Foundation - By Isaac Asimov Page 0,72

him you were treating with these barbarians."

"Hm-m-m. Well, there's no need for threats. You are free to question the man yourself tonight. Meanwhile, madam, keep your wagging tongue still."

"At your orders?"

"Here, take this, then, and keep still."

The band was about her waist and the necklace around her neck. He pushed the knob himself and stepped back.

The Commdora drew in her breath and held out her hands stiffly. She fingered the necklace gingerly, and gasped again.

The Commdor rubbed his hands with satisfaction and said, "You may wear it tonight and I'll get you more. Now keep still."

The Commdora kept still.

7.

Jaim Twer fidgeted and shuffled his feet. He said, "What's twisting your face?"

Hober Mallow lifted out of his brooding, "Is my face twisted? It's not meant so."

"Something must have happened yesterday, 朓 mean, besides that feast." With sudden conviction, "Mallow, there's trouble, isn't there?"

"Trouble? No. Quite the opposite. In fact, I'm in the position of throwing my full weight against a door and finding it ajar at the time. We're getting into this steel foundry too easily."

"You suspect a trap?"

"Oh, for Seldon's sake, don't be melodramatic." Mallow swallowed his impatience and added conversationally, "It's just that the easy entrance means there will be nothing to see.

"Nuclear power, huh?" Twer ruminated. "I'll tell you. There's just about no evidence of any nuclear power economy here in Korell. And it would be pretty hard to mask all signs of the widespread effects a fundamental technology such as nucleics would have on everything."

"Not if it was just starting up, Twer, and being applied to a war economy. You'd find it in the shipyards and the steel foundries only."

"So if we don't find it, then"

"Then they haven't got it or they're not showing it. Toss a coin or take a guess."

Twer shook his head, "I wish I'd been with you yesterday."

"I wish you had, too," said Mallow stonily. "I have no objection to moral support. Unfortunately, it was the Commdor who set the terms of the meeting, and not myself. And what is coming now would seem to be the royal groundcar to escort us to the foundry. Have you got the gadgets?"

"All of them."

8.

The foundry was large, and bore the odor of decay which no amount of superficial repairs could quite erase. It was empty now and in quite an unnatural state of quiet, as it played unaccustomed host to the Commdor and his court.

Mallow had swung the steel sheet onto the two supports with a careless heave. He had taken the instrument held out to him by Twer and was gripping the leather handle inside its leaden sheath.

"The instrument," he said, "is dangerous, but so is a buzz saw. You just have to keep your fingers away."

And as he spoke, he drew the muzzle-slit swiftly down the length of the steel sheet, which quietly and instantly fell in two.

There was a unanimous jump, and Mallow laughed. He picked up one of the halves and propped it against his knee, "You can adjust the cutting-length accurately to a hundredth of an inch, and a two-inch sheet will slit down the middle as easily as this thing did. If you've got the thickness exactly judged, you can place steel on a wooden table, and split the metal without scratching the wood."

And at each phrase, the nuclear shear moved and a gouged chunk of steel flew across the room.

"That," he said, "is whittling with steel."

He passed back the shear. "Or else you have the plane. Do you want to decrease the thickness of a sheet, smooth out an irregularity, remove corrosion? Watch!"

Thin, transparent foil flew off the other half of the original sheet in six-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, a comer magician, a vaudeville act made into high-pressure salesmanship. Commdor Asper fingered scraps of steel. High officials of the government tiptoed over each other's shoulders, and whispered, while Mallow punched clean, beautiful round holes through an inch of hard steel at every touch of 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 the general excitement and thought-absorption, and stained his hands like any laborer.

Mallow stood them upright and shaved the ends off with a single stroke of the shear, and then joined the pipes, fresh cut to fresh cut.

And there was a single pipe! The new ends, with even atomic irregularities missing, formed