by Will Mohler
III
"Nobody goes up there," said the hulking oyster-eyed man in the burlapovercoat.
The bum's eyes cleared long enough for him to peer into Dewforth'seyes in order to see if his madness was worth sharing, then theyfilmed over again as he decided that it was not.
Dewforth crowded past him and walked on. He was making real progress.He had at last found someone who acknowledged that there was somethingup there above eye-level. The others--old lost children, figures ofscab and grime--had been unaware of anything but inner cavities ofcraving and fear above the sidewalk firmament of trodden gum disks,sputum stars and the ends of twice-smoked cigarettes.
He could not have lost sight of the Control Tower. He had neverrealized what streets were. Before that time he had known a singlewell policed block between the station and his place of work. He stillthought of streets as more or less open strips along which peoplemoved, north or south, east or west, purposefully from Point A toPoint B with perhaps one right-angle turn, two at the most, pausingonly to tip hats or look into shop windows. Now it developed thatstreets were sewers, battlegrounds, lairs, abattoirs, cesspools,lazarettes, midways of deformity and brawling markets where nightmaresand spirochetes were sold.
The city had not less than three dimensions. He had not been fullyprepared for the implications of this, either. Existence in threedimensions does not necessarily mean three-dimensional vision. The skywas not visible through the maze of girders, stairways and catwalksoverhead. Dewforth tried to orient himself by the direction ofshadows, but this was misleading. It was the heart of the shadowdistrict, and the play of shadows was the order of things. The ruleswere the rules of phantoms. Flesh lived there in subjection. Longmiscegenation with shadow had made phantoms of them all and endowedall shadows with the menace of the real. Everything was equivocal ashell.
Dewforth wandered in a cavern without walls. He saw bulky overcoatswith defeated hats or defeated heads; long-legged dwarfs in blackleather jackets; willowy chorus-boys with platinum ringlets, waitingin their niches for the gift of violence; scuttling trolls withhorse-blanket jackets and alpine hats; deposed patriarchs under thesmall shelter of black derbies, hiding from persecution behind theSpanish moss of consolidated beards; headless things and thinglessheads, importuning, threatening, watching or just standing there,those that were able.
In his search for a way out of the darkness, he was obliged to turnback time and again. If gangs of shadows fought with knives at the endof a street which had at first looked promising, what business hadshadows cursing or screaming or bleeding? If the madman who enjoinedthe mob to fight in the service of nothingness was only a mousedancing on a summit of garbage, why did they cheer? At the end ofstill another street, a mass rape may not have been in progress; theparticipants may not have waited sullenly in a long line; amacrocephalic gnome in a plaid suit may not actually have moved up anddown the line selling tickets at a reduced rate and explaining thatthe outrage had been in progress since the preceding Christmas Eve:but why was the unreality so consistant?
And if no one was in fact being ravaged, why did everyone look asthough they had been?
* * * * *
All these spectacles tested Dewforth's courage, but they dimmed hisresolve not at all. At last he found a deserted street. He followedit and he was rewarded with encouraging signs. There was more birdlimeunderfoot, and the inhuman yammering of the streets was replaced withechoing silence, and that silence was invaded by the sound--the voiceof the colossus, remote and terrible.
Dewforth asked directions again, this time of a pear-shaped figurewhich may or may not have had legs and which sat in the mouth of aniron cave and smoked what appeared to be a twist of hemp. "Where...."Dewforth began.
"Nobody goes up there," the hemp-smoker answered without looking up athim.
"Where do they come down, then," asked Dewforth, trying a new approachbut with little hope. There was a long pause. The pear-shaped mandidn't have arms either, Dewforth noticed. Hands, but no arms.
"Well now, some got it, some ain't," he said.
"How's that?" asked Dewforth. The pear blew out a cloud of smoke,sulphurous, with viscous strings through it. "I knowed a guy caught itfrom a drinking glass once."
This dialogue might have gone on much longer if Dewforth had not justthen noticed that his noninformer was sitting on the bottom step of along, dark stairway which led up and up into a jungle of lacy girdersand shadows above them.
He did not bother kicking the pear-shaped man. He stepped over him andran up the stairs two at a time. His footsteps rang on the iron stairsand carried through the structure. It sounded like the bells of asunken cathedral ringing in the tide.
On the second level there was more light and more air. It was colder.There were loiterers on the second level too, but these were far frommenacing. They clung to things and pressed themselves against things,and they stared with unfocused eyes at something which had been therebefore but was not there now. These men seemed to be wearing greasyfezzes and dark, baggy long underwear with buttons and vestigiallapels. As he approached them, Dewforth saw that the fezzes wereactually felt hats with the brims atrophied or rotted away, and thefunereal long-johns were the weatherbeaten remains of those suitswhich are designed for Young Men On The Way Up. As though by tacitagreement of long standing, these men did not look directly atDewforth as he passed, nor he at them.
There was no difficulty about finding a stairway to the next level,but there was a rusty chain across the entrance.
Dewforth's foot caught in this chain as he stepped over it, and itshattered like a chain of stale pretzels. There were no more peoplebeyond the second level--none that could be seen.
He soon lost count of levels. Stairs became narrower and more heavilyencrusted with birdlime and rust as he ascended. In some places therewere long sweeping ramps which led to blind sacs or reached outunsupported into space, and he was forced to retrace his steps. At notime did he look down, even when it was possible. There were usuallyhigh barriers along the platforms and ramps. These were covered withlayers of old advertising posters which peeled and were torn by thewind, revealing still more ancient posters underneath. They seemed tohave grown there by themselves like lichen. It seemed entirelyreasonable to Dewforth that the writing on the older postersunderneath was runic or demotic and the faces were ochre-stainedskulls, but his impulse was to hurry past and not study them tooclosely.
* * * * *
At last he found a long steep ladder running up the outside of one ofthe legs of the Control Tower. Only huge slowly circling birds andlow-flying clouds came between him and the underside of the controlhouse at the top of the structure. Before beginning the climb headmonished himself not to look down and not to ponder what he wasdoing. In order to keep climbing, however, he had to keep admonishinghimself, thereby only reminding himself to look down and to ponder, tothe detriment of his equilibrium and confidence. Was it vertigo, ordid the ladder or the Tower itself sway in the singing wind? Who wasto say that the earth itself did not heave like fermenting mash? Wasany object inherently more solid than any other object? What was"stability"?
When he looked down at the city he could not pick out the building inwhich he had worked. There was nothing in any feature of thelandscape. Nothing. If his position, clinging to a girder high abovethe city, made no sense, it did not make less sense than the positionof a man, or a Dewforth, sitting in a blind cell among thousands ofother blind cells down there, drawing tiny lines. Nothing bound him tothe drafting room nor even to the Dewforth of the drafting room--notso much as a spider web or a shaft of light. The light pointed toitself. The wind got under his shirt and chilled his navel, apoignant reminder of disconnectedness.
An eagle glided close and screamed at him. It was like the laughter ofhis wife. He resumed his climb, looking down no more.
The last few yards of the climb were the worst. Some bolts holding theladder in place were shapeless little masses o
f rust. The eleventhrung from the top broke under his weight, and for the last ten stepshe had to lighten his body by means of a technique of autosuggestionand will-projection which he invented on the spot, demonstrating whatcould be done under pressure of extreme necessity. He could see abovehis head a tiny balcony not more than a yard square, at which theladder terminated. The floor of this balcony appeared to be made oflong, weatherbeaten cigars which reason told him were badly corrodediron bars. Reason also told him that there would be a door there.
He could not see a door through the skeleton floor of the balcony, butthe idea that there would not be a door there was, under thecircumstances, insupportable. There would be a door, he told himselfas he made his way upwards by means of levitation and the mosttentative of steps. It would probably have an inhospitable sign onit--NO TRESPASSING, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, DANGER or perhaps HIGHVOLTAGE. It might prove to be locked. If so, he would pound on ituntil some one opened it, he decided.
There was even an outside possibility that no one would be inside. Hehad never considered that possibility before that time. He decidedthat it was not time to consider it now.
When Dewforth heaved himself up onto the small projecting platform hefelt the ladder give under his feet. It was not just another rung. Hesaw the entire ladder go curling away into the emptiness like a hugebroken spring. Then he lay on the platform face down with his eyesclosed, fingers clutching the sill of the door, for a long time.
New sounds invaded his personal darkness as he lay there. He heardbells, buzzers, klaxons, whistles and slamming relays. There werevoices from loudspeakers--imperious and hopeless, angry and feeble,impassioned and monotonous, arrogant and anguished--in a syntheticlanguage made up of odd phonemes long since discarded from a thousandother languages. When he looked up he saw no door but only a rectangleof darkness with erratic flashes of colored light.
Having no choice, he entered on his hands and knees.
IV
Dewforth wandered in a labyrinth of control panels which reachedalmost to the ceiling, but did not entirely shut out the light. Thislight was like skimmed milk diffused in shadow. He reasoned that itcame from windows, but when he tried to remember whether the controlcab had windows he could not be sure. He had no visual image ofwindows seen from the outside, but he had supposed that such anedifice would hardly be blind. Somewhere beyond this maze of controlpanels, he also reasoned, there must be an area like the bridge of anenormous ship where the clamor of the bells, buzzers, klaxons andwhistles and the silent warnings and importunings of dials, gauges,colored lights, ticker-tapes which spewed from metal mouths, thepalsied styles which scribbled on creeping scrolls, were somehowcollated and made meaningful, where the yammering loudspeakers couldbe answered, and where the operators could look out and down and seewhat they were doing.
Where were the operators?
The noise was deafening. Unlike the noise of machinery in a factory itwas not homogeneous. Each sound was intended to attract attention andto evoke a certain response, but what response and from whom? Longlevers projecting from the steel deck wagged back and forthspastically like the legs of monstrous insects struggling on theirbacks. Several times Dewforth was temporarily blinded by an explosionof blue light as a fuse blew or something short-circuited among therows of knife-switches and rheostats on the panels. One would neverreally get used to the sporadic sound or to the lights. There was noknowable pattern about them--about what they did or said. When heclosed his eyes and tried to compose himself the words _Out ofControl_ flashed red against the back of his eyelids, but he toldhimself that this was foolish. How was one to adjudge a situation tobe Out of Control when one did not know what constituted control, overwhat, or by whom? Furthermore, he rebuked himself, if thepanels--never mind how many or how forbidding--with their lights,bells, buzzers, switches, relays, dials, gauges, styles, tapes,pointers, rheostats and buttons had any meaning, and in fact if theTower itself had any meaning at all, that meaning was _Control_. Howarrogant it had been of him to imagine, even briefly, that becausehe--a green intruder in that high place--had not immediatelycomprehended what it was all about, the situation must be out ofcontrol. _Absurd!_
* * * * *
There were hundreds--perhaps thousands--of little labels attached tothe control panels, presumably indicating the functions of thebuttons, switches and other controls. Dewforth leaned close andstudied these, but found only mute combinations of letters andnumbers, joined by hyphens or separated by virgules.... They made himfeel somewhat more fragile, more round-shouldered and colder, but heresisted despair. It was getting a little darker, though. Theskimmed-milk light above him was taking on a bluish tint. He had noway of knowing how long he had wandered among the control panels. Histime-sense had always been dependent upon clocks and bells--and uponthe arrivals and departures of trains.
It was a sound which finally led Dewforth out of the maze of controlpanels.
It was not a louder sound, not more emphatic, imperative or clear thanthe others; it was formless, feeble and ineffably pathetic. It wasits utter incongruity which reached Dewforth through the roboticclamor, and which touched him ... a mewing, as of a kitten trapped ina closet.
It came, as he discovered, from The Operator.
He was quite alone among his levers, wheels, switches, buttons,cranks, gauges, lights, bells, buzzers, horns, ticker-tapes, creepingscrolls, barking loudspeakers and cryptic dials. Dewforth saw himsharply silhouetted against a long window through which bluish-graylight poured but through which nothing could be clearly seen fromwhere he stood. The Operator sat on a high, one-legged stool. His headwas drawn into his shoulders, which were crumpled things of birdlikebones. His head was bald on top but the fringe was long and wild. Hehad big simian ears set at right angles to his head and the lightshone through them, not pink but yellowish. There was an aureole offine hairs about them which gave them the appearance of angel's wings.With enlarged hands at the ends of almost fleshless arms he clutchedat the knobs of rheostats and the cranks of transformers, hesitantly,spasmodically, and without ever quite reaching anything. Each time hewithdrew his hands quickly as though he had been on the point oftouching something very hot. His arms might have been elongated by alifetime of such aborted movement.
Just as Dewforth began to wonder how his sudden appearance there wouldaffect the old man, feeble and distraught as he already was, theOperator whirled on his stool and stared at Dewforth with eyes soround, so huge and so terrified that the rest of his face was notnoticeable at all.
He shouted something that sounded like "_Huzzah!_" but almostcertainly was not, then stiffened, then fell to the steel deck with nomore fuss than a bag of corn-husks would have made, and died.
* * * * *
One would think that a windowed control cab or wheelhouse atop theloftiest structure in a city, or in an entire landscape, would afforda man an Olympian view of the world below, and of its people and theiractivities.
Dewforth must have believed this at one time, but he found that it wasnot so. The entire lower portion of the windows was covered with thinpages of typescript, mostly yellowed, dusty and curled at theedges--orders, instructions, directives, memoranda, all _Urgent_, _ForImmediate Action_, _Important_, _Priority_, _On No Account_, or _AtAll Costs_.
The texts of these orders, instructions, directives or memorandaconsisted of mute combinations of letters and numbers, joined byhyphens or separated by virgules.
Through the upper portion of the windows Dewforth could just make outthe horizon and a narrow strip of darkening sky, which were silent andwhich demanded nothing of him. Amid the continuing clamor of all thesignal devices, he tried to recapture the last utterance of theOperator--the former Operator.
"_Huzzah!_" was out of the question. "_Who's there?_" or "_Who'sthat?_" were more likely, but, as he thought of it, weren't "_Whosewhat?_", "_What's where?_", "_Where's what?_" or even "_Who's where?_"just as likely?
Of these possible
last words, "_Who's where?_" echoed mostpersistently in his memory.
Dewforth might have torn away the pages of meaningless orders andlooked down upon lights as darkness fell, but he did not.
Opaque as they were in form and content alike, there was somethingreassuringly familiar in the lines of inane symbols. And they were allthat stood between him and the approaching tidal wave of night, andbeyond the night, the winter with its storms.
--WILL MOHLER
* * * * *
+-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Typographical errors corrected in text: | | | | Page 139: "more efficient that the rest" replaced with | | "more efficient than the rest" | | Page 141: whispper replaced with whisper | | Page 141: disance replaced with distance | | Page 143: "the participants many not have waited" | | replaced with | | "the participants may not have waited" | | Page 143: spectacle replaced with spectacles | | Page 147: homogenous replaced with homogeneous | | Page 149: "Where's what" replaced with "Where's what?" | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+
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