Wilkie took position at a Ledbetter projector. Scheer was already at one; it had been specially fitted with sights and some other gadgetry that Ardmore could not identify. Scheer pressed a couple of studs; a pencil beam of light sprang out.
Using it as if it were a saw he sliced the top off the boulder. Wilkie caught the separated portion with a tractor-pressor combination and moved it aside. He set his controls and it hung in air; where it had been the stone was flat and of mirror polish. “That’s the temple’s base,” said Wilkie.
Scheer continued carving with his pencil beam, trucking his projector around as necessary. The flat top had now been squared off; the square was the summit of a four-sided truncated pyramid. That done, he started carving steps down one side of the figure. “That’s enough, Scheer,”
Wilkie commanded. “Let’s make a wall. Prepare the surface.”
Scheer did something with his projector. No beam could be seen, but the flat upper surface turned black. “Carbon,” announced Wilkie. “Industrial diamonds probably. That’s our work bench. O. K., Scheer. ” Wilkie moved the detached chunk back over the “bench”; Scheer carved off apiece; it turned molten, dripped down on the flat surface, spread to the edges and stopped. It now had a white metallic sheen. As it doled Scheer nipped each corner, then, using one pressor as a vise to hold it firmly to the boulder and another as a moving wedge, he turned each corner up. It was now a shallow, open box, two feet square and an inch deep. Wilkie whisked it aside and hung it in air.
The process was repeated, but this time a single sheet rather than a box was formed. Wilkie put it out of the way and put the box back on the pedestal. “Let’s stuff the turkey,” announced Wilkie.
He transferred the chopped-off chunk back to a position over the open box. Scheer carved off a piece and lowered it into the box, then played a beam on it. It melted down and spread over the bottom. “Granite is practically glass,” lectured Wilkie, “and what we want is foamed glass, so we use no transmutation in this step-except the least, little bit to make the gases to foam it. Let’s have a shot of nitrogen, Scheer.” The master sergeant nodded and irradiated the mess for a split second; it foamed up like boiling fudge, filling the shallow box to the rim, and froze.
Wilkie snagged the simple sheet out of the air and caused it to hover over the filled box, then to settle so that it lay, somewhat unevenly, as a cover. “Iron it down, Scheer.”
The sheet glowed red and settled in place, pressed flat by an invisible hand. Scheer walked his projector around, welding the cover of the box to the box proper. When he had finished Wilkie set the filled box up on edge at one edge of the pedestal. Leaving the controls of his projector set to hold it there, he walked over to the far side of the room where a tarpaulin covered a pile of something on a bench.
“To save your time and for practice we made four others earlier,” he explained and whipped off the tarpaulin. Disclosed were a stack of sandwich panels exactly like that one just created. He did not touch them; instead Scheer lifted them off by projector one at a time and built a cube, using the newly made panel as the first face and the pedestal as the bottom of the cube. Wilkie returned to his projector and held the structure rigid while Scheer welded each seam. “Scheer is much more accurate than I am,” he explained. “I give him all the tough parts.
O. K., Scheer — how about a door?”
“How big?” grunted the sergeant, speaking for the first time.
“Use your judgment. Eight inches high would be all right.”
Scheer grunted again and carved a rectangular opening in the side facing the slope on which he had begun earlier to carve steps. When he finished Wilkie announced, “There’s your temple, boss.”
No human hand had touched the boulder nor anything made from it, from start to finish.