The angry officer muttered a curse and struggled to free himself from the grasp of his comrades.
“Take him back to his quarters and sit on him till he cools off,” the thon told them. “And better see that he doesn’t get a chance at that lunatic.”
“I’m mortified,” he said to the abbot, when the livid guardsman was hauled away. “They aren’t my servants, and I can’t give them orders. But I can promise you he will grovel for this. And if he refuses to apologize and leave immediately, he’ll have to match that hasty sword against mine before noon tomorrow.”
“No bloodshed!” begged the priest. “It was nothing. Let’s all forget it.” His hands were trembling, his countenance gray.
“He will make apology and go,” Thon Taddeo insisted, “or I shall offer to kill him. Don’t worry, he doesn’t dare fight me because if he won, Hannegan would have him impaled on the public stake while they forced his wife to — but never mind that. He’ll grovel and go. Just the same, I’m deeply ashamed that such a thing could have come about.”
“I should have had the Poet thrown out as soon as he showed up. He provoked the whole thing, and I failed to stop it. The provocation was dear.”
“Provocation? By the fanciful lie of a vagrant fool? Josard reacted as if the Poet’s charges were true.”
“Then you don’t know that they are preparing a comprehensive report on the military value of our abbey as a fortress?”
The scholar’s jaw fell. He stared from one priest to the other in apparent unbelief.
“Can this be true?” he asked after a long silence.
The abbot nodded.
“And you’ve permitted us to stay.”
“We keep no secrets. Your companions are welcome to make such a study if they wish. I would not presume to ask why they want the information. The Poet’s assumption, of course, was merest fantasy.”
“Of course,” the thon said weakly, not looking at his host.
“Surely your prince has no aggressive ambitions in this region, as the Poet hinted.”
“Surely not.”
“And even if he did, I’m sure he would have the wisdom at least the wise counselors to lead him — to understand that our abbey’s value as a storehouse of ancient wisdom is many times greater than its value as a citadel.”
The thon caught the note of pleading, the undercurrent of supplication for help, in the priest’s voice, and he seemed to brood on it, picking lightly at his food and saying nothing for a time.
“We’ll speak of this matter again before I return to the collegium,” he promised quietly.
A pall had fallen on the banquet, but it began to lift during the group singing in the courtyard after the meal, and it vanished entirely when the time came for the scholar’s lecture in the Great Hall. Embarrassment seemed at an end, and the group had resumed a surface cordiality.
Dom Paulo led the thon to the lectern; Gault and the don’s clerk followed, joining them on the platform. Applause rang out heartily following the abbot’s introduction of the thon; the hush that followed suggested the silence of a courtroom awaiting a verdict. The scholar was no gifted orator, but the verdict proved satisfying to the monastic throng.
“I have been amazed at what we’ve found here,” he told them. “A few weeks ago I would not have believed, did not believe, that records such as you have in your Memorabilia could still be surviving from the fall of the last mighty civilization. It is still hard to believe, but evidence forces us to adopt the hypothesis that the documents are authentic. Their survival here is incredible enough; but even more fantastic, to me, is the fact that they have gone unnoticed during this century, until now. Lately there have been men capable of appreciating their potential value — and not only myself. What Thon Kaschler might have done with them while he was alive! — even seventy years ago.”
The sea of monks’ faces was alight with smiles upon hearing so favorable a reaction to the Memorabilia from one so gifted as the thon. Paulo wondered why they failed to sense the faint undercurrent of resentment — or was it suspicion? — in the speaker’s tone. “Had I known of these sources ten years ago,” he was saying, “much of my work in optics would have been unnecessary.”Ahha! thought the abbot, so that’s it. Or at least part of it. He’s finding out that some of his discoveries are only rediscoveries, and it leaves a bitter taste. But surely he must know that never during his lifetime can he be more than a recoverer of lost works; however brilliant, he can only do what others before him had done. And so it would be, inevitably, until the world became as highly developed as it had been before the Flame Deluge.
Nevertheless, it was apparent that Thon Taddeo was impressed.
“My time here is limited.” he went on, “From what I have seen, I suspect that it will take twenty specialists several decades to finish milking the Memorabilia for understandable information. Physical science normally proceeds by inductive reasoning tested by experiment; but here the task is deductive. From a few broken bits of general principles, we must attempt to grasp particulars. In some cases, it may prove impossible. For example—” He paused for a moment to produce a packet of notes and thumbed through them briefly. “Here is a quotation which I found buried downstairs. It’s from a four-page fragment of a book which may have been an advanced physics text. A few of you may have seen it.”
“ ‘ — and if the space terms predominate in the expression for the interval between event-points, the interval is said to be space-like, since it is then possible to select a co-ordinate system — belonging to an observer with an admissible velocity — in which the events appear simultaneous, and therefore separated only spatially. If, however, the interval is timelike the events cannot be simultaneous in any co-ordinate system, but there exists a co-ordinate system in which the space terms will vanish entirely, so that the separation between events will be purely temporal, id est, occurring at the same place, but at different times. Now upon examining the extremals of the real interval—” “
He looked up with a whimsical smile. “Has anyone here looked at that reference lately?”
The sea of faces remained blank.
“Anyone ever remember seeing it?”
Kornhoer and two others cautiously lifted their hands.
“Anyone know what it means?”
The hands quickly went down.
The thon chuckled. “It’s followed by a page and a half of mathematics which I won’t try to read, but it treats some of our fundamental concepts as if they weren’t basic at all, but evanescent appearances that change according to one’s point of view. It ends with the word ‘therefore’ but the rest of the page is burned, and the conclusion with it. The reasoning is impeccable, however, and the mathematics quite elegant, so that I can write the conclusion myself. It seems the conclusion of a madman. It began with assumptions, however, which appeared equally mad. Is it a hoax? If it isn’t, what is its place in the whole scheme of the science of the ancients? What precedes it as prerequisite to understanding? What follows, and how can it be tested? Questions I can’t answer. This is only one example of the many enigmas posed by these papers you’ve kept so long. Reasoning which touches experiential reality nowhere is the business of angelologists and theologians, not of physical scientists. And yet such papers as these describe systems which touch our experience nowhere. Were they within the experimental reach of the ancients? Certain references tend to indicate it. One paper refers to elemental transmutation — which we just recently established as theoretically impossible — and then it says ‘experiment proves.’ But how?
“It may take generations to evaluate and understand some of these things. It is unfortunate that they must remain here in this inaccessible place, for it will take a concentrated effort by numerous scholars to make meaning of them. I am sure you realize that your present facilities are inadequate — not to mention ‘inaccessible’ to the rest of the world.”