The utilities magnate looked mollified. He released me and said. “What do you think of the place. Vornan?”
“Delightful. Lovely in its delicacy. I admire the taste of your architect, his restraint, his classicism.”
I couldn’t be sure whether that was meant as sincere praise or as derision. Bruton appeared to take the compliments at face value. He seized Vornan by one wrist, clamped his other hand about me, and said, “I'd like to show you some of the behind-the-scenes stuff, fellows. This ought to interest you, Professor. And I know Vornan here will go for it. Come on!”
I feared that Vornan would make use of that shock technique he had demonstrated on the Spanish Stairs and send Bruton flying a dozen yards for having dared to lay hands on him. But, no, our guest let himself be manhandled. Bruton bulled his way through the swirling chaos of the party, towing us in his wake. We reached a dais in the center of the room. An invisible orchestra sounded a terrifying chord and burst forth with a symphony I had never heard before, bringing loops of sound spurting from every corner of the room. A girl in the garb of an Egyptian princess was dancing atop the dais. Bruton clamped one hand on each of her bare thighs and lifted her out of the way as though she were a chair. We mounted the dais beside him; he signaled and we sank abruptly through the floor.
“We’re two hundred feet down.” Bruton announced. “This is the master control room. Look!”
He waved his arms grandly. All about us were screens relaying images of the party. The action unfolded kaleidoscopically in a dozen rooms at once. I saw poor Kralick wobbling unsteadily while some femme fatale climbed on his shoulders. Morton Fields was coiled in a compromising position about a portly woman with a broad, flat nose; Helen McIlwain was dictating notes into the amulet at her throat, a task that required her to give a good imitation of the fellative act, while Lloyd Kolff was enjoying the act itself not far away, laughing cavernously as a wide-eyed girl crouched before him. I could not find Heyman at all. Aster Mikkelsen stood in the midst of a room with moist, palpitating walls, looking serene as the frenzy raged about her. Tables laden with food moved seemingly of their own will through each room; I watched the guests seizing tidbits, stuffing themselves, hurling tender morsels at one another. There was a room in which spigots of (I presume) wine or liquor dangled from the ceiling for anyone to grasp and squeeze and draw comfort from; there was a room that was in total darkness, but not unoccupied; there was a room in which the guests took turns donning the headband of some sensory-disruptive device.
“Watch this!” Bruton cried.
Vornan and I watched, he with mild interest, I in distress, as Bruton yanked switches, closed contacts, tapped out computer orders in maniacal glee. Lights flickered on and off in the upper rooms; floors and ceilings changed places; small artificial creatures flew insanely among the shrieking, laughing guests. Shattering sounds too terrifying to be called music resounded through the building. I thought the Earth itself would erupt in protest, and molten lava engulf us all.
“Five thousand kilowatts an hour,” Bruton proclaimed.
He splayed his hands against a counterbalanced silvery globe a foot in diameter and nudged it forward on a jeweled track. Instantly one wall of the control room folded out of sight, revealing the giant shaft of a magnetohydrodynamic generator descending into yet another subbasement. Monitor needles did a madman’s dance; dials flashed green and red and purple at us. Perspiration rolled down Wesley Bruton’s face as he recited, almost hysterically, the engineering specifications of the power plant on which his palace was founded. He sang us a wild song of kilowatts. He set his grip on thick cables and massaged them in frank obscenity. He beckoned us down to see the core of his generator, and we followed, led ever deeper into the pit by this gnomish tycoon. Wesley Bruton, I remembered vaguely, had put together the holding company that distributed electricity across half the continent, and it was as though all the generating capacity of that incomprehensible monopoly were concentrated here, beneath our feet, harnessed for the sole purpose of maintaining and sustaining the architectural masterpiece of Albert Ngumbwe. The air was fiercely hot at this level. Sweat rolled down my cheeks. Bruton ripped open his jacket to bare a hairless chest banded by thick cords of muscle. Vornan-19 alone remained untroubled by the heat; he danced along beside Bruton, saying little, observing much, quite uninfected by the feverish mood of his host.
We reached the bottom. Bruton fondled the swelling flank of his generator as though it were a woman’s haunch. Suddenly it must have dawned on him that Vornan-19 was less than ecstatic over this parade of wonders. He whirled and demanded, “Do you have anything like this where you come from? Is there a house that can match my house?”
“I doubt it,” said Vornan gently.
“How do people live up there? Big houses? Small?”
“We tend toward simplicity.”
“So you’ve never seen a place like mine! Nothing to equal it in the next thousand years!” Bruton paused. “But — doesn’t my house still exist in your time?”
“I am not aware of that.”
“Ngumbwe promised me it would last a thousand years! Five thousand! No one would tear a place like this down! Listen, Vornan, stop and think. It must be there somewhere. A monument of the past — a museum of ancient history—”
“Perhaps it is,” said Vornan indifferently. “You see, this area lies outside the Centrality. I have no firm information on what may be found there. However, I believe the primitive barbarity of this structure might have been offensive to those who lived in the Time of Sweeping, when many things changed. Much perished then through intolerance.”
“Primitive — barbarity—” Bruton muttered. He looked apoplectic. I wished I had Kralick on hand to get me out of this.
Vornan went on planting barbs in the billionaire’s unexpectedly thin hide. “It would have been charming to retain a place like this,” he said. “To stage festivals in it, curious ceremonies in honor of the return of spring.” Vornan smiled. “We might even have winters again, if only so we could experience the return of spring. And then we would dance and frolic in your house, Sir Bruton. But I think it is lost. I think it has gone, hundreds of years ago. I am not sure. I am not sure.”
“Are you making fun of me?” Bruton bellowed. “Laughing at my house? Am I just a savage to you? Do—”
I cut in quickly. “As an expert on electricity, Mr. Bruton, perhaps you’d like to know something about power sources in Vornan-19’s era. At one of his interviews a few weeks ago he said a few things about self-contained power sources involving total energy-conversion, and possibly he’d elaborate, now, if you’d care to question him.”
Bruton forgot at once that he was angry. He used his arm to wipe away the sweat that was trickling into his browless eyes and grunted, “What’s this? Tell me about this!”
Vornan put the backs of his hands together in a gesture that was as communicative as it was alien. “I regret that I know so little about technical matters.”
“Tell me something, though!”
“Yes,” I said, thinking of Jack Bryant in his agony and wondering if this was my moment to learn what I had to learn. “This system of self-sufficient power, Vornan. When did it come into use?”
“Oh… very long ago. In my day, that is.”
“Howlong ago?”
“Three hundred years?” he asked himself. “Five hundred? Eight hundred? It is so difficult to calculate these things. It was long ago… very long ago.”