His lips were smeared with wine, but his smile was still magnificent. As he caught sight of me, he disengaged himself from the Sawtelle girl, who was trying to pull him into the rivulet of wine, and said to me, “This is excellent, Sir Garfield. I am having a splendid evening.” His forehead furrowed. “Sir Garfield is the wrong form of address, I remember. You are Leo. It is a splendid evening, Leo. This house — it is comedy itself!”

All around us the bacchanal raged more furiously. Blobs of living light drifted at eye level; I saw one distinguished guest capture one and eat it. A fist-fight had begun between the two escorts of a bloated-looking woman who was, I realized in awe and distaste, a beauty queen of my youth. Near us two girls rolled on the floor in a vehement wrestling match, ripping away handfuls of each other’s clothing. A ring of onlookers formed and clapped rhythmically as the zones of bare flesh were revealed; suddenly pink buttocks flashed and the quarrel turned into an uninhibited sapphic embrace. Vornan seemed fascinated by the flexed legs of the girl beneath, by the thrusting pelvis of her conqueror, by the moist sucking sounds of their joined lips. He inclined his head to get a better view. Yet at the same moment a figure approached us and Vornan said to me, “Do you know this man?” I had the unsettling impression that Vornan had been looking in two directions at once, taking in a different quadrant of the room with each of his eyes. Was it so?

The newcomer was a short, chunky man no taller than Vornan-19, but at least twice as wide. His immensely powerful frame was the support for a massive dolichocephalic head that rose, without virtue of a neck, from his enormous shoulders. He had no hair, not even eyebrows or lashes, which made him look far more naked than the various nude and seminude caperers reeling about in our vicinity. Ignoring me, he pushed a vast paw at Vornan-19 and said. “So you’re the man from the future? Pleased to know you. I’m Wesley Bruton.”

“Our host, Good evening.” Vornan gave him a variant of the smile, less dazzling, more urbane, and almost at once the smile flicked away and the eyes came into play: keen, cool, penetrating. Nodding gently in my direction he said. “You know Leo Garfield, of course?”

“Only by reputation,” Bruton roared. His hand was still outstretched. Vornan had not taken it. The look of expectancy in Bruton’s eyes slowly curdled into bewildered disappointment and barely suppressed fury. Feeling I had to do something, I seized the hand myself, and as he mangled me I shouted, “So good of you to invite us, Mr. Bruton. It’s a miraculous house.” I added in a lower voice, “He doesn’t understand all of our customs. I don’t think he shakes hands.”

The utilities magnate looked mollified. He released me and said. “What do you think of the place. Vornan?”

“Delightful. Lovely in its delicacy. I admire the taste of your architect, his restraint, his classicism.”

I couldn’t be sure whether that was meant as sincere praise or as derision. Bruton appeared to take the compliments at face value. He seized Vornan by one wrist, clamped his other hand about me, and said, “I'd like to show you some of the behind-the-scenes stuff, fellows. This ought to interest you, Professor. And I know Vornan here will go for it. Come on!”

I feared that Vornan would make use of that shock technique he had demonstrated on the Spanish Stairs and send Bruton flying a dozen yards for having dared to lay hands on him. But, no, our guest let himself be manhandled. Bruton bulled his way through the swirling chaos of the party, towing us in his wake. We reached a dais in the center of the room. An invisible orchestra sounded a terrifying chord and burst forth with a symphony I had never heard before, bringing loops of sound spurting from every corner of the room. A girl in the garb of an Egyptian princess was dancing atop the dais. Bruton clamped one hand on each of her bare thighs and lifted her out of the way as though she were a chair. We mounted the dais beside him; he signaled and we sank abruptly through the floor.

“We’re two hundred feet down.” Bruton announced. “This is the master control room. Look!”

He waved his arms grandly. All about us were screens relaying images of the party. The action unfolded kaleidoscopically in a dozen rooms at once. I saw poor Kralick wobbling unsteadily while some femme fatale climbed on his shoulders. Morton Fields was coiled in a compromising position about a portly woman with a broad, flat nose; Helen McIlwain was dictating notes into the amulet at her throat, a task that required her to give a good imitation of the fellative act, while Lloyd Kolff was enjoying the act itself not far away, laughing cavernously as a wide-eyed girl crouched before him. I could not find Heyman at all. Aster Mikkelsen stood in the midst of a room with moist, palpitating walls, looking serene as the frenzy raged about her. Tables laden with food moved seemingly of their own will through each room; I watched the guests seizing tidbits, stuffing themselves, hurling tender morsels at one another. There was a room in which spigots of (I presume) wine or liquor dangled from the ceiling for anyone to grasp and squeeze and draw comfort from; there was a room that was in total darkness, but not unoccupied; there was a room in which the guests took turns donning the headband of some sensory-disruptive device.

“Watch this!” Bruton cried.

Vornan and I watched, he with mild interest, I in distress, as Bruton yanked switches, closed contacts, tapped out computer orders in maniacal glee. Lights flickered on and off in the upper rooms; floors and ceilings changed places; small artificial creatures flew insanely among the shrieking, laughing guests. Shattering sounds too terrifying to be called music resounded through the building. I thought the Earth itself would erupt in protest, and molten lava engulf us all.

“Five thousand kilowatts an hour,” Bruton proclaimed.

He splayed his hands against a counterbalanced silvery globe a foot in diameter and nudged it forward on a jeweled track. Instantly one wall of the control room folded out of sight, revealing the giant shaft of a magnetohydrodynamic generator descending into yet another subbasement. Monitor needles did a madman’s dance; dials flashed green and red and purple at us. Perspiration rolled down Wesley Bruton’s face as he recited, almost hysterically, the engineering specifications of the power plant on which his palace was founded. He sang us a wild song of kilowatts. He set his grip on thick cables and massaged them in frank obscenity. He beckoned us down to see the core of his generator, and we followed, led ever deeper into the pit by this gnomish tycoon. Wesley Bruton, I remembered vaguely, had put together the holding company that distributed electricity across half the continent, and it was as though all the generating capacity of that incomprehensible monopoly were concentrated here, beneath our feet, harnessed for the sole purpose of maintaining and sustaining the architectural masterpiece of Albert Ngumbwe. The air was fiercely hot at this level. Sweat rolled down my cheeks. Bruton ripped open his jacket to bare a hairless chest banded by thick cords of muscle. Vornan-19 alone remained untroubled by the heat; he danced along beside Bruton, saying little, observing much, quite uninfected by the feverish mood of his host.

We reached the bottom. Bruton fondled the swelling flank of his generator as though it were a woman’s haunch. Suddenly it must have dawned on him that Vornan-19 was less than ecstatic over this parade of wonders. He whirled and demanded, “Do you have anything like this where you come from? Is there a house that can match my house?”

“I doubt it,” said Vornan gently.

“How do people live up there? Big houses? Small?”

“We tend toward simplicity.”