=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. The
train which took him to the city every morning passed through a
country in the terminal stages of a long war of self-destruction.
Whatever had been burned, botched, poisoned or exhausted in that
struggle had been filled along the right-of-way, among drifts of soot
and ground-mists of sulphurous smoke and chemical flatulence, to form
a long tedious mural--a parody of cloud-borne Asiatic hills,
precipitous and always so close to the tracks that their tops could
not 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, it
shot like a bolt in the groove of an arbolest between unbroken
barriers of advertising or through deep concrete troughs and roaring
tunnels full of grimy light and grubby air.
There was one inconsistancy in this scheme of things: Just as the
train emerged from a deep valley of slag-hills and swung into a long
curve, passengers on the left side had a panoramic view of the city--a
frozen scene of battle between geometrical monsters, made remote and
obscure by the dust of a thousand thousand merely human struggles, too
small to be visible from the crusty windows of the train by the merely
human eye. They had about one second in which to absorb this vision of
corporate purpose. Then they were plunging into a final stretch of
tunnel to the center of the city itself, where no surface was ever
more than fifteen paces away and where there were no horizons at all.
Dewforth was excited by this view even though it reached him in a
fragmentary and subliminal way. Day after day he told himself that he
would have all his faculties at the ready before the train swung into
the curve. But morning after morning he was still emerging from the
stale fumes of the preceding night's beer, or he allowed himself to be
hypnotized by the sound of the wheels or fascinated by the jiggling of
another passenger's earlobe at that critical moment. The train had
always entered the clangorous colon of the city before this resolve
could crystallize in his mind, and he was left with an impression
which lay somewhere in the scale of reality between the after-image of
a light bulb and the morning memory of a fever-dream. He could never
have described the scene except in loose generalities about buildings
of contrasting height and unemphatic color.
* * * * *
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 a
displaced rectangle. A shining thread of morning sky could be seen
beneath it. It was only logical to suppose that it stood on legs of
some kind--a complicated process of girders. The upper part appeared
to be made of corrugated metal, but, as with the matter of the legs,
it was impossible to separate what was actually seen and what was
merely inferred. The only other structures Dewforth had seen which
resembled it at all were water towers and shipyard cranes, but these
had been mere toys compared with the thing that hovered over the
center of the city.
Its purpose could not be guessed, but what disturbed Dewforth more was
the fact that he could not be sure that it existed. He was a precision
draftsman, more or less resigned to deteriorating eyesight, and his
usual abstracted state of mind during that segment of his day had also
to be considered. He hoped that someone else would mention the
structure. Once--only once--a man sitting on the opposite seat had
made 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 had
meant. Had he seen the same thing? Had he seen anything at all? And
what had he meant by "turned"?
But he had not asked. The other had been not merely forbidding, not
merely repugnant, but alternately forbidding and repugnant--in
daylight, an impeccable burgher sitting tall and righteous under a
tall hat; in tunnels, a hunchbacked gargoyle picking its nose in the
fickle darkness.
If Dewforth had been the only passenger on the train, or indeed the
last man in the world, he could not have been more alone with his
wonder. You did not ask whimsical questions of strangers nowadays. You
did not ask many questions of friends. All uncertainties incubated in
private darkness; they lived and grew and even put forth new
appendages.
Not a building. Not a water tank. Not a crane. Perhaps it was only an
illusion.
Illusion or not, it wanted a name so that it might be at least
catalogued in his own mind. Therefore, on a morning since forgotten
and for reasons never closely examined, he decided to call it The
Control Tower.