chameleon, with a chameleon’s ability to blend into his surroundings. He had brains, technical competence—it would have been surprising if he had lacked technical competence after the education that had been provided for him—and he was long on charm, but there the list of assets seemed to end. Sometimes it seemed to him that an essential ingredient had been left out of his particular formula, a hardening agent perhaps, and the result was that he had never coalesced into a firm recognizable entity.

“I like Patty,” Zib said.

“You’re welcome to her.” Again he smiled. “That isn’t as far out a suggestion as it sounds. I wouldn’t be surprised if Patty decided to play both sides of the street. She’s unsold on men. Or me.” He paused. “Shocked?”

“Hardly.”

“The emancipated woman?”

“We face things as they are.”

The worst part about any aspect of Women’s Lib, Paul thought, is that it is taken so seriously that its disciples can speak only in clichés.

Zib studied her martini. She looked up. “I don’t really know you at all, do I?” She paused. “Sometimes I wonder if I really know anyone. Do you ever get that feeling? You know, that you’re—locked out?”

“Frequently.” Paul gestured to the waiter for another round of drinks. If he was going to face Bert McGraw, he thought, he wanted inner support.

“What you said about Nat,” Zib said.

“I said he was not unlike Bert McGraw.”

“And what did you mean by that?”

Paul smiled. “He’s a character out of the Wild West. He covers it well, but every now and again a little of it shows. ‘When you say that, smile, podner!’ That kind of thing.”

Zib shook her head. “You’re wrong. I told you. He’s a lamb and I wish he weren’t.” Because if he weren’t, she thought, I wouldn’t be carrying on with you, or anybody else. So, in a sense, it was Nat’s fault. Comforting thought.

“Sweetie,” Paul said, “let me tell you something. Don’t ever push him too far. Now, let’s order. I’ve been summoned to the presence.”

Patty was at a table for two at Martin’s when Bert McGraw walked in. Martin himself, menus in hand, scurried up in greeting and led the way across the restaurant. McGraw bent to kiss his daughter, not on the cheek, but squarely on the mouth; for the McGraws a kiss was a kiss and not a vague gesture.

Then he sat down. His whiskey was waiting, as promised, a generous hooker of bourbon on ice. He tasted it, sighed, and smiled at the girl. “Hi, honey.”

“You look peaked, McGraw.”

“Maybe I am, but seeing you makes it better.” Simple truth. Patty was a long generation removed from his Mary, but there was a similarity between the women that never ceased to amaze him, a quiet warm steadiness that certainly had not sprung from his rough genes. In her presence he could relax. “Between you and the whiskey I’m feeling fine.”

Patty was smiling too. “Liar. You’re tired. They put too much on you on the big jobs, and there’s never been a bigger than the World Tower.”

“Your mother’s been at you.”

“She didn’t need to.” Smiling still. “I have eyes in my head. You need a rest. Take Mother away. Take that trip to Ireland you’ve always talked about.” Patty paused. “Why haven’t you ever done it, Daddy?”

Why indeed? “There’s never been the time.”

“That isn’t the reason.”

McGraw smiled. “If you’re such a smart whippersnapper, tell me what the reason is.” He shook his head then. “No, that isn’t fair, is it? I’ll tell you the reason, honey. It’s because Ireland isn’t a place to me, it’s a dream, and I’m afraid the dream would be damaged if I actually went to look at it.” Confession. He finished his whiskey.

Patty was smiling fondly. “I believe it all but one part,” she said, “and that I won’t swallow. You afraid? Of anything? Ever?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so.” There were times when his feeling of closeness to her equaled, in different ways even surpassed, his feeling of closeness to Mary. Wife and daughter were not the same thing: each had her domain where she ruled supreme. “Afraid of many things, honey,” McGraw said. “Afraid from the moment I saw you through the hospital window that one day you would go away, as you have—”

“I haven’t gone away, Daddy.”

“In a way you have. I don’t know how mothers feel about their sons who marry, but I know how a father feels about his daughter.” He forced himself to smile. It was uphill work. “The finest man in the world isn’t good enough for her.”

“Do you think Paul is the finest man in the world?” Right up to you, McGraw. How do you answer that? Smiling, “I’ve known worse.” Have you? After your talk with Giddings, do you still think so?

Patty’s smile was gone. “I wonder if you mean that.”

“I said it, didn’t I, honey?”

Patty said, “You’re a woolly bear, Daddy, and, I’ve been told, a very fine poker player.” She shook her bright head. “I don’t see how, because sometimes you’re so transparent. I always thought you liked Paul.”

“And what changed your mind?”

“The look in your eye. Daddy, what’s happened?” McGraw took his time. He looked up as a waiter approached.

“Another drink, sir?” the waiter said.

“Yes.” It was Patty who answered. “For my father, but not for me.” And when the waiter was gone, “It’s bad?” she said.

“Bullied by my own daughter,” McGraw said. He tried to keep it light, but he wasn’t sure it sounded that way. “I don’t know, honey. There may be—things to do with the World Tower.”

“What kind of things?” And then, contractor’s daughter, subcontractor’s wife, she answered her own question: “Shenanigans? Paul? But how could—” She stopped. She said quietly, “He could, couldn’t he? I’ve heard your tales—kickbacks, false invoices, bills, of lading—” The words came easily to her tongue. “Is that it?”

“I don’t know anything for sure, honey. And I’m not going to badmouth a man until I do know.”

The fresh drink arrived. McGraw looked at it, picked it up, and made himself sip it slowly. What he needed, he thought, was not a drink in a glass, but a bottle. And cronies, as in the old simple days. Frank and Jimmy and O’Reilly and McTurk—the names ran through his mind like a litany. Drinking and brawling and laughing together—a long time ago.

“Yes, Daddy.”

Good, God, was he talking aloud? He noticed that his hand was unsteady as he set the glass down.

“I’ve heard you talk of them all,” Patty said. “I wish I’d known you then.”

He had himself under control again. “I was pushing forty, honey, when you were born.”

“I know.”

“Mary, bless her, only a year younger.”

“I know that too. It never mattered that you were older than other parents. You weren’t really.”

“I don’t know,” McGraw said. “The young days were gone, and there you were.” He smiled. “We wanted you bad, honey. I went down on my knees and thanked the good Lord when you arrived healthy and whole.” He picked up the glass again. “Let’s order a meal.”

It was as if Patty had not heard. “What happened to them, Frank and Jimmy and O’Reilly and—was it McTurk?”

“It was. A big black Irishman with shoulders like a truss bridge.” McGraw was silent. “What happened to them? I don’t know, honey.” Today was filled with confessions and reminiscences. “I had a dream once. I was climbing a mountain with friends. Up and up we went, into the mists. I lost the sight of them, and even the sound of their voices, and there was nothing to do but climb on.” He paused, looking far beyond the girl, beyond the walls of the restaurant, into the past. It took an effort to bring himself back to the table. “At the top of the mountain,” he said, “I came out into bright sunshine. I searched, but I was all alone. I never knew what happened to the others. I don’t think you ever know. At the top of the mountain you are always alone.” He started to beckon the waiter and then stopped. “What was that you said?”

“I’m leaving Paul, Daddy. Or I was. But if he’s in trouble—” She smiled, mocking herself. “I don’t mean to sound noble. I detest noble women. Their—nobility spoils everything they do.” Pause. “It’s just that if Paul’s in trouble, the n this isn’t the time to walk out on him, is it?”

“I don’t know, honey. I don’t know what the reason is.” McGrau hesitated, “Do you want to tell me?” How many times had he asked that question, knowing that the answer was yes on the subject, whatever it was, would never have been brought up? He watched the girl quietly and waited.

Patty smiled again. “I guess I’m transparent too. Maybe we’d better not play poker together.”

McGraw said nothing.

The reason,” Patty said, “is the usual sordid reason. Or maybe it isn’t usual these days. Maybe to most people a little wife-swapping doesn’t matter. But it does to me.” McGraw sat quiet, fresh anger under tight control. He said at last, “It does to me too, honey. And to your mother.”

“I know.” Patty was smiling gently. “You gave me old-fashioned standards. I’m glad.”

McGrau was silent for a time. He said at last. “Do you know who it is?”

“Zib Wilson.”

“Does Nat know?”

“I haven’t asked him.”

There was silence. “Maybe,” McGraw said slowly, “if you’d had children. I know that’s old-fashioned too.”

“We can’t. Daddy. That’s another pan of it. Paul had a vasectomy. He didn’t-bother to tell me about it for a long time, but there it is.” Patty picked up the menu. She smiled brightly. “As they say, so what else is new? I think some food for you, McGraw. Unless you’re going to drink your lunch, you drunken lout?”

God, he thought, if only we could take on their problems, their pain. But, of course, we can’t. “You sound just like a nagging wife,” he said.

Patty’s eyes were very bright, too bright. “And you,

Daddy, sound—” She stopped. Tears appeared. She got Kleenex out of her purse and swabbed viciously. “Oh, damn!” she said. “Damn, damn, damn! I wasn’t going to cry!”

“Sometimes,” McGraw said, “it’s that or break something. I’ll order for you, honey.”

Zib took a cab from the restaurant back to the magazine. In her office she plumped down in her chair, kicked off her shoes, and ignoring the pile of manuscripts on her desk, stared unseeing at the wall.

She did not for a moment really believe what Paul Simmons had said about Nat: that he was a character out of the Wild West she would do well not to push too far. She had her own view of Nat.

On the other hand, how well did she really know her husband? How well could anyone know another? The question recurred constantly in the fiction she had to read, and there just might be something to it after all.

She had lived in married intimacy with Nat for almost three years now, and while that wasn’t long as some marriages went, it was certainly long enough to develop familiarity with at least the man’s approach to the more common daily activities, and were not these indicative of basic character traits?

Nat emptied his pockets carefully each night and hung up all of his clothes. He put trees in his shoes. He squeezed the toothpaste tube from the bottom instead of the top, and Zib was convinced that he counted silently to himself as he brushed his teeth for exactly thirty seconds, or was it forty-five? One chimpanzee, two chimpanzee, three chimpanzee …

Zib was a restless sleeper. Nat, on the other hand, settled himself on his back and did not stir. Nor did he snore. And although he was not one to sing in his morning shower or otherwise behave in a manner abominably ebullient so early in the day, he was cheerful over fruit juice, egg, and coffee, and in the preparing of them never seemed to have things go perversely, maddeningly wrong.

His morning run in the park and his walks to and from the office plus a regimen of daily floor exercises kept him in splendid physical condition. The running and the walking Zib supposed she would in any case have been able to bear, but the floor exercises would have been just too much if Nat had not explained that they were necessary because of an old spine injury sustained when he was thrown from a horse on some monster mountain out in the West.

He was even-tempered and did not swear at waiters or cab drivers. He was punctual. He preferred bourbon to martinis, which at first had seemed odd, but now seemed quite ordinary. He looked with approval and an artist’s eye at pretty women, but Zib would have wagered heavily that looking was as far as it went. Their own sex life, was pleasant, varied, and without the compulsions some seemed to have these days.

Where in all that, was the character Paul Simmons pictured?

And why was she so suddenly concerned anyway? Could she actually imagine Nat in the outraged-husband role, confronting her with the fact of her infidelity and, if Paul wen to be believed, taking some kind of retaliatory action? The kind of thing that turned up in the Daily News or, for that matter, in probably half a dozen of the manuscripts sitting right here on her desk? Nonsense.

If then was one quality Nat lacked, it was aggressiveness. She remembered talking about that lack one night. She had said, “You’re better than you think you are. Ben Caldwell knows it. Why else would he have pushed you along the way he has?”

“Nobody else around.” Nat smiled. “Next question?’* “That,” Zib said, “is one of the most annoying things about you. You won’t be drawn. You know, I’ve never seen you lose your cool.”

“It happens sometimes.”

“I don’t believe it.” And then, groping for words to clothe the idea, “Respect,” she said. “That’s the thing that counts.”

“Important,” Nat said. “Agreed. So?”

“How can you respect somebody who doesn’t have even a trace of bastard in him?”

Calmly, “Or bitch?”

“Right.”

“Would you rather I had temper tantrums? Threw things?”

“That isn’t what I mean. But in this world either you push or you get walked on, don’t you see that?”

“It’s a big-city attitude.”

“This is a big city.” She paused. “Why did you ever come here?”

“Because I don’t belong, you mean?”

“That isn’t what I mean and you know it. All I’m asking is why you came here in the first place.”

“To find you.”

“Be serious.”

“All right.” Nat was smiling again. “Because Ben Caldwell was here, and I wanted to work with, work under the best. Simple as that.”

“And you have.” Zib nodded. “When the World Tower is all finished, wrapped up, just another big building, then what?” She hesitated. “Back to your mountains?”

“Possibly. Probably. Will you come with me?”

“I’d be out of place. As much—” She stopped.

“As much as I am here?” He shook his head, smiling again. “You will fit wherever you are. You’re a social creature.”

“And you?”

Nat shrugged. “Sometimes I wonder,” he said.

No trace of temper, Zib thought now; never a trace of temper showing. Oh, not emotionless; not that. With her he could be a passionate man, lover. But other times, in ways Paul Simmons had hinted? No way. Paul was wrong. That was all there was to it

Then why the small nagging doubt? Answer me that, Elizabeth.

6

Bert McGraw was back in his office after lunch, and Paul Simmons, clearly uncomfortable, sat low in one of the leather visitor’s chairs. The old man, Paul thought, was like a bear with a sore paw, and it behooved him to tread warily. He looked at his watch. “One-thirty,” he said, “on the dot.” He paused and, daring, added, “As specified.”

“I had lunch with Patty,” McGraw said. He had himself under control, but how long the temptation to hammer on his desk and shout could be restrained he had no idea.

“I was busy for lunch,” Paul said. Along with his chameleon abilities went an actor’s voice. “Business is good.”

“Is it now?” Deliberately the old man picked up the manila envelope of change-authorization copies, looked at it, and then, with a sudden flipping motion, scaled it to land accurately in Paul’s lap. “Have a look,” McGraw said, and heaved himself out of his chair to walk to the windows, his back to the room.

In the big office only the faint whispering of the papers in Paul’s hands disturbed the silence. Paul said at last, “So?”

McGraw turned from the windows. He stood square, his hands behind his back. “Is that all you have to say?”

“I don’t understand. What else is there to say?”

“Did you make those changes?”

“But of course.”

“Why of course?” The old man’s voice was rising.

Paul scratched an eyebrow. “I don’t know what to say. Why wouldn’t I make the changes?”

“Because,” McGraw said, “you’re not some dumb working stiff. If somebody says, ‘Do this,’ you don’t just do it without question. You—” McGraw stopped. “Say it,” he said, “whatever it is.”

Simmons’s voice had taken on a faint edge. “I’ll try not to make it irreverent,” he said, “because you don’t like that.”

“Say it however you goddam well please.” The old man was back in his big chair, holding tight to the arms.

“All right,” Paul said. “It goes like this. Most times if somebody says, ‘Change this,’ I want reasons. But when Jesus Christ Ben Caldwell or his anointed disciple Nat Wilson give me the Word, then I tug at my forelock and say, ‘Aye, aye, sir,’ and the change is made. Not for me to question why. Does that answer the question?”

McGraw said slowly, “Don’t be flip with me, young fellow.” Automatic response. He sat quiet, thoughtful, puzzled still. He said at last, “You’re sayin’, are you not, that it was Nat Wilson himself who signed those changes?” Paul’s face showed surprise. “I never thought different. Why would I?”

“And,” McGraw said, “because the changes, as far as I’ve seen, stand to save you a little money here, a little there, all of it adding up to quite a bit, then you had even more reason to take what was handed you without question, is that it?”

“I think I recall you suggesting,” Paul said, “that the teeth of gift horses are best not examined.” He tapped the papers in his lap. “If this was the way they wanted their building wired, and as you say, I saved money by doing it their way, why should I raise any kind of a fuss?” McGraw said slowly, “Nat Wilson says he didn’t issue those changes.”

Paul’s face altered, but he said merely, “I see.”

“And what, goddammit, do you see? Will Giddings doesn’t believe Wilson issued those changes either. Neither does Ben Caldwell.”

“And what do you think, Father-in-law?”

The office was silent again. McGraw looked at his hands spread flat on the desktop. “What I think,” he said slowly, “would call down penance in confession.” He was looking straight at Simmons now. “I’m thinking that the knave-or-fool judgment applies. You’re carrying on with the man’s wife—”

“Patty told you that?”

McGraw sat silent, watching still.

“Okay,” Paul said at last. “That’s how it is.” He spread his hands. “You can’t understand it—”

“That I cannot. Nor can I forgive.” The black fury was rising, irresistible. “I’m an old-fashioned working-class fool, and you’re young, bright, educated, decently bred, and all—and the stench of you is in my nostrils like the stench of something dead that’s been out in the sun too long.”

“Look,” Paul said, “I’ve taken enough—”

“You haven’t begun to take,” McGraw said. “Move from that chair before I’m done and I’ll break your back.” He paused His breathing was audible now. With effort he forced his voice down. “Why would Nat Wilson issue those changes* Tell me that. They gain him nothing. He is the architect He and Ben Caldwell, Ben mostly of course, but that changes nothing. Between them they approved Lewis’s electrical drawings, his design. Why should Wilson make any attempt at change?”

Simmons sat silent! He wanted to stand up and walk out, and was afraid. The old man behind the desk was, as he had told Zib, a fearsome old man, quite capable of the physical violence he had threatened.

“I asked you a question,” McGraw said.

“You asked several.”

“Then answer them all.”

Simmons took a deep breath. “Nat Wilson is a subtle man,” he said.

“And what, goddammit, is that supposed to mean?”

“He resents me.”

McGraw was frowning now. “Why?” And then, “Because you’re carrying on with his wife, is that what you mean?”

Simmons nodded. It was better, he thought, not to speak.

“I don’t believe it,” McGraw said. “I know the man. If he knew you were sneaking behind his back, he’d brace you with it and take a few teeth out of that Pepsodent smile. He—”

“And he is playing with Patty,” Paul said.

McGraw opened his mouth. He closed it again, but it reopened despite him. And then it closed once more. And opened. No sound emerged. His face had lost its color and his breath came now in great gasps that were not enough. His eyes protruded as he tried to make a gesture with one hand, and failed. He slumped deep in his chair, gasping still like a fish on the bank.

Paul got up quickly. He stood for a moment indecisive and then walked to the door and threw it open. To Laura outside he said, “You’d better call an ambulance. He’s—I think—he’s having a heart attack.”

Grover Frazee took a cab back to his Pine Street office after his lunch with the governor. He had known Armitage a long time, and in the usual meaning of the words they were, he supposed, good friends…

But in the governor’s world, and as far as that went in Frazee’s too, friendship was a fine-sounding word that had very little to do with business. Business was conducted on its merits, period.

If a man produced you backed him; if he failed, you did not.

Oh, he hadn’t failed. Not yet. But in the foreseeable future the building was going to be damned near empty. There was the rub.

You could lay the blame to general business conditions or that administration down in Washington with its three-steps-forward-and-two-and-a-half-steps-back policies.

But placing the blame accomplished nothing. Explanation rarely helped, and in this instance, today at lunch, explanation hadn’t even softened the governor’s attitude.

“You’re the man in charge, Grover,” the governor had said, “which means that you get the brickbats as well as the bouquets. I know the feeling and the position.” He grinned bitterly as he stirred sugar into his coffee and watched the liquid swirl. He looked up at last. “How bad is it? Give me some figures.” He watched Frazee steadily.

Frazee gave them to him—percentage of rented floor space, and of possible new rentals, certain and hoped-for income versus basic maintenance and carrying costs. Discouraging. “But it can’t last,” he said.

“The hell it can’t.” The governor’s voice did not rise, but it “had taken on a new note. “Unemployment hasn’t dropped and inflation hasn’t been whipped. I don’t think there’s a chance of our going into a thirties-type depression, but neither do I think that all of a sudden everything is going to be ginger-peachy, particularly in the big cities.”

“Bob Ramsay—”

“Bob Ramsay hears voices. It’s a wonder to me he hasn’t come down from the nearest hill with new tablets. He thinks we’re going to put the whole state to work for his city, and we aren’t. He thinks maybe he’ll make the city into the fifty-first state, and he isn’t going to. He thinks Congress is going to roll over and wave its paws in the air after giving him a blank check, and it isn’t going to work that way either.”

Privately, Frazee entertained similar views, but he said nothing.

“He loves this city,” the governor said. “I’ll give him that. And he’s held it together almost with his bare hands. But the fact of the matter is that too much business is moving out, into the suburbs, more than is coming in. The big time, the big apple, the place where it’s at—that concept has lost its appeal. What is left here is turning rapidly into a place for the very rich and the very poor, and neither group rents office space in big buildings.” Well, Frazee thought now in the quiet of his own office, Bent Armitage was probably right. He usually was.

The phone on his desk buzzed quietly. He opened the switch. “Yes?”

“Mr. Giddings to see you,” Letitia’s voice said. “He says it is urgent.”

First Armitage at lunch, now Will Giddings obviously with some kind of trouble; there are times when they seem to come at you from all sides. “All right,” Frazee said in resignation. “Send him in.”

Giddings came straight to the point. “Time to plug you in,” he said, and tossed an envelope filled with change-authorization copies on Frazee’s desk.

Frazee shook them out, looked at one or two, and then looked up at Giddings in mild puzzlement. “I’m not an engineer,” he said. “You’re supposed to be. Explain.” Giddings explained, and when he was done, he sat back and waited.

The big office was still. Frazee pushed his chair back slowly, got up, walked to the window, and stood looking down at traffic. His back to the room, “You didn’t know about the changes,” he said.

“I didn’t know. I’m at fault, along with Caldwell’s people—Nat Wilson in particular—and Bert McGraw. We’re all responsible.”

Frazee turned back to the room. “And now what?”

“We check out each one of these to see if the changes were actually made and what effect there might be.”

“What kind of effect?”

Giddings shook his head. “I won’t even guess. It could be trivial. It could be serious. And that’s why I’m here.” Frazee walked back to his desk and sat down. “You want what?”

“To call off that nonsense this afternoon up in the Tower Room.” A big man, serious, forceful. “I don’t want people up there.”

“Why?”

“Goddammit,” Giddings said, “do I have to spell it out? The building isn’t finished. Now we know, or at least have reason to believe, that there may be electrical flaws in what is done. We don’t know how serious the flaws are, and until we do know it doesn’t make sense to have an indoor garden party, for God’s sake, when right in the middle of it—”

“The lights might go out?” Frazee said. “Something like that?”

Giddings studied the backs of his hands while he calmed himself. He looked up at last and nodded. “Something like that,” he said.

“But you can’t be sure, can you?”

He was no match for Frazee at this kind of thing, Giddings told himself. He was no fluent, smooth business type; he was an engineer, and at the moment, with those pieces of paper lying on Frazee’s desk, he was almost prepared to admit that he wasn’t even a very good, that was to say careful, engineer. “I can’t be sure,” he said. “That’s why I want time.”

Frazee was thinking of Governor Armitage. “You’re the man in charge,” the governor had said, “which means you get the brickbats as well as the bouquets.” True enough, but why not duck and let someone else take the brickbats?

“I don’t see how we can call off the arrangements, Will,” Frazee said. He smiled.

“Why the hell not?”

Frazee’s manner was patient. “Invitations went out months ago and were accepted by people who might now otherwise be in Moscow or London or Paris or Peking or Washington. They have put themselves to some trouble to appear here for what amounts”—Frazee’s smile spread—“to a launching, Will. When a ship is launched, it is not complete either: months of work remain. But the launching ceremony is a gala occasion, set far in advance, and one simply does not call off that kind of affair at the last moment.”

“Goddammit,” Giddings said, “you can’t equate a striped-pants cookie-push with the kind of trouble we might have, can’t you see that?”

Frazee sat quiet, contemplative. He said at last, “I can’t see it, Will. What kind of trouble concerns you so much?”

Giddings lifted his big hands and let them fall. “That’s the hell of it. I don’t know.” Giddings was thinking now of Bert McGraw’s theory that some buildings were accursed, and while he didn’t believe it for a moment, he had known jobs on which nothing ever seemed to go right, and try as you could, you could find no solid explanation. Then there was that one other thing today, only a little time ago: “Somebody’s running around inside the building, and I don’t like that either.”

Frazee frowned. “Who?”

“I don’t know, and we’ll play hell finding out without a floor-to-floor search with an army.”

Frazee smiled. “Ridiculous. Why is the man even important?”

Giddings said, “Look, there are too many things I don’t know, and that is just the goddam trouble. I’m responsible to you for that building. I’ve lived with it and sweated over it—”

“No one could have done more, Will.”

“But,” Giddings said, “things got by me and by everybody else too, and now all I’m asking is time to find out how serious those things are. Is that too much to ask?” Frazee picked up a gold pencil and studied it thoughtfully. Suppose things did happen during the reception in the Tower Room? What if there were some kind of electrical failure, what harm? Would it not, by showing up flaws within the building, in a sense take the monkey off his back, give him more time to find tenants, by following the governor’s cut-rate suggestions if no other way; in a sense, by shifting blame to McGraw and Caldwell, contractor and supervising architect, would he not place himself in the position of saying that circumstances beyond his control delayed the rush to occupy the splendid facilities of the brand-new World Tower communications center?

Giddings said, “At least you’re thinking about it. That’s something.”

Frazee put down the pencil. “But I’m afraid that’s all it is, Will.” He paused. “We cannot cancel the arrangements. I’m sorry you don’t see that, but you’ll have to take my word for it. We cannot make the building a laughingstock right at the beginning.”

Giddings sighed and stood up. He had, really, expected no more. “You’re the boss. I hope to hell you’re right and I’m wrong, seeing things, shadows, thinking about a big Polack who walked off a steel beam for no reason at all—no, he doesn’t have a goddam thing to do with this, it’s just the kind of thing that sticks in my mind and I don’t know why.” He walked to the door and paused there, his hand on the knob. “I think I’m going over to Charlie’s Bar on Third Avenue. I think I’m going to get drunk.” He walked out.

Frazee sat on at his desk, motionless, thoughtful. His own thinking was sound, he was convinced, but another opinion was frequently a good idea. He picked up the phone and said to Letitia, “Get me Ben Caldwell, please.” The telephone buzzed. Frazee picked it up and spoke his name. Ben Caldwell’s quiet voice said, “Something on your mind, Grover?”

The papers were strewn on the desk in front of him. “These—things,” Frazee said. “I don’t even know what to call them—papers changing design—you know about them?”

“I know about them.”

“Your man seems to have signed them.”

“He says no. For the moment I believe him.”

“Are they important, Ben?”

There was no hesitation. “We will have to see.”

No trace of anxiety, Frazee thought, and found relief in the concept. “Will Giddings wants me to call off today’s opening.”

Caldwell was silent.

Frazee, frowning, said, “What do you think?”

“About what?” This was the unworldly side of Caldwell.

“Should I call off the opening?”

“Public relations is not my line, Grover.” There was a hint of asperity in the quiet voice.

“No,” Frazee said. “Of course not.”

There was a short silence. “Was that all?” Caldwell said.

“That was all.” Frazee hung up and reflected that of all the men he knew, the governor included, only Caldwell had the power to bring back boyhood memories of leaving the headmaster’s study after an unpleasant interview.

Well, one thing was settled: there was no need to change plans for the afternoon.

7

The governor was of two minds, but as usual his practical side prevailed. There was nothing that said that he, governor of the state, must check in with the city’s mayor when he came to visit. On the other hand, why raise hackles, unnecessarily? And Bob Ramsay’s hackles were notoriously easy to raise. “I’m still at the Harvard Club,” the governor said on the phone to the mayor. “Is that turf neutral enough for a Yale man? If it is, come up. I’ll buy you a drink. “We can go over to Grover Frazee’s hoedown together.”

Mayor Bob Ramsay was fifty-seven years old, in splendid physical shape, in his second term as mayor of the great city and loving ever minute of it. In the mayor’s lexicon the word challenge was set in capital letters.

Deep in a leather chair in a comer of the club lounge, a snifter of cognac at his elbow, “What are you going to talk about?” the governor said. “Brotherhood of man as symbolized by the World Tower?”

It was a favorite theme of Ramsay’s. But Bent Armitage had a way of souring even the most lofty thoughts, and the theme immediately lost its savor. The mayor sipped his black coffee. “I haven’t thought much about it,” he said. It was a mistake.

The governor’s grin appeared. “That’s crap, and you know it, son. Like Mark Twain, you spend a great deal of time preparing your impromptu remarks. We all do. Why not admit it?”

“What I intended to convey,” the mayor said stiffly, “is that I haven’t yet decided exactly what remarks are called for.”

The governor switched the subject smoothly. “What do you think of the building?”

Ramsay sipped his coffee again while he examined the question for booby traps. “I think we are all agreed,” he said, “that it is a lovely structure, one of Ben Caldwell’s best, if not his crowning achievement.”

“I’ll go along with that,” the governor said.

“And it brings additional space—”

“—which the city needs like a broken head.”

Ramsay finished his coffee deliberately. He set the cup down. “Not fair and not true. What the city needs is all the fine facilities it can have—and this is one—together with the kind of aid that every large city in this country must have or perish.” It was a matter of faith with him. He looked at the governor in challenge.

“Maybe,” the governor said. He looked at his watch. “We have a little time. Let’s kick it around a bit. Suppose I offer the idea that cities of over-a-million population are as out of date as the dinosaur? What do you say to that?” The mayor breathed hard and said nothing.

“I’m serious,” the governor said. “What about an abundance of one-hundred-thousand-population cities, each containing all the necessary services and surrounded by the necessary industries and enterprises to provide employment, but without the helpless slums and the gigantic welfare rolls and the crime problems that come out of them? Would you go along with that concept?”

“And you,” the mayor said, “are the one who is always accusing me of seeing visions, looking for pie in the sky.”

“A little different,” the governor said. “You’re looking for manna to keep your pet dinosaur alive. I’m looking for a new kind of livestock we can live with.” He paused and grinned. “That’s a piss-poor analogy, but maybe you’ll see what I mean. Call it a modern-day version of Jefferson’s ideal bucolic civilization, to replace the monster-city environment we’ve created in which nobody’s happy.” He paused again. “Except maybe Bob Ramsay.” The mayor had been doing his arithmetic. “We would have to break this metropolitan area up into a hundred and thirty separate cities, each going its own way—”

“Independent as hogs on ice,” the governor said. He nodded. “There’s nothing wrong with tug-and-haul. That’s what it takes to hammer out policy.”

“I rarely know,” the mayor said, “whether you are serious or your tongue is pushing hard at your cheek. Do you know yourself?”

Again that grin, directed inward at the governor’s own foibles. “This time,” he said, “I am perfectly serious. Your city is breaking up anyway, new poverty is moving in and solid middle-class support moving out. In not too long you’ll have left only people living in penthouses and riding in limousines, and people living in slums mugging each other in the streets and subways.” The governor paused, unsmiling. “Can you deny it?”

The mayor could not. “But you make it sound hopeless, and it isn’t. Give us back some of the taxes the state takes from us, the federal government takes from us, and—”

“And,” the governor said, “you’ll provide more low-income housing, more welfare, more indigent hospital care, more slum schools.” He paused for emphasis. “And you’ll simply attract more people who need those things. So you’ll be digging your hole deeper and compounding your problems, and that means you’ll need more police to cope, and firemen, and courts, and, inevitably, more low-income housing, more welfare, more indigent hospital care, more slum schools—ad infinitum.” He paused again. “You’re beyond the point where you can even hope to catch up.”

The mayor was silent, depressed.

“What I’m saying,” the governor said, “is that our brand-new shining beautiful World Tower isn’t a sign of progress at all; it’s a sign of retrogression, just another dinosaur stable.” He finished his cognac and sighed. “So let’s go down to it and tell everybody that the building we dedicate today is a symbol of the future, man’s hope, the greatest thing that has come along since the wheel.” He stood up wearily. “What the hell else can we say?”

8

Assistant Fire Commissioner Timothy O’Reilly Brown was tall, redheaded, and intense, with a low boiling point. He did not know Nat, but he knew Ben Caldwell by soaring reputation, and if there was anyone in the entire city who did not know of the World Tower building, Tim Brown had no idea who it might be, so he was not on entirely unknown ground. Nevertheless, “What you’re telling me.” he told Nat now, “is a purely internal matter. I’ve no desire to mix into it. You and Bert McGraw and the owners can straighten it out between you.”

“You know better than I do, of course,” Nat said, “but aren’t fire regulations sometimes relaxed or maybe overlooked when a special event has to go through on schedule?” He was being as tactful as he knew how. It was uphill work.

“No.”

“Never?”

“You heard me.”

Tact be damned. “That,” Nat said, “is horseshit, and you know it. Most firemen, fire inspectors, are honest, just as most cops and building inspectors and most contractors are honest and most mistakes that are made are honest mistakes.” He paused. “But some aren’t, and you know that too.”

Tim Brown said, “The door is right behind you. I don’t know what kind of shenanigans you’re trying to pull, but I’m not even going to listen to the pitch. Out.” Nat made no move. “Suppose,” he said, “just suppose—”

“I said out!”

“I don’t think you’re big enough to put me out,” Nat said, “and think of the stink there’d be if you tried and something did happen at the Tower building.” He paused. “It would look like Assistant Commissioner Brown had his fingers into something, wouldn’t it? Or don’t you even care about that?”

Tim Brown had half-risen in his chair. He sat down now. The nightmare of every public official, of course, was the possibility of merely being accused of misprision whether innocent or not. He hesitated.

“I’m not accusing anybody,” Nat said. “I’m not hankering for a slander suit. But what I am saying is that apparently changes in electrical design have been made, and maybe those changes reduce or even eliminate the designed safety factors, and if certain leniencies in fire regulations were allowed in order not to stop this scheduled opening, then if anything were to happen in that building, there might be hell to pay and no pitch hot.” He leaned back in his chair. “I may be jumping at shadows. I hope I am. Then you can call me a fool and I’ll apologize for taking up your time.”

Brown was silent still, thinking hard. He said at last, “What do you want me to do?”

“It’s your department, but—”

“That’s no help. You come in here shouting ‘Fire!’ and then wash your hands of all knowledge. You—”

“If and when you climb down off your high horse,” Nat said, “maybe we can make some kind of sense, but not before.” He stood up. “I’ve tossed it in your lap.” He started for the door.

“Hold it,” Brown said. “Sit down.” His face was suddenly weary. He took a deep breath to regain control. He said slowly, “I’ve got a sick wife and an ulcer and an understaffed fire department in a city full of people who don’t give a shit about the kind of protection we try to give them, who think alarm boxes are for games—do you know that I lost two men this last week, two men killed answering false alarms?” He shook his head. “Never mind. My problems.” He opened a drawer, got out a pack of cigarettes, shook one loose, broke it in half and threw it angrily into the wastebasket. He tossed the package back into the drawer and slammed the drawer shut. “That’s fourteen today I haven’t smoked,” he said. He made himself sit quietly. “Now let’s talk sense.” He paused. “What exactly have you got?”

Better, Nat thought, and ticked items off on his fingers. “First,” he said, “a batch of copies of design-change authorizations with my name on them that I didn’t sign. We’ll have to assume somebody wanted the changes made. Joe Lewis, the electrical engineer, is checking the changes now to see how deep they go.”

“How do you know they were even made?”

“We have to assume they were. Isn’t that how you people think? You assume the worst can happen and you try to prevent it? Not all oily rags ignite spontaneously, but you call all oily rags fire hazards.”

True enough. Brown, calmer now, nodded affirmation. “It’s out of my field,” Nat said, “and I’m just guessing, but I can think of a dozen things your people might have overlooked, knowing that the building isn’t really occupied and knowing too that today’s doings were planned months ago and can’t be postponed.” He paused. “Pressure in the standpipes, floor hoses actually in place, fire doors operable and not blocked, sprinkler systems checked out, standby generators checked and ready—how much is your department’s job, and how much belongs to building inspectors, I don’t know; you’ve always seemed to work together.”

“We do.” Brown smiled wearily. “Or we try. We try to work with the cops too—”

“And that’s another thing,” Nat said. “The plaza’s crawling with cops. I assume that’s because somebody is worried about something.” And, face it, he told himself, that makes you a little more uptight too. “So am I,” he said, “even if I don’t know what.” He was thinking of the blinking elevator lights, the soft whirring of the highspeed cables as somebody moved around in the empty building at will.

“These days,” Brown said, “with nuts throwing bombs or shooting into crowds for no reason at all, everybody is always worried about everything.” He paused. “Or ought to be.” He sighed. “All right. I’ll see what I can find out. And I’ll see that the building is as well covered now as a building that size can be.”

The words started up again a train of thought already half-forgotten. “A building that size,” Nat said, and paused thoughtfully. “Despite every safety factor we design into it and every care we take with it and every possible threat we anticipate and plan for—it’s still vulnerable, isn’t it?”

Brown opened the desk drawer, glared down at the cigarette package, and then slammed the drawer shut again. “Yes,” he said, “your big building is vulnerable. The bigger they are, the more vulnerable they are. You just don’t think about it.”

“I’m thinking about it,” Nat said.

He walked again, back to the Caldwell offices. Ben Caldwell had already left for the ceremonies at the Tower building. Nat walked into his own office and sat down to stare at the drawings thumbtacked to the wall.

He told himself that he was being frightened of shadows as when, a time not easily forgotten, backpacking alone somewhere above the thirteen-thousand-foot contour, he had come across the largest bear tracks he had ever seen showing plainly the long front claws that spell grizzly.

Grizzly bears were extinct, some said; or near enough. Near enough was no consolation. One grizzly bear was more than ample: one grizzly bear was entirely too much.

Black bears were one thing: you left them alone and, unless it was a mother with cubs, they would not bother you. But the big fellow, Ursus horribilis, played by no rules except his own: what grizzly wanted, grizzly took, and his temper was short.

He could outrun a horse and he could kill a thousand-pound steer with a single blow of his forepaw. Searching for goodies like marmots or pikas, he could overturn with a flick of a paw rocks that two men together could not lift. When you hunted grizzly, or his cousin the big Alaska brown, you never, never, never fired unless you were above him; otherwise, those who knew assured you, no matter what weight weapon you were firing, he would get to you, and then it was Kitty-bar-the-door. And Nat wasn’t even carrying a gun.

All of this brought to mind by a few footprints on a windswept mountain slope high above timberline.

The balance of that afternoon Nat had had the feeling that he wanted to look in all directions at once; and that night after dark, in his sleeping bag, staring up at the stars and at occasional clouds that moved across their patterns, it had been worse: every night sound, every rustle of wind in rocks or stunted Alpine growth, sounded an alarm, and despite his fatigue from the days tramping, sleep was a long time coming.

When he awakened shortly after first light and reluctantly climbed out of the warm sleeping bag into the brisk mountain air, the grizzly was not immediately in his thoughts; until he saw the fresh tracks only feet from where he had slept. The great beast had obviously come to see what this strange animal was; for all his bulk quieter than the night itself, curious, fearless—and in the end, uninterested.

Nat never saw the bear, but he never forgot it. Now, sitting m his silent office, “I never saw the man in the building either,” he said aloud, “and probably I’ll never see him, and maybe he is harmless too, but I don’t for a moment believe it.”

He sat up and put through a call to Joe Lewis. “Anything yet?”

“We’re not magicians,” Lewis said. “Some of those changes we’re going to have to put into the computer and see what happens if: if we have a circuit failure here or an overload there; that kind of thing you don’t expect but you’ve got to consider.” He paused. “You aren’t usually jumpy.”

“I am now,” Nat said, “and if you ask me why, I can’t tell you. Call it a hunch.”

There was a short silence. Lewis said, “When did these changes turn up?”

“This morning. Giddings brought them in.”

“Where did he get them?”

“I don’t know.” Nat paused. “Maybe I’d better find out.”

There was no answer at Giddings’s telephone at the Tower building. Nat called Frazee’s office. Frazee had already gone to the festivities. “Can’t have a program without the MC,” Letitia Flores said. “My boss man is starting the talkfest right about now.” Letitia was plump, fluent in four languages, efficient as Joe Lewis’s computer. “Anything I can do?”

“Giddings,” Nat said. “Do you know where he is?”

“Charlie’s Bar on Third Avenue.” Letitia gave the address. “Next question?”

“If he calls in,” Nat said, “tell him I’m looking for him.”

“Shall I tell him why?”

Strangely, Nat thought, there was no need. On this problem, their previous frequent differences notwithstanding, he and Will Giddings saw eye to eye. “He’ll know,” he said.

Again he walked, without thought of the exertion, without any sense of physical fatigue, by the turmoil that was building in his mind compelled into activity. This time he noticed his surroundings.

Just in the years he had known it Third Avenue had changed. He had come too late for the El, which once had rocketed down through the Bowery, a summer-night excursion, he had been told, with open lighted tenement windows showing humanity in most of its usually private activities. But just in the last few years the change in the avenue seemed to have accelerated, and what once had been neighborhood was now impersonal shops and apartment buildings, sidewalks filled with strangers, hurriers-on, passers-through. Like himself.

Charlie’s Bar was a throwback: swinging doors with the name etched in heavy glass, heavy dark wood bar and booths and tables, the smell of pipe-smoke and malt, and the sound of quiet male talk. It was a bar where customers were known and a man could still while away a quiet afternoon over a few mugs of beer and talk. Zib, for all her Women’s Lib, Nat thought, would come in here and immediately twitch to get back out again though no word of unwelcome would be spoken.

He found Giddings at the bar, a shot glass of whiskey and a full mug of beer in front of him, and the bartender leaning on an elbow in friendly conversation.

Giddings was not drunk, but there was a glint in his eyes. “Well, well,” he said, “look who’s here. Wrong side of town, isn’t it?”

“You can do better than that, Will.” Nat gestured at the drinks on the bar. “I’ll have the beer, but not the shot.” Then, again to Giddings, “Let’s take a booth. Talk.”

“About what?”

“Can’t you guess? I’ve talked with Joe Lewis. His people are going to the computers. I’ve talked with a fellow named Brown downtown.”

“Tim Brown?” Giddings was alert now.

Nat nodded. He accepted the filled mug of beer, reached for his pocket.

Giddings Said, “No. On my check.” He slid down from his stool. “Charlie McGonigle, Nat Wilson. We’ll be over in the comer booth, Charlie.” He led the way, drinks in hand.

The beer was good, cool, not icy, soothing. Nat drank deep and set the mug down.

“Why Tim Brown?” Giddings said. He ignored the boilermaker in front of him.

It was beginning to sound like a record too often played or a word become meaningless. Nat wished it were. “Too many mistakes,” he said. “You’re an engineer. You understand that. Something goes wrong. It ought to stop right there because we’ve designed in safety devices that ought to function immediately.” He paused. “But suppose the safety device has been bypassed? Or it isn’t functioning because the fire department people or the inspectors let it go just for now?”

Giddings shook himself like a dog on a hearth. “Maybe,” he said. “But if you went to Tim Brown, you’re thinking fire. Why?” Bert McGraw’s mention of jinxed buildings was very much in his mind. He wished he could shake the thought.

“Electrical changes,” Nat said, “all of them. You can fuse steel with a hundred and ten volts. I’ve done it: a knifeblade shorted out in an electric toaster once.” Giddings’s nod was almost imperceptible. His eyes were steady on Nat’s face.

“We bring power into that building,” Nat said, “at thirteen thousand eight hundred volts, not a hundred and ten—”

“You’re thinking of whoever it was riding the elevators?” Giddings paused. “But why? Tell me, man, for the love of God, why?”

“I don’t know.” Simple truth, but the hunch that was almost conviction remained. “You’re a big man,” Nat said. “You ever been in a bar fight?”

Giddings smiled faintly, without amusement. “One or two.”

“Has it ever been because some little man was liquored up and looking to show what a ring-tailed wonder he was and he picked on you because you were the biggest man in the bar?”

Giddings was silent, thoughtful. “Go on.”

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Nat said. “I’m an architect. I also know horses and I know mountains and I know skiing and—and things. I don’t think I know much about people.”

“Go on,” Giddings said again.

“I’m no shrink,” Nat said. “But if somebody can’t get anybody to pay attention to him even when he goes around like a freak, and decides that, say, a bomb is the only answer, where does he plant it? In an airplane—gets lots of attention—but they don’t plant bombs in little airplanes, do they? It’s always a big shiny jet. Or it’s a crowded airport that’s known around the world—it isn’t at Teterboro or Santa Fe.”

Giddings picked up the shot glass and set it down again untouched. “You’ve flipped,” he said. And he added, “I hope.”

“I hope so too.” Nat felt calmer now, almost resigned, which was strange. “That building of ours,” he said, “is the biggest. And today is the day everybody is looking at it. Look there.” He pointed to the color TV set mounted behind the bar.

The set was on, the volume turned down. The picture was of the World Tower Plaza, the police barricades, the temporary platform now partially filled with seated guests. Grover Frazee, a carnation in his buttonhole, smiled and extended his hand as more guests mounted the platform stairs. A band was playing; the music reached only faintly across the barroom,

“You didn’t want the opening,” Nat said. “Neither did I. Now I want it even less and I can’t say why.” He paused. “Look there.”

The television camera had swung from the platform and the guests to the crowds behind the barricades. Here and there a hand waved at the lens, but it was on scattered handheld signs that the camera focused. “Stop the War!” one sign read. “Stop the Bombing!” urged another. The signs waved angrily.

The camera moved on, paused, and then zoomed in to focus on a new sign: “Millions for this Monster Building! But How About Welfare?”

“All right,” Giddings said. “The natives are restless. They always are these days.” He picked up the shot glass and knocked the drink back, his good humor restored.

The camera had returned to the platform steps where the governor and the mayor paused to wave at the crowd. Watching, “I always have the feeling,” Giddings said, “that politicians will gather to dedicate a whorehouse if there’s publicity to be had.” He was smiling now. “But, then, whores vote too, same as anybody else.”

Nat said quietly, “Where did you get those change orders, Will?” He watched Giddings’s smile disappear.

“Are they real, do you mean?” Giddings said. There was truculence in his tone.

“You’ve shown me copies,” Nat said. “Where are the originals?”

“Look, sonny—”

Nat shook his head. “I told you: not that way. If you’re afraid to answer the question, just say so.”

“Afraid, hell.”

“Then where are the originals?”

Giddings turned the empty shot glass around and around on the table top. He said at last, “I don’t know.” He looked up. “And that’s the stupid simple truth. What I got in the mail yesterday was an envelope of Xerox copies.” He paused. “No return address. Grand Central Station postmark.” He spread his large hands. “No note. Just the copies.” He paused again. “It could be somebody’s idea of a joke.”

“Do you think that?”

Giddings shook his head slowly.’ “I don’t.”

“Neither,” Nat said, “do I.”

9

Watching the arriving guests-and the still orderly crowds behind the barricades, considering the waving signs in all their shade* of meaning or non-meaning, Patrolman Barnes said “Security. Ten years ago, Mike, did you ever hear the word?”

“The name of the game,” Shannon said, as if the cliché explained everything. He was a fine figure of a man and conscious of it. In front of the barricades he did not exactly strut, but neither did he try to make himself inconspicuous “You not only read too much, Frank, you think too much.”

“Fret the Russian Jews,’” Barnes read from a nearby waving sign. “The last time I saw that sign was in the UN plaza.”

“With today’s prices,” Shannon said, “you save what you can to use over and over again. At the ballpark you see the same banners game after game.”

“Not quite the same,” Barnes said. He was smiling. He and Mike Shannon got along fine, and if there was disparity between them in education or even quickness of intellect, well, what of it? Other factors, like ease, rapport, and loyalty, were far more important. “Have you been inside this building at all, Mike?”

Shannon had not. It was not exactly that a building is a building is a building, although some of that concept did color his thinking: it was rather that in the city there are so many buildings, as there are so many neighborhoods, that a man could drive himself daft trying to keep up with them all and did best to mind his own business in his own familiar areas. He said as much. “But you,” he said, and shook his head, “you take in too much territory, Frank. It isn’t healthy.” He paused. “What about the inside of this building? What sets it apart?” He paused again and looked heavenward. “Aside from its size?”

“A central security desk,” Barnes said. “There is that word again. It’s a command post in touch with every floor. There’s a computer center that controls temperature and humidity and heaven knows what all throughout the whole building. The fire doors to the stairwells are locked electronically, but if there is an emergency, they automatically open from the stair side. There is a double fire-alarm system that can be activated from any floor—” He was silent, smiling faintly.

“And what is funny?” Shannon said.

“I heard a story once,” Barnes said. “The airplane of the future. It takes off from Heathrow Airport near London. It tucks up its flaps and gear and swings its wings into supersonic position. Then a voice comes on the loudspeaker: ‘Welcome aboard, ladies and gentlemen,’ the voice says. ‘This is Flight One Hundred, London to New York. We will fly at an altitude of sixty-three thousand feet, at a speed of seven hundred twenty miles an hour, and we will arrive at Kennedy Airport at precisely three-fifty-five New York time. This is the most advanced aircraft in the world. It is entirely automated, and there is no pilot aboard. All operations of the aircraft are handled electronically, all contingencies have been anticipated, and nothing can possibly go wrong go wrong go’ wrong … wrong.’”

Shannon shook his head. “I don’t know where you get them,” he said.

Grover Frazee, that fresh carnation in his buttonhole, waited hatless and smiling at the foot of the platform steps in the Tower Plaza, as automobile after automobile drew up in the cleared street lane to discharge its passengers. Every one of them wore, Frazee thought, the expression that is reserved for weddings, parliament or legislature openings, to dedications. Oh, yes, and for funerals. Now where did that thought come from?

He stepped forward, hand outstretched. “Mr. Ambassador.” he said, “how generous of you to take the time to come here today.”

“I would not have missed it, Mr. Frazee. This huge beautiful building dedicated to man’s communication with man—” The ambassador shook his head in admiration.

Senator John Peters had shared a taxi from LaGuardia with Representative Cary Wycoff. They had flown up from Washington together on a shuttle, and part of their conversation stuck in Cary Wycoff’s mind. The conversation had begun idly enough while they were still on the ground at National Airport.

“Time was,” the senator had said as they fastened their seat belts “when it was the railroad or nothing. Back before the war. You-don’t remember that, do you?”

Cary Wycoff did not. He was thirty-four years old, in his second term in Congress, and even the Korean War was before his time, let alone World War H, which obviously Jake Peters was referring to. “You are pulling rank on me, Senator,” Cary said.

The senator grinned. “Pure envy. I’d like to be your age again just starting out.”

“Now,** Cary asked, “or then?” He had never thought of it before in quite this way, but was the wish for renewed youth pure nostalgia or simply a desire to stick around and see what came next? Sheer selfishness or intelligent curiosity?

“Now,” the senator said with emphasis. “I have no hankering for the past. I went down to Washington in thirty-six. Depression is only a word now. It was a pustulating sickness then, and no matter how much we told ourselves we were making progress in curing it, actually all we were doing was feeding the patient aspirin and putting Band-Aids on his open sores and hoping to God he wouldn’t die on our hands.”

Against this kind of elder statesman talk Cary always felt defensive. “We have problems today,” he said. “You won’t deny it?”

“Oh, hell, son, you know better than that. But the difference is that today we have the means to improve things. We have the knowledge, the wealth, the production, the distribution, the communication—above all, the communication—and what we had then was damn little more than hysteria and despair.”

“The knowledge?” Cary said. “It seems to me—”

“I used the word advisedly,” the senator said sharply. “Knowledge we have. The question is whether we have the wisdom to use it properly. That’s why I’d like to be your age again, just starting out, but in a world that could be a better world than it’s ever been since Eve gave Adam that apple. Only I doubt if it was an apple; I never heard of apples in Mesopotamia, where the Garden of Eden is supposed to have been. Ever think of that?” Cary had not. Thinking about it now, he was amused, not so much by the question as by the senator’s adroitness in bringing it up and thereby switching the conversation without even seeming to shift gears.

Jake Peters was an anomaly: he spoke with a big-city working-class accent that was almost the “dese,” “dem,” and “dose” type, but his erudition in astonishing areas could rock you right back on your heels. If you argued with Jake Peters, as a long list of his Senate colleagues could testify, you did well to have your homework letter-perfect.

The senator was already off on another subject. “I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I almost didn’t come today.” He smiled. “Ever get hunches, son?”

Cary Wycoff did, but disliked admitting it. “Now, Senator.’* he said.

“Oh, I’m not clairvoyant,” the senator said. He was smiling. “And I’ve known Bent Armitage a long time and this mean* a lot to him.” He paused. The smile faded. “At least I think it does. I never asked him.”

“I should think,” Cary Wycoff said, “that it means a lot to many people. A new building means new jobs, new businesses attracted into the city, more taxes—”

“You see it black-and-white, don’t you?” the senator said.

It was a sore point. Cary Wycoff regarded himself as liberal in view and political position, and yet to his dismay occasionally, as now, the charge of tunnel vision cropped up and he did not know how to refute it. “I don’t try to stifle dissent, Senator,” he said. And he added, “As some do.”

“If you think you’re sticking your finger in my eye, son,” the senator said easily, “think again.” There was an air of circuit-rider righteousness in young Wycoff, as in other congressmen and even presidential candidates the senator could name, and he had long ago decided that argument with them was futile. A man totally convinced of his own rectitude saw only heresy in any other view.

“If a man believes in what he says or does,” Cary Wycoff said, “I believe he should be allowed—”

“To do what? Commit violence? Destroy records? Set bombs?” The senator watched Wycoff’s indecision.

“Our own revolution,” Cary said at last,’ “was violent dissent, wasn’t it?”

“It was,” the senator said. “But if those who launched it and carried it out had lost instead of winning, they would have had to take the consequences, however noble a document the Declaration was and is. They were laying their head’ on the block and they knew it.”

“Then.” Cary said, “morality is decided by whether you win or lose? Is that it?” There was scorn in his voice.

“That,” the senator said, “has been argued for a long time, and I don’t pretend to know the answer.” He smiled. “What I do know is that when somebody takes the law into his own hands and because of it somebody else is injured, I don’t hold with total amnesty.”

“You don’t believe in turning the other cheek?” Cary was sure he had scored a debating point.

“I’ve known times,” the senator said, “when all that got a man was two black eyes instead of one—and he still had to fight.” He leaned forward to poke a bill over the cab driver’s shoulder. “Hunch or not, here we are.”

They stepped out of the taxi and walked between the barricades toward the platform. Signs waved. A few voices began an unintelligible chant.

“Cops all over the place,” Cary Wycoff said. “You’d think there was a threat of some kind.”

“I would have thought,” the senator said, “that you would call them fuzz.” And then, “Grover,” he said, “you picked a fine day for it.”

“Welcome, Jake,” Frazee said. “And Cary. You’re in good time. We’re about to start the teethclicking.”

All three men smiled.

“Up you go on the platform,” Frazee said. “Sort yourselves out. I’ll be right up.”

“I take it,” the senator said, “that you want brief mention of God, motherhood, and man’s future—without political overtones?”

Frazee smiled again. “Precisely.”

The building was equipped with a closed-circuit television net that could scan every floor, every subbasement. But on this day, the building not yet open to the public, the security desks were unmanned and the television systems were dead.

The point had been argued, but economy had carried the weight. The World Tower, it was said, was no Fort Knox with untold wealth in gold piled high for the taking. Not yet.

Later, when the building was occupied, fully tenanted (Grover Frazee had winced at the thought and at the use of the manufactured word), security would become a problem, as it is in all of the city’s large buildings, and the expense of that security would be accepted as a matter of routine.

Later, all of the security desks would be manned day and night, and the closed-circuit television would maintain its ceaseless vigil. But not yet. Not today.

But even today, as for many months since the building’s skeleton of structural steel had begun to be fleshed out and clothed, the computer center was manned. Consider the analogy of the heart beating in the fetus, well before birth supplying nutriment and life force to the developing organism.

Here at the semicircular desk facing the blinking lights, the rotating spools, and the rows of instrument dials, one man watched over the health of the great structure.

Floor 65, northwest corridor, required additional cooling air—was there a leak of some kind allowing outside heat to enter? A question to examine tomorrow, in the meantime, more washed, cooled air to the northwest corridor.

Floor 125, the Tower Room, in anticipation of the flood of reception guests with their concomitant BTUs, each human a walking heat machine, was already cooled two degrees below normal.

The pressure of the electric current into the building from the Con Edison substation held steady. The flow would fluctuate as automated systems turned on and off.

From the step-down transformers, all voltages were steady within their normal limits.

Elevator No. 35, local floors 44-54, was still shut down for repair; it showed dead on the panel.

In the subbasements automated systems functioned, motors hummed softly, standby generators waited with their massive built-in patience.

All systems normal. All systems go. The man in the padded swivel chair facing the great panel could relax and almost doze.

His name was Henry Barber and he lived in Washington Heights with a wife, Helen, three children, Ann, 10, Jody, 7, and Peter, 3, and Helen’s mother, 64. Barber had a degree in electrical engineering from Columbia. His hobbies were chess, pro football, and the old movies shown at the Museum of Modem Art. He was thirty-six years old. He never became any older.

Mercifully, he never knew what hit him: the blow from the eighteen-inch wrecking bar shattered his skull, he was almost instantly dead and therefore totally insensitive to what happened later.

John Connors stood for a few moments, studying the blinking lights of the control panel. Then he left the quiet room and went on down the stairs to the subbasement where the electrical cables entered the building from the nearby substation. There, door closed, secure from interruption, he sat quietly, from time to time glancing at his watch.

The question he had asked himself earlier was still in his mind. answered satisfactorily now. He repeated it over and over again with pleasure as he studied the massive electrical cables and the brooding transformers: Why bunt, when a triple would clear the bases?

“Swing away,” he whispered. “Swing for the fences.”

In the plaza the band played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and protest signs waved to the rhythm.

Rabbi Stein prayed that the building with its communications potential be an instrument of peace for all mankind.

In a comer of the plaza, subtly contained by a few uniformed police, a mixed group, Arabs and non-Arabs, chanted for justice in Palestine.

Monsignor O’Toole blessed the building.

Signs calling for birth control and nationwide legalized abortion sprouted like crocuses in early spring.

The Reverend Arthur William Williams called for celestial blessing, peace, and prosperity.

Signs appeared demanding taxation of church-owned property.

The Reverend Joe Willie Thomas attempted to climb the steps to the platform microphones and was restrained. From the foot of the steps he denounced idolatry.

Grover Frazee acted as master of ceremonies.

The governor spoke. He praised the buildings purpose.

The mayor spoke in favor of brotherhood of man.

Senator Jake Peters praised progress.

Congressman Cary Wycoff spoke of the benefits the building would bring to the city.

A ribbon across one of the concourse doors was cut in full view of television and still cameras. It was hastily replaced and cut a second time when it was learned that NBC-TV had missed the shot.

The invited guests flowed through the door and into two automated express elevators for the less-than-two-minute trip to the highest room in the tallest building in the world where the bar tables were already set up, candles lighted, canapés set out, champagne was chilled and ready, and waiters and waitresses stood by.