The being bowed. It stretched out a hand—a graceful skeleton hand. Transparent skin was stretched over the slender joints, which gleamed beneath it like dull silver. Fingers, snow-white and fleshless, opened like the petals of a crystal lily. Joh Fredersen laid his hand in it, feeling it, in the moment of contact, to be burnt by an unbearable coldness. He wanted to push the being away from him but the silver-crystal fingers held him fast. “Good-bye, Joh Fredersen,” said the mass head, in a voice full of a horrible tenderness. “Give me a face soon, Joh Fredersen!” A soft far-off voice laughed, as if the house were laughing in its sleep. The hand let go, the door opened, Joh Fredersen reeled into the street. The door closed behind him. In the gloomy wood of the door glowed, copper-red, the seal of Solomon, the pentagram. When Joh Fredersen was about to enter the brain-pan of the New Tower of Babel Slim stood before him, seeming to be slimmer than ever. “What is it?” asked Joh Fredersen. Slim made to speak but at the sight of his master the words died on his lips. “Well—?” said Joh Fredersen, between his teeth. Slim breathed deeply. “I must inform you, Mr. Fredersen,” he said, “that, since your son left this room, he has disappeared!” “What does that mean? ... disappeared!” “He has not gone home, and none of our men has seen him....” Joh Fredersen screwed up his mouth. “Look for him!” he said hoarsely. “What are you all here for? Look for him!” He entered the brain-pan of the New Tower of Babel. His first glance fell upon the clock. He stepped to the table and stretched out his hand to the little blue metal plate. CHAPTER V The man before the machine which was like Ganesha, the god with the elephant’s head, was no longer a human being. Merely a dripping piece of exhaustion, from the pores of which the last powers of volition were oozing out in large drops of sweat. Running eyes no longer saw the manometer. The hand did not hold the lever—it clawed it fast in the last hold which saved the mangled man-creature before it from falling into the crushing arms of the machine. The Pater-noster works of the New Tower of Babel turned their buckets with an easy smoothness. The eye of the little machine smiled softly and maliciously at the man who stood before it and who was now no more than a babel. “Father!” babbled the son of Joh Fredersen, “to-day, for the first time, since Metropolis stood, you have forgotten to let your city and your great machines roar punctually for fresh food.... Has Metropolis gone dumb, father? Look at us! Look at your machines! Your god-machines turn sick at the chewed-up cuds in their mouths—at the mangled food that we are.... Why do you strangle its voice to death? Will ten hours never, never come to an end? Our Father, which art in heaven—!” But in this moment Joh Fredersen’s fingers were pressing the little blue metal plate and the voice of the great Metropolis.