It was a tour of inspection. They went into a building, big, looking
like any other big and useful building of the ancients, gray stone
walls, windows with ragged spears of glass. Inside, though, it wasn't
like the others. Two sub-basements down, Tropile winced and turned away
from the flood of violet light that poured out of a quartz bull's-eye
on top of a squat steel cone.
"Perfectly harmless, Tropile--you don't have to worry," Haendl boomed.
"Know what you're looking at? There's a fusion reactor down there.
Heat. Power. All the power we need. Do you know what that means?"
He stared soberly down at the flaring violet light of the inspection
port.
"Come on," he said abruptly to Tropile.
Another building, also big, also gray stone. A cracked inscription over
the entrance read: ORIAL HALL OF HUMANITIES. The sense-shock this time
was not light; it was sound. Hammering, screeching, rattling, rumbling.
Men were doing noisy things with metal and machines.
"Repair shop!" Haendl yelled. "See those machines? They belong to our
man Innison. We've salvaged them from every big factory ruin we could
find. Give Innison a piece of metal--any alloy, any shape--and one of
those machines will change it into any other shape and damned near any
other alloy. Drill it, cut it, plane it, weld it, smelt it, zone-melt
it, bond it--you tell him what to do and he'll do it.
"We got the parts to make six tractors and forty-one cars out of
this shop. And we've got other shops--aircraft in Farmingdale and
Wichita, armaments in Wilmington. Not that we can't make some armaments
here. Innison could build you a tank if he had to, complete with
105-millimeter gun."
"What's a tank?" Tropile asked.
Haendl only looked at him and said: "Come on!"
* * * * *
Glenn Tropile's head spun dizzily and all the spectacles merged and
danced in his mind. They were incredible. All of them.
Fusion pile, machine shop, vehicular garage, aircraft hangar. There was
a storeroom under the seats of a football stadium, and Tropile's head
spun on his shoulders again as he tried to count the cases of coffee
and canned soups and whiskey and beans. There was another storeroom,
only this one was called an armory. It was filled with ... guns. Guns
that could be loaded with cartridges, of which they had very many; guns
which, when you loaded them and pulled the trigger, would fire.
Tropile said, remembering: "I saw a gun once that still had its firing
pin. But it was rusted solid."
"These work, Tropile," said Haendl. "You can kill a man with them. Some
of us have."
"_Kill_--"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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