Finally they have made it up to the top of the hill, which Tom Howard has shaved to the bedrock in a kind of monk’s tonsure. Not because he hates living things, though he probably has no particular affection for them, but to hold at bay the forces of erosion and to create a defensive glacis across which the movements of incredibly poisonous snakes, squirrel-sized insects, opportunistic lower primates, and villainous upper primates will be visible on the array of video cameras he has built into fairly subtle recesses and crevices up on the walls. Seen up close, the house is surprisingly not as dour and fortresslike as it looked at first. It is not just a single large culvert but a bundle of them in different diameters and lengths, like a faggot of bamboo. There is a decent number of windows, particularly on the north side where there’s a view, down the slope that John and Randy have just climbed, to a crescent-shaped beach. The windows are set deeply into the walls, partly to back them out of the nearly vertical rays of the sun and partly because each one has a retractable steel shutter, hidden in the wall, that can be dropped down in front of it. It is an okay house, and Randy wonders if Tom Howard would be willing to deed it over to the Dentist and hock his colossal suite of Gomer Bolstrood furniture and move his family into a crowded apartment building just in order to retain control of Epiphyte Corporation. But maybe that won’t even be necessary.