'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. The others--old lost children, figures of
scab and grime--had been unaware of anything but inner cavities of
craving and fear above the sidewalk firmament of trodden gum disks,
sputum stars and the ends of twice-smoked cigarettes.

He could not have lost sight of the Control Tower. He had never
realized what streets were. Before that time he had known a single
well policed block between the station and his place of work. He still
thought of streets as more or less open strips along which people
moved, north or south, east or west, purposefully from Point A to
Point B with perhaps one right-angle turn, two at the most, pausing
only to tip hats or look into shop windows. Now it developed that
streets were sewers, battlegrounds, lairs, abattoirs, cesspools,
lazarettes, midways of deformity and brawling markets where nightmares
and spirochetes were sold.

The city had not less than three dimensions. He had not been fully
prepared for the implications of this, either. Existence in three
dimensions does not necessarily mean three-dimensional vision. 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. 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. He saw bulky overcoats
with defeated hats or defeated heads; long-legged dwarfs in black
leather jackets; willowy chorus-boys with platinum ringlets, waiting
in their niches for the gift of violence; scuttling trolls with
horse-blanket jackets and alpine hats; deposed patriarchs under the
small shelter of black derbies, hiding from persecution behind the
Spanish moss of consolidated beards; headless things and thingless
heads, importuning, threatening, watching or just standing there,
those that were able.

In his search