A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller [83]
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