by Ayn Rand
PART FIVE
We made it. We created it. We brought it forth from the night of theages. We alone. Our hands. Our mind. Ours alone and only.
We know not what we are saying. Our head is reeling. We look upon thelight which we have made. We shall be forgiven for anything we saytonight....
Tonight, after more days and trials than we can count, we finishedbuilding a strange thing, from the remains of the Unmentionable Times,a box of glass, devised to give forth the power of the sky of greaterstrength than we had ever achieved before. And when we put our wires tothis box, when we closed the current--the wire glowed! It came to life,it turned red, and a circle of light lay on the stone before us.
We stood, and we held our head in our hands. We could not conceive ofthat which we had created. We had touched no flint, made no fire. Yethere was light, light that came from nowhere, light from the heart ofmetal.
We blew out the candle. Darkness swallowed us. There was nothing leftaround us, nothing save night and a thin thread of flame in it, as acrack in the wall of a prison. We stretched our hands to the wire, andwe saw our fingers in the red glow. We could not see our body nor feelit, and in that moment nothing existed save our two hands over a wireglowing in a black abyss.
Then we thought of the meaning of that which lay before us. We can lightour tunnel, and the City, and all the Cities of the world with nothingsave metal and wires. We can give our brothers a new light, cleaner andbrighter than any they have ever known. The power of the sky can be madeto do men's bidding. There are no limits to its secrets and its might,and it can be made to grant us anything if we but choose to ask.
Then we knew what we must do. Our discovery is too great for us towaste our time in sweeping the streets. We must not keep our secret toourselves, nor buried under the ground. We must bring it into the sightof all men. We need all our time, we need the work rooms of the Home ofthe Scholars, we want the help of our brother Scholars and their wisdomjoined to ours. There is so much work ahead for all of us, for all theScholars of the world.
In a month, the World Council of Scholars is to meet in our City. It isa great Council, to which the wisest of all lands are elected, and itmeets once a year in the different Cities of the earth. We shall go tothis Council and we shall lay before them, as our gift, this glass boxwith the power of the sky. We shall confess everything to them. Theywill see, understand and forgive. For our gift is greater than ourtransgression. They will explain it to the Council of Vocations, and weshall be assigned to the Home of the Scholars. This has never been donebefore, but neither has a gift such as ours ever been offered to men.
We must wait. We must guard our tunnel as we had never guarded itbefore. For should any men save the Scholars learn of our secret, theywould not understand it, nor would they believe us. They would seenothing, save our crime of working alone, and they would destroy us andour light. We care not about our body, but our light is...
Yes, we do care. For the first time do we care about our body. For thiswire is as a part of our body, as a vein torn from us, glowing with ourblood. Are we proud of this thread of metal, or of our hands which madeit, or is there a line to divide these two?
We stretch out our arms. For the first time do we know how strong ourarms are. And a strange thought comes to us: we wonder, for the firsttime in our life, what we look like. Men never see their own faces andnever ask their brothers about it, for it is evil to have concern fortheir own faces or bodies. But tonight, for a reason we cannot fathom,we wish it were possible to us to know the likeness of our own person.