Tower of Glass

Robert Silverberg

1970

Praise be to Krug! Krug the Lifegiver, Krug the Builder!

Krug is a man driven; coming from the slums of the Midwest he's made his fortune and his reputation by being the hardest businessman around.

Praise be to Krug! Krug the Lifegiver, Krug the Builder!

In order to solve the population problem: not enough humans to do the jobs that needed doing, Krug set his scientists to work developing artificial beings. So the android was born.

Krug looked upon the Vats and saw that they were good.

One of Krug's interests was astronomy so it was natural that he sponsored a telescope in the Antarctic, which picked up the first signs of extra terrestrial intelligence.

And Krug said, Let there be high-energy nucleotides in the Vats. And the nucleotides were poured.

In his late middle age, he starts building a massive tower in the wastes of the Canadian Arctic with which to communicate with those intelligences. But the androids had created a religion around their creator, dreaming of a time when he would allow them the same rights as human beings.

Praise be to Krug! Krug the Lifegiver, Krug the Builder!

When Krug learns of this religion he reacts with disdain and disbelief. When he showed this disdain, his chief foreman, an android like the vast majority of the population, reacts with violence.

What now for Krug's dreams of communication with alien beings?

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This is a Gollancz Classic Science Fiction edition

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