all the way, to stop the door in case they tried to throw it open in his
face. He held his breath for those few steps, listening for the
slightest sound other than the soft squeak of his own shoes.
Nothing. Silence.
He used the toe of his shoe to push up the doorstop; then he pulled open
the door and walked onto the small platform. He had just enough time to
realize where he was, when the door closed behind him and all the lights
in the shaft went out.
At first he thought Harris had come into the maintenance room after him.
But when he tried the door, it was not locked. And when he opened it,
all the lights came on. The emergency lighting didn’t burn twenty-four
hours a day; it came on only when one of the service entrances was open;
and that was why Harris had left the door ajar.
Bollinger was impressed by the system of lights and platforms and
ladders. Not every building erected in the 1920s would have been
designed with an eye toward emergencies. In fact, damned few
skyscrapers built since the war could boast any safety provisions.
These days, they expected you to wait in a stalled elevator until it was
repaired, no matter if that took ten hours or ten days; and if the lift
couldn’t be repaired, you could risk a manually cranked descent, or you
could rot in it.
The more time he spent in the building, the deeper he penetrated it, the
more fascinating he found it to be. It was not on the scale of those
truly gargantuan stadiums and museums and highrises that Hitier had
designed for the “super race” just prior to and during the first days of
World War Two. But then Hitler’s magnificent edifices had never been
realized in stone and mortar, whereas this place had risen.
He began to feel that the men who had designed and constructed it were
Olympians. He found his appreciation strange, for he knew that had he
been restricted to the halls and offices during the day, when the
building was full of people Dew R Kooniz and buzzing with commerce, he
would not have noticed the great size and high style of the structure.
One took for granted that which was commonplace; and to New Yorkers,
there was nothing unusual about a forty-two-story office building. Now,
however, abandoned for the night, the tower seemed incredibly huge and
complex; in solitude and silence one had time to contemplate it and see
how magnificent and extraordinary it was. He was like a microbe
wandering through the I’veins and bowels of a living creature, a
behemoth almost beyond measurement.
He felt in league with the minds that could conceive of a monument-like
this. He was one of them, a mover and shaker, a superior man. The
Olympian nture of ‘i the building-and of the architects responsible for
itstruck a responsive chord in him, made him reverberate il 1 with the
knowledge of his own special godlike stature.
Brimming with a sense of glory, he was more deter- 4 mined than ever to
kill Harris and the woman. They were animals. Lice.
Parasites.
Because of Harris’s freakish psychic gift, they posed a threat to
Bollinger. They were trying to deny him his rightful place in this new
and forceful current of history: the at first gradual but
ever-quickening rise of the new men.
He pushed the doorstop against the floor to keep the door open and the
lights burning. Then he went to the edge of the platform and peered
down the ladder.
They were three floors under him. The woman on top, nearest by a few
rungs. Harris below her, going first. Neither of them looked up.
Thiey certainly were aware of the momentary loss of light and understood
the significance of it. They were hurrying toward the next platform,
where they could get out of the shaft.
Bollinger knelt, tested the railing. It was strong. He leaned against
it, using it like a safety harness to keep him from tumbling to his
death.
He didn’t want to kill them here. The place and method of murder were