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 som............