Finger flashed more lists on the screen. And pictures. All two-dimensional, Oxnard noted. Everything about the room was two-dimensional. Flat paintings on the walls. Flat desktop dominating the decor. The waterchairs were sort of three-dimensional, but only to the tactile sense.

They looked just as flat as everything else. All planes and angles. Nothing holographic. Even the woman wasn’t as three-dimensional as she should be, despite her legs.

It was a pleasant enough office, though. Brightly colored carpeting and draperies. Everything soft looking, even the padded walls. Up here on the one hundred and sixty-seventh floor of the Titanic Tower they never had to worry about smog or noise or dust. The air was pristine, cool, urged smoothly through the sealed offices by gently whispering machinery hidden behind the walls. Very much the same way that people were moved through Titanic’s offices: quietly, efficiently, politely, relentlessly.

Oxnard remembered how nice everyone had been to him the first time he had visited Titanic, eighteen months earlier. They had all been very polite, very enthusiastic, had even pronounced laser and holographic correctly, although they never quite seemed to grasp the difference between a hologram and a holograph. He had first met Les Montpelier then, and had been ushered into Finger’s lofty sanctuary, right here in this same room. Finger wasn’t looking like Cary Grant in those days and his comment on Oxnard’s invention was:

“Stop wasting my time with dumb gadgets! What we need is a show with growth potential. Spinoffs, repeats, byproducts. This thing’s a pipedream!”

That was eighteen months ago. Now Finger was saying: “Every major network has three-dee shows on the air! All top ten series are three-dees! People are standing in line all over the country to buy three-dee sets. And what have you and the other flunkies and drones working for me produced? Nothing! No-thing. Not a goddamned thing.” Finger was perspiring now. The sculptured planes of his face were glistening and somehow looked as if they might be beginning to melt. He touched another button on his desk and the faint whir of an extra air blower sounded from somewhere in the padded ceiling.

“I had to go out myself and find the inventor of the three-dee process and personally coax him to come here and consult with us,” Finger said, his voice sounding at once hurt and outraged.

It was almost true. The woman, whose name Oxnard still couldn’t recall, had called him and said Mr. Finger would like to meet with him. When Oxnard reminded her that they had met eighteen months earlier, the woman had merely smiled on the phone screen and suggested that the future of her career depended on getting him into Finger’s office. Oxnard reluctantly agreed to a date and time.

“All right, then,” Finger went on. “A less loyal man would make some heads roll in a situation like this. I haven’t fired anybody. I haven’t panicked. You still have your jobs. I hope you appreciate that.”

They both bobbed their heads.

“After lunch, the New York people will want to see what we’ve got. Take him,” Finger barely glanced in Oxnard’s direction, “back to the studio and make sure all this fancy gadgetry is working when I arrive there.”

“With it, B.F.,” Montpelier said as he struggled up out of his waterchair.

The woman got to her feet and Oxnard did the same. Finger swivelled his chair slightly and started talking into the phone screen. They were dismissed.

It took exactly twenty-eight paces through the foot-smothering carpet to get to the office door. Les Montpelier swung it open gingerly and they stepped into the receptionist’s area.

“One good thing about flightweight doors,” Montpelier muttered. “You can’t slam them.”

The Titanic Tower was built to earthquake specifications, of course. Which meant that it was constructed like an oversized rocket booster, all aluminum or lighter metals, with a good deal of plastics. If the sensors in the subbasement detected an earth movement beyond the designed tolerances, rocket engines built into the pods along the building’s sides roared to life and hurtled the entire tower, along with its occupants, safely out to a splashdown in the Pacific, beyond the line of oil rigs.

The whole system had been thoroughly tested by NASA; even though a few diehard conservative engineers thought that the tests weren’t extensive enough, the City of Los Angeles decided that it couldn’t grow laterally any more—all the land had been used up. So skyscrapers were the next step. Earthquake-proof skyscrapers.

There hadn’t been an earthquake severe enough to really test the rocket towers, although the Tishman Tower had been blasted off by a gang of pranksters who tinkered with the seismographic equipment in its basement. The building arched beautifully out to sea, with no injuries to its occupants beyond the sorts of bruises and broken bones you’d expect from bouncing off the foam plastic walls, floors and ceilings. A few heart attacks, of course, but that was to be expected. The pedestrians who happened to be strolling on the walkways around the Tower were, unfortunately, rather badly singed by the rocket exhaust. A few of them eventually died, including eighty-four in a sightseeing bus that was illegally parked in front of the Tower. Most of them were foreign visitors, though, and Korean missionaries at that.

As they walked down the corridor toward the studio, Oxnard noted how the foam plastic flooring absorbed the sounds of their footfalls, even without carpeting. It was a great building for sneaking up behind people.

“Why did you let Finger yell at you like that?” Oxnard wondered aloud. “Les, you brought me up here to see him a year and a half ago.”

Montpelier glanced at the woman, who answered: “We’ve learned that it’s best to let B.F. have his little tantrums, Dr. Oxnard. It’s a survival technique.”

Her voice was low, throaty, the kind that would be unbearably exotic if it had just the faintest trace of a foreign accent. But her pronunciation was flat Southern California uninspired. Over the phone she had managed to sound warm and inviting. But not now.

“I don’t have a Doctorate, Miz... uh...” Oxnard grimaced inwardly. He could remember equations, but not names.

“Impanema.” She flashed a meaningless smile, like a reflex that went along with stating her name. “Brenda Impanema.”

“Oh.” For the first time, Oxnard consciously overrode his inherent shyness and really looked at her. Something about her name reminded him of an old song and a girl in an old-fashioned covered-top swimsuit. But Brenda didn’t look like that at all. She seemed to be that indeterminate age between twenty and forty, when women used style and cosmetics before resorting to surgery and Vitaform Processing. She had the slight, slim body of the standard corporate executive female who spent most of her money on whatever style of clothing was fashionable that week and got most of her nutrition on dates with over-eager young stallions. Good legs, though. Flat chested, probably: it was difficult to tell through all the ribbons and flouncy stuff on her blouse. But she had good legs and the good sense to wear a miniskirt, even though it wasn’t in style this week.

Behind those overlarge green glasses, her face was knotted into a frown of concentrated worry.

“Don’t get upset,” Oxnard said generously. “The laser system works like a charm. Finger and his New York bankers will be completely impressed. You won’t lose your jobs.”

Montpelier laughed nasally. “Oh, B.F. could never fire us. We’ve been too close for too many years.”

“What he means,” Brenda said, “is that we know too much about him.”

Pointing a lean finger at her, Montpelier added, “And he knows too much about us. We’re married to him—for better or for worse.”

Oxnard wondered how far the marriage went. But he kept silent as they reached the elevator, stepped in and dropped downward.

“It must make for a nerve-wracking life,” Oxnard said.

“Oh, no... the elevator’s completely safe,” Montpelier said over the whistling of the slipstream outside their shuddering, plummeting compartment.

“I didn’t mean that,” Oxnard said. “I mean... well, working for a man like Finger. He treats you like dirt.”

Brenda shrugged. “It only hurts if you let him get to you.”

Montpelier scratched at his beard. “Listen. I’ll tell you about B.F. There’s a lot more to him than you think. Like that time he kicked me down the elevator shaft...”

“He what?”

“It was an accident,” Brenda said quickly.

“Sure,” Montpelier agreed. “We were discussing something in the hallway; my memory’s a little hazy...”

“The chess show,” said Brenda.

“Oh, yes.” Montpelier’s eyes gleamed with the memory of his idea. “I had this terrific idea for a chess show. With real people—contestants, you know, from the audience—on each square. We’d dress them in armor and all and let them fight it out when they got moved onto the same square...”

“And the final survivor gets a million dollars,” Brenda said.

“And the Hospital Trust gets the losers... which we would then use on our ‘Medical Miracles’ show!”

Oxnard felt a little dizzy. “But chess isn’t...”

Brenda touched him with the fingertips of one hand. “It doesn’t matter. Listen to what happened.” She was smiling. Oxnard felt himself grin back at her.

Montpelier went on, “Well, B.F. and I went round and round on this idea. He didn’t like it, for some reason. The more I argued for it, the madder he got. Finally we were at the end of the hallway, waiting for the elevator and he got so mad he kicked me! He actually kicked me. He was taking Aikido lessons in those days and he kicked me right through the goddamned elevator door!”

“You know how flimsy the doors around here are,” Brenda quipped.

Before Oxnard could say anything, Montpelier resumed:

“I went bum-over-teakettle right down the elevator shaft!”

“Geez...”