Dewforth wandered in a labyrinth of control panels which reached
almost to the ceiling, but did not entirely shut out the light. This
light was like skimmed milk diffused in shadow. He reasoned that it
came from windows, but when he tried to remember whether the control
cab had windows he could not be sure. He had no visual image of
windows seen from the outside, but he had supposed that such an
edifice would hardly be blind. Somewhere beyond this maze of control
panels, he also reasoned, there must be an area like the bridge of an
enormous ship where the clamor of the bells, buzzers, klaxons and
whistles and the silent warnings and importunings of dials, gauges,
colored lights, ticker-tapes which spewed from metal mouths, the
palsied styles which scribbled on creeping scrolls, were somehow
collated and made meaningful, where the yammering loudspeakers could
be answered, and where the operators could look out and down and see
what they were doing.
Where were the operators?
The noise was deafening. Unlike the noise of machinery in a factory it
was not homogeneous. Each sound was intended to attract attention and
to evoke a certain response, but what response and from whom? Long
levers projecting from the steel deck wagged back and forth
spastically like the legs of monstrous insects struggling on their
backs. Several times Dewforth was temporarily blinded by an explosion
of blue light as a fuse blew or something short-circuited among the
rows of knife-switches and rheostats on the panels. One would never
really get used to the sporadic sound or to the lights. There was no
knowable pattern about them--about what they did or said. When he
closed his eyes and tried to compose himself the words _Out of
Control_ flashed red against the back of his eyelids, but he told
himself that this was foolish. How was one to adjudge a situation to
be Out of Control when one did not know what constituted control, over
what, or by whom? Furthermore, he rebuked himself, if the
panels--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 the
Tower itself had any meaning at all, that meaning was _Control_. How
arrogant it had been of him to imagine, even briefly, that because
he--a green intruder in that high place--had not immediately
comprehended what it was all about, the situation must be out of
control. _Absurd!_
* * * * *
There were hundreds--perhaps thousands--of little labels attached to
the control panels, presumably indicating the functions of the
buttons, switches and other controls. Dewforth leaned close and
studied these, but found only mute combinations of letters and
numbers, joined by hyphens or separated by virgules.... They made him
feel somewhat more fragile, more round-shouldered and colder, but he
resisted despair. It was getting a little darker, though. The
skimmed-milk light above him was taking on a bluish tint. He had no
way of knowing how long he had wandered among the control panels. His
time-sense had always been dependent upon clocks and bells--and upon
the arrivals and departures of trains.
It was a sound which finally led Dewforth out of the maze of control
panels.
It was not a louder sound, not more emphatic, imperative or clear than
the others; it was formless, feeble and ineffably pathetic. It was
its utter incongruity which reached Dewforth through the robotic
clamor, and which touched him ... a mewing, as of a kitten trapped in
a 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, creeping
scrolls, barking loudspeakers and cryptic dials. Dewforth saw him
sharply silhouetted against a long window through which bluish-gray
light poured but through which nothing could be clearly seen from
where he stood. The Operator sat on a high, one-legged stool. His head
was drawn into his shoulders, which were crumpled things of birdlike
bones. His head was bald on top but the fringe was long and wild. He
had big simian ears set at right angles to his head and the light
shone through them, not pink but yellowish. There was an aureole of
fine hairs about them which gave them the appearance of angel's wings.
With enlarged hands at the ends of almost fleshless arms he clutched
at the knobs of rheostats and the cranks of transformers, hesitantly,
spasmodically, and without ever quite reaching anything. Each time he
withdrew his hands quickly as though he had been on the point of
touching something very hot. His arms might have been elongated by a
lifetime of such aborted movement.
Just as Dewforth began to wonder how his sudden appearance there would
affect the old man, feeble and distraught as he already was, the
Operator whirled on his stool and stared at Dewforth with eyes so
round, so huge and so terrified that the rest of his face was not
noticeable at all.
He shouted something that sounded like "_Huzzah!_" but almost
certainly was not, then stiffened, then fell to the steel deck with no
more fuss than a bag of corn-husks would have made, and died.
* * * * *
One would think that a windowed control cab or wheelhouse atop the
loftiest structure in a city, or in an entire landscape, would afford
a man an Olympian view of the world below, and of its people and their
activities.
Dewforth must have believed this at one time, but he found that it was
not so. The entire lower portion of the windows was covered with thin
pages of typescript, mostly yellowed, dusty and curled at the
edges--orders, instructions, directives, memoranda, all _Urgent_, _For
Immediate Action_, _Important_, _Priority_, _On No Account_, or _At
All Costs_.
The texts of these orders, instructions, directives or memoranda
consisted of mute combinations of letters and numbers, joined by
hyphens or separated by virgules.
Through the upper portion of the windows Dewforth could just make out
the horizon and a narrow strip of darkening sky, which were silent and
which demanded nothing of him. Amid the continuing clamor of all the
signal devices, he tried to recapture the last utterance of the
Operator--the former Operator.
"_Huzzah!_" was out of the question. "_Who's there?_" or "_Who's
that?_" were more likely, but, as he thought of it, weren't "_Whose
what?_", "_What's where?_", "_Where's what?_" or even "_Who's where?_"
just as likely?
Of these possible last words, "_Who's where?_" echoed most
persistently in his memory.
Dewforth might have torn away the pages of meaningless orders and
looked down upon lights as darkness fell, but he did not.
Opaque as they were in form and content alike, there was something
reassuringly familiar in the lines of inane symbols. And they were all
that stood between him and the approaching tidal wave of night, and
beyond 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?" |
| |
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
* * * * *