The white-red light glowed. The voice spoke. The numbers dropped down through the great room. In the brain-pan of Metropolis. Freder remained standing, motionless, by the door. He was not sure as to whether or not his father had noticed him. Whenever he entered this room he was once more a boy of ten years old, his chief characteristic uncertainty, before the great concentrated, almighty certainty, which was called Joh Fredersen, and was his father. The first secretary walked past him, greeting him silently, respectfully. He resembled a competitor leaving the course, beaten. The chalky face of the young man hovered for one moment before Freder’s eyes like a big, white, lacquer mask. Then it was blotted out. Numbers dropped down through the room. One chair was empty. On seven others sat seven men, pursuing the numbers which sprang unceasingly from the invisible. A lamp glowed white-red. New York spoke. A lamp sparkled up: white-green. London began to speak. Freder looked up at the clock opposite the door, commanding the whole wall like a gigantic wheel. It was the same clock, which, from the heights of the New Tower of Babel, flooded by searchlights, flicked off its second-sparks over the great Metropolis. Joh Fredersen’s head stood out against it. It was a crushing yet accepted halo above the brain of Metropolis. The searchlights raved in a delirium of colour upon the narrow windows which ran from floor to ceiling. Cascades of light frothed against the panes. Outside, deep down, at the foot of the New Tower of Babel boiled the Metropolis. But in this room not a sound was to be heard but the incessantly dripping numbers. The Rotwang-process had rendered the walls and windows sound-proof. In this room, which was at the same time crowned and subjugated by the mighty time-piece, the clock, indicating numbers, nothing had any significance but numbers. The son of the great Master of Metropolis realised that, as long as numbers came dripping out of the invisible no word, which was not a number, and coming from a visible mouth, could lay claim to the least attention. Therefore he stood, gazing unceasingly at his father’s head, watching the monstrous hand of the clock sweep onward, inevitably, like a sickle, a reaping scythe, pass through the skull of his father, without harming him, climb upwards, up the number-beset ring, creep around the heights and sink again, to repeat the vain blow of the scythe. At last the white-red light went out. A voice ceased. Then the white-green light went out, too. Silence. The hands of those writing stopped and, for the space of a moment, they sat as though paralysed, relaxed, exhausted. Then Joh Fredersen’s voice said with a dry gentleness: “Thank you, to-morrow.” And without looking round: “What do you want, my boy?”