Vault of the Ages

Chapter 3 WISDOM OF THE ANCIENTS

In the morning, at breakfast, Ronwy told the boys: “I will gather the men of the City in council today and try to get them to vote for making the things you need. These northern invaders are a savage people, and the Dalesmen have always been our friends.” His smile was a little bitter. “Or as nearly our friends as we outcasts have.”

“Where is the meeting held?” asked Tom. “In a great hall down the street,” said Ronwy. “But by our law, no outsiders may attend such councils, so you might as well explore the City today. If you aren’t afraid of ghosts and devils—and I, in all my life here, have never met any—you should be interested.”

“The City!” Carl’s heart thudded with sudden excitement. The City, the City, the wonderful magic City—he would be roaming through it!

“Be careful, though,” said Ronwy. “There are many old pits and other dangerous places hidden by brush and rubble. Snakes are not unknown either. I will see you here again in the evening.”

Taking some bread and meat along for lunch, Carl and his friends wandered outside and down the streets. Whatever fear they had was soon lost in the marvel of it all; but a great awe, tinged with the sorrow of a world’s loss, took its place.

The witch-folk were about their daily business, sullenly ignoring the strangers. Women cooked and spun and tended babies. Children scrambled through empty houses and over great heaps of rubble, or sat listening to the words of an old teacher sitting under a tree. Men were doing their various tasks. Some worked in the little gardens planted in open spaces, some were in smithies and carpenter shops, some drove wagonloads of goods down wide avenues which must have carried more traffic in the old days than Carl could imagine. The boy was struck afresh by the pitiful smallness of this life, huddled in the vast wreck of its godlike ancestors, puzzling dimly over things it could never understand—much less rebuild. He sighed.

A great gong boomed solemnly down the air, echoing from wall to wall. It was Ronwy’s first summons, telling the witch-men that a council would meet in the afternoon.

“Look, Carl. Look up there!”

The Chief’s son craned his neck as Owl pointed. Up the sheer wall of an ancient tower, up, up, up, unbelievably far up. The stories said these buildings had been called skyscrapers, and indeed, thought Carl wildly, their heights seemed to storm the heavens.

The scarred brick facing was gone after the first few stories, and only a skeleton of giant rust-red girders was left above, a dark net of emptiness through which the wind piped its mournful song. Clambering around on those mighty ribs were the tiny forms of men. The sound of their hammers and chisels drifted faintly down to the boys, and now and then the flame of a crude blowtorch would wink like a star caught in the steel net. The heavy ropes of a block and tackle reached from the heights down to the weed-grown street.

“What are they doing?” whispered Tom.

“They’re tearing it down,” said Carl, very softly. “Piece by piece, they’re ripping out the steel to sell to the tribes.” A shivering wind rippled about his words and blew them down the hollow canyon of the avenue.

There was a huge sadness in it—the little men of today, gnawing apart the mighty works they no longer understood. In a few hundred years, or a few thousand, what did it matter? Nothing would be left, nothing but rubble and waving grass and the wild dogs howling where men had once lived.

Sorrow wrestled in Carl with a slowly gathering anger. It was wrong, it was wrong. The ancient wisdom was not accursed! Men should be trying to learn it and use it to rebuild—not let time and the witch-folk eat it away. Already a priceless heritage was gone; if this greed and ignorance were not halted, nothing would be left for the future.

His gloom deepened as the three prowled further. So little remained. The buildings were gutted long ago. Nothing remained but empty shells and the clumsy things of today’s dwellers. Beyond this central part where the people lived, everything had simply been stripped of metal and left to crumble. The forest had grown far into the town.

Owl would not be stopped from climbing several stories up one of the towers, and Tom and Carl followed him. From that windy height they could look miles over the dead City and the hills and woods beyond.

To the north a broad river ran through the toppled ruin of a great bridge. Today, thought Carl bleakly, they had only a couple of wooden scows for getting over. He looked south too, after some sign of the Lann, but could see only waving, sunlit green of trees. They were waiting, though. They were waiting.

It was nearly noon when the boys found the vault which was to mean so much to them. They were exploring the southern edge of the inhabited section, skirting a wall of bush and young trees that screened off the long low sides of caved-in buildings, when Tom pointed and cried, “What’s that?”

Carl approached the thing gingerly, afraid in spite of himself. A pole stuck in the ground bore the skull of a horse—a common sign to keep off evil spirits. Beyond this were the two sides of a house otherwise fallen to heaps of brick and glass. At the rear of those parallel walls was a curious gray object like nothing he had seen before.

“It’s magic,” said Tom, holding fast to his lucky charm. “The witches put up that sign because they’re afraid of whatever it is.”

“Ronwy said there weren’t any ghosts here,” replied Owl stanchly. “He ought to know.”

Carl stood for a moment thinking. In spite of having no great faith in the old stories of evil, he could not keep his heart from thumping. The thing brooding there in the hot, white sunlight was of the unknown. But—it was that fear which had kept men from learning what their ancestors had to teach. “Come on,” he said swiftly, before he could have time to get really frightened. “Let’s go see.”

“Maybe—” Tom licked his lips, then tossed his red head. “All right! I’m not scared either.”

“Not much, anyway,” said Owl.

They moved carefully through the grass-grown mounds of rubble, poking ahead with Tom’s spear in case of snakes, until they were at the rear of the old house. Then they stood for a long time staring at the mystery.

It was a concrete block, about ten feet square and seven feet high, with a door of age-eaten bronze in the front. There were letters engraved in the gray cement above the door, and Carl spelled them slowly out:

TIME VAULT

“What’s a vault?” asked Tom.

“It’s a place where you keep things,” said Carl.

“But you can’t keep time,” said Owl. “Time’s not a thing. It’s a—well—it’s time. Days and years.”

“That’s a very strong magic,” said Tom, his voice trembling a little. “Or else whoever made this was crazy. Let’s go.”

“I wonder—that door—” Carl pushed against the heavy green metal. It creaked slowly open, and he saw concrete steps leading down into a great darkness.

“You, boys! Get away!”

The boys whirled, and saw a witch-man standing just outside the pole. He held a drawn bow in his hands, the arrow pointing at them, and his angry face made it plain that he meant business.

“Come out!” he shouted. “It’s forbidden!”

Carl and his friends scrambled back, secretly a little glad to be ordered from the vault. “I’m sorry,” said Carl. “We didn’t know.”

“If you weren’t guests, I’d kill you,” said the witch-man. “That place is taboo. It’s full of black magic.”

“How do you know, if you can’t go in?” asked Owl impudently.

“People have been in there,” spat the man. “It’s full of machines and books and things. The same black magic that brought the Doom. We don’t want it to get loose again.”

He watched them go down the street and muttered charms against the devils in the vault.

“I’m sorry,” said Ronwy, when the boys returned to his house in the evening. “My folk are afraid to deal with anyone till they see how this war with the Lann comes out. I couldn’t convince them otherwise. And they said you could stay here only three more nights. If the enemy hasn’t given up by then, you’ll have to try sneaking past them.”

Carl nodded absently, too full of the day’s discoveries to think of his own danger right away.

He had to talk to someone, and Ronwy’s wise blue gaze invited faith.

Carl spilled out the story of what he had seen and thought, and Ronwy tugged his white beard and smiled sadly.

“I’ve spent my life reading the old histories and other books we’ve found, and thinking about them,” he said. “I believe I know what the Doom really was.”

“There was a war,” said Tom eagerly.

“Yes. The tribes—they called them nations—were much bigger then. This whole land, farther than any man has traveled today, was owned by one nation called America, and there were other lands too—some of them even across the sea. They had many wars and were very cruel, destroying whole cities from the air and laying the country waste. Finally, one great war ruined so many cities and machines, and killed so many people, that things couldn’t go on. There was plague and famine. By that time, too, so much of the land had been used up that people couldn’t go back to a simple life in the country, so many of them starved to death; and the others fought over what was left, bringing themselves still lower. Finally only a few remained and the land could feed them, so things got better after a while. But there were those who believed the old machines and powers had brought this evil to pass. If men hadn’t had machines that ran over the ground, and sailed, and flew, and destroyed, they wouldn’t have been able to hurt each other so much. These people convinced the others that the old wisdom—science, they called it—was bad and should be forbidden. Since very few were left who even understood science, it was easy to kill them or make them keep still.

“That was about five hundred years ago. Since then, the forests and the soil have come back and more people can live off the land than could right after the Doom. We have rebuilt until we live as you see today. But because of the taboos and the fear, we have not gone on to rebuild all that our ancestors had.”

Carl nodded slowly. “I thought it was something like that,” he said.

“But maybe the taboos are right,” said Tom. “If it weren’t for the—the science, there couldn’t have been the Doom and all the suffering.”

“Neither could there have been many good things,” answered Ronwy. “The ancients were not afraid of smallpox and the coughing sickness and other diseases which plague us today, because they had conquered them through science. Men lived in a plenty we cannot imagine today, and they had so much to do and see and think about that they were like gods. They lived longer and happier lives than we. Drought in one place did not mean that the people starved, for they could bring food from somewhere else in the world. The cold weather which has driven the Lann south against the Dales would not have mattered to them. Oh, there was so much they did, and so much they were about to do.

“Yes, they were cruel and foolish and brought the Doom on themselves. But why can we not learn from their mistakes? Why can we not use their science to live as they did, and at the same time be kinder and wiser? The world today is a world of want, and therefore a world of war; but we could build a future in which there was no hunger, no fear, no battle against man and nature. Think it over, boys! Think it over!”

Carl woke instantly at the touch on his shoulder and sat up in bed. Gloom of night filled the chamber, but he could dimly see the City Chiefs tall form bending over him.

“What is it?” he breathed, fumbling for the dagger he kept under his pillow.

“Uh—ugh—whoof!” Tom and Owl stirred in the double bed they shared and sat up, blinking into the night. Carl saw them as deeper shadows in the slowly stirring murk.

“Carl,” whispered Ronwy. “Listen to me, Carl. There isn’t much time.”

“Yes, yes, what is it?” The boy swung out of the blankets, feeling the floor cold under his bare feet.

“I have talked to you, and I think you believe as I,” came the rapid murmur out of darkness.

“About the old science, and the need—the very desperate need—of today’s world for a rebirth of knowledge. No one else will listen. I’ve been alone with my dreams, all my life. But you are son of the Chief of the greatest tribe in these lands. Someday, if the Dalesmen are not conquered, you will be their Chief yourself and able to do much.

“I want to show you the time vault. Now, while the City sleeps. Will you come with me?”

Strangely unafraid, strangely calm and steady except for the high pulse within him, Carl slipped on trousers and sword belt. Tom and Owl readied themselves at his back; there was the faintest chatter of teeth, but they would follow him even into the lair of the Doom, and he felt warm at the knowledge. Noiseless on bare feet, the three boys slipped out after Ronwy.

In die moonless dark, the City was a place of looming shadows, streets like tunnels of night, a ghostly breeze and the tiny patter of a hurrying rat. A pair of bats swooped blackly against the dim glow of the Milky Way, and a wild dog howled far off in the woods. Ghostly, flitting through the enormous night silence and the small fearful noises below a wheeling sky, the four humans made their way to the forbidden place.

Tom and Owl and even Carl shivered when they stood under the dim white skull that marked it, but Ronwy drew a long breath. “No one lives near by,” he said. “We can talk now.”

As they groped carefully toward the vault, he went on: “As Chief, I do have power to go here whenever I wish, and I have spent long times studying the marvels within. But my people won’t let me remove anything from it. They’re afraid. All the world is afraid. Man’s greatest devil is fear.”

The door still gaped open on unknown blacknesses. Ronwy struck flint and steel to light a candle he bore. “Follow me,” he said. The yellow glow picked his face out of night, old and calm and immensely comforting. “I have entered often. There is no magic, no Doom-nothing to be afraid of—only wonder and mystery.”

They went down the steps. At the bottom, Ronwy lifted his candle high and Carl saw that the vault was a great underground chamber lined with concrete, reaching farther into shadowy distance than he could see. He stood unmoving, caught up in the marvel of it.

Steel cabinets stretched along the sides. Long benches held models protected under glass covers: cunningly wrought models of engines whose purpose Carl could not imagine, their metal catching the light in a dull shimmer. Full-size things of steel and copper and glass, shapes such as he had never dreamed, quietly waited for a man who understood. And there were books—books, everywhere books, shelf after glassed-in shelf of books from floor to ceiling—

“Come here,” said Ronwy.

Carl followed him over to a wall on which there was a bronze plaque. The boy’s lips moved as he slowly puzzled out what was engraved thereon.

TO YOU WHO COME AFTER: THE WORLD IS ON THE EDGE OF THE FINAL WAR, THE WAR WHICH I THINK WILL DESTROY ALL CIVILIZATION AND HURL MAN, IF MAN SURVIVES, BACK TO SAVAGERY AND IGNORANCE. IT WILL TAKE LONG TO REGAIN WHAT IS LOST. PERHAPS IT WILL NEVER BE DONE. BUT I MUST DO WHAT I CAN TO SAVE THE KNOWLEDGE WHICH IS SO GREAT AND GOOD. IT IS MEN WHO ARE EVIL AND MISUSE THEIR POWERS; THEIR KNOWLEDGE CAN ONLY BE GOOD. LEST THE TORCH WHICH IS NOW BURNING LOW GO OUT FOREVER, I PLACE A SPARK FROM IT HERE TO REKINDLE IT IN FUTURE AGES.

IN THIS VAULT, THERE ARE BOOKS WHICH EXPLAIN WHAT WE KNOW OF SCIENCE AND HISTORY, STARTING WITH SIMPLE THINGS WHICH ANYONE CAN UNDERSTAND AND GOING ON TO THE PROUDEST DISCOVERS OF THE HUMAN RACE. OUR SMALLER TOOLS AND MACHINES ARE HERE, AND MODELS OF THE LARGER ONES, TO HELP YOU LEARN AND REBUILD. HERE, TOO, ARE WHAT I COULD GATHER OF THE GREAT PROPHETS AND PHILOSOPHERS AND ARTISTS FROM ALL OUR PAST AGES, TO EXPLAIN HOW A REGAINED POWER SHOULD BE USED WITH MORE WISDOM AND KINDNESS THAN OUR UNHAPPY WORLD HAS SHOWN, AND TO INSPIRE YOU NOT MERELY TO IMITATE US, BUT TO GO ON FOR YOURSELVES AND CREATE NEWER AND BETTER DREAMS OF YOUR OWN.

GUARD THIS TREASURE. USE IT WELL. MAY GOD HELP YOU IN YOUR TASK AND IN YOUR TRIUMPHS.

It was long before Carl had finished spelling it out, and he had not understood much of what was in the message. But he knew it was a cry across the ages, and tears stung his eyes.

“Who did this?” he whispered.

“I don’t know,” answered Ronwy as softly. “It must have been a scientist who foresaw the Doom, five hundred years ago, and tried to save this for us. But his name is nowhere here. I think,” he added after a moment, “that he didn’t want us to know his name, that he wanted us to think of the whole human race> which had created all this, as giving it to us.”

“And the vault is tabooed!” Carl’s bitter cry sent the echoes booming hollowly from wall to wall.

“It need not always be so,” replied Ronwy. “Someday, when you are Chief of the Dalesmen, you may be able to get the taboo lifted. It will take the work of many men and many years to learn all that is in here and put it to use. In a lifetime of study, I have only mastered a tiny part of this great store. Come.” He took Carl’s hand. “Let me show you a little.”

It was a strange quest, hunting among these dusty cases and boxes, lifting books and plans and models in trembling hands, there in the vault where time—yes, time itself—had been caged.

Carl’s mind staggered from most of the writings and machines. But there were things which could be used right now, today! A new design of sailboat, a windmill, a ritual called vaccination for preventing the dreaded smallpox, the natural laws of heredity by which farmers could breed better grain and livestock—a whole new world lay under his hands!

Tom picked up one thing, a short metal tube with glass in one end and a crank on the side.

“What is this?” he asked.

Ronwy smiled in the yellow candle glow. “Turn the crank,” he said.

Tom did, and yelled in astonishment as a clear, white beam of light sprang from the glass. He dropped the thing—Carl snatched it out of the air—and the light died away.

“It’s called a flashlight,” said Ronwy. “It has to be hand-powered, the card by it said, because the batteries they once had wouldn’t last many years.”

Carl turned the miracle over in his fingers. “May I keep this?” he asked. “I’ll need something to prove what I say when I bring this story back to Dalestown.”

It was Ronwy’s turn to be surprised. “What do you mean?” he asked.

Carl’s eyes gleamed fierce. “I mean that tomorrow night we three will try to sneak past those Lann scouts and get home,” he answered. “Then the Dalesmen will come here in force, take over the vault, learn how to make weapons like the ancients had—and drive the invaders away!”

There was a silence, then—

“We get past the Lann,” said Owl.