lded with hands. The robes of the votaries
were grimy and greasy, and the prayer they poured out was sweat. They
chewed tobacco and spat regardless. They eyed her as curiously as she
them. They swaggered each his own way, one by extra obliviousness,
another with a flourish of gesture. They seemed to want to speak, and
so did she, but embarrassment caused a common silence.

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