1 We ask, why must we know, but it has no answer to give us.
2 And these three hours give us strength for our hours above the ground.
3 But it is a sin to give men names which distinguish them from other men.
4 Only the glass box in our arms is like a living heart that gives us strength.
5 It is my ears which hear, and the hearing of my ears gives its song to the world.
6 We are to give its goal, its highest meaning to all this glowing space of rock and sky.
7 We can give our brothers a new light, cleaner and brighter than any they have ever known.
8 We cannot know what word we are to give, nor what great deed this earth expects to witness.
9 And now we know that metal draws the power of the sky, and that metal can be made to give it forth.
10 I wonder, for it is hard for me to conceive how men who knew the word "I" could give it up and not know what they lost.
11 And it was a sight which has stayed with us through the years, and it haunts us, and follows us, and it gives us no rest.
12 They leapt to their feet, they ran from the table, and they stood pressed against the wall, huddled together, seeking the warmth of one another's bodies to give them courage.
13 And we were punished when the Council of Vocations came to give us our life Mandates which tell those who reach their fifteenth year what their work is to be for the rest of their days.
14 Tonight, after more days and trials than we can count, we finished building a strange thing, from the remains of the Unmentionable Times, a box of glass, devised to give forth the power of the sky of greater strength than we had ever achieved before.