“They was goin’ to fix up everybody slick after the war. Oh, hell, yes.”

“You in it?” Hugo asked.

“Up to my God-damned neck, buddy.”

“Me, too. Guess I’ll go up the line.”

“I’ll go witcha.”

“Well—”

They waited a moment longer, for the man with the chalk had reappeared. Hugo’s comrade grunted. “Wash windows an’ work in the steel mills. Break your neck or burn your ear off. Wha’ do they care?” Hugo had taken a step toward the door, but the youth with the troubled eyes caught his sleeve. “Don’t go up for that, son. They burn you in them steel mills. I seen guys afterward. Two years an’ you’re all done. This is tough, but that’s tougher. Sweet Jesus, I’ll say it is.”

Hugo loosened himself. “Gotta eat, buddy. I don’t happen to have even three bones available at the moment.”

The man looked after him. “Gosh,” he murmured. “Even guys like that.”

He was in a dingy room standing before a grilled window. A voice from behind it asked his name, age, address, war record. Hugo was handed a piece of paper to sign and then a second piece that bore the scrawled words: “Amalgamated Crucible Steel Corp., Harrison, N. J.”

Hugo’s emotional life was reawakened when he walked into the mills. His last nickel was gone. He had left the train at the wrong station and walked more than a mile. He was hungry and cold. He came, as if naked, to the monster and he did it homage.

Its predominant colour scheme was black and red. It had a loud, pagan voice. It breathed fire. It melted steel and rock and drank human sweat, with human blood for an occasional stimulant. On every side of him were enormous buildings and woven between them a plaid of girders, cables, and tracks across which masses of machinery moved. Inside, Thor was hammering. Inside, a crane sped overhead like a tarantula, trailing its viscera to the floor, dangling a gigantic iron rib. A white speck in its wounded abdomen was a human face.

The bright metal gushed from another hole. It was livid and partially alive; it was hot and had a smell; it swept away the thought of the dark descending night. It made a pool in a great ladle; it made a cupful dipped from a river in hell. A furnace exhaled sulphurously, darting a snake’s tongue into the sky. The mills roared and the earth shook. It was bestial, reptilian—labour, and the labour of creation, and the engine that turned the earth could be no more terrible.

Hugo, standing sublimely small in its midst, measured his strength against it, soaked up its warmth, shook his fist at it, and shouted in a voice that could not be heard for a foot: “Christ Almighty! This—is something!”

“Name?”

“Hugo Danner.”

“Address?”

“None at present.”

“Experience?”

“None.”

“Married?”

“No.”

“Union?”

“What?”