The whole affair had been so wrapped in mist that none had seen its fall. But all had heard the roar and crash of its collapse.

The city had not slept. A common guilt had kept them thinking of the man who died above them and the holiday that they had passed in emptiness. And when they had tried to sleep, the image of the Singer etched itself upon the darkness of the night. They felt unspoken shame in merely being sons and grandsons of the masons and carpenters who had made the great machine in centuries long gone.

When Terra shuddered in the night, the old machine had torn itself away and splintered in a single heap of rotted wood and rusted iron. And many in the peaceless night remarked that it was odd the Singer and the old machine should die the self-same moment.

Shortly after daybreak the wreckage lay behind a civil barricade and a crew of laborers was sent to clear the chaos from the streets. A group of men lifted the heavy beams. Ox-drawn sledges took them well beyond the city gates.

Each workman feared that he might be the one to come upon the mangled body of the Singer who now lay buried in the last remains of the machine. The heavy drayage of debris lasted into early afternoon.

A workman finally spied the giant tension cable that drew the heavy chains. He feared to see the mutilation he would find beneath the tangled cables and the ropes.

But when he had pulled the final chains away, the manacles were empty. And where the Singer should have been there lay only a key—a great key forged from a metal never mined on earth. When the workman stooped to pick it up he found that it was broken. It was clear that whatever door it might have fit would never see its use again. That nameless door would remain forever locked or open. For a moment the workman wondered which. “Open,” he thought. “Yes, definitely open.”

He pondered the great key. Was it of any consequence? Should he report it to the Grand Musician? He finally threw the broken key into a passing ox-cart filled with wreckage. He shrugged his shoulders and set out to find the overseer.

At length he found the foreman sent to direct the clean-up operation at the wall. “Tell the Grand Musician,” he said, “there is no body in the wreckage and the manacles are empty.”

XXIII

“What would you like to be when you grow up, little girl?”

“Alive.”

The child lay wide awake and filled with fear. Something dreadful in the dying of her friend left her trembling in the cold. To be an orphan in a world that took so little thought of homeless children was tenuous enough. But a greater dread stalked her smaller world. The Singer was no more, and she felt again the way she had before he came and found her begging by the roadside.