Will Mohler

“ Just as the train emerged from a deep valley of slag-hills and swung into a long curve, passengers on the left side had a panoramic view of the city—a frozen scene of battle between geometrical monsters, made remote and obscure by the dust of a thousand thousand merely human struggles, too small to be visible from the crusty windows of the train by the merely human eye. ”

“ But we will survive these things: I still have my four hours per month at Central Computing and Control; Bertha has her endless and endlessly varying work on committees (the last one was dedicated to the abolition of gambling at Las Vegas in favor of such wholesome games as Scrabble and checkers) .
We cannot soften and slough away altogether, for when all else fails, when the last stronghold of the spirit is in peril, there is always the vision of year's end and another glorious vacation. ”

“ There was no difficulty about finding a stairway to the next level, but there was a rusty chain across the entrance.
Dewforth's foot caught in this chain as he stepped over it, and it shattered like a chain of stale pretzels. There were no more people beyond the second level—none that could be seen. ”

“ The ground was slimy and cold under our bare feet when we got down from the bus, but the two viragos behind us gave us no time to pick our way delicately over the uneven ground. We were propelled through the small door at the side of the gate, and at last we found ourselves within the ten-foot barriers of the Misery Camp. We just looked at each other and giggled.
Inside the yard, about twenty other guests shuffled around and around in a circle. Their gray coveralls were dark and heavy with the rain and clung to their bodies in clammy-looking patches. ”

“ Several times Dewforth was temporarily blinded by an explosion of blue light as a fuse blew or something short-circuited among the rows of knife-switches and rheostats on the panels. One would never really get used to the sporadic sound or to the lights. There was no knowable pattern about them—about what they did or said. When he closed his eyes and tried to compose himself the words Out of Control flashed red against the back of his eyelids, but he told himself that this was foolish. ”

“ The work at the rock quarry was organized according to the same futilitarian pattern that governed the manure-pile operation. Rock had to be hacked, pried and blasted from one end of the quarry, then reduced to coarse gravel with sledge-hammers and carted to the other end of the excavation in wheelbarrows. Most of the men commenced working at some task in the quarry with the automatic unconcern of trained beasts who have paused for rest and water, perhaps, but have never fully stopped. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When I had been marked, one of the guards took his ink and brush and advanced upon Bertha. The other addressed himself to me. "There is a choice of activities. There is the jute mill, the rock quarry, the stump-removal detail, the manure pile...."
"How about the steam laundry?" I asked, prompted now by the cold sound of a sudden gust of rain against the wooden side of the building.
Splukk! went the guard's kidney-sock as it landed on the right hinge of my jaw. Soft or not, it nearly dropped me. ”

“ 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. ”

“ How much light would a Leadership Star cast in that bottomless inkiness?
Acute restless had the effect of sending Dewforth frequently to the lavatory, not so much for physiological reasons as because there was no other place to go and he had to go somewhere when the white walls of the drafting room threatened to crush him. He went as often as he thought he could without attracting the attention of Mr. Shrank or eliciting ponderous jocosities from the other workers. ”

“ The slab was less than six inches wide at the top!
"If we work this thing right, this job will practically do itself. We'll be through here before sundown," I heard myself snap out. The others, accustomed now to obeying any imperative voice, fell to with crowbars and peaveys as I directed them. "Use them as levers," I said. "Don't just flail and hack—pry!" ”

“ Well, anyway—we've got work for climbers like you. Real work, shnook. I know climbers like you hope you'll meet aristocracy in a place like this—ten hour men or even weekly workers, but I can promise you, shnook, that you'll be too damned tired to disport yourself socially, and too damned busy looking at your toes. ”

“ In his search 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 ”

“ I had never seen people look so completely dispirited and tired. Only one man raised his head to look at us as we stood there. I noticed that his forehead had bright purple marks on it. These proved to be "No. 94, Property of MMF," in inch-high letters which ran from temple to temple just above his eyebrows. Incredibly enough the man grinned at us.
"You'll be sah-reeeee," he yelped. I saw him go down into the mud under a blow with a kidney-sock from a burly male guard who had been standing in the center of the cheerless little circle. ”

“ He had no infantile obsession about such facilities. Was he driven by an aggregation of petty forces, each too small to make sense by itself? Or was there one reason hiding behind a cloud of small rationalizations? There was a difference in the air in the lavatory, and in the sound—the undifferentiated background sound which came from nowhere. Nowhere? ”

“ Besides, the steam laundry is for the ladies. Don't forget who's in charge here."
"Who is in charge here, then?" I asked, strangely emboldened by the clout on the side of the jaw.
Splukk! "That's somethin' you don't need to know, shnook. You ain't gonna sue nobody. You signed a release—remember?"
I had nothing to say. My toes, I noted, looked much the same. Then, behind my back, I heard a sharp squeal from Bertha. "Stop that! Oh stop! Stop! The brochure said nothing about—"
"Take it easy lady," said the other guard in an oily-nasty voice. "I won't touch you none. ”

“ They seemed to have grown there by themselves like lichen. It seemed entirely reasonable to Dewforth that the writing on the older posters underneath was runic or demotic and the faces were ochre-stained skulls, but his impulse was to hurry past and not study them too closely.
At last he found a long steep ladder running up the outside of one of the legs of the Control Tower. Only huge [145] slowly circling birds and low-flying clouds came between him and the underside of the control house at the top of the structure. ”

“ So well had they succeeded that most workers could barely stand the sight of one another, and so were driven back upon themselves and their work. Only by [139] practicing an almost egg-like self-containment could a draftsman or other worker hope to get through the day without open conflict and disaster.
Latent antipathies among workers were further intensified by means of the Annual Proficiency Competitions. At the conclusion of these tests all employees save two were given Proficiency Stars. ”

“ Less overt were the lengths to which Personnel had gone to discourage the exchange of information, or confidences, among employees.
Under the guise of aptitude testing, the psychologists had been able to select and organize teams consisting entirely of mutually incompatible individuals. ”