Hal at Quabbin Recovery Systems
Its windows are the smoky brown kind that in daylight become dark mirrors. Hal’s late father had publicly repudiated this kind of window-glass in an interview in Lens & Pane when the stuff first came out. Right now, lit from inside, the windows have a sort of bloody, polluted aspect.
Context
Second catalogued hit: the Q.R.S. building's tinted windows trip a memory of JOI's optics dogma — window-glass that turns itself into a mirror, and the optical scientist repudiated it publicly, in Lens & Pane, "a trade organ" (the raw's gloss, just after the quoted span). The late-book flash of the founder's principles at their purest and most cranky: glass that reflects instead of transmits was worth a public repudiation in the window-trade press. The raw then does what JOI would have hated to the same panes — "lit from inside," they go bloody and polluted — and the whole sighting sits on the threshold of a recovery facility whose windows literally show visitors themselves instead of what's inside, half a step from 166's mirror-that-AA-hauls-out. That last linkage is ours-as-extractor to note, not the raw's.