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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.
"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.
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.
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.
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. There was an unholy Friday restlessness upon Dewforth. To make matters worse, it was the last Friday in March.
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.
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 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.
It was a thing which belonged to vast distances spatial distances and other kinds of distance as well. Now it was close, or he was closer to it than he had ever imagined he would be in his life. It was accessible. Dewforth left at half past three when the somnolence of afternoon was heaviest on the heads of the other draftsmen. He did not speak to Mr. Shrank about it.
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.
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