The glow of the transmat was not quite the proper shade of green. Lilith eyed it doubtfully. “Do we dare go?” she asked.

“We have to,” Thor Watchman said.

“And if we’re killed?”

“We won’t be the only ones to die today.” He adjusted the controls. The field’s hue flickered and shifted up the spectrum until it was almost blue; then it sagged toward the opposite end, turning a bronze-like red.

Lilith plucked at Watchman’s elbow. “We’ll die,” she whispered. “The transmat system probably is wrecked.”

“We must reach the tower,” he told her, and finished setting the dials. Unexpectedly the green glow returned in its proper quantity. Watchman said, “Follow me,” and plunged into the transmat. He had no time to ponder the likelihood of his destruction, for immediately he came forth at the construction site of the tower. Lilith stepped out of the transmat and stood beside him.

Savage winds raked the area. All work had ceased. Several scooprods still clung to the top level of the tower, with workmen marooned in them. Other androids moved aimlessly over the site, scuffing at the icy crust of the tundra, asking one another for the latest news. Watchman saw hundreds of men crowded into the zone of the service domes: the overflow from the chapel, no doubt. He looked up at the tower. How beautiful it is, he thought. Just a few weeks from completion, now. A supple glassy needle rising up and up and up and up beyond all comprehension.

The androids saw him. They rushed toward him, shouting his name, flocking close about him.

“Is it true?” they asked. “Krug? Krug? Does Krug loathe us? Does he call us things? Are we truly nothing to him? Does he reject our prayers?”

“True,” Watchman said. “All true, everything you’ve heard. Total rejection. We are betrayed. We have been fools. Make way, please. Let me pass!”

The betas and gammas moved back. Even on this day, the social distances held their force in governing the relations among androids. With Lilith close behind him, Watchman strode toward the control center.

He found Euclid Planner within. The assistant foreman was slumped at his desk in apparent exhaustion. Watchman shook him and Planner slowly stirred.

“I stopped everything,” he murmured. “The moment that the word came through from the chapel. I said, Everybody stop. Stop. And everybody stopped. How can we build a tower for him when he—”

“All right,” Watchman said gently. “You did the right thing. Get up, now. You can go. The work here is ended.”

Euclid Planner, nodding, got to his feet and left the control center.

Watchman replaced him in the linkup seat. He jacked himself into the computer. Data still flowed, although limply. Taking command, Watchman activated the scooprods at the tower’s top, easing them down to ground level and releasing the trapped workmen. Then he requested a simulation of a partial systems failure in the refrigeration units. The screen presented him with the desired event. He studied the geography of the construction site and decided the direction in which he wished the tower to fall. It would have to go down to the east, so that it would destroy neither the control center where he sat nor the bank of transmats. Very well. Watchman instructed the computer and shortly received an outline of the potential danger area. Another screen showed him that more than a thousand androids were present in that area.

He acted through the computer to relocate the reflector plates that illuminated the site. Now the plates hovered over a strip 1400 meters long and 500 meters wide, in the eastern quadrant of the construction zone. That strip was brilliantly lit; all else was darkness. Watchman’s voice thundered out of hundreds of loudspeakers, ordering complete evacuation of the designated sector. Obediently, the androids moved from light into darkness. The area was cleared within five minutes. Well done, Watchman thought.

Lilith stood behind him. Her hands rested lightly on his shoulders, caressing the thick muscles alongside his neck. He felt her breasts pressing against the back of his head. He smiled.

“Proceed with derefrigeration activity,” he told the computer.

The computer now followed the plan devised for the simulation. It reversed the flow of three of the long silvery strips of refrigeration tape embedded in the tundra; instead of absorbing the heat of the tower, the helium-II diffusion cells of the tapes began to radiate the heat previously absorbed and stored. At the same time the computer deactivated five other tapes, so that they neither absorbed nor released energy, and programmed seven additional tapes to reflect whatever energy now reached them, while retaining the energy they already contained. The net effect of these alterations would be to thaw the tundra unequally beneath the tower, so that when the foundation — caissons lost their grip the tower would fall harmlessly into the evacuated zone. It would be a slow process.

Monitoring the environmental changes, Watchman observed with pleasure how the temperature of the permafrost steadily rose toward the thaw level. The tower was as yet firm upon its foundations. But the permafrost was yielding. Molecule by molecule, ice was becoming water, iron-hard turf was becoming mud. In a kind of ecstasy Watchman received each datum of increasing instability. Did the tower now sway? Yes. Minutely, but it was clearly moving beyond the permissible parameters of wind-sway. It was rocking on its base, tipping a millimeter this way, a millimeter that. What did it weigh, this 1200-plus-meters-high structure of glass blocks? What sort of sound would it make as it tumbled? Into how many pieces would it break? What would Krug say? What would Krug say? What would Krug say?

Yes, there was definitely some slippage now.

Watchman thought he could detect a change of color on the tundra’s surface. He smiled. His pulse-rate accelerated; blood surged to his cheeks and his loins. He found himself in a state of sexual excitement. When this has been done, he vowed, I will couple with Lilith atop the wreckage. There. There. Real slippage now! Yawing! Leaning! What was happening there at the roots of the tower? Were the caissons straining to remain welded to the earth that no longer would hold them? How slippery was the mud below the surface? Would it boil and bubble? How long before the tower falls? What would Krug say? What would Krug say?

“Thor,” Lilith murmured, “can you come out of it for a moment?”

She had jacked herself in too. “What? What?” he said.

“Come out. Unjack.”

Reluctantly he broke the contact. “What’s the trouble?” he asked, shaking free of the images of destruction that possessed his mind.

Lilith pointed outside. “Trouble. Fileclerk’s here. I think he’s making a speech. What should I do?”

Glancing out, Watchman saw the AEP leader near the transmat bank, surrounded by a knot of betas. Fileclerk was waving his arms, pointing toward the tower, shouting. Now he was starting to walk toward the control center.

“I’ll handle this,” Watchman said.

He went outside. Fileclerk came up to him midway between the transmats and the control center. The alpha appeared greatly agitated. He said at once, “What is happening to the tower, Alpha Watchman?”

“Nothing that should concern you.”

“The tower is under the authority of Property Protection of Buenos Aires,” Fileclerk declared. “Our sensors have reported that the building is swaying beyond permissible levels. My employers have sent me to investigate.”

“Your sensors are quite precise,” Watchman said. “The tower is swaying. There has been a system failure in the refrigeration. The permafrost is thawing and we anticipate that the tower will shortly fall.”

“What have you done to correct this?”