Frankenstein

roadhouse with laughter, sharing family news and also that kind of news that’s called gossip, mostly gossip of a benign nature, although some that in all honesty could be called mean, as well. They were not saints, after all, but merely souls in the long and often meandering journey from sin to salvation.
    At seven o’clock sharp, Mayor Erskine Potter locked the front doors from the outside, using chain and a padlock.
    Simultaneously, Tom Zell padlocked the fire exit from the bathroom hall and Ben Shanley chained the kitchen exit.
    The fire exit from the private dining room had been barred earlier.
    Now the mayor and the two councilmen met as planned at thebackstage door, by which they entered the roadhouse. With the blue-velvet curtain between them and the Riders, they double-padlocked that final exterior exit.
    In the main room, where everyone was meeting and greeting, the three men went behind the bar, by way of the service gate. Zell and Shanley busied themselves with nothing important, using their bodies to shield the mayor from view as he locked the two deadbolts on the door between the backbar and the service corridor.
    Erskine was excited about being able to watch the Builders at work, a spectacle that he had never seen before. But the best thing of the night would be the killing of the children.
    None of the Community would ever be born as a child. They all came into this world as adults, grown and extruded in mere months. And because they were not only sterile but were also incapable of sexual activity, they could never produce children.
    Procreation was an inefficient method of reproduction. Not only were children inefficient, they were also
alien
to the minds of those in the Community. And not merely alien but repellent.
    How fine the world would be when, one day, there was no small voice anywhere in it, no childish laughter, no laughter at all.

    
chapter
64

    This facility is so immense that if you were more comfortable living with illusions than with truth, you could believe that it went on forever, corridor into corridor through uncountable intersections, chamber after chamber above chamber under chamber within chamber, like a concrete-and-steel expression of an equation by Einstein defining the indefinable.
    Victor Immaculate lives with no illusions. Nothing is infinite or eternal, neither the world nor the people of the world, neither the universe nor time.
    From the chamber with chair and futon, he walks two corridors, descends in an elevator, walks another corridor, and passes through two rooms into a third, where a straight-backed chair faces a blank wall.
    During this journey, he sees no one. No voices are heard, no footsteps other than his own, no doors closing in the distance, no sounds but those he makes.
    Two hundred twenty-two individuals work here, live here, but Victor sees his key personnel only when necessary. The many others,he never sees. The facility’s core computer keeps track of Victor’s position at all times. It also tracks the position of every member of the staff, each of whom it alerts by direct-to-brain messaging when Victor approaches them, enabling them to fade away and avoid seeing—or being seen by—the master of this maze.
    All but a minute fraction of face-to-face encounters are a waste of time. They distract the mind and foster inefficiency.
    Initially, Victor worked here with scores of the best scientists of this or any age. They are all dead.
    Now the Community staffs this facility. They call it the Hive, a term that is not intended to have a negative connotation. They all admire the organization, industry, and efficiency of bees.
    In the room with the single straight-backed chair, Victor sits.
    Beside the chair is a small table. On the table is a cold bottle of water. Beside the bottle is a small white dish. In the dish lies a pale-blue capsule. He opens the bottle, slips the capsule into his mouth, drinks.
    Now he waits for the blank wall, which is a plasma screen, to fill with images from the roadhouse.
    While he waits, he thinks.
    He is always thinking. His mind is ever occupied—it abounds, it
teems
—with ideas, theories, extrapolations. The continuous nature of his thought is less remarkable than the profundity and fertility of it. The world has never previously known a mind of such high caliber—nor will it ever again.
    One of his finest ideas is the entity he calls a Builder. He has heretofore seen them in action only in a laboratory