“Lucifer!” he yelped, leaping back, then finished lamely: “ortus est et primo die.”

“CONTACT!” said Brother Kornhoer, as Dom Paulo, Thon Taddeo and his clerk descended the stairs.

The monk on the ladder struck the arc. A sharp spffft! — and blinding light flooded the vaults with a brilliance that had not been seen in twelve centuries.

The group stopped on the stairs. Thon Taddeo gasped an oath in his native tongue. He retreated a step. The abbot, who had neither witnessed the testing of the device nor credited extravagant claims, blanched and stopped speech in mid-sentence. The clerk froze momentarily in panic and suddenly fled, screaming “Fire!”

The abbot made the sign of the cross. “I had not known!” he whispered.

The scholar, having survived the first shock of the flare, probed the basement with his gaze, noticing the drive-mill, the monks who strained at its beams. His eyes traveled along the wrapped wires, noticed the monk on the ladder, measured the meaning of the wagon-wheel dynamo and the monk who stood waiting, with downcast eyes, at the foot of the stairs.

“Incredible!” he breathed.

The monk at the foot of the stairs bowed in acknowledgment and depreciation. The blue-white glare cast knife-edge shadows in the room, and the candle flames became blurred wisps in the tide of light.

“Bright as a thousand torches,” breathed the scholar. “It must be an ancient-but no! Unthinkable!”

He moved on down the stairs like a man in a trance. He stopped beside Brother Kornhoer and gazed at him curiously for a moment, then stepped onto the basement floor. Touching nothing, asking nothing, peering at everything, he wandered about the machinery, inspecting the dynamo, the wiring, the lamp itself.

“It just doesn’t seem possible, but—”

The abbot recovered his senses and descended the stairs.

“You’re dispensed from silence!” he whispered at Brother Kornhoer. “Talk to him. I’m — a little dazed.”

The monk brightened. “You like it, m’Lord Abbot?”

“Ghastly,” wheezed Dom Paulo.

The inventor’s countenance sagged.

“It’s a shocking way to treat a guest! It frightened the thon’s assistant out of his wits. I’m mortified!”

“Well, it is rather bright.”

“Hellish! Go talk to him while I think of a way to apologize.”

But the scholar had apparently made a judgment on the basis of his observations, for he stalked toward them swiftly. His face seemed strained, and his manner crisp.

“A lamp of electricity,” he said. “How have you managed to keep it hidden for all these centuries! After all these years of trying to arrive at a theory of—” He choked slightly, and seemed to be fighting for self-control, as if he had been the victim of a monstrous practical joke. “Why have you hidden it? Is there some religious significance — And what—” Complete confusion stopped him. He shook his head and looking around as if for an escape.

“You misunderstand,” the abbot said weakly, catching at Bother Kornhoer’s arm. “For the love of God, Brother, explain!”

But there was no balm to soothe an affront to professional pride — then or in any other age.

19

After the unfortunate incident in the basement, the abbot sought by every conceivable means to make amends for that unhappy moment. Thon Taddeo gave no outward sign of rancor, and even offered his hosts an apology for his spontaneous judgment of the incident, after the inventor of the device had given the scholar a detailed account of its recent design and manufacture. But the apology succeeded only in convincing the abbot further that the blunder had been serious. It put the thon in the position of a mountaineer who has scaled an “unconquered” height only to find a rival’s initials carved in the summit rock — and the rival hadn’t told him in advance. It must have been shattering for him, Dom Paulo thought, because of the way it was handled.

If the thon had not insisted (with a firmness perhaps born of embarrassment) that its light was of a superior quality, sufficiently bright even for close scrutiny of brittle and age-worn documents which tended to be indecipherable by candlelight, Dom Paulo would have removed the lamp from the basement immediately. But Thon Taddeo had insisted that he liked it — only to discover, then. that it was necessary to keep at least four novices or postulants continuously employed at cranking the dynamo and adjusting the arc-gap; thereupon, he begged that the lamp be removed — but then it was Paulo’s turn to become insistent that it remain in place.

So it was that the scholar began his researches at the abbey, continuously aware of the three novices who toiled at the drive-mill and the fourth novice who invited glare-blindness atop the ladder to keep the lamp burning and adjusted — a situation which caused the Poet to versify mercilessly concerning the demon Embarrassment and the outrages he perpetrated in the name of penitence or appeasement.

For several days the thon and his assistant studied the library itself, the files, the monastery’s records apart from the Memorabilia — as if by determining the validity of the oyster, they might establish the possibility of the pearl. Brother Kornhoer discovered the thon’s assistant on his knees in the entrance of the refectory, and for a moment he entertained the impression that the fellow was performing some special devotion before the image of Mary above the door, but a rattle of tools put an end to the illusion. The assistant laid a carpenter’s level across the entranceway and measured the concave depression worn in the floor stones by centuries of monastic sandals.

“We’re looking for ways of determining dates,” he told Kornhoer when questioned. “This seemed like a good place to establish a standard for rate of wear, since the traffic’s easy to estimate. Three meals per man per day since the stones were laid.”

Kornhoer could not help being impressed by their thoroughness; the activity mystified him. “The abbey’s architectural records are complete,” he said. “They can tell you exactly when each building and wing was added. Why not save your time?”

The man glanced up innocently. “My master has a saying: ‘Nayol is without speech, and therefore never lies.’ “

“Nayol?”

“One of the Nature gods of the Red River people. He means it figuratively, of course. Objective evidence is the ultimate authority. Recorders may lie, but Nature is incapable of it.” He noticed the monk’s expression and added hastily:

“No canard is implied. It is simply a doctrine of the thon’s that everything must be cross-referenced to the objective.”

“A fascinating notion,” murmured Kornhoer, and bent down to examine the man’s sketch of a cross-section of the floor’s concavity. “Why, it’s shaped like what Brother Majek calls a normal distribution curve. How strange.”

“Not strange. The probability of a footstep deviating from the center-line would tend to follow the normal error function.”

Kornhoer was enthralled. “I’ll call Brother Majek,” he said.

The abbot’s interest in his guests’ inspection of the premises was less esoteric. “Why,” he demanded of Gault, “are they making detailed drawings of our fortifications?”

The prior looked surprised. “I hadn’t heard of it. You mean Thon Taddeo—”

“No. The officers that came with him. They’re going about it quite systematically.”

“How did you find out?”

“The Poet told me.”

“The Poet! Hah!”

“Unfortunately, he was telling the truth this time. He pick-pocketed one of their sketches.”

“You have it?”

“No, I made him return it. But I don’t like it. It’s ominous.”

“I suppose the Poet asked a price for the information?”

“Oddly enough, he didn’t. He took an instant dislike to the thon. He’s gone around muttering to himself ever since they came.”