"Up-stairs is the mold-loft. It's our dressmaking-shop. We lay down the design on the floor, and mark out every piece of the ship in exact size, and then make templates of wood to match--those are the patterns. It's something like making a gown, I suppose." "I see," said Marie Louise. "Then you fit the dress together out in the yard." "Exactly," said Davidge. "You've mastered the whole thing already. It's a long climb up there. Will you try it?" "Later, perhaps. I want to see these delightful what-you-may-call-'ems first." She watched the men at work, each group about its own machine, like priests at their various altars. Davidge explained to her the cruncher that manicured thick plates of steel sheets as if they were finger-nails, or beveled their edges; the puncher that needled rivet-holes through them as if they were silk, the ingenious Lysholm tables with rollers for tops. Marie Louise was like a child in a wholesale toy-shop, understanding nothing, ecstatic over everything, forbidden to touch anything. In her ignorance of technical matters, the simplest device was miraculous. The whole place was a vast laboratory of mysteries and magic. There was a something hallowed and awesome about it all. It had a cathedral grandeur, even though it was a temple builded with hands for the sake of the things builded with hands. The robes of the votaries were grimy and greasy, and the prayer they poured out was sweat. They chewed tobacco and spat regardless. They eyed her as curiously as she them. They swaggered each his own way, one by extra obliviousness, another with a flourish of gesture. They seemed to want to speak, and so did she, but embarrassment caused a common silence. On the ground they had cleared and under the roof they had established they had fashioned vessels that should carry not myrrh and nard to make a sweet smell or to end in a delicate smoke, but wheat, milk and coal, clothes and shoes and shells, for the feeding and warming of people in need, and for the destruction of the god of destruction. Marie Louise's response to the mood of the place was conversion, a passion to take vows of eternal industry, to put on the holy vestments of toil and wield the--she did not even know the names of the tools. She only knew that they were sacred implements. She was in an almost trancelike state when Davidge led her from this world with its own sky of glass to the outer world with the same old space-colored sky. He conducted her among heaps of material waiting to be assembled, the raw stuffs of creation. As they drew near the almost finished ship the noise of the riveting which had been but a vague palpitation of the air became a well-nigh intolerable staccato. Men were at work everywhere, Lilliputian against the bulk of the hull they were contriving. Davidge escorted Marie Louise with caution across tremulous planks, through dark caverns into the hold of the ship.