This was not, in fact, a flat roof, but a room consisting of a force field in the shape of a glass dome. But a glass pane is visible because it has accumulated a layer of dust; the force field, being uncontaminated by dust, was virtually invisible.
This room was comfortably furnished; tubular metal furniture was covered with a black, leatherlike material that was warm and yielding to the touch; the thick black carpet was as soft as spring grass. The only unusual item was the tall black box that stood against the southern wall, with its sloping panel of opaque glass and row of control knobs. This was the Steegmaster, the creation of Torwald Steeg, which was responsible for this tower and almost everything in it.
Standing beside the Steegmaster, staring out over the square, stood a man in a gray suit. The tall figure was slim and upright; only the white hair betrayed that he was old.
He asked: “Did you recognize it?”
“It was the Himalayas, wasn’t it?”
“Your geography is improving. You were standing on the summit of Mount Everest, looking south toward Nepal. The summit in the distance was Kanchenjunga.”
It was a game they played every time Niall came to the white tower. Yesterday it had been the South Pole; two days before that, the crater of Mount Etna in full eruption. Niall had guessed wrong both times.
He went and joined the old man by the window, and was surprised to see that the square was no longer empty. In the few minutes since he had entered the tower, a large contingent of men had formed ranks outside the headquarters of the Spider Lord; there must have been at least a hundred of them. As he watched they were joined by another squad who marched out of a side street. At an order from one of the black-clad commanders, all stood to attention. A moment later, the double doors of the headquarters building opened, and death spiders and wolf spiders began to emerge. They were marching in single file, and Mail recognized the spider at the head of the column as Dravig. They crossed the western side of the square and moved north toward the river; the slave quarter lay on its further bank. As the spiders continued to pour out of the building, Niall found it hard to believe that it could have held so many. By the time the doors closed, there must have been at least three hundred spiders on the march. The men, with two commanders at their head, marched behind them.
Niall asked his companion: “Do you know what is happening?”
“I assume this is connected with the death of the spider?”
“Do you know who killed him?”
The old man shook his head. “You overestimate the powers of the Steegmaster. Its purpose is merely to gather and correlate information.”
It was true that Niall had only the vaguest idea of the capacities or limitations of the Steegmaster; wishful thinking inclined him to regard it as an all-knowing intelligence.
“But you knew about the death of the spider?”
“Naturally, since it took place only a hundred yards away.”
“But you’ve no idea who might have killed him?”
“I would like to help you. But I lack the information to assess the probabilities.”
“I thought the Steegmaster could read minds.”
The old man said patiently: “Not minds. Thoughts. That is an entirely different matter. A thought-reading machine can decipher the information stored in the memory circuits of the brain, but it operates best when the person is asleep. It is almost impossible to read the thoughts of someone who is awake because the mental processes are too complex, and most of them operate on a subconscious level. The Steegmaster has no power to read feelings and intuitions, which operate on frequencies far beyond its range. To work efficiently, the Steegmaster requires specific information.”
Niall took from his pocket the pendant on its gold chain. He held it out on his palm, with the symbol uppermost. “How about this? Can you tell me anything about it?”
The old man studied it for a moment. “I would say that it is a magical sigil.”
“Sigil?” Niall had never heard the word.
“A type of symbol used in magic or alchemy.”
“But what does it mean?”
The old man smiled at him. “Let us see if we can find out.” As he finished speaking, he vanished. And since he had been forewarned by the smile, Niall accepted the disappearance without surprise. Throughout their conversation, he had been aware that he was actually speaking to the computer that stood between them. Like the mountain range that had confronted him on entering the tower, the old man was a computer-created hologram; this was why Niall sometimes addressed him by the name of his creator, the twenty-third-century scientist Torwald Steeg. Niall was also aware of his purpose in disappearing, rather than leaving the room in the normal manner. Steeg’s aim was to teach him a new set of reflexes and reactions; it was an attempt to make him trust his reason rather than his senses.
Now reason told him the old man would be found in the library. He stepped again into the column in the center of the room. As the mist surrounded him, he again experienced the sensation of weightlessness; his body seemed to be a feather drifting gently into a gulf. When the slight jerk told him that the descent had ceased, he stepped out of the column. Of all the rooms in the tower, the library was Niall’s favorite; he loved to breathe its smell of dust, old parchment, and leather-bound books. To refer to it as an illusion would have struck him as a kind of blasphemy. The library, was, admittedly, a creation of the Steegmaster; but a creation of such complexity was in some way more real than mere physical reality. After all, what was reality but a force field of subatomic energies?
The library was a vast hexagonal room, about fifty yards wide, and so high that its domed ceiling was almost invisible. The walls were lined with bookshelves and with wrought-iron galleries that encircled the room; Niall had once counted them and discovered that there were precisely a hundred. Between these galleries ran black iron stairways whose steps, like the galleries themselves, had a fretwork design based on a motif of leaves and petals. On either side of the library, an old-fashioned cagelike elevator ran up to the topmost gallery.
These shelves, according to the gold plate above the door, contained copies of every book in the world, a total of 30,819,731 volumes. Every book had been photographed page by page and stored in the memory of the computer — a project that had taken an army of scholars more than fifty years. The undertaking had been inspired by the notion of the twentieth-century writer H. G. Wells, who had advocated the creation of an encyclopedia encompassing the whole range of human knowledge. This library was even more ambitious than Wells’s “world brain”; it contained, quite simply, every idea that man had ever committed to print.
The design of the room had been based upon a combination of the Reading Room of the British Museum, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the Vatican Library. The center of the library was occupied by a large circular desk, staffed by librarians; from this, like spokes in a wheel, radiated blue leather-covered tables illuminated by reading lamps. Niall had never discovered the identities of the people who sat at these tables and trod softly around the galleries; he liked to believe that they were real men and women of the twenty-third century, whose identities had been captured and preserved by the miraculous technology of Torwald Steeg.
The old man was standing at the central desk, talking to one of the librarians; now he turned and beckoned to Niall, pointing to the nearest elevator. Niall joined him as he was pulling aside the creaking concertina of a door, and followed him into the wood-paneled interior, whose rear wall bore the notice: “Maximum load three persons.” The old man touched a button; nothing happened. He opened and closed the concertina door again; this time, the elevator began to rise slowly, with a soft, whining sound. Niall had no idea how all this was accomplished, and no desire to know; he preferred to bask in the illusion that he had been transported back into an earlier century.
They stepped out at the twenty-eighth level — each level had its number cast in the ironwork of the front of the balcony. These galleries made Niall nervous, since the fretwork made it possible to see through the floor and the sides of the balcony, which were scarcely three feet high. He knew it was impossible to fall, yet would have felt more comfortable if the floor and wall had been solid.
As he followed Steeg along the gallery, Niall observed that many of the titles of the books were in Latin: Turba Philosophorum, Speculum Alchamiae, De Occulta Philosophia, Aureum Vellus; others were in Greek or Arabic. They halted before a shelf whose metal-engraved label read: Hermetica, KU to LO.