As Slim entered Freder’s home to question the servants concerning their master, Joh Fredersen’s son was walking down the steps which led to the lower structure of the New Tower of Babel. As the servants shook their heads at Slim saying that their master had not come home, Joh Fredersen’s son was walking towards the luminous pillars which indicated his way. As Slim, with a glance at his watch, decided to wait, to wait, at any rate for a while—already alarmed, already conjecturing possibilities and how to meet them—Joh Fredersen’s son was entering the room from which the New Tower of Babel drew the energies for its own requirements.
He had hesitated a long time before opening the door. For a weird existence went on behind that door. There was howling. There was panting. There was whistling. The whole building groaned. An incessant trembling ran through the walls and the floor. And amidst it all there was not one human sound. Only the things and the empty air roared. Men in the room on the other side of this door had powerless sealed lips. But for these men’s sakes Freder had come.
He pushed the door open and then fell back, suffocated. Boiling air smote him, groping at his eyes that he saw nothing. Gradually he regained his sight.
The room was dimly lighted and the ceiling, which looked as though it could carry the weight of the entire earth, seemed perpetually to be falling down.
A faint howling made breathing almost unbearable. It was as though the breath drank in the howling too.
Air, rammed down to the depths, coming already used from the lungs of the great Metropolis, gushed out of the mouths of pipes. Hurled across the room, it was greedily sucked back by the mouths of pipes on the other side. And its howling light spread a coldness about it which fell into fierce conflict with the sweat-heat of the room.
In the middle of the room crouched the Paternoster machine. It was like Ganesha, the god with the elephant’s head. It shone with oil. It had gleaming limbs. Under the crouching body and the head which was sunken on the chest, crooked legs rested, gnome-like, upon the platform. The trunk and legs were motionless. But the short arms pushed and pushed alternately forwards, backwards, forwards. A little pointed light sparkled upon the play of the delicate joints. The floor, which was stone, and seamless, trembled under the pushing of the little machine, which was smaller than a five-year-old chief.
Heat spat from the walls in which the furnaces were roaring. The odour of oil, which whistled with heat, hung in thick layers in the room. Even the wild chase of the wandering masses of air did not tear out the suffocating fumes of oil. Even the water which was sprayed through the room fought a hopeless battle against the fury of the heat-spitting walls, evaporating, already saturated with oil-fumes, before it could protect the skins of the men in this hell from being roasted.
Men glided by like swimming shadows. Their movements, the soundlessness of their inaudible slipping past, had something of the black ghostliness of deep-sea divers. Their eyes stood open as though they never closed them.
Near the little machine in the centre of the room stood a man, wearing the uniform of all the workmen of Metropolis: from throat to ankle, the dark blue linen, bare feet in the hard shoes, hair tightly pressed down by the black cap. The hunted stream of wandering air washed around his form, making the folds of the canvas flutter. The man held his hand on the lever and his gaze was fixed on the clock, the hands of which vibrated like magnetic needles.
Freder groped his way across to the man. He stared at him. He could not see his face. How old was the man? A thousand years? Or not yet twenty? He was talking to himself with babbling lips. What was the man muttering about? And had this man, too, the face of Joh Fredersen’s son?
“Look at me!” said Freder bending forward.
But the man’s gaze did not leave the clock. His hand, also, was unceasingly, feverishly, clutching the lever. His lips babbled and babbled, excitedly.
Freder listened. He caught the words. Shreds of words, tattered by the current of air.
“Paternoster … that means, Our Father! … Our Father, which are in heaven! We are in hell. Our Father! … What is thy name? Art thou called Paternoster, Our Father? Or Joh Fredersen? Or machine? … Be hallowed by us, machine. Paternoster! … Thy kingdom come … Thy kingdom come, machine … Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven … What is thy will of us, machine, Paternoster? Art thou the same in heaven as thou art on earth? … Our Father, which art in heaven, when thou callest us into heaven, shall we keep the machines in thy world—the great wheels which break the limbs of thy creatures—the great merry-go-round called the earth? … Thy will be done, Paternoster! … Give us this day our daily bread … Grind, machine, grind flour for our bread. The bread is baked from the flour of our bones … And forgive us our trespasses … what trespasses, Paternoster? The trespass of having a brain and a heart, that thou hast not, machine? And lead us not into temptation … Lead us not into temptation to rise against thee, machine, for thou art stronger than we, thou art a thousand times stronger than we, and thou art always in the right and we are always in the wrong, because we are weaker than thou art, machine … But deliver us from evil, machine … Deliver us from thee, machine … For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever, Amen … Paternoster, that means: Our Father … Our Father, which are in heaven …”
Freder touched the man’s arm. The man started, struck dumb.
His hand lost its hold of the lever and leaped into the air like a shot bird. The
