In the Control Tower

by Will Mohler

  Produced by Robert Cicconetti, Jeannie Howse and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

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  +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has | | been preserved. | | | | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For | | a complete list, please see the end of this document. | | | | This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction, | | December 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any | | evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication | | was renewed. | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+

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  IN THE CONTROL TOWER

  by WILL MOHLER

  Illustrated by GIUNTA

  =Shadows haunted the dying alleys. Madness stalked the wide streets. And what lay at the city's heart?=

  I

  Dewforth had almost most lost the habit of looking from windows. Thetrain which took him to the city every morning passed through acountry in the terminal stages of a long war of self-destruction.Whatever had been burned, botched, poisoned or exhausted in thatstruggle had been filled along the right-of-way, among drifts of sootand ground-mists of sulphurous smoke and chemical flatulence, to forma long tedious mural--a parody of cloud-borne Asiatic hills,precipitous and always so close to the tracks that their tops couldnot be seen.

  This was almost merciful, considering what had been done to the sky.When the train did not sneak between hills of slag, cinders, rubbish,garbage, dross and the bloody brown carrion of broken machinery, itshot like a bolt in the groove of an arbolest between unbrokenbarriers of advertising or through deep concrete troughs and roaringtunnels full of grimy light and grubby air.

  There was one inconsistancy in this scheme of things: Just as thetrain emerged from a deep valley of slag-hills and swung into a longcurve, passengers on the left side had a panoramic view of the city--afrozen scene of battle between geometrical monsters, made remote andobscure by the dust of a thousand thousand merely human struggles, toosmall to be visible from the crusty windows of the train by the merelyhuman eye. They had about one second in which to absorb this vision ofcorporate purpose. Then they were plunging into a final stretch oftunnel to the center of the city itself, where no surface was evermore than fifteen paces away and where there were no horizons at all.

  Dewforth was excited by this view even though it reached him in afragmentary and subliminal way. Day after day he told himself that hewould have all his faculties at the ready before the train swung intothe curve. But morning after morning he was still emerging from thestale fumes of the preceding night's beer, or he allowed himself to behypnotized by the sound of the wheels or fascinated by the jiggling ofanother passenger's earlobe at that critical moment. The train hadalways entered the clangorous colon of the city before this resolvecould crystallize in his mind, and he was left with an impressionwhich lay somewhere in the scale of reality between the after-image ofa light bulb and the morning memory of a fever-dream. He could neverhave described the scene except in loose generalities about buildingsof contrasting height and unemphatic color.

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  The single memorable feature of the panorama, looming above the rest,was not even a building. It eluded all familiar categories. It was,like the other components of the picture, rectangular; but it was adisplaced rectangle. A shining thread of morning sky could be seenbeneath it. It was only logical to suppose that it stood on legs ofsome kind--a complicated process of girders. The upper part appearedto be made of corrugated metal, but, as with the matter of the legs,it was impossible to separate what was actually seen and what wasmerely inferred. The only other structures Dewforth had seen whichresembled it at all were water towers and shipyard cranes, but thesehad been mere toys compared with the thing that hovered over thecenter of the city.

  Its purpose could not be guessed, but what disturbed Dewforth more wasthe fact that he could not be sure that it existed. He was a precisiondraftsman, more or less resigned to deteriorating eyesight, and hisusual abstracted state of mind during that segment of his day had alsoto be considered. He hoped that someone else would mention thestructure. Once--only once--a man sitting on the opposite seat hadmade a comment which could have applied to it. "It turned," he said,just as the tunnel swallowed the train.

  Dewforth would have liked to ask the other passenger what he hadmeant. Had he seen the same thing? Had he seen anything at all? Andwhat had he meant by "turned"?

  But he had not asked. The other had been not merely forbidding, notmerely repugnant, but alternately forbidding and repugnant--indaylight, an impeccable burgher sitting tall and righteous under atall hat; in tunnels, a hunchbacked gargoyle picking its nose in thefickle darkness.

  If Dewforth had been the only passenger on the train, or indeed thelast man in the world, he could not have been more alone with hiswonder. You did not ask whimsical questions of strangers nowadays. Youdid not ask many questions of friends. All uncertainties incubated inprivate darkness; they lived and grew and even put forth newappendages.

  Not a building. Not a water tank. Not a crane. Perhaps it was only anillusion.

  Illusion or not, it wanted a name so that it might be at leastcatalogued in his own mind. Therefore, on a morning since forgottenand for reasons never closely examined, he decided to call it TheControl Tower.