The Dark Tower

Pimli’s eyes met Finli’s. The Master believed he saw amusement in his Security Chief’s look, but of course what he saw might have been no more than his own sense of humor, reflected back at him like a face in a mirror. Finli untacked the sign without a word and turned it rightside up. Neither of them commented on the elevator machinery, which was loud and ill-sounding. Nor on the way the car shuddered in the shaft. If it froze, escape through the upper hatch would be no problem, not even for a slightly overweight (well . . . quite overweight) fellow like Prentiss. Damli House was hardly a skyscraper, and there was plenty of help near at hand.

They reached the third floor, where the sign on the closed elevator door was rightside up. It said STAFF ONLY and PLEASE USE KEY and GO DOWN IMMEDIATELY IF YOU HAVE REACHED THIS LEVEL IN ERROR. YOU WILL NOT BE PENALIZED IF YOU REPORT IMMEDIATELY.

As Finli produced his key-card, he said with a casualness that might have been feigned (God damn his unreadable black eyes): “Have you heard from sai Sayre?”

“No,” Pimli said (rather crossly), “nor do I really expect to. We’re isolated here for a reason, deliberately forgotten in the desert just like the scientists of the Manhattan Project back in the 1940s. The last time I saw him, he told me it might be . . . well, the last time I saw him.”

“Relax,” Finli said. “I was just asking.” He swiped the key-card down its slot and the elevator door slid open with a rather hellish screee sound.

EIGHT

The Study was a long, high room in the center of Damli, also oak-paneled and rising three full stories to a glass roof that allowed the Algul’s hard-won sunlight to pour in. On the balcony opposite the door through which Prentiss and the Tego entered was an odd trio consisting of a ravenhead taheen named Jakli, a can-toi technician named Conroy, and two hume guards whose names Pimli could not immediately recall. Taheen, can-toi, and humes got on together during work hours by virtue of careful—and sometimes brittle—courtesy, but one did not expect to see them socializing off-duty. And indeed the balcony was strictly off-limits when it came to “socializing.” The Breakers below were neither animals in a zoo nor exotic fish in an aquarium; Pimli (Finli o’ Tego, as well) had made this point to the staff over and over. The Master of Algul Siento had only had to lobo one staff member in all his years here, a perfectly idiotic hume guard named David Burke, who had actually been throwing something—had it been peanut-shells?—down on the Breakers below. When Burke had realized the Master was serious about lobotomizing him, he begged for a second chance, promising he’d never do anything so foolish and demeaning again. Pimli had turned a deaf ear. He’d seen a chance to make an example which would stand for years, perhaps for decades, and had taken it. You could see the now truly idiotic Mr. Burke around to this day, walking on the Mall or out by Left’rds Bound’ry, mouth slack and eyes vaguely puzzled—I almost know who I am, I almost remember what I did to end up like this, those eyes said. He was a living example of what simply wasn’t done when one was in the presence of working Breakers. But there was no rule expressly prohibiting staff from coming up here and they all did from time to time.

Because it was refreshing.

For one thing, being near working Breakers made talk unnecessary. What they called “good mind” kicked in as you walked down the third-floor hall on either side, from either elevator, and when you opened the doors giving on the balcony good mind bloomed in your head, opening all sorts of perceptual doorways. Aldous Huxley, Pimli had thought on more than one occasion, would have gone absolutely bonkers up here. Sometimes one found one’s heels leaving the floor in a kind of half-assed float. The stuff in your pockets tended to rise and hang in the air. Formerly baffling situations seemed to resolve themselves the moment you turned your thoughts to them. If you’d forgotten something, your five o’clock appointment or your brother-in-law’s middle name, for instance, this was the place where you could remember. And even if you realized that what you’d forgotten was important, you were never distressed. Folken left the balcony with smiles on their faces even if they’d come up in the foulest of moods (a foul mood was an excellent reason to visit the balcony in the first place). It was as if some sort of happy-gas, invisible to the eye and unmeasurable by even the most sophisticated telemetry, always rose from the Breakers below.