The  foundry was  large,  and bore  the odor  of decay  which no  amount ofsuperficial repairs  could quite  erase¹. It was  empty now and  in quite anunnatural state of quiet, as it played unaccustomed host to the Commdor andhis court.
Mallow  had swung  the steel sheet  onto the  two supports with  a carelessheave. He had taken the instrument held out to him by Twer and was grippingthe leather handle inside its leaden sheath.
"The instrument,"  he said, "is dangerous,  but so is a  buzz saw. You justhave to keep your fingers away."And as  he spoke,  he drew the  muzzle-slit² swiftly down the  length of thesteel sheet, which quietly and instantly fell in two.
There was  a unanimous  jump, and Mallow  laughed. He picked up  one of thehalves and propped³ it  against his knee, "You can adjust the cutting-lengthaccurately to  a hundredth of an inch, and a  two-inch sheet will slit downthe middle as easily as this thing did. If you've got the thickness exactlyjudged, you can place  steel on a wooden table, and split the metal withoutscratching the wood."And at  each phrase,  the nuclear shear⁴  moved and a gouged  chunk⁵ of steelflew across the room.
"That," he said, "is whittling⁶ ?with steel."He  passed back  the shear.  "Or else you  have the  plane. Do you  want todecrease  the thickness  of  a sheet,  smooth out  an  irregularity, removecorrosion? Watch!"Thin, transparent  foil flew  off the other  half of the  original sheet insix-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, acomer  magician, a  vaudeville  act made  into high-pressure  salesmanship.
Commdor Asper  fingered scraps  of steel. High officials  of the governmenttiptoed over  each other's  shoulders, and whispered,  while Mallow punchedclean, beautiful  round holes through an inch of  hard steel at every touchof his nuclear drill.

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