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 "Who's where?" just as likely?
Of these possible last words, "Who's where?" echoed most persistently in his memory.
Dewforth might have torn away the pages of meaningless orders and looked down upon lights as darkness fell, but he did not.
Opaque as they were in form and content alike, there was something reassuringly familiar in the lines of inane symbols. And they were all that stood between him and the approaching tidal wave of night, and beyond the night, the winter with its storms.