r regions of the Thorax
which Lee himself had never before seen.

The drop of the freight-elevator was a good mile. Through the
transparent walls of the cage they saw new excavations being made on
various levels, all of them by powertools and chemicals alone, since
explosives might have caused tremors dangerous to The Brain. It was like
watching a skyscraper being built from the top down and all the way vast
amber colored, translucent pillars had followed them down the shaft, the
spinal column of The Brain.

Down at the lowest level the gentlemanly plainclothesmen of "Military
Intelligence" took over and did all the explaining. There were visions
of scores of tunnel tubes curving into the rock with the gleaming eyes
of narrow-gauge electric trains streaking away into the infinite;
visions of forbidding steel doors operated by photoelectric cells which
opened at a finger's raising of a guard's hand: "This is the Atomic
Powerplant," and their astonished eyes looked down from a dizzy height
into something like a huge drydock with something like the inverted hull
of an oceanliner in the middle of it, a selfcontained machine which
would continue to pour kilowatts for years, for decades on end without a
moving part, without a human being anywhere in sight. Vistas of
breathtaking airconditioning plants, vistas of giant mess halls, living
quarters, kitchens, plotting-rooms, all ready for immediate occupancy in
the event of war but yawning now with emptiness in the sleep of an
uneasy peace....

But the most awe-inspiring and, to Lee, foreboding sights, were the
"C.P.F.'s" as the guards called them, the "Critical-Parts-Factories." On
a superficial glance they looked ordinary modern plants: staggered rows
of machine tools sprouting from the main stem of the assembly line.
There was the familiar din of steel, the piercing screeches of the
multiple drills, the heavy pantings of the hydraulic presses. But after
a minute or so the visitors felt a vague uneasiness and then the
realization dawned that there was something missing and that this
something was human life.

"Aren't there even machine tenders or supervisors? Isn't there
_anybody_?"

"Not a soul," the answer came. "It's all automatic. Full automatic down
here."

They stared at the end of the assembly line; every twenty seconds it
spit out a fractional horsepower motor onto a transport band which
nursed the newborn engine into the rows of testing machines.

*