for a way out of the darkness, he was obliged to turn
back time and again. If gangs of shadows fought with knives at the end
of a street which had at first looked promising, what business had
shadows cursing or screaming or bleeding? If the madman who enjoined
the mob to fight in the service of nothingness was only a mouse
dancing on a summit of garbage, why did they cheer? At the end of
still another street, a mass rape may not have been in progress; the
participants may not have waited sullenly in a long line; a
macrocephalic gnome in a plaid suit may not actually have moved up and
down the line selling tickets at a reduced rate and explaining that
the outrage had been in progress since the preceding Christmas Eve:
but why was the unreality so consistant?

And if no one was in fact being ravaged, why did everyone look as
though they had been?

* * * * *

All these spectacles tested Dewforth's courage, but they dimmed his
resolve not at all. At last he found a deserted street. He followed
it and he was rewarded with encouraging signs. 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. "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. 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.

He did not bother kicking the pear-shaped man. He stepped over him and
ran up the stairs two at a time. His footsteps rang on the iron stairs
and carried through the structure. It sounded like the bells of a
sunke