Tower of Glass
by Robert Silverberg[ Science Fiction ]
Simeon Krug is a self-made man, fantastically wealthy, having built a huge fortune with his android "products," genetically-engineered human slaves who worship him as a God. Krug epitomizes self-aggrandizement, oblivious to his own ego and the price others pay for his prominence. Currently, Krug's latest project attempts to communicate with aliens in response to enigmatic signals from a distant and uninhabitable world--and to do so he must build a huge tower, a mile high, in the Arctic tundra.
Closer to home, in trying to organize to receive basic human rights, Krug's androids come to learn that their "god" has feet of clay, that he is merely human and as flawed as any mortal. His son, and heir, is uncomfortable with the reach of his father's ego and is unwilling to take on the mantle of divinity. The implications of this discovery and the underlying conflicts threaten much more than the TOWER OF GLASS...
"...a multi-levelled work of high adventure, considerable tension and social consciousness."
--Harlan Ellison.
1
Look, Simeon Krug wanted to say, a billion years ago there wasn't even any man, there was only a fish. A slippery thing with gills and scales and little round eyes. He lived in the ocean, and the ocean was like a jail, and the air was like a roof on top of the jail. Nobody could go through the roof. You'll die if you go through, everybody said, and there was this fish, he went through, and he died. And there was this other fish, and he went through, and he died. But there was another fish, and he went through, and it was like his brain was on fire, and his gills were blazing, and the air was drowning him, and the sun was a torch in his eyes, and he was lying there in the mud, waiting to die, and he didn't die. He crawled back down the beach and went into the water and said, Look, there's a whole other world up there. And he went up there again, and stayed for maybe two days, and then he died. And other fishes wondered about that world. And crawled up onto the muddy shore. And stayed. And taught themselves how to breathe the air. And taught themselves how to stand up, how to walk around, how to live with the sunlight in their eyes. And they turned into lizards, dinosaurs, whatever they became, and they walked around for millions of years, and they started to get up on their hind legs, and they used their hands to grab things, and they turned into apes, and the apes got smarter and became men. And all the time some of them, a few, anyway, kept looking for new worlds. You say to them, Let's go back into the ocean, let's be fishes again, it's easier that way. And maybe half of them are ready to do it, more than half, maybe, but there are always some who say, Don't be crazy. We can't be fishes any more. We're men. And so they don't go back. They keep climbing up.
