"It was not always so," he said. His voice softened as his memory drifted back across the ages. "Once it was yellow, pitted and airless and dead, shining only with light reflected from the sun. Men changed that, as they changed the face of their world, by the power of their science, which in the end defeated the aims they strove for and destroyed them almost utterly. The handful that remained of them found haven in the Valley and began a new civilization, which is today the People. This time, being wiser, they outlawed the practice of science."
Under Kaliz' calm assurance Ortho's resentment dwindled, and his loathing of the high-priest gave way to bewilderment.
"Science?" he repeated. "It is another strange word. I do not understand."
"In another age Gor Zan would have been a scientist," Kaliz said. "I have seen them with my own eyes in the ancient days, puttering in tomblike shops that shut other men away from them, denying all pleasure while they spent their lives improving what other scientists had already discovered. They were never satisfied, and in the end it was their insatiable lust for perfection that killed them, that set the very moon aflame and flung mankind back into the savagery from which it had risen.
"For there was a time," he went on sombrely, shifting his sitting-stone to follow Ortho's troubled gaze down into the blue depths of the Valley, "long before my own, when men lived as simply as we, but without our peace and security. The world then was a savage place, full of frightful beasts which killed men for food because they were no more than weaker animals. Men, being weak and soft, sought communal safety in numbers and gained an advantage over the beasts because they developed intelligence and logic by exchanging ideas and experiences.
"They learned to use this intelligence to develop weapons which eventually wiped out the dangerous beasts and made the world safe; but they were not content with safety, and fought savagely among themselves. Nations numbering millions of men came into being and warred with each other, and with each war their ingenuity grew and the deadliness of their weapons kept pace with their ingenuity."
Kaliz was quiet for a moment, listening to the faint laughter of the People that drifted up faintly from the Valley floor.
"Men were not happy then as they are now," he said. "I remember them, Ortho, because I was one of them, and by a miracle escaped the great holocaust that destroyed mankind. Men had developed a weapon whose destructiveness was beyond the power of the mind to conceive, and it escaped control; nation after nation died in a breath, whole continents vanished under the impact of robot missiles whose explosions destroyed matter itself. One of these, perhaps by intent, struck the moon, and its reaction under the moon's lighter gravity set up a conflagration which never went out.
"Those of us who survived the holocaust were greatly changed by the radiations of the explosions, and most of us soon died. I alone, by chance, was rendered deathless. More ages have passed than I can number, but I live on, perhaps eternally, to see that the People do not err and fall again into the trap which science with its Machines would place in their way.