I was standing in a small hall that had synthetic walls with those fluorescent paintings on them. It was pretty short, had no doors anywhere, and led toward the foot of a white staircase. The only way I could go was forward, so I went. With that door locked behind me I knew I would be slightly above suspicion—but only slightly, my friends, only slightly. Sooner or later someone was going to ask who I was.

The stairs were very pretty. I remember them because they were the first set I'd ever seen outside the Housing Museum. They had white even steps and they curved upward like a conic section. I ran my fingers along the smooth stone balustrade and trudged up expecting anything from a cobra to one of Tex Richard's Fighting Robots to jump out at me. I was scared to death.

I came to a square railed landing and it was then I first sensed the vibrations. I'd thought it was my heart whopping against my ribs with that peculiar bam-bam-bam that takes your breath away and sets a solid lump of cold under your stomach. Then I realised this pulse came from the Prog Building itself. I trotted up the rest of the stairs on the double and came to the top. There was a sliding door there. I took hold of the knob and thought: "Oh, well, they can only stuff me and put me under glass"—so I shoved the door open.

Boys, this was it—that nucleus I told you about. I'll try to give you an idea of what it looked like because it was the most sensational thing I've ever seen—and I've seen plenty in my time. The room took up the entire width of the building and it was two stories high. I felt as though I'd walked into the middle of a clock. Space was literally filled with the shimmer and spin of cogs and cams that gleamed with the peculiar highlights you see on a droplet of water about to fall. All of those thousands of wheels spun in sockets of precious stone—just like a watch only bigger—and those dots of red and yellow and green and blue fire burned until they looked like a painting by that Frenchman from way back. Seurat was his name.

The walls were lined with banks of Computation Integraphs—you could see the end-total curves where they were plotted on photoelectric plates. The setting dials for the Integraphs were all at eye level and ran around the entire circumference of the room like a chain of enormous white-faced periods. That was about all of the stuff I could recognize. The rest just looked complicated and bewildering.

That bam-bam-bam I told you about came from the very center of the room. There was a crystal octahedron maybe ten 

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