The place was simply crammed with strange, incomprehensible equipment, mechanisms whose purposes were completely unguessable. Enormous coils writhed sinuously, twining themselves about great metal tubes that stretched high into the air. Wheels turned smoothly within wheels that turned within wheels. At the far end of the room a great slide shot gleaming metal tracks upward into one of the turrets, and then on into the night. A panel of switches ran the full length of one wall. "Well?" Cecil said. "How do you like it?" "If you'll pardon the vulgarism," Toffee said, "this is the damnedest shanty I've ever seen. What is all that stuff for anyway?" "Well," Gerald said slowly, "we're not exactly sure about all of it ourselves. Of course our main interest is in that big machine in the center." He pointed to a mammoth arrangement of wheels, tubes, dynamos and levers. "We call that the production unit. With the proper adjustments you can produce almost any mechanical or chemical device known to man. With that machine alone, and enough raw materials, of course, a single man could match the output of any of the nation's largest factories. The inventor only made it just to have something to do. Actually, he was going to destroy it. Said it would make mankind useless." He turned to Marc. "There won't be any trouble making the bomb ... or even a thousand bombs ... with that." "What happened to the inventor?" Marc asked uneasily. "Oh, him," Gerald said with a note of sadness. "Unfortunately he met with an untimely end just after we met him." He nodded to the gleaming track. "He was explaining that space catapult to us, telling us how a man wearing the proper equipment could be thrown out into space, even into regions unknown to man, and live to tell the tale. He was just telling us how to work the lever when suddenly the thing went off with him in it." He lowered his eyes delicately. "If ever a man went to heaven, it must have been poor Mr. Adams. At least he was certainly headed in that direction the last time we saw him. Anyway, Cecil and I like to think he's just away on a little trip." "How terribly sweet and sentimental," Toffee said acidly. "I suppose he wasn't wearing the right equipment at the time?" "Alas, no," Gerald said. "Anyway, Mr. Adams was a very strange man. He had no practical sense at all. He just stayed here all alone and built all these things just to see if they really _could_ be built. He had no idea of ever putting them to any commercial use. He never saw anyone or had any friends apparently. It seemed a little sad at the time that Cecil and I, both virtual strangers, were the only ones here to see him off."