h were crumpled things of birdlike
bones. His head was bald on top but the fringe was long and wild. He
had big simian ears set at right angles to his head and the light
shone through them, not pink but yellowish. There was an aureole of
fine hairs about them which gave them the appearance of angel's wings.
With enlarged hands at the ends of almost fleshless arms he clutched
at the knobs of rheostats and the cranks of transformers, hesitantly,
spasmodically, and without ever quite reaching anything. Each time he
withdrew his hands quickly as though he had been on the point of
touching something very hot. His arms might have been elongated by a
lifetime of such aborted movement.

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.

He shouted something that sounded like "_Huzzah!_" but almost
certainly was not, then stiffened, then fell to the steel deck with no
more fuss than a bag of corn-husks would have made, and died.

* * * * *

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. The entire lower portion of the windows was covered with thin
pages of typescript, mostly yellowed, dusty and curled at the
edges--orders, instructions, directives, memoranda, all _Urgent_, _For
Immediate Action_, _Important_, _Priority_, _On No Account_, or _At
All Costs_.

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. Amid the continuing clamor of all the
signal devices, he tried to recapture the last utterance of the
Operator--the former Operator.

"_Huzzah!_" was out of the question. "_Who's there?_" or "_Who's
that?_" were more likely, but, as he thought of it, weren't "_Whose
what?_", "_What's where?_", "_Where's what?_" or even "_Wh