There were hundreds--perhaps thousands--of little labels attached to the control panels, presumably indicating the functions of the buttons, switches and other controls. Dewforth leaned close and studied these, but found only mute combinations of letters and numbers, joined by hyphens or separated by virgules.... They made him feel somewhat more fragile, more round-shouldered and colder, but he resisted despair. It was getting a little darker, though. The skimmed-milk light above him was taking on a bluish tint. He had no way of knowing how long he had wandered among the control panels. His time-sense had always been dependent upon clocks and bells--and upon the arrivals and departures of trains. It was a sound which finally led Dewforth out of the maze of control panels. It was not a louder sound, not more emphatic, imperative or clear than the others; it was formless, feeble and ineffably pathetic. It was its utter incongruity which reached Dewforth through the robotic clamor, and which touched him ... a mewing, as of a kitten trapped in a closet. It came, as he discovered, from The Operator. He was quite alone among his levers, wheels, switches, buttons, cranks, gauges, lights, bells, buzzers, horns, ticker-tapes, creeping scrolls, barking loudspeakers and cryptic dials. Dewforth saw him sharply silhouetted against a long window through which bluish-gray light poured but through which nothing could be clearly seen from where he stood. The Operator sat on a high, one-legged stool. His head was drawn into his shoulders, which 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.