A low hiss from the stairway alerted the basement again, although there had been several earlier false alarms. Clearly no one had informed the illustrious thon that a marvelous invention awaited his inspection in the basement. Clearly, if it had been mentioned to him at all, its importance had been minimized. Obviously, Father Abbot was seeing to it that they all cooled their heels. These were the wordless significances exchanged by glances among them as they waited.
This time the warning hiss had not been in vain. The monk who watched from the head of the stairs turned solemnly and bowed toward the fifth monk on the landing below.
“In principio Deus,” he said softly.
The fifth monk turned and bowed toward the fourth monk at the foot of the stairs. “Caelum et terram creavit,” he murmured in turn.
The fourth monk turned toward the three who lounged behind the machine. “Vacuus autem erat mundus,” he announced.
“Cure tenebris in superficie profundorum,” chorused the group.
“Ortus est Dei Spiritus supra aquas,” called Brother Forbore, returning his book to its shelf with a rattling of chains.
“Gratias Creatori Spiritui,” responded his entire team.
“Dixitque Deus: ‘FIAT LUX,’ “ said the inventor in a tone of command.
The vigil on the stairs descended to take their posts. Four monks manned the treadmill. The fifth monk hovered over the dynamo. The sixth monk climbed the shelf-ladder and took his seat on the top rung, his head bumping the top of the archway. He pulled a mask of smoke-blackened oily parchment over his face to protect his eyes, then felt for the lamp fixture and its thumbscrew, while Brother Kornhoer watched him nervously from below.
“Et lux ergo facta est,” he said when he had found the screw.
“Lucem esse bonam Deus vidit,” the inventor called to the fifth monk.
The fifth monk bent over the dynamo with a candle for one last look at the brush contacts. “Et secrevit lucem a tenebris,” he said at last, continuing the lesson.
“Lucem appellavit ‘diem,’ “ chorused the treadmill team, “et tenebras ‘noctes,’ “ Whereupon they set their shoulders to the turnstile beams.
Axles creaked and groaned. The wagon-wheel dynamo began to spin, its low whir becoming a moan and then a whine as the monks strained and gruntedat the drive-mill. The guardian of the dynamo watched anxiously as the spokes blurred with speed and became a film. “Vespere occaso,” he began, then paused to lick two fingers and touch them to the contacts. A spark snapped.
“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.