Watch!"
Thin, transparent foil flew off the other half of the original sheet in six-inch swarths, then eight-inch, then twelve.
"Or drills? It"s all the same principle."
They were crowded around now. It might have been a sleight-of-hand show, a comer magician, a vaudeville act made into high-pressure salesmanship. Commdor Asper fingered scraps of steel. High officials of the government tiptoed over each other"s shoulders, and whispered, while Mallow punched clean, beautiful round holes through an inch of hard steel at every touch of his nuclear drill.
"Just one more demonstration. Bring two short lengths of pipe, somebody."
An Honorable Chamberlain of something-or-other sprang to obedience in the general excitement and thought-absorption, and stained his hands like any laborer.
Mallow stood them upright and shaved the ends off with a single stroke of the shear, and then joined the pipes, fresh cut to fresh cut.
And there was a single pipe! The new ends, with even atomic irregularities missing, formed one piece upon joining.
Then Mallow looked up at his audience, stumbled at his first word and stopped. There was the keen stirring of excitement in his chest, and the base of his stomach went tingly and cold.
The Commdor"s own bodyguard, in the confusion, had struggled to the front line, and Mallow, for the first time, was near enough to see their unfamiliar hand-weapons in detail.
They were nuclear! There was no mistaking it; an explosive projectile weapon with a barrel like that was impossible. But that wasn"t the big point. That wasn"t the point at all.
The butts of those weapons had, deeply etched upon them, in worn gold plating, the Spaceship-and-Sun!
The same Spaceship-and-Sun that was stamped on every. one of the great volumes of the original Encyclopedia that the Foundation had begun and not yet finished. The same Spaceship-and-Sun that had blazoned the banner of the Galactic Empire through millennia.
Mallow talked through and around his thoughts, "Test that pipe! It"s one piece. Not perfect; naturally, the joining shouldn"t be done by hand."
There was no need of further legerdemain. It had gone over. Mallow was through. He had what he wanted. There was only one thing in his mind. The golden globe with its conventionalized rays, and the oblique cigar shape that was a space vessel.
The Spaceship-and-Sun of the Empire!
The Empire! The words drilled! A century and a half had passed but there was still the-Empire, somewhere deeper in the Galaxy. And it was emerging again, out into the Periphery.
Mallow smiled!
9.
The Far Star was two days out in space, when Hober Mallow, in his private quarters with Senior Lieutenant Drawt, handed him an envelope, a roll of microfilm, and a silvery spheroid.
"As of an hour from now, Lieutenant, you"re Acting Captain of the Far Star,until I return, r forever."
Drawt made a motion of standing but Mallow waved him down imperiously.
"Quiet, and listen. The envelope contains the exact location of the planet to which you"re to proceed. There you will wait for me for two months. If,before the two months are up, the Foundation locates you, the microfilm is my report of the trip.
"If, however," and his voice was somber, "I do not return at the end of two months, and Foundation vessels do not locate you, proceed to the planet,Terminus, and hand in the Time Capsule as the report. Do you understand that?"
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