He grasped the handle of the door and tugged and the door came open, slowly because it was heavy.
He went inside and thumbed the switch and the lights came on and everything was exactly as the instruction sheet had said. There was the bed and the machine beside it and the great steel box standing in one corner.
The air was foul, but there was no dust, since the vault was not tied in with the air-conditioning system which through centuries had spread the dust through all the other rooms.
Standing there alone, in the glare of the bulb, with the bed and machine and great steel box before him, terror came upon him, a ravening terror that shook hint even as he tried to stand erect and taut to keep it away from him—a swift backlash of fear garnered from the many generations of unknowing and uncaring.
Knowledge—and there was a fear of knowledge, for knowledge was an evil thing. Years ago they had decided that, the ones who made decisions for the Ship, and they had made a law against Reading and they had burned the books.
The Letter said that knowledge was a necessary thing.
And Joshua, standing beside the tomato tank, with the other tanks and their growing things about him, had said that there must be reason and that knowledge would disclose the reason.
But it was only the Letter and Joshua—only the two of them against all the others of them, only the two of them against the decision that had been made many generations back.
No, he said, talking to himself, no, not those two alone—but my father and his father before him and fathers before that, handing down the Letter and the Book and the art of Reading. And he, himself, he knew, if he had had a child, would have handed him the Letter and the Book and would have taught him how to read. He could envision it—the two of them crouched in some obscure hiding beneath the dim glow of a bulb, slowly studying out the way that letters went together to form the words, doing a thing that was forbidden, continuing a chain of heresy that had snaked its way throughout the Folk for many generations.
And here, finally, was the end result, the bed and machine and the great steel box. Here, at last, was the thing to which it all had pointed.