“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 fiightweight doors,” Montpelier muttered. “You can’t slam them.”

The Titanic Tower was built to earthquake specificstions 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.