Chapter 8

The  foundry was  large,  and bore  the odor  of decay  which no  amount ofsuperficial repairs  could quite  erase. It was  empty now and  in quite anunnatural state of quiet, as it played unaccustomed host to the Commdor andhis court.
Mallow  had swung  the steel sheet  onto the  two supports with  a carelessheave. He had taken the instrument held out to him by Twer and was grippingthe leather handle inside its leaden sheath.
"The instrument,"  he said, "is dangerous,  but so is a  buzz saw. You justhave to keep your fingers away."And as  he spoke,  he drew the  muzzle-slit swiftly down the  length of thesteel sheet, which quietly and instantly fell in two.
There was  a unanimous  jump, and Mallow  laughed. He picked up  one of thehalves and propped it  against his knee, "You can adjust the cutting-lengthaccurately to  a hundredth of an inch, and a  two-inch sheet will slit downthe middle as easily as this thing did. If you've got the thickness exactlyjudged, you can place  steel on a wooden table, and split the metal withoutscratching the wood."And at  each phrase,  the nuclear shear  moved and a gouged  chunk of steelflew across the room.
"That," he said, "is whittling ?with steel."He  passed back  the shear.  "Or else you  have the  plane. Do you  want todecrease  the thickness  of  a sheet,  smooth out  an  irregularity, removecorrosion? Watch!"Thin, transparent  foil flew  off the other  half of the  original sheet insix-inch swarths, then eight-inch, then twelve.
"Or drills? It's all the same principle."They were crowded around  now. It might have been a sleight-of-hand show, acomer  magician, a  vaudeville  act made  into high-pressure  salesmanship.
Commdor Asper  fingered scraps  of steel. High officials  of the governmenttiptoed over  each other's  shoulders, and whispered,  while Mallow punchedclean, beautiful  round holes through an inch of  hard steel at every touchof his nuclear drill.
"Just one  more demonstration. Bring two  short lengths of pipe, somebody."An Honorable  Chamberlain of something-or-other sprang  to obedience in thegeneral excitement  and thought-absorption, and stained  his hands like anylaborer.
Mallow stood  them upright and shaved the ends off  with a single stroke ofthe  shear,   and  then  joined   the  pipes,  fresh  cut   to  fresh  cut.
And there was a  single pipe! The new ends, with even atomic irregularitiesmissing, formed one piece upon joining.
Then  Mallow looked  up at  his audience,  stumbled at  his first  word andstopped. There  was the keen stirring  of excitement in his  chest, and thebase of his stomach went tingly and cold.
The Commdor's  own bodyguard, in the confusion,  had struggled to the frontline,  and  Mallow, for  the  first  time, was  near  enough  to see  theirunfamiliar hand-weapons in detail.
They  were nuclear!  There  was no  mistaking it;  an  explosive projectileweapon  with a  barrel like that  was impossible.  But that wasn't  the bigpoint. That wasn't the point at all.
The  butts of  those weapons  had, deeply  etched upon  them, in  worn goldplating, the Spaceship-and-Sun!
The  same Spaceship-and-Sun  that was  stamped on  every. one of  the greatvolumes of the original  Encyclopedia that the Foundation had begun and notyet finished.  The same  Spaceship-and-Sun that had blazoned  the banner ofthe Galactic Empire through millennia.
Mallow talked  through and around  his thoughts, "Test that  pipe! It's onepiece.  Not perfect;  naturally, the  joining shouldn't  be done  by hand."There  was no  need of further  legerdemain. It  had gone over.  Mallow wasthrough. He  had what he wanted. There was only one  thing in his mind. Thegolden globe  with its  conventionalized rays, and the  oblique cigar shapethat was a space vessel.
The Spaceship-and-Sun of the Empire!
The Empire!  The words drilled! A  century and a half  had passed but therewas still  the-Empire, somewhere deeper in the  Galaxy. And it was emergingagain, out into the Periphery.
Mallow smiled!