Tower of Glass

19

November 17, 2218.

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

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

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

Installation of the tachyon-beam system has begun. Five giant rods of brilliant red copper, sixty centimeters thick and hundreds of meters long, will form a quintuple spine, rising inside vertical service cores that span close to half the tower’s height, and the lower sections of these great busbars are going into place now. A circular jacket of translucent plastic a meter in diameter forms the housing for each bar. The workmen slide forty-meter lengths of copper into these jackets, then cunningly fuse them end to end with quick dazzling bursts of power from the eye of a welding laser. Elsewhere in the building, hundreds of electricians supervise the spraying of conductive filaments into the tower’s gleaming inner walls, and squadrons of mechanics install conduits, waveguides, frequency converters, fluxmeters, optical guidance accessories, focal plane locators, neutron activation foils, Mцssbauer absorbers, multi-channel pulse height analyzers, nuclear amplifiers, voltage converters, cryostats, transponders, resistance bridges, prisms, torsion testers, sensor clusters, degaussers, collimaters, magnetic resonance cells, thermocouple amplifiers, accelerator reflectors, proton accumulators, and much more, everything carefully computer-tagged in advance with its floor level and flow-chart designation. Sending messages to the stars by tachyon beam is not a simple project.

The tower is already a thing of unparalleled splendor, starkly supple, spectacularly spearing the sky. Visitors drive many kilometers out into the tundra to get the best view of it, for at close range it cannot properly be appreciated. Krug enjoys reminding his guests, though, that what they see today is merely the bottom third of the ultimate structure. To visualize the final building, one must imagine a second tower of the same size piled atop this November spire, and then a third one set atop that. The mind rebels. The image will not come. Instead, one can bring into view only the picture of a slender, impossibly attenuated, terribly frail needle of glass that hangs in the sky, seeking to put down roots, and, failing, topples and topples and topples, falling like Lucifer through all one long day, and shatters with a faint tinkle in the icy air.