Slim held his ground during this peeling scrutiny.
Joh Fredersen said, speaking rather softly:
“From now on I wish to be informed of my son’s every action.”
Slim bowed, waited, saluted and went.
But he did not find the son of his great master again where he had left him. Nor was he destined to find him.
CHAPTER III
The man who had been Joh Fredersen’s first secretary stood in a cell of the Pater-noster, the never-stop passenger lift which, like a series of never ceasing well-buckets, trans-sected the New Tower of Babel.—With his back against the wooden wall, he was making the journey through the white, humming house, from the heights of the roof, to the depths of the cellars and up again to the heights of the roof, for the thirtieth time, never moving from the one spot.
Persons, greedy to gain a few seconds, stumbled in with him, and stories higher, or lower, out again. Nobody paid the least attention to him. One or two certainly recognised him. But, as yet, nobody interpreted the drops on his temples as being anything but a similar greed for the gain of a few seconds. All right—he would wait until they knew better, until they took him and threw him out of the cell: What are you taking up space for, you fool, if you’ve got so much time? Crawl down the stairs, or the first escape....
With gasping mouth he leant there and waited....
Now emerging from the depths again, he looked with stupified eyes towards the room which guarded Joh Fredersen’s door, and saw Joh Fredersen’s son standing before that door. For the fraction of a second they stared into each other’s over-shadowed faces, and the glances of both broke out as signals of distress, of very different but of equally deep distress. Then the totally indifferent pump-works carried the man in the cell upwards into the darkness of the roof of the tower, and, when he dipped down again, becoming visible once more on his way downwards, the son of Joh Fredersen was standing before the opening of the cell and was, in a step, standing beside the man whose back seemed to be nailed to the wooden wall.