Tower of Glass

20

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

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

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

The observatory was a series of pleasant glossy domes sitting atop an ice-sheet two and a half kilometers thick. Tunnels in the ice linked dome to dome, and gave access also to the outlying apparatus: the vast dish of a radio telescope’s parabolic antenna, the metal grid of an X-ray receiver, the burnished mirror that picked up relayed transmissions from the orbiting observatory high above the South Pole, the short, stocky multiple-diffraction optical telescope, the three golden spikes of the hydrogen antenna, the fluttering airborne webwork of a polyradar system, and the rest of the devices with which the astronomers here kept watch on the universe. Instead of using refrigeration tapes to insure that the ice would not melt beneath the buildings, they had employed individual heat-exchange plaques for every structure, so that each building was a little island on the great glacier.

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

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

Krug contemplated the pattern of surges.

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

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

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

“It’s got tomean something!”

“Perhaps it does.”

“How can we find out?”

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

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

“No. There has to be continuity. They couldn’t have reached a technological level that would allow them to send transgalactic messages at all unless they were able to retain the achievements of earlier generations.”

Krug swung round. “You know something? This planetary nebula, this blue sun — I still don’t believe it could have intelligent beings living there. Any kind of life — no! Listen, blue suns don’t last long, Vargas. It takes millions of years for the surface of a planet just to cool enough to get solid. There isn’t that much time, a blue sun. Any planets it’s got, they’re still molten. You want me to believe signals coming from people who live on a fireball?”

Vargas said quietly, “Those signals come from NGC 7293, that planetary nebula in Aquarius.”

“For sure?”

“For sure. I can show you all the data.”

“Never mind. But how, a fireball?”

“It’s not necessarily a fireball. Maybe some planets cool faster than others. We can’t be sure how long it takes them to cool. We don’t know how far the home world of the message-senders is from that sun. We’ve got models showing the theoretical possibility that a planet can cool fast enough, even with a blue sun, to allow—”

“It’s a fireball, that planet,” said Krug sullenly.

Defensive now, Vargas said, “Perhaps. Perhaps not. Even if it is: must all life-forms live on a solid-surface planet? Can’t you conceive a civilization of high-temperature entities evolving on a world that hasn’t cooled yet? If—”

Krug snorted in disgust. “Sending signals with machines made of molten steel?”

“The signals don’t have to be mechanical in origin. Suppose they can manipulate the molecular structure of—”

“You talk fairy tales to me, doctor. I go to a scientist, I get fairy tales!”

“At the moment fairy tales are the only way of accounting for the data,” Vargas said.

“You know there’s got to be a better way!”

“All I know is that we’re getting signals, and they undoubtedly come from this planetary nebula. I know it isn’t plausible. The universe doesn’t have to seem plausible to us all the time. Its phenomena don’t have to be readily explicable. Transmat wouldn’t be plausible to an eighteenth-century scientist. We see the data as best we can, and we try to account for it, and sometimes we do some wild guessing because the data we’re getting doesn’t seem to make sense, but—”

“The universe doesn’t cheat,” Krug said. “The universe plays fair!”

Vargas smiled. “No doubt it does. But we need more data before we can explain NGC 7293. Meanwhile we make do with fairy tales.”

Krug nodded. He closed his eyes and fondled dials and meters, while within him a monstrous raging impatience sizzled and blazed and bubbled.Hey, you star people! Hey, you, sending those pulses! Who are you? What are you? Where are you? By damn, I want to know!

What are you trying to tell us, you?

Who are you looking for?

What’s it all mean? Suppose I die before I find out!

“You know what I want?” Krug said suddenly. “To go outside, to that radio telescope of yours. And climb up into the big dish. And cup my hands and shout at those bastards with the numbers. What’s the signal now? 2-5-1, 2-3-1, 2-1? It drives me crazy. We ought to answer them right now. Send some numbers: 4-10-2, 4-6-2, 4-2. Just to show them we’re here. Just to let them know.”

“By radio transmission?” Vargas said. “It’ll take 300 years. The tower will be finished soon.”

“Soon, sure. Soon. You ought to see it. Come see, next week. They’re putting the gadgets in it now. We’ll be talking to the bastards soon.”

“Would you like to hear the audio signal coming in, the new one?”

“Sure.”

Vargas touched a switch. From speakers in the laboratory wall came a dry cold hiss, the sound of space, the voice of the dark abyss. It was a sound like a cast-off snakeskin. Overriding that withered sound, seconds later, came sweet upper-frequency tones.Pleep pleep. Pause.Pleep pleep pleep pleep pleep. Pause.Pleep. Pause. Pause.Pleep Pleep. Pause.Pleep pleep pleep. Pause.Pleep. Pause. Pause.Pleep pleep. Pause.Pleep. Silence. And then again,pleep pleep, the new cycle beginning.

“Beautiful,” Krug whispered. “The music of the spheres. Oh, you mysterious bastards! Look, doctor, you come see the tower next week, next — oh, Tuesday. I’ll have Spaulding call you. You’ll be amazed. And listen, anything else new comes up, another change in the signal, I want to hear right away.”

Pleep pleep pleep.

He headed for the transmat.

Pleep.

Krug leaped northward along the meridian, following the line of 90 DEGREES E., looped the North Pole, and emerged beside his tower. He had sped from icy plateau to icy plateau, from the world’s bottom to its top, from late spring to early winter, from day to night. Androids were busy everywhere. The tower seemed to have grown fifty meters since yesterday’s visit. The sky was ablaze with the light of reflector plates. The song of NGC 7293 sang seductively in Krug’s mind.Pleep pleep pleep.

He found Thor Watchman in the control center, jacked in. The alpha, unaware of Krug’s presence, seemed lost in a drugged dream, climbing the precipices of some distant interface. An awed beta offered to cut into the circuit and tell Watchman, via the computer, that Krug had arrived. “No,” Krug said. “He’s busy. Don’t bother him.”Pleep pleep pleep pleep pleep. He stood for a few moments, watching the play of expressions on Watchman’s tranquil face. What was passing through the alpha’s mind now? Freight invoices, transmat manifests, welding cues, weather reports, cost estimates, stress factors, personnel data? Krug felt pride geysering in his soul. Why not? He had plenty to be proud of. He had built the androids, and the androids were building the tower, and soon man’s voice would go forth to the stars—

Pleep pleep pleep. Pleep.

Affectionately, a little surprised at himself, he put his hands to Thor Watchman’s broad shoulders in a quick embrace. Then he went out. He stood in the frigid blackness a short while, surveying the frenzied activity at every level of the tower. On top they were putting new blocks in place with flawless rhythm. Inside, the tiny figures were hauling neutrino-sheathing around, joining lengths of copper cable, installing floors, carrying the heat-cool-power-light system higher and higher. Through the night came a steady pulsation of sound, all the noises of construction blending into a single cosmic rhythm, a deep booming hum with regular soaring climaxes. The two sounds, the inner and the outer one, met in Krug’s mind,boom andpleep, boom andpleep, boom andpleep.

He walked toward the transmats, ignoring the knives of the Arctic wind.

Not bad for a poor man without much education, he told himself. This tower. These androids. Everything. He thought of the Krug of forty-five years ago, the Krug growing up miserable in a town in Illinois with grass in the middle of the streets. He hadn’t dreamed much about sending messages to the stars then. He just wanted to make something out of himself. He wasn’t anything, yet. Some Krug! Ignorant. Skinny. Pimpled. Sometimes on holocasts he heard people saying that mankind had entered a new golden age, with population down, social and racial tensions forgotten, a horde of servomechanisms to do all the dirty work. Yes. Yes. Fine. But even in a golden age somebody has to be on the bottom. Krug was. Father dead when he was five. Mother hooked on floaters, sensory scramblers, any kind of dream-pills. They got a little money, not much, from a welfare foundation. Robots? Robots were for other people. Half the time the data terminal, even, was shut off for unpaid bills. He never went through a transmat until he was nineteen. Never even left Illinois. He remembered himself: sullen, withdrawn, squint-eyed, sometimes going a week or two without speaking to anyone. He didn’t read. He didn’t play games. He dreamed a lot, though. He slid through school in a haze of rage, learning nothing. Slowly coming out of it when he was fifteen, propelled by that same rage, turning it suddenly outward instead of letting it fester within:I show you what I can do, I get even with you all! Self-programming his education. Servotechnology. Chemistry. He didn’t learn basic science; he learned ways of putting things together. Sleep? Who needed sleep? Study. Study. Sweat. Build. A remarkable intuitive grasp of the structure of things, they said was what he had. He found a backer in Chicago. The age of private capitalism was supposed to be dead; so was the age of free-lance invention. He built a better robot, anyway. Krug smiled, remembering: the transmat hop to New York, the conferences, the lawyers. And money in the bank. The new Thomas Edison. He was nineteen. He stocked his laboratory with equipment and looked for grander projects. At twenty-two, he started to create the androids. Took awhile. Somewhere in those years, the probes began coming back from the near stars, empty. No advanced life-forms out there. He was secure enough now to divert some attention from business, to allow himself the luxury of wondering about man’s place in the cosmos. He pondered. He quarreled with the popular theories of the uniqueness of man. Went on toiling, though, diddling with the nucleic acid, blending, hovering over centrifuges, straining his eyes, dipping his hands deep into tubs of slime, hooking together the protein chains, getting measurably closer to success. How can man be alone in the universe if one man himself can make life? Look how easy it is! I’m doing it: am I God? The vats seethed. Purple, green, gold, red, blue. And eventually life came forth. Androids shakily rising from the foaming chemicals. Fame. Money. Power. A wife; a son; a corporate empire. Properties on three worlds, five moons. Women, all he wanted. He had grown up to live his own adolescent fantasies. Krug smiled. The young skinny pimpled Krug was still here within this stocky man, angry, defiant, burning. You showed them, eh? You showed them! And now you’ll reach the people in the stars.Pleep pleep pleep. Boom. The voice of Krug spanning the light-years. “Hello? Hello? Hello, you! This is Simeon Krug!” In retrospect he saw his whole life as a single shaped process, trending without detour or interruption toward this one goal. If he had not churned with intense, unfocused ambitions, there would have been no androids. Without his androids, there would not have been sufficient skilled labor to build the tower. Without his tower—

He entered the nearest transmat cubicle and set coordinates in a casual way, letting his fingers idly choose his destination. He stepped through the field and found himself in the California home of his son Manuel.

He hadn’t planned to go there. He stood blinking in afternoon sunlight, shivering as a sudden wave of warmth struck his Arctic-tuned skin. Beneath his feet was a shining floor of dark red stone; the walls that rose on either side of him were coruscating swirls of light bursting from polyphase projectors mounted in the foundation; above him was no roof, only a repellor field set for the blue end of the spectrum, through which there dangled the fruit-laden branches of some tree with feathery gray-green leaves. He could hear the roar of the surf. Half a dozen household androids, going about their domestic chores, gaped at him. He caught their awed whispers: “Krug … Krug…”

Clissa appeared. She wore a misty green wrap that revealed her small high breasts, her sharp-boned hips, her narrow shoulders. “You didn’t tell me you were—”

“I didn’t know I was.”

“I would have had something ready!”

“Don’t feel I need anything special. I’m just dropping in. Is Manuel—”

“He isn’t here.”

“No. Where?”

Clissa shrugged. “Out. Business, I guess. Not due back until dinnertime. Can I get you—”

“No. No. What a fine house you have, Clissa. Warm. Real. You and Manuel must be very happy here.” He eyed her slender form. “It’s such a good place for having children too. The beach— the sun— the trees—”

An android brought two mirror-bright chairs, expanding and socketing them with a swift deft twinkle of his hands. Another turned on the waterfall on the inland side of the house. A third lit an aroma spike, and the odor of cloves and cinnamon unfolded in the courtyard. A fourth offered Krug a tray of milky-looking sweets. He shook his head. He remained standing. So did Clissa. She looked uncomfortable.

She said, “We’re still newlyweds, you know. We can wait awhile for children.”

“Two years, isn’t it, you’ve been married? A long honeymoon!”

“Well—”

“At least get your certificate. You could start thinking about children. I mean, it’s time you— time I— a grandchild—”

She held forth the tray of sweets. Her face was pale; her eyes were like opals in a frosty mask. He shook his head again.

He said, “The androids do all the work of raising a kid, anyhow. And if you don’t want to get yourself stretched, you could have it ectogenetically, so—”

“Please?” she said softly. “We’ve talked about this before. I’m so tired today.”

“I’m sorry.” He cursed himself for pushing her too hard. His old mistake; subtlety was not his chief skill. “You’re feeling all right?”

“Just fatigue,” she said, not convincing him. She seemed to make an effort to show more energy. She gestured, and one of her betas began to assemble a stack of glittering metal hoops that rotated mysteriously about some hidden axis; a new sculpture, Krug thought. A second android adjusted the walls, and he and Clissa were bathed in a cone of warm amber light. Music trembled in the air, coming from a cloud of tiny glittering speakers that floated, fine as dust, into the courtyard. Clissa said, too loudly, “How is your tower going?”

“Beautiful. Beautiful. You should see it.”

“Perhaps I’ll come, next week. If it isn’t too cold there. Are you up to 500 meters yet?”

“Past it. Rising all the time. Only not fast enough. I ache to see if finished, Clissa. To be able to use it. I’m so full of impatiences I’m sick of them.”

“You do look a little strained today,” she said. “Flushed, excited. You ought to slow down, sometimes.”

“Me? Slow? Why? Am I too old?” He realized he was barking at her. He said more temperately, “Look, maybe you’re right. I don’t know. I better leave now. I don’t mean to be a bother to you. I just felt like a little visit.”Pleep pleep. Boom. “You tell Manuel it was nothing special, yes? To say hello. When did I see him, anyway? Two weeks, three? Not since right after he came out of that shunt-room business. A man can visit his son sometimes.” He reached out impulsively, drew her to him, hugged her lightly. He felt like a bear hugging a forest sprite. Her skin was cold through that misty wrap. She was all bones. He could snap her in half with a quick yank. What did she weigh, fifty kilos? Less? A child’s body. Maybe she couldn’t even have children. Krug found himself trying to imagine Manuel in bed with her, and pushed the thought away, appalled. He kissed her chilly cheek. “You take care,” he said. “So will I. We both take care, get lots of rest. You say hello to Manuel for me.”

He rushed to the transmat. Where to next? Krug felt feverish. His cheeks were flaming. He was adrift, floating on the broad bosom of the sea. Coordinates tumbled across his mind; frantic, he seized one set, fed it to the machine.Pleep. Pleep. Pleep. The scaly hiss of amplified star-noise nibbled at his brain. 2-5-1, 2-3-1, 2-1. Hello? Hello? The theta force devoured him.

It brought him forth inside an immense musty cavern.

There was a roof, dozens of dim kilometers overhead. There were walls, metallic, reflective, yellow-brown, curving toward some distant place of union. Harsh lights glared and flickered. Sharp-edged shadows stained the air. Construction noises sounded: crash, thunk, ping, bavoom. The place was full of busy androids. They clustered close to him, glistening with awe, nudging, whispering: “Krug … Krug … Krug…” Why do androids always look at me that way? He scowled at them. He knew that perspiration was bursting from every pore. His legs were unsteady. Ask Spaulding for a coolpill: but Spaulding was elsewhere. Krug was jumping solo today.

An alpha loomed before him. “We were not led to anticipate the pleasure of this visit, Mr. Krug.”

“A whim. Simply passing through, looking in. Pardon me — your name—?”

“Romulus Fusion, sir.”

“How big a work-force here, Alpha Fusion?”

“Seven hundred betas, sir, and nine thousand gammas. The alpha staff is quite small; we rely on sensors for most supervisory functions. Shall I show you around? Would you like to see the lunar runabouts? The Jupiter modules? The starship, perhaps?”

The starship. The starship. Krug comprehended. He was in Denver, at Krug Enterprises’ main North American vehicle-assembly center. In this spacious catacomb many types of transportation devices were manufactured, covering all needs that the transmat could not meet: ocean-crawlers, sliders for surface travel, stratospheric gliders, heavy-duty power-haulers, immersion modules for use on high-pressure worlds, ion-drive systemships for short-hop spacing, interstellar probes, gravity boxes, skydivers, minirailers, sunscoops. Here, too, for the past seven years, a picked technical staff had been building the prototype of the first manned stargoing vessel. Lately, since the commencement of the tower, the starship had become a stepchild among Krug’s projects.

“The starship,” Krug said. “Yes. Please. Let’s see it.”

Aisles of betas opened for him as Romulus Fusion ushered him toward a small teardrop-shaped slider. With the alpha at the controls they slipped noiselessly along the floor of the plant, past racks of half-finished vehicles of every description, and came at length to a ramp leading to yet a lower level of this subterranean workshop. Down they went. The slider halted. They got out.

“This,” said Romulus Fusion.

Krug beheld a curious vehicle a hundred meters long, with flaring vanes running from its needle-sharp nose to its squat, aggressive-looking tail. The dark red hull seemed to have been fashioned from conglomerated rubble; its texture was rough and knobby. No vision accesses were in evidence. The mass-ejectors were conventional in form, rectangular slots opening along the rear.

Romulus Fusion said, “It will be ready for flight-testing in three months. We estimate an acceleration capability of a constant 2.4 g, which of course will bring the vessel rapidly to a velocity not far short of that of light. Will you go inside?”

Krug nodded. Within, the ship seemed comfortable and not very unusual; he saw a control center, a recreation area, a power compartment, and other features that would have been standard on any contemporary systemgoing ship. “It can accommodate a crew of eight,” the alpha told him. “In flight, an automatic deflector field surrounds the ship to ward off all oncoming free-floating particles, which of course could be enormously destructive at such velocities. The ship is totally self-programming; it needs no supervision. These are the personnel containers.” Romulus Fusion indicated four double rows of black glass-faced freezer units, each two and a half meters long and a meter wide, mounted against a wall. “They employ conventional life-suspension technology,” he said. “The ship’s control system, at a signal from the crew or from a ground station, will automatically begin pumping the high-density coolant fluid into the containers, lowering the body temperature of personnel to the desired degree. They will then make the journey submerged in cold fluid, serving the double purpose of slowing life-processes and insulating the crew against the effects of steady acceleration. Reversal of the life-suspension is just as simple. A maximum deepsleep period of forty years is planned; in the event of longer voyages, the crew will be awakened at forty-year intervals, put through an exercise program similar to that used in the training of new androids, and restored to the containers after a brief waking interval. In this way a voyage of virtually infinite length can be managed by the same crew.”

“How long,” Krug asked, “would it take this ship to reach a star 300-light years away?”

“Including the time needed for building up maximum velocity, and the time required for deceleration,” replied Romulus Fusion, “I’d estimate roughly 620 years. Allowing for the expected relativistic time-dilation effects, apparent elapsed time aboard ship should be no more than 20 or 25 years, which means the entire voyage could be accomplished within the span of a single deepsleep period for the crew.”

Krug grunted. That was fine for the crew; but if he sent the starship off to NGC 7293 next spring, it would return to Earth in the thirty-fifth century. He would not be here to greet it. Yet he saw no alternative.

He said, “It’ll fly by February?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Start picking a crew: two alphas, two betas, four gammas. They’ll blast off for a system of my choosing early in ’19.”

“As you instruct, sir.”

They left the ship. Krug ran his hands over its pebbled hull. His infatuation with the tachyon-beam tower had kept him from following the progress of the work here; he regretted that now. They had done a magnificent job. And, he saw, his assault on the stars would have to be a two-pronged effort. When the tower was complete, he could attempt to open realtime communication with the beings whom Vargas insisted lived in NGC 7293; meanwhile, his android-staffed starship would be embarked on its slow journey outward. What would he send aboard it? The full record of man’s accomplishments — yes, cubes galore, whole libraries, the entire musical repertoire, a hundred high-redundancy information systems. Make that crew four alphas, four betas; they’d need to be masters of communications techniques. While they slept, he would beam tachyon-borne messages to them from Earth, detailing the knowledge that he expected to gain from the tower’s contacts with the star-folk; perhaps, by the time the starship reached its destination in the year 2850 or so, it would have become possible to give its crew access to dictionaries of the language of the race it was to visit. Whole encyclopedias, even. Annals of six centuries of tachyon-beam contact between Earthmen and the inhabitants of NGC 7293!

Krug clapped Romulus Fusion’s shoulder. “Good work. You’ll hear from me. Where’s the transmat?”

“This way, sir.”

Pleep. Pleep. Pleep.

Krug jumped back to the tower site.

Thor Watchman was no longer jacked into the master control center’s computer. Krug found him inside the tower, on the fourth level up, overseeing the installation of a row of devices that looked like globes of butter mounted on a beaded glass string.

“What are these?” Krug demanded.

Watchman looked surprised to see his master appear so abruptly. “Circuitbreakers,” he said, making a quick recovery. “In case of excessive positron flow—”

“All right. You know where I’ve been, Thor? Denver. Denver. I’ve seen the starship. I didn’t realize it: they’ve got it practically finished. Effective right now we’re going to tie it into our project sequence.”

“Sir?”

“Alpha Romulus Fusion is in charge out there. He’s going to pick a crew, four alphas, four betas. We’ll send them off next spring under life-suspension, coldsleep. Right after we send our first signals to NGC 7293. Get in touch with him, coordinate the timing, yes? Oh — and another thing. Even though we’re ahead of schedule here, it still isn’t going fast enough to please me.”Boom. Boom. The planetary nebula NGC 7293 sizzled and flared behind Krug’s forehead. The heat of his skin evaporated his sweat as fast as it could burst from his pores. Getting too excited, he told himself. “When you finish work tonight, Thor, draw up a personnel requisition increasing the work crews by 50%. Send it to Spaulding. You need more alphas, don’t hesitate. Ask. Hire. Spend. Whatever.”Boom. “I want the entire construction scheme reprogrammed. Completion date three months tighter than the one we have now. Got it?”

Watchman seemed a little dazed. “Yes, Mr. Krug,” he said faintly.

“Good. Yes. Good. Keep up the good work, Thor. Can’t tell you how proud. How happy.”Boom. Boom. Boom. Pleep. Boom. “We’ll get you every skilled beta in the Western Hemisphere, if necessary. Eastern. Everywhere. Tower’s got to be finished!”Boom. “Time! Time! Never enough time!”

Krug rushed away. Outside, in the cold night air, some of the frenzy left him. He stood quietly for a moment, savoring the sleek glimmering beauty of the tower, aglow against the black backdrop of the unlit tundra. He looked up. He saw the stars. He clenched his fist and shook it.

Krug! Krug! Krug! Krug!

Boom.

Into the transmat. Coordinates: Uganda. By the lake. Quenelle, waiting. Soft body, big breasts, thighs parted, belly heaving. Yes. Yes. Yes. 2-5-1, 2-3-1, 2-1. Krug leaped across the world.