p 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.

IV

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