Nobody knew the airport. Maybe when it was built, when it was a small quonset hut with an open tower and a searchlight, but not anymore. Over the years it had grown "like Topsy" as they used to say and now it had miles of corridors, hundreds of shops and restaurants, and no one could count the miles of wires, cables and conduit that formed the airport's nervous system.

Some of the corridors were no longer used, sealed off by time and airline changes and changing travel patterns and requirements. Only rarely would these halls hear the sound of human feet, and even more rarely was it necessary to repair something in them. For the most part they lay unused, secured from human intrusion upon the population of rats and insects that lived there.

Even more silent were the old steam tunnels, the tunnels that used to carry heat to the small rooms where passengers in suits and dresses waited for the DC-3s and, earlier, trimotors, to whisk them across the country in what for the time was luxury. Now and then a drop of water would condense in the forgotten pipes and drip through a rusted hole, leaving its mark on the raw cement floor.

Some of these corridors and tunnels weren't even shown on the maps and plans in the Chief Engineer's office. Forgotten, they underlay what was now the most-used transportation hub in the world.