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Updated: May 26, 2025
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Observe their jaw-hinges," they would say. Another factor which isolated employees from one another was the peculiarly virulent form of halitosis which afflicted all workers without exception. The company cafeteria was the source of this malady. Thus, if Dewforth had been the only employee in that vast complex of buildings, or in the world, he could not have been restlessness.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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