Charlie had no idea why Mudge had gotten into the line of sightseers, but he assumed that Mudge knew what he was doing. He moved forward swiftly, though, and was glad of it. Tourists from all over the world jammed the lobby, and the chatter was, if not deafening, annoying.
Charlie finally got to the credit machine standing on a pole at the entrance to an aisle made by posts connected to chains. He inserted the tip of his ID disc-star into the hole, saw the display, ACCEPTED, and passed on into the aisle. He saw Mudge go by the elevator and step onto the stairway to the second floor. Pressed by a man ahead and a woman behind, a close contact Charlie had to endure, he moved slowly up the steps. At the top, he found Mudge waiting for him.
Charlie glanced at the vast and mostly hollow interior rising twelve stories to the top. He had seen this before at least a dozen times, yet he still felt somewhat awed. The exhibits were in tall and wide recesses in the wall in a staggered ascending arrangement. The visitors traveled on winding escalators that went slanting upward around and around the walls past the sea- and landscapes with the figures of fish, birds, insects, animals, and plants appropriate to the particular geological time. Standing on the escalator, their altitude ever increasing, the visitors would travel from Pre-Cambrian time (plants and animals with soft tissues) to the Cambrian (the backboneless ocean creatures of the first stage of the Paleozoic Era). Then, moving upward diagonally, they would go past the Ordovician (the first primitive fishes). They would continue through the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras, oohing and aahing at the life-sized animated dinosaur robots, and they would end up near the top where Homo sapiens of the New Era was the prime exhibit. They would get off into a recess there and take elevators down to the lobby. Along the corkscrew way, they could step off for a while into recesses to one side of the exhibits to view the curiosities.
Mudge did not get onto the escalator. He turned and went into a doorway to a hall. Passing the two men stationed there, Mudge nodded his head at them. This must have been a signal to let Ohm also pass into the hall. It was not more than ten feet long, ending in a wide strip displaying a montage of some of the life forms on the upper levels. Mudge said something be- fore Ohm got near enough to hear him. Ohm started slightly as the strip before him slid up into a slot in the ceiling and a hall-wide strip slid down behind him from a ceiling slot. For a moment, the two were in a box three feet wide.
Mudge stepped through the entrance, which had been hidden by the wall strip, into an elevator cage. He turned and beckoned Ohm to follow him. Ohm got into it. Mudge said, "Up." The doors closed, and the cage rose swiftly. Evidently, since there was no display of floor numbers, the elevator went to one floor only. When it stopped, Mudge got behind Ohm and gently nudged him out. Charlie did not like it that Mudge, who had been in front of him almost all the way, now was behind him. He could do nothing about it and was not sure that he had any reason to try to do something.
They stepped out, facing south, into a large but low-ceilinged room with unactivated wall strips and a thick expensive-looking green carpet. Mudge told him to move on. Charlie went to the only door, which led west. Here was a curving hallway about ten feet wide with another thick carpet and dead-screen strips. As they walked along it, Charlie Ohm saw doors closed on his right. He doubted that these were tenanted. Whoever lived here had plenty of extra rooms and must, therefore, be a very important person indeed.
At the end of a curving three hundred feet, they stopped before a large door. Mudge inserted an ID tip into the code-hole. A few second later, a voice told them to come in. Mudge stepped behind Ohm again and told him to go in. Ohm pulled the door open and went in. He was in a large anteroom with plenty of comfortable-looking chairs and davenports. Obviously, he was to go into the next room. He opened the door to that and entered a very large room. Its windows gave him a view of the Hudson River and of the forest covering the part of New Jersey that he could see. There was a lot of furniture, though not too much for this room. On the wall, spaced among the activated strips, were paintings in the ancient Chinese manner. Ohm wondered if these were originals and not copies. The furnishings and the furniture were certainly Chinese. One of the objets d'art that caught his eye was a big bronze Buddha in a niche.
The man sitting in a chair at the end of the room, near a window, was wearing scarlet pajamas and slippers and a Kelly-green morning robe. He was large and dark-skinned and had prominent epicanthic folds. His nose was large and hawkish; his eyebrows, heavy; his chin, massive. He looked familiar, but it was not until Ohm was a few feet from him that Ohm realized why. Decrease the epicanthic folds by half. Change the blue eyes to brown. He would look much like Jeff Caird ... Father Tom Zurvan ... himself.
Mudge said, "You may stop here." Meaning, "You must." Ohm did so, and Mudge said, "I'll take your bag."
Reluctantly, Ohm handed it over. He had intended to see just where Mudge put it, but the man arose from the chair and bowed slightly, shaking hands with himself. That was Tuesday's greeting, which meant that this man could be that day's citizen. Or it could mean that he was indicating that he knew Ohm's primal persona. Or it could mean both.
The man smiled and said, "Welcome, grandson."
Ohm stared, felt his blood rushing from his head, and said, "Grandson?"
"Also my great-great-grandson in your paternal and maternal lines."
Though shaken, Ohm had recovered quickly. Aware that he had not returned the formal greeting, he did so. And he said, "You have the advantage of me."
That was not quite true. Only one man in the world could be his great-great-grandfather and still be living. But he had died.
That was what the vital statistics of the World Data Bank recorded. However, who knew better than Ohm that the data bank held many lies?
"Advantage?" the man said. He gestured that Ohm should sit down. Ohm, as was proper, waited until the older man seated himself first. Before taking the chair offered, he glanced around. Mudge was standing by a table ten feet behind him. The shoulderbag was on the table but unopened. Mudge, of course, would know by its weight that it contained a gun.
Ohm also scanned the strips, each of which displayed some of the exhibits in the tower.
Ohm sat down, looked steadily into the man's eyes, and said, "All right, no advantage. You did take me by surprise, I admit that. I had no idea ... we've all been told that the founder was killed in a laboratory accident."
"Blown to bits," the man said. "It was not difficult to grow skin and organs and bones from my own cells, even hands, which had, of course, my fingerprints, and one eyeball that was not destroyed by the explosion. By design, of course. There were a lot of of courses."
"Your intimates were wondering why you looked so young," Ohm said. "You finally had to seem to die, and then you took a new ID."
Gilbert Ching Immerman nodded and said, "My permanent residence is not in this country. It won't hurt for you to know that. You may also know that Saturday is not my official citizenship day. I flew here to straighten this mess out."