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05 - Anthem - Ayn Rand · Daily Classic Sci Fi Books

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  Chapter five. We made it, we created it, We brought it forth
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  from the night of the ages. We alone, our hands, our mind
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  ours alone, and only we know not what we are saying. Our head
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  is reeling. We look upon the light which we had made. We shall
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  be forgiven for anything we say to night to night. After more days in
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  trials than we can count, we finished building a strange thing from the remains
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  of the unmentionable times, a box of glass, devised to give forth the
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  power of the sky, of greater strength than we had ever achieved before.
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  And when we put our wires to this box, when we closed the current,
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  the wire glowed, it came to life, It turned red, and
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  a circle of light lay on the stone before us. We stood, and
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  we held our head in our hands. We could not conceive of that which
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  we had created. We had touched no flint, made no fire. Yet
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  there was light, light that came from nowhere, light from the heart of
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  metal. We blew out the candle. Darkness swallowed us, and there was
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  nothing left around us, nothing save the night, and a thin thread of
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  flame in it, as a crack in the wall of a prison. We
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  stretched our hands to the wire, and we saw our fingers in the red
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  glow. We could not see our body nor feel it. And in that
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  moment nothing existed save our two hands over a wire, glowing in a black
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  abyss. Then we thought of the meaning of that which lay before us.
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  We can light our tunnel, and the city, and all the cities of
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  the world with nothing save metal and wires. We can give our brothers a
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  new light, cleaner and brighter than any they have ever known. The power
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  of the sky can be made to do men's bidding. There are no limits
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  to its secrets and its might, and it can be made to grant us
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  anything. If we but choose to ask. Then we knew what we must
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  do. Our discovery is too great for us to waste our time in sweeping
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  streets. We must not keep our secret to ourselves, nor buried under the
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  ground. We must bring it into the sight of all men. We need
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  all our time. We need the workrooms of the Home of the Scholars.
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  We want the help of our brother scholars and the wisdom joined to ours.
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  There was so much work ahead for all of us, for all the scholars
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  of the world. In a month, the World Council of Scholars is to
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  meet in our city. It is a great council to which the wisest of
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  all lands are elected, and it meets once year in the different cities of
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  the earth. We shall go to this council, and we shall lay before
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  them, as our gift, the glass box with the power of the sky.
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  We shall confess everything to them. They will see, understand, and
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  forgive, for our gift is greater than our transgression. They will explain it
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  to the Council of Vocations, and we shall be assigned to the home of
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  the Scholars. This has never been done before, but neither has a gift
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  such as ours ever been offered to men. We must wait. We must
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  guard our tunnel as we have never guarded it before. For should any men,
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  save the Scholars, learn of our secret, they would not understand it,
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  nor would they believe us. They would see nothing save our crime of
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  working alone, and they would destroy us and our light. We care not
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  about our body, but our light is yes, we do care. For
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  the first time, we do care about our body, for this wire is
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  a part of our body, as a vein torn from us, glowing with
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  our blood. We are proud of this thread of metal, or of our
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  hands which made it, or is there a line to divide these two.
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  We stretch out our arms for the first time, do we know how strong
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  our arms are? And a strange thought comes to us. We wonder,
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  for the first time in our life, what we look like. Men never
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  see their own faces and never ask their brothers about it, for it is
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  evil to have concern for their own faces or bodies. But tonight, for
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  a reason we cannot fathom, we wish it were possible to us to know
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  the likeness of our own person. End of Chapter five