Level 461 enclosed the first human city, Eridu of Sumer, complete with its thirty-foot brick walls, the ziggurat temple to Enlil the Earth god, the palace of the king, the mud huts of the peasants. Level 462 was a Mycenaean Island, lapped by blue salt water. A Minoan temple in an olive grove crowned the height, and a high-beaked galley floated on the water, with sunlight sparkling from bronze shields, glowing from the purple sail.
Level 463 was a landscape from an imaginary fantastic world created by mystic-artist Dyer Lothaire. And Level 509 was a private fairyland, closed to the public, a magic garden inhabited by furtive nymphs.
There were levels for business offices, for dwellings, for laboratories. The fourth level enclosed the world's largest stadium. Levels 320 through 323 housed the University of the World, and the initial enrollment was forty-two thousand; 255 was the world's vastest library; 328 a vast art gallery.
There were showrooms, retail stores, restaurants, quiet taverns, theaters, telecast studios-a complex of the world society caught, pillared up into the air at the whim of Mervyn Alien. Humanity's lust for lost youth had paid for it. Mervyn Alien sold a commodity beside which every ounce of gold ever mined, every prized possession, every ambition and goal, were like nothing. Eternal life, replenished youth-love, loyalty, decency, honor found them unfair overstrong antagonists.
CHAPTER IX
Eyes in the Wall
Briskly Mario alighted from the aircab at the public stage on the 52nd level, the coordination center of the tower. Among the crowds of visitors, tenants, employees, he was inconspicuous. He stepped on a pedestrip to the central shaft, stepped off at the express elevator to Level 600. He entered one of the little cars. The door snapped shut, he felt the surge of acceleration, and almost at once the near-weightlessness of the slowing. The door flicked open, he stepped out on Level 600, two miles in the air.
He was in the lobby of the Paradise Inn, beside which the Atlantic-Empire lobby was mean and constricted. He moved among exquisitely dressed men and women, persons of wealth, dignity, power. Mario was inconspicuous. He might have been a janitor or a maintenance electrician. He walked quietly down a corridor, stopped at last by a door marked Private. He thumbed the lock; it opened into a janitor's closet But the janitors for the 600th level all had other storerooms. No other thumb would spring this lock. In case an officious floor-manager forced the door, it was merely another janitor's closet lost in the confusion.
But it was a very special closet. at the back wall, Mario pushed at a widely separated pair of studs, and the wall fell aside. Mario entered a dark crevice, pushed the wall back into place. Now he was alone-more alone than if he were in the middle of the Sahara. Out in the desert a passing aircraft might spy him. Here in the dead spaces alongside the master columns, among elevator shafts, he was lost from every eye. If he died, no one would find him. In the far, far future, when the Empyrean Tower was at last pulled down, his skeleton might be exposed. Until then he had vanished from the knowledge of man.
He shone his flashlight ahead of him, turned to the central spinal cord of elevator shafts, tubes like fibers in a tremendous vegetable. Here he found his private elevator, lost among the others like a man in a crowd. The mechanics who installed it could not recognize its furtive purpose. It was a job from a blueprint, part of the day's work, quickly forgotten. To Mario it was a link to Level 900, the Chateau d'lf.
He stepped on the tiny platform. The door snapped. Up he was thrown, up a mile. The car halted, he stepped out. He was in the Chateau d'lf-invisible, a ghost. Unseen, unheard, power was his. He could strike from nothingness, unsuspected, unimagined, master of the master of the Chateau d'lf.
He breathed the air, exultant, thrilling to his power. This was the ultimate height of his life. He snapped on his torch, though there was no need. He knew these passages as if he had been born among them. The light was a symbol of his absolute authority. He had no need for skulking. He was in his private retreat, secure, isolated, remote.
Mario halted, glanced at the wall. At eight-foot intervals circles of fluorescent paint gleamed brightly. Behind this wall would be the grand foyer to the Chateau d'lf. Mario advanced to one of the fluorescent circles. These he himself had painted to mark the location of his spy cells. These were little dull spots hardly bigger than the head of a pin, invisible at three feet. Mario, in the guise of an electrician, had installed them himself, with a pair at every location, for binocular vision.
From his pouch he brought a pair of goggles, clipped a wire to the terminal contacts of the spy cells, fitted the goggles over his eyes. Now he saw the interior of the foyer as clearly as if he were looking through a door.
It was the height of a reception-a house-warming party at the Chateau d'lf. Men, old, young, distinguished or handsome or merely veneered with the glow of success; women at once serene and arrogant, the style and show of the planet. Mario saw jewels, gold, the shine and swing of thousand-colored fabrics, and at eye-level, the peculiar white-bronze-brown-black mixture, the color of many heads, many faces-crowd-color.
Mario recognized some of these people, faces and names world-known. Artists, administrators, engineers, bon-vivants, courtesans, philosophers, all thronging the lobby of the Chateau d'lf, drawn by the ineffable lure of the unknown, the exciting, the notorious.
There was Mervyn Alien, wearing black. He was as handsome as a primeval sun-hero, tall, confident, easy in his manner, but humble and carefully graceful, combining the offices of proprietor and host
Thane Paren was nowhere in sight.
Mario moved on. As at 5600 Exmoor, he found a room drenched with amber-white light, golden, crisp as celery, where the broad-leafed plants grew as ardently as in their native humus. The herbarium was empty, the plants suspired numbing perfume for their own delectation.
Mario passed on. He looked into a room bare and undecorated, a workshop, a processing plant. A number of rubber-wheeled tables were docked against a wall, each with its frock of white cloth. A balcony across the room supported an intricate mesh of machinery, black curving arms, shiny metal, glass. Below hung a pair of translucent balls, the pallid blue color of Roquefort cheese. Mario looked closely. These were the golasma cellules.
No one occupied the chamber except a still form on one of the stretchers. The face was partly visible. Mario, suddenly attentive, shifted his vantage point. He saw a heavy blond head, rugged blunt features. He moved to another cell. He was right. It was Janniver, already drugged, ready for the transposition.
Mario gave a long heavy suspiration that shook Ebery's paunch. Ditmar had made it. Zaer, Mario, Breaugh, and now Janniver, lured into this room like sheep the Judas-goat conducts to the abbatoir. Mario bared his teeth in a grimace that was not a smile. A tide of dark rage rose in his mind.
He calmed himself. The grimace softened into the normal loose lines of Ebery's face. Who was blameless, after all? Thane Paren? No. She served Mervyn Alien, the soul in her brother's body. He himself, Roland Mario? He might have killed Mervyn Alien, he might have halted the work of the Chateau d'lf by crying loudly enough to the right authorities. He had refrained, from fear of losing his body. Pete Zaer? He might have kept to the spirit of his bargain, warned his friends on the Oxonian Terrace.
All the other victims, who had similarly restrained their rage and sense of obligation to their fellow-men? No, Ditmar was simply a human being, as weak and selfish as any other, and his sins were those of commission rather than those of omission, which characterized the others.
Mario wandered on, peering in apartment, chamber and hall. A blonde girl, young and sweet as an Appalachian gilly-flower, swam nude in Alien's long green-glass pool, then sat on the edge amid a cloud of silver bubbles. Mario cursed the lascivious responses of Ebery's body, passed on. Nowhere did he see Thane Paren.