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Updated: May 26, 2025
How much light would a Leadership Star cast in that bottomless inkiness? Acute restless had the effect of sending Dewforth frequently to the lavatory, not so much for physiological reasons as because there was no other place to go and he had to go somewhere when the white walls of the drafting room threatened to crush him.
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.
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.
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.
But he knew that in another place a template would be laid over his work. An irregular portion like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle would be cut out of it and the rest, perhaps more than half of his work, would be destroyed. It was even possible that all of it was destroyed. Dewforth worked for a firm which made components. Of what, no one said, no one asked. Components, Inc., the firm was called.
This moist and muted sound had reminded Dewforth of a hippopotamus venting its wind under water, and in a moment of thoughtless exhilaration he had even thought of sharing this bizarre notion with his wife. He never did so, as it happened. Why had he ever told his wife about that wretched Leadership Star? Her laughter persisted through his dreams, or through his dream. He only had one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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