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. --WILL MOHLER * * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Typographical errors corrected in text: | | | | Page 139: "more efficient that the rest" replaced with | | "more efficient than the rest" | | Page 141: whispper replaced with whisper | | Page 141: disance replaced with distance | | Page 143: "the participants many not have waited" | | replaced with | | "the participants may not have waited" | | Page 143: spectacle replaced with spectacles | | Page 147: homogenous replaced with homogeneous | | Page 149: "Where's what" replaced with "Where's what?" | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ * * * * *