"Nobody goes up there," said the hulking oyster-eyed man in the burlap
overcoat.
The bum's eyes cleared long enough for him to peer into Dewforth's
eyes in order to see if his madness was worth sharing, then they
filmed 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 something
up there above eye-level. The others--old lost children, figures of
scab and grime--had been unaware of anything but inner cavities of
craving 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 never
realized what streets were. Before that time he had known a single
well policed block between the station and his place of work. He still
thought of streets as more or less open strips along which people
moved, north or south, east or west, purposefully from Point A to
Point B with perhaps one right-angle turn, two at the most, pausing
only to tip hats or look into shop windows. Now it developed that
streets were sewers, battlegrounds, lairs, abattoirs, cesspools,
lazarettes, midways of deformity and brawling markets where nightmares
and spirochetes were sold.
The city had not less than three dimensions. He had not been fully
prepared for the implications of this, either. Existence in three
dimensions does not necessarily mean three-dimensional vision. The sky
was not visible through the maze of girders, stairways and catwalks
overhead. Dewforth tried to orient himself by the direction of
shadows, but this was misleading. It was the heart of the shadow
district, and the play of shadows was the order of things. The rules
were the rules of phantoms. Flesh lived there in subjection. Long
miscegenation with shadow had made phantoms of them all and endowed
all shadows with the menace of the real. Everything was equivocal as
hell.
Dewforth wandered in a cavern without walls. He saw bulky overcoats
with defeated hats or defeated heads; long-legged dwarfs in black
leather jackets; willowy chorus-boys with platinum ringlets, waiting
in their niches for the gift of violence; scuttling trolls with
horse-blanket jackets and alpine hats; deposed patriarchs under the
small shelter of black derbies, hiding from persecution behind the
Spanish moss of consolidated beards; headless things and thingless
heads, 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 turn
back time and again. If gangs of shadows fought with knives at the end
of a street which had at first looked promising, what business had
shadows cursing or screaming or bleeding? If the madman who enjoined
the mob to fight in the service of nothingness was only a mouse
dancing on a summit of garbage, why did they cheer? At the end of
still another street, a mass rape may not have been in progress; the
participants may not have waited sullenly in a long line; a
macrocephalic gnome in a plaid suit may not actually have moved up and
down the line selling tickets at a reduced rate and explaining that
the 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 as
though they had been?
* * * * *
All these spectacles tested Dewforth's courage, but they dimmed his
resolve not at all. At last he found a deserted street. He followed
it and he was rewarded with encouraging signs. There was more birdlime
underfoot, and the inhuman yammering of the streets was replaced with
echoing silence, and that silence was invaded by the sound--the voice
of the colossus, remote and terrible.
Dewforth asked directions again, this time of a pear-shaped figure
which may or may not have had legs and which sat in the mouth of an
iron 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 at
him.
"Where do they come down, then," asked Dewforth, trying a new approach
but with little hope. There was a long pause. The pear-shaped man
didn'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 it
from a drinking glass once."
This dialogue might have gone on much longer if Dewforth had not just
then noticed that his noninformer was sitting on the bottom step of a
long, dark stairway which led up and up into a jungle of lacy girders
and shadows above them.
He did not bother kicking the pear-shaped man. He stepped over him and
ran up the stairs two at a time. His footsteps rang on the iron stairs
and carried through the structure. It sounded like the bells of a
sunken 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 from
menacing. They clung to things and pressed themselves against things,
and they stared with unfocused eyes at something which had been there
before but was not there now. These men seemed to be wearing greasy
fezzes and dark, baggy long underwear with buttons and vestigial
lapels. As he approached them, Dewforth saw that the fezzes were
actually felt hats with the brims atrophied or rotted away, and the
funereal long-johns were the weatherbeaten remains of those suits
which are designed for Young Men On The Way Up. As though by tacit
agreement of long standing, these men did not look directly at
Dewforth 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 it
shattered like a chain of stale pretzels. There were no more people
beyond the second level--none that could be seen.
He soon lost count of levels. Stairs became narrower and more heavily
encrusted with birdlime and rust as he ascended. In some places there
were long sweeping ramps which led to blind sacs or reached out
unsupported into space, and he was forced to retrace his steps. At no
time did he look down, even when it was possible. There were usually
high barriers along the platforms and ramps. These were covered with
layers of old advertising posters which peeled and were torn by the
wind, revealing still more ancient posters underneath. They seemed to
have grown there by themselves like lichen. It seemed entirely
reasonable to Dewforth that the writing on the older posters
underneath was runic or demotic and the faces were ochre-stained
skulls, but his impulse was to hurry past and not study them too
closely.
* * * * *
At last he found a long steep ladder running up the outside of one of
the legs of the Control Tower. Only huge slowly circling birds and
low-flying clouds came between him and the underside of the control
house at the top of the structure. Before beginning the climb he
admonished himself not to look down and not to ponder what he was
doing. In order to keep climbing, however, he had to keep admonishing
himself, thereby only reminding himself to look down and to ponder, to
the detriment of his equilibrium and confidence. Was it vertigo, or
did the ladder or the Tower itself sway in the singing wind? Who was
to say that the earth itself did not heave like fermenting mash? Was
any 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 in
which he had worked. There was nothing in any feature of the
landscape. Nothing. If his position, clinging to a girder high above
the city, made no sense, it did not make less sense than the position
of a man, or a Dewforth, sitting in a blind cell among thousands of
other blind cells down there, drawing tiny lines. Nothing bound him to
the drafting room nor even to the Dewforth of the drafting room--not
so much as a spider web or a shaft of light. The light pointed to
itself. The wind got under his shirt and chilled his navel, a
poignant reminder of disconnectedness.
An eagle glided close and screamed at him. It was like the laughter of
his wife. He resumed his climb, looking down no more.
The last few yards of the climb were the worst. Some bolts holding the
ladder in place were shapeless little masses of rust. The eleventh
rung from the top broke under his weight, and for the last ten steps
he had to lighten his body by means of a technique of autosuggestion
and will-projection which he invented on the spot, demonstrating what
could be done under pressure of extreme necessity. He could see above
his head a tiny balcony not more than a yard square, at which the
ladder terminated. The floor of this balcony appeared to be made of
long, weatherbeaten cigars which reason told him were badly corroded
iron 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, but
the idea that there would not be a door there was, under the
circumstances, insupportable. There would be a door, he told himself
as he made his way upwards by means of levitation and the most
tentative of steps. It would probably have an inhospitable sign on
it--NO TRESPASSING, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, DANGER or perhaps HIGH
VOLTAGE. It might prove to be locked. If so, he would pound on it
until some one opened it, he decided.
There was even an outside possibility that no one would be inside. He
had never considered that possibility before that time. He decided
that it was not time to consider it now.
When Dewforth heaved himself up onto the small projecting platform he
felt the ladder give under his feet. It was not just another rung. He
saw the entire ladder go curling away into the emptiness like a huge
broken spring. Then he lay on the platform face down with his eyes
closed, fingers clutching the sill of the door, for a long time.
New sounds invaded his personal darkness as he lay there. He heard
bells, buzzers, klaxons, whistles and slamming relays. There were
voices from loudspeakers--imperious and hopeless, angry and feeble,
impassioned and monotonous, arrogant and anguished--in a synthetic
language made up of odd phonemes long since discarded from a thousand
other languages. When he looked up he saw no door but only a rectangle
of darkness with erratic flashes of colored light.
Having no choice, he entered on his hands and knees.