When he looked down at the city he could not pick out the building in which he had worked. There was nothing in any feature of the landscape. Nothing. If his position, clinging to a girder high above the city, made no sense, it did not make less sense than the position of a man, or a Dewforth, sitting in a blind cell among thousands of other blind cells down there, drawing tiny lines. Nothing bound him to the drafting room nor even to the Dewforth of the drafting room—not so much as a spider web or a shaft of light. The light pointed to itself. The wind got under his shirt and chilled his navel, a poignant reminder of disconnectedness.
An eagle glided close and screamed at him. It was like the laughter of his wife. He resumed his climb, looking down no more.
The last few yards of the climb were the worst. Some bolts holding the ladder in place were shapeless little masses of rust. The eleventh rung from the top broke under his weight, and for the last ten steps he had to lighten his body by means of a technique of autosuggestion and will-projection which he invented on the spot, demonstrating what could be done under pressure of extreme necessity. He could see above his head a tiny balcony not more than a yard square, at which the ladder terminated. The floor of this balcony appeared to be made of long, weatherbeaten cigars which reason told him were badly corroded iron bars. Reason also told him that there would be a door there.
He could not see a door through the skeleton floor of the balcony, but the idea that there would not be a door there was, under the circumstances, insupportable. There would be a door, he told himself as he made his way upwards by means of levitation and the most tentative of steps. It would probably have an inhospitable sign on it—NO TRESPASSING, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, DANGER or perhaps HIGH VOLTAGE. It might prove to be locked. If so, he would pound on it until some one opened it, he decided.
There was even an outside possibility that no one would be inside. He had never considered that possibility before that time. He decided that it was not time to consider it now.
When Dewforth heaved himself up 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.