On the ground they had cleared and under the roof they had established they had fashioned vessels that should carry not myrrh and nard to make a sweet smell or to end in a delicate smoke, but wheat, milk and coal, clothes and shoes and shells, for the feeding and warming of people in need, and for the destruction of the god of destruction.
Marie Louise’s response to the mood of the place was conversion, a passion to take vows of eternal industry, to put on the holy vestments of toil and wield the––she did not even know the names of the tools. She only knew that they were sacred implements.
She was in an almost trancelike state when Davidge led her from this world with its own sky of glass to the outer world with the same old space-colored sky. He conducted her among heaps of material waiting to be assembled, the raw stuffs of creation.
As they drew near the almost finished ship the noise of the riveting which had been but a vague palpitation of the air became a well-nigh intolerable staccato.
Men were at work everywhere, Lilliputian against the bulk of the hull they were contriving. Davidge escorted Marie Louise with caution across tremulous planks, through dark caverns into the hold of the ship.
In these grottoes of steel the clamor of the riveters grew maddening in her ears. They were everywhere, holding their machine-guns against reverberant metal and hammering steel against steel with a superhuman velocity; for man had made himself more than man by his own inventions, had multiplied himself by his own machineries.
“That’s the great Sutton,” Davidge remarked, presently. “He’s our prima donna. He’s the champion riveter of this part of the country. Like to meet him?”
Marie Louise nodded yes before she noted that the man was stripped to the waist. Runnels of sweat ran down his flesh and shot from the muscles leaping beneath his swart hide.
Davidge went up to him and, after howling in vain, tapped his brawn. Sutton looked up, shut off his noise, and turned to Davidge with the impatience of a great tenor interrupted in a cadenza by a mere manager.
Davidge yelled, with unnecessary voltage: