“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.”