Niels Sverenssen’s million-dollar home was situated in Connecticut, forty miles from New York City, on the shore side of a two-hundred-acre estate of parkland and trees that overlooked Long Island Sound. The house framed two sides of a large, clover-leaf pool set among terraced banks of shrubs. A tennis court on one side and outbuildings on the other completed the pool’s encirclement. The house was fashionably contemporary, spacious, light, and airy, with sections of roof sweeping in clean, unbroken planes from crest almost to ground level in some places to give the complete structure the lines and composition of an abstract sculpture, and drawing back in others to reveal vertical faces and slanted panels of polished brownstone, tiled mosaic, or glass. The imposing central structure rose two levels and contained the larger rooms and Sverenssen’s private quarters. One wing fell to single level and comprised six extra bedrooms and additional living space to accommodate the guests of his frequent weekend parties and other functions. The other was two-storied, though not as high as the central portion; it contained offices for Sverenssen and a secretary, a library, and other rooms dedicated to his work.
There was something odd about the history of Sverenssen’s house.
Lyn had flown up to New York accompanied by one of Clifford Benson’s agents, who had introduced her to a local office of the CIA to examine their records for additional information on Sverenssen. It turned out that his house had been built for him ten years previously by the construction division of Weismand Industries, Inc., a large, diversified corporation. The company was a builder of industrial premises, not private dwellings, which was no doubt why they had called in several outside architects and designers as consultants. What made the project even stranger was that Weismand was based in California; why would Sverenssen have used them when any number of qualified firms existed in the area?
Further checks revealed that Weismand Industries stock was held mainly by a Canadian insurance consortium that was closely linked to the same British banking fraternity that, along with its French and Swiss connections, had launched Sverenssen’s spectacular career upon his sudden return from obscurity. Had Sverenssen simply been repaying a favor, or were there other reasons why he felt it necessary to build his house using a company with which he had close, and presumably confidential, connections?
Lyn asked herself the question again as she reclined in a bikini on a chaise by the pool and studied the house through the intervening flower beds and shrubs. Sverenssen, wearing sunglasses and clad in a pair of scarlet bathing trunks, was sitting a few feet away at an umbrellaed table drinking iced lemonade and talking with a man he had introduced as Larry. A blonde named Cheryl was basking face-down and naked on another chaise a short distance away, while two other girls, Sandy and Carol, were laughing and shouting in the pool with a Mediterranean-looking character by the name of Enrico. Sandy was topless, and the object of the mêlée in progress was evidently to render her bottomless as well. Another couple had been around earlier, but had been gone for the last hour or so. It was Friday afternoon, and more people were expected to arrive as the evening wore on, plus a few the next morning. Sverenssen had described the occasion as "a pleasant get-together of some interesting friends" when Lyn called him on Thursday morning.
The only thing that seemed even slightly unusual about the house was the office wing, she decided as she looked at it. Sverenssen had stressed that it was not open to visitors when he showed her around earlier. That seemed reasonable enough, but something was different about it, she realized. This part of the building wasn’t built to the same airy and open design as the rest of the place, with yards of plate-glass windows and sliding glass doors that led through to the inside. Instead it was solid, with small windows set high off the ground. They looked thick and seemed more suited to keeping sunlight out, along with everything else. As she looked closer, she was sure that what had seemed at first to be ornamental trim across the windows was in fact carefully disguised bars guaranteed to exclude any possibility of entry—not just by burglars, but by a tank. There were no doors to the outside at all; the only access to the wing was from inside the house. If she hadn’t been looking specifically, she would never have noticed it, but the office wing, beneath its veneer of tiled designs and paint-work to match the rest of the house, was virtually a fortress.
The noise from the pool rose to a crescendo that culminated in a shriek as Enrico emerged from a flurry of water and bodies waving the lower half of Sandy’s swimsuit triumphantly over his head. "One down, one to go," he yelled.
"Not fair!" Sandy screamed. "I was drowning. That’s an unfair advantage."
"Carol’s turn," Enrico shouted.
"Like hell," Carol laughed. "That’s inequality. Sandy, give me a hand and let’s get the bastard." The commotion started all over again.
"It sounds as if they could use some help," Sverenssen said, turning his head to look across at Lyn. "Go ahead and join in. There aren’t any restrictions on how you enjoy yourself here, you know."
She let her head fall back on the raised end of the chaise and forced a smile. "Oh, sometimes spectator sports are just as much fun. Anyway, they seem to be managing okay. I’ll be the reserve division."
"She’s being smart and saving her energy," Larry said, speaking to Sverenssen and sending Lyn a broad wink. She did a good job of pretending not to notice.
"Very wise," Sverenssen said.
"The real fun starts later," Larry explained, grinning. Lyn managed a half-smile, at the same time wondering how she was going to handle that. "We’ll find you lots of new friends. They’re great people here."
"I can’t wait," Lyn said drily.
"Isn’t she charming," Sverenssen said, glancing at Larry and looking approvingly back at Lyn. "I met her in Washington, you know—a most fortunate encounter. She has people that she visits here in New York." It made her feel like a piece of merchandise, which was probably a pretty close assessment of her situation. She wasn’t especially surprised; if she hadn’t been prepared to play along for appearance’s sake, she wouldn’t have come in the first place.
"I get to Washington a lot," Larry said. "You work there or something?"
Lyn shook her head. "Uh uh. I’m with the Space Arm in Houston—computers, lasers, and people who talk numbers all day, but it’s a living."
"Ah, but we’re going to change that, aren’t we, Lyn," Sverenssen said. He looked at Larry. "As a matter of fact I was thinking of something in Washington that would suit her perfectly, and prove far more interesting, I’m sure. Do you remember Phil Grazenby? I had lunch with him one day while I was there recently, and he wants somebody bright and attractive to manage the new agency he’s opening. And he is talking about really worthwhile money."
"We’ll have to get together there if you make it," Larry said to Lyn. He made a face. "Aw, but that’s business, and it’s a long time away. Why wait until Washington? We can get to know each other right here. Are you here alone?"
"Yes, she’s free," Sverenssen murmured.
"That’s great!" Larry exclaimed. "Me too, and I’m the perfect guy for introducing new faces around here. Believe me, honey, you’ve made the right choice. You must have good taste. Tell you what—you can partner me in one of the games later. So we’ve got a deal, right?"
"I live for the present," Lyn said. "Suppose we let later take care of itself later, okay?" She stretched to squint up at the sun, then looked at Sverenssen. "Right now all I’m going to be good for is a case of radiation sickness if I don’t cover up. I’m going to go inside in the shade and put on something else until it cools down a bit. I’ll see you later?"
"By all means, my dear," Sverenssen said. "The last thing we want is for you to end up on the casualty list." Lyn unfolded herself from the chaise and walked toward the house. "I think you may have a little game of playing hard to get to win before—" she heard Sverenssen murmur. The rest was drowned out by another burst of screaming from the pool.
Cheryl raised her head and watched as Lyn disappeared between the shrubs. "You’ve got nothing to offer, Larry," she said. "Now I could show her a good time that’s really different."
"So what’s wrong with both of us?" Larry asked.
Lyn’s room contained twin king-size beds and was as luxuriously furnished and fitted as every other part of the house. She was supposed to be sharing it with somebody called Donna, who hadn’t arrived yet. Inside, she took off her bikini and put on a shirt and shorts. Then she stood by the window thinking for a while.
There was a datagrid screen in the room, but she didn’t want to make any calls since there was a good chance it was bugged. Anyway she didn’t need to if she wanted to get out because Clifford Benson’s people had aheady anticipated that. Inside her shoulder bag in the closet was a microelectronic transmitter that looked like a powder compact but would send out a signal when she unlocked a safety catch and pressed a disguised button. If she pressed it once, a CIA agent would call the house within seconds, posing as a brother with news of a family emergency and stating that a cab was on its way to collect her. If she pressed it three times, the two agents in the airmobile parked a mile down the road from the front gate would arrive in under half a minute, but that option was for use only if she got into real trouble. But she didn’t want to get out just yet. The house was empty and quieter than it would be at any time for the rest of the weekend. There would never be another chance like this for a look around the place with little risk of being disturbed. She sure-as-hell wasn’t going to chicken out after a couple of hours with nothing to report, she told herself.
She took a deep breath, bit her lip nervously, walked over to the door, inched it open, and listened. Everything seemed still. As she let herself out into the passage a half-stifled giggle came from behind the door opposite. She stopped for a second; there was no other sound, and she moved quietly on toward the central part of the house.
The passage led through a small den into a large, central, open room that rose the full height of the building, one side a sloping wall of glass panels facing the rear of the house. The room was elbow-shaped, thickly carpeted, and had a sunken floor in front of a large fireplace of brickwork, with areas of raised floors around it angling away to openings and stairways which gave access to other parts of the house.
Muffled voices and kitchen noises were coming from one of the corridors, but she didn’t detect any sign of Sverenssen’s domestic staff in her immediate vicinity. She slowly examined the furnishings, ornaments, the pictures on the walls, and the fittings overhead, but found nothing that looked out of place. After pausing to replay her mental model of the layout, she picked out a narrow corridor that seemed to lead toward the office wing and followed it.
Eventually, after exploring the system of rooms that the corridor brought her to, most of which she had already seen in the course of the quick tour that Sverenssen had given her, she came back to what seemed to be the only door anywhere that opened through into the office wing. She tried the handle gently, but it was locked, as she had expected. When she tapped it with a knuckle, the sound it produced was flat and solid, even from the parts that looked like ordinary wood panels. They might have been wood on the surface, but there was a lot of something else underneath; that door had been put there to keep out a lot more than just drafts. Without a rock drill or an army demolition squad, she wasn’t going to get any farther in that direction, so she turned to go back to the center part of the house. As she began moving, she recalled one of the sculptures that she had seen in the central room. It hadn’t really struck her at the time, but now as she thought about it again, she realized that there had been something vaguely familiar about it. Surely not, she thought as she tried to visualize it again in her mind. There was no way it could be possible. She frowned, and her pace quickened a fraction.
The piece was standing in an illuminated recess on one side of the brick fireplace—an abstract form rendered in some kind of silver and gold translucent crystal, about eight inches high and mounted on a solid black base. At least, when she glanced over it casually a few minutes earlier she had thought it to be abstract. But now as she picked it up and turned it slowly over in her hands, she became more convinced than ever that its form couldn’t be simply a coincidence.
Its lowermost part was a composition of surfaces and shapes that could have meant anything, but projecting up from the center to form the main body of the design was a tapering column of finely carved terraces, levels, and intervening buttresses flowing upward in distinctive curves. Could it represent a tower? she wondered. A tower that she had seen not long ago. Three slim spires continued upward from the top of the main column—three spires supporting a circular disk just below their apexes. A platform? The disk had more finely cut details on its surface. She turned the sculpture over. . . . and gasped. There were more details, defining a readily discernible pattern of concentric rings—on the underside of the platform! She was looking at a representation of the central tower of the city of Vranix. It couldn’t possibly be. But it couldn’t be anything else.
Her hand was shaking as she carefully replaced the sculpture in its recess. What the hell had she gotten herself into? she asked herself. Her first urge was to go back to her room, collect her things, and get out fast; but as she forced herself to calm down and her mind to think more clearly, she fought back the feeling. The opportunity to learn more was unique, and it would never present itself again. If there were more, nobody might ever know unless she found it now. She closed her eyes for a second and took a deep breath to summon up her reserves of nervous energy to see it through.
She had to find out more about the office wing, but there seemed no way to get inside. Maybe she could get nearer in some other way. . . . under it, perhaps? A house like this would surely have cellars. There would probably be stairs somewhere in the direction of the kitchen. She moved across to the end of the corridor leading that way; voices were still audible, but they sounded closed off. Two doors proved to be closets. The third that she tried revealed a flight of wooden stairs going down. She entered, eased the door shut behind her, and descended.
The cellar that she found herself in looked ordinary, with a bench and some tool racks, a storage space, and lots of pipes and conduits. Machinery of some kind, probably a central air conditioner, was humming behind a louvered door to one side. Two other cellars opened off from this one, one in each direction of the two arms of the house; she moved on into the one leading toward the office wing. It was another storage area, full of boxes and leftover decorating materials. A partition wall with a gap in its center screened off the far end. Lyn crossed the area and peered through the gap. The cellar did not continue on beneath the office wing, but ended at a bare wall on the far side of the small space behind the partition. As Lyn looked around and studied the surroundings, she realized that the part of the cellars she had entered was strangely different from the rest structurally, particularly the blank wall facing her.
The line where the wall and ceiling met was formed by a steel girder that must have measured fifteen inches across the flange at least, and it was supported by two more, equally massive members running down the corners and terminating in what looked like solid concrete foundations partly visible along the lower part of the walls and going down into the floor. The ceiling, too, was reinforced with girders and cross-ties gusseted at the angles. All was painted white to blend in with the general background of the other cellar rooms, and the casual visitor would probably never have noticed; but to somebody who was looking for the unusual and who had a special interest in that end of the house, the heavy structures stood out unmistakably.
So the office wing itself was not over any part of the cellars but was built on solid ground, and she was looking at one side of its foundation and underpinning. It was built from materials and in a fashion that would have supported a battleship. What could there be upstairs that would have crushed the foundations of an ordinary house and had made all this necessary? she wondered.
And then she remembered the holes she had seen punched through the concrete at McClusky.
A Thurien interstellar communications system contained a microscopic, artificially generated, black-hole toroid when it was switched on and operating.
But that idea was even more insane. The house had been built ten years before. Nobody had heard of the Ganymeans, let alone Thurien, in 2021.
She backed slowly away from the partition and turned dazedly back toward the stairs.
At the top of the stairs she stopped for a while to give the thumping in her chest time to slow down and to bring her reeling mind under some kind of control. Then she opened the door a fraction and brought her eye close to it just in time to catch a glimpse of Sverenssen moving out of sight behind an angle in the wall back near the corner room. He had been turning his head from side to side as he moved, as if he were looking for something . . . or somebody. Lyn immediately erupted into a new spasm of shaking and shivering. Suddenly Navcomms and Houston seemed very far away. If she ever got out of this, she’d never want to leave the coziness of her own office again.
If Sverenssen was looking for her, he would already have tried knocking on the door of her room. The part of her that felt guilty told her that she needed a reason for not being there. She thought for a few seconds, then let herself out into the corridor and went the other way, into the kitchen. A minute later she reemerged holding a cup of coffee and began making her way back to the guest section of the house.
"Oh, there you are." Sverenssen’s voice sounded from behind her when she was halfway across one of the raised floors around the periphery of the corner room. She froze; had she done anything else, the coffee and the cup would have been all over the carpet. Sverenssen came out of one of the side rooms as she turned to face him. He was still wearing his bathing trunks, but had put sandals on his feet and thrown a shirt loosely over his shoulder. He was eying her uncertainly, as if he were mildly suspicious about something but not sufficiently sure of himself to be direct.
"I went to get some coffee," she said, as if it weren’t obvious. Immediately she felt like the classical dumb broad; but at least she managed to stop herself from following up her statement with an inane laugh. She was certain that Sverenssen was looking past her shoulder at the sculpture in its recess. She could picture it in her mind’s eye with a neon sign in six-inch letters above shouting, "I HAVE BEEN MOVED." Somehow she resisted the compulsion to turn her head.
"I wouldn’t have thought that somebody from Houston would be bothered by the sun," he remarked. "Especially somebody with a tan like yours." His voice was superficially casual, but had an undertone that invited an explanation.
For a second or two she felt trapped. Then she said, "I just wanted to get away for a while. Your friend. . . Larry, was starting to come on a bit strong. I guess I need time to get used to this."
Sverenssen looked at her dubiously, as if she had just confirmed his fears about something. "Well, I do hope you manage to loosen up a little before too much longer," he said. "I mean, the whole idea of being here is to enjoy oneself. It would be such a shame if one person allowed her inhibitions to ruin the atmosphere for everyone else, wouldn’t it?"
Despite her confusion, Lyn couldn’t keep a sharp edge out of her voice. "Look . . . I didn’t exactly come here expecting this," she told him. "You never said anything about playing musical people."
A pained expression came over Sverenssen’s face. "Oh dear, I do hope you’re not going to start preaching any middle-class morals. What did you expect? I said I would be entertaining some friends, and I expect them to be entertained and made to feel welcome in a manner appropriate to their tastes."
"Their tastes? That’s very nice of you. They must love you for it. What about my tastes?"
"Are you suggesting that my acquaintances fail to come up to your standards? How amusing. You’ve already made your tastes quite plain—you aspire to luxury and the company that goes with it. Well, you have them. Surely you don’t expect anything in this life to come free."
"I didn’t expect to be treated like a piece of candy to be dangled in front of those overgrown kids out there."
"You’re talking like an adolescent. Do I not have a right to expect you, as my guest, to behave sociably in return for my hospitality? Or did you imagine that I was some kind of a philanthropist who opens his home to the world for reasons of pure charity? I can assure you that I am nothing of the kind, and neither is anybody else who has the intelligence to understand the realities of life."
"Who said anything about charity? Doesn’t respect for people come into it anywhere?"
Sverenssen sneered. Evidently it didn’t. "Another middle-class opiate. All I can say to you is that whatever fantasies you have been harboring appear to have been sadly unfounded." He sighed and shrugged, apparently having already dismissed the matter as a lost cause. "The opportunity is yours to enjoy a life quite free from worries financial or otherwise, but seizing it requires that you throw off a lot of silly protective notions left over from childhood and make a pragmatic assessment of your situation."
Lyn’s eyes blazed, but she managed to keep her voice under control. "I think I just made it." Her tone said the rest.
Sverenssen appeared indifferent. "In that case I suggest that you call yourself a cab without further delay and return to your world of misplaced romanticism and unfulfillable dreams," he said. "It really makes no difference to me. I can get somebody else here within the hour. The choice is entirely yours."
Lyn stood absolutely still until she had fought down the urge to hurl her coffee in his face. Then she turned away and, mustering the effort to maintain her calm, walked off in the direction of her room. Sverenssen followed her coldly with his eyes for a few seconds, then shrugged contemptuously and hurried out through a side door to rejoin the others at the pool.
Two hours later Lyn was sitting in a Washington-bound plane beside the CIA agent who had accompanied her to New York. Around them sat families, couples, people alone, and people together; some were dressed in business suits, some in jackets, and others in casual shirts, sweaters, and jeans. They were talking, laughing, reading, and sleeping—just ordinary, sane, civilized people, minding their own business. She wanted to hug every one of them.