The crowd was beginning to flow back into the corridor, "Who was that!" Dick demanded.
Clay gave him a sidelong glance. "You don't know? That's right, you've never seen him. That was the Boss."
The crowd flowed along, brilliant, glittering, with a cloud of scent and a murmur of laughter. Here were half a dozen East Indians in turbans, hawk-nosed and dark, with flashing eyes; here came a priest of Eblis and a gypsy mountebank, disputing, arm in arm; there was the famous Mrs. Wray, whose intrigues were the talk of Eagles; here came a work detail and a cart loaded with monstrous slabs of flooring. The corridor boomed, clattered, rippled with echoes: this was life. The owner of all this must be a fortunate man; what more could anyone ask in the world?
But if the end of it was nothing but that gray frog-face, and that expression of settled gloom? ...
They passed a doorway guarded by an ape-faced fellow in black; the door had a familiar G and crossbones symbol -- a Gismo Room. Dick understood now perfectly well how Eagles was organized, and why it could be no other way. All the Gismos in Eagles belonged to the Boss, just as all the slobs were his; that was an elementary precaution. There was an elite guard that watched the Gismos, and an even more select corps that did nothing but watch the guards, with an elaborate tradition of rivalry and hatred between them.
There were hundreds of Gismos in Eagles, pouring out a wealth of things all day and all night long; but even here, there was a limit to their number. There had to be a quota system -- so much for a casual visitor, so much more for a Secretary's favorite, so much more again for the Secretary himself. That made sense of the whole tumultuous, unrelenting struggle for position that went on in Eagles: position to command more luxuries and pleasures for yourself, and to dispose of them for others. Then there was the danger, too, that made it a game fit for a man to play: with each step up the pyramid, your position became more exposed, there were more people who would like to pull you down. It was danger that put the spice in it, that made eyes sparkle and lips gleam red.
Crossing one of the wide plazas at mid-level, Dick happened to glance up and see a familiar figure leaning over the balcony above. It was only for an instant, then the bright red tunic was gone into the crowd.
"Someone you know?" asked Clay, following his glance.
"Keel, I think. He's out of sight now." He and the blond young man had met in the corridors several times since Keel's ducking, but each time they had only nodded distantly; Keel's crowd and Dick's did not mix, and so far there had been no further trouble.
But there had been something in Keel's expression just now, or the tilt of his head: a hint of that good-humored mockery which was somehow more disturbing than malice ...
"He won't bother you," said Clay absently. "No gang feuds; that's the rule, and the Boss enforces it."
"He could challenge me," said Dick, and grinned self-consciously. He had been working out under old Finnegan the stick-master, and his natural aptitude for the stick had so far improved that none of Vivian's other protégés could stand against him.
"Well, you're not worried about that; are you? Forget it."
They had ridden up a ramp and through a doorway where Dick had never gone before; now they were in a long glass-roofed esplanade which paralleled a sunken railway track. Below them, two cars were standing idle, one loaded with sheets of burnished golden metal, the other empty. The tracks dwindled almost to a point; beyond, through the glass, Dick caught sight of a slender peak of metal, bright against the pale sky.
A nervous fellow in the fur jacket and shako of the Household Guard was fussing about on the platform, superintending a small flotilla of chairs, twenty or twenty-five of them, which he had got jammed up against a V-shaped barricade. He came bustling over with a list in his hand: "Clay? Jones? All right, then we can start. Just a moment." He turned; there was some sort of disturbance up at the point of the V. Standing, Dick saw a red-faced man in the lead chair striking at the face of a slob who was holding the gate closed. The stick rose and fell deliberately; the slob, vainly trying to protect his head, fell out of sight, but another one instantly took his place. There was a muffled roar from the red-faced man, who raised his stick again; but the nervous Guard officer shouted, "All right, open!" The gate swung back; the chairs began to move. The officer pushed by toward a chair of his own, muttering and gnawing his mustache.
Once past the bottleneck, the chairs spread out into a scattered flock. Dick recognized two or three people he knew slightly, but most of the group seemed to be visitors; there was an elderly lady in a hideous, flowered mantle, two middle-aged couples, a lank young man in a Western hat. The red-faced man was still in the lead; Dick saw his head go back as he tipped up a bottle.
He transferred his attention to the Tower, which became gradually more visible through the glass roof of the passage. As they drew nearer, he could see that its lower stages were cross-hatched with scaffolding, a little like a tower built of matchsticks, from the center of which the metal tip protruded ... and it was only with that thought that he began to realize how huge the Tower really was.
The passage was very long, the Tower farther away than it seemed, and the closer they got, the more incredibly, monstrously big it appeared. The huge buttresses began to loom over them; the distant, sunlit tip of the tower grew tiny by comparison, glinting up there like a half-fallen star. Dick felt a curious shrinking of his own person, which he did not like: instead of the Tower growing larger, it was as if he and all the rest of the human beings had grown small -- small as grasshoppers.
"We leave the chairs here," called the nervous officer. He was standing at the end of the passage; beyond him, through the glass doors, they could see a dark space in which trucks moved and loops of cable hung out of vacancy; there was a muffled roar of engines and a clatter of riveting hammers which made the officer's voice almost inaudible. The guests were getting out of their chairs and converging on him; the boys were wheeling the empty chairs away.
"We are now about to enter the Tower of Eagles, the tallest man-made object in the entire world," said the officer's high voice. "One thousand, six hundred feet in height. The Empire State Building in New York was one thousand, two hundred and fifty feet in height, the Great Pyramid at Gizeh was only four hundred and eighty-one feet in height when intact. The Eiffel Tower in Paris, France, is nine hundred eighty-four and one-quarter feet high, or less than two-thirds the height of Eagles Tower. The tower has a triangular cross-section and is constructed of a unique ferro-platinum alloy throughout. The engraved plates of the exterior are of four-teen-carat gold, and each represents more than eighty hours of hand labor by skilled craftsmen. Kindly step this way."
They passed through the doorway into a vast space bf confusing shapes and sounds. Near at hand, the interior had a finished appearance and was brightly lighted; farther away, there was a gulf of darkness broken only by shafts of dim sunlight, and the occasional blue flare of a torch. "This," shouted the officer over the din, "is the Grand Staircase which when completed will rise the entire height of the Tower." Floodlights illumined the bottom of the distant staircase; it swept in a graceful curve up around a central pillar, and was lost in the darkness of the staging above. Every second step had a niche, in which a ten-foot statue stood. The marble of the steps themselves, as well as the banister, railings and walls, seemed to be intricately carved and inlaid.