slack and eyes vaguely puzzled-almost know who I am, /almost remember what I did to end up like this, those eyes said. He was a living example of what simply wasn't done when one was in the presence of working Breakers. But there was no rule expressly prohibiting staff from coming up here and they all did from time to time.
Becavise it was refreshing.
For one thing, being near working Breakers made talk unnecessary. What they called "good mind" kicked in as you walked down the third-floor hall on either side, from either elevator, and when you opened the doors giving on the balcony good mind bloomed in your head, opening all sorts of perceptual doorways. Aldous Huxley, Pimli had thought on more than one occasion, would have gone absolutely bonkers up here. Sometimes one found one's heels leaving the floor in a kind of half-assed float. The stuff in your pockets tended to rise and hang in the air. Formerly baffling situations seemed to resolve themselves the moment you turned your thoughts to them. If you'd forgotten something, your five o'clock appointment or your brother-in-law's middle name, for instance, this was the place where you could remember. And even if you realized that what you'd forgotten was important, you were never distressed. Folken left the balcony with smiles on their faces even if they'd come up in the foulest of moods (a foul mood was an excellent reason to visit the balcony in the first place). It was as if some sort of happy-gas, invisible to the eye and unmeasurable by even the most sophisticated telemetry, always rose from the Breakers below.
The two of them hiled the trio across the way, then approached die wide fumed-oak railing and looked down. The room below might have been the capacious library of some richly endowed gentlemen's club in London. Softly glowing lamps, many with genuine Tiffany shades, stood on little tables or shone on the walls (oak-paneled, of course). The rugs were the most exquisite Turkish. There was a Matisse on one wall, a Rembrandt on another... and on a third was the Mona Lisa.
The real one, as opposed to the fake hanging in the Louvre on Keystone Earth. A man stood before it with his arms clasped behind him. From up here he looked as though he were studying the painting-trying to decipher the famously enigmatic smile, maybe-but Pimli knew better. The men and women holding magazines looked as though they were reading, too, but if you were right down there you'd see that they were gazing blankly over the tops of their McCalVs and their Harper's or a littie off to one side. An eleven- or twelve-year-old girl in a gorgeous striped summer dress that might have cost sixteen hundred dollars in a Rodeo Drive kiddie boutique was sitting before a dollhouse on the hearth, but Pimli knew she wasn't paying any attention to the exquisitely made replica of Damli at all.
Thirty-three of them down there. Thirty-three in all. At eight o'clock, an hour after the artificial sun snapped off, thirty-three fresh Breakers would troop in. And there was one fellow-one and one only-who came and went just as he pleased. A fellow who'd gone under the wire and paid no penalty for it at all... except for being brought back, that was, and for this man, that was penalty enough.
As if the thought had summoned him, the door at the end of the room opened, and Ted Brautigan slipped quietly in. He was still wearing his tweed riding cap. Daneeka Rostov looked up from the dollhouse and gave him a smile. Brautigan dropped her a wink in return. Pimli gave Finli a little nudge.
Finli: (I see him)
But it was more than seeing. They felt him. The moment Brautigan came into the room, those on the balcony-and, much more important, those on the floor-felt the powerlevel rise. They still weren't completely sure what they'd gotten in Brautigan, and the testing equipment didn't help in that regard (the old dog had blown out several pieces of it himself, and on purpose, the Master was quite sure). If there were others like him, the low men had found none on their talent hunts (now suspended; they had all the talent they needed to finish the job). One thing that did seem clear was Brautigan's talent as a facilitator, a psychic who was not just powerful by himself but was able to up the abilities of others just by being near them. Finli's