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.”