“All right then, Mister and Owner. Ramble around and worry about the ground you’re walking on. It’s you that get the worries for it. I’m glad my daddy took the official pauper words. We used to be rich.” Unexpectedly she brightened and laughed at herself, “Now that, you’ve heard that too, Rod. Here’s your food. Do you have water?”

“I’ll steal from the sheep,” he said irreverently. She knew he was joking and she waved him a friendly goodbye.

The old, old gap was to the rear of the house, so he left by the front. He wanted to go the long wrong way around, so that neither human eyes nor human minds would stumble on the secret he had found fifty-six years before, the first time he was eight years old. Through all the pain and the troubles he had remembered this one vivid bright secret — the deep cave full of ruined and prohibited treasures. To these he must go.

The sun was high in the sky, spreading its patch of brighter grey above the grey clouds, when he slid into what looked like a dry irrigation ditch.

He walked a few steps along the ditch. Then he stopped and listened carefully, very carefully.

There was no sound except for the snoring of a young hundred-ton ram a mile or so away.

Rod then stared around.

In the far distance, a police ornithopter soared as lazy as a sated hawk.

Rod tried desperately much to hier.

He hiered nothing with his mind, but with his ears he heard the slow heavy pulsing of his own blood pounding through his head.

He took a chance.

The trap door was there, just inside the edge of the culvert.

He lifted it and, leaving it open, dove in confidently as a swimmer knifing his way into a familiar pool.

He knew his way.

His clothes ripped a little but the weight of his body dragged him past the narrowness of the doorframe.

His hands reached out and like the hands of an acrobat they caught the inner bar. The door behind snapped shut. How frightening this had been when he was little and tried the trip for the first time! He had let himself down with a rope and a torch, never realizing the importance of the trap door at the edge of the culvert!

Now it was easy.

With a thud, he landed on his feet. The bright old illegal lights went on. The dehumidifier began to purr, lest the wetness of his breath spoil the treasures in the room.

There were drama-cubes by the score, with two different sizes of projectors. There were heaps of clothing, for both men and women, left over from forgotten ages. In a chest, in the corner, there was even a small machine from before the Age of Space, a crude but beautiful mechanical chronograph, completely without resonance compensation, and the ancient name “Jaeger Le Coultre” written across its face. It still kept Earth time after fifteen thousand years.

Rod sat down in an utterly impermissible chair — one which seemed to be a complex of pillows built on an interlocking frame. The touch enough was a medicine for his worries. One chair leg was broken, but that was the way his grandfather-to-the-nineteenth had violated the Clean Sweep.

The Clean Sweep had been Old North Australia’s last political crisis, many centuries before, when the last underpeople were hunted down and driven off the planet and when all damaging luxuries had to be turned in to the Commonwealth authorities, to be repurchased by their owners only at a reevaluation two hundred thousand times higher than their assessed worth. It was the final effort to keep Norstrilians simple, healthy,and well. Every citizen had to swear that he had turned in every single item, and the oath had been taken with thousands of telepaths watching. It was a testimony to the high mental power and adept deceitfulness of grandfather-to-the-nineteenth that Rod McBan CXXX had inflicted only symbolic breakage on his favorite treasures, some of which were not even in the categories allowed for repurchase, like offworld drama-cubes, and had been able to hide his things in an unimportant corner of his fields — hide them so well that neither robbers nor police had thought of them for the hundreds of years that followed.

Rod picked up his favorite: Hamlet, by William Shakespeare. Without a viewer, the cube was designed to act when touched by a true human being. The top of the cube became a little stage, the actors appeared as bright miniatures speaking Ancient Inglish, a language very close to Old North Australian, and the telepathic commentary, cued to the Old Common Tongue, rounded out the story. Since Rod was not dependably telepathic, he had learned a great deal of the Ancient Inglish by trying to understand the drama without commentary. He did not like what he first saw and he shook the cube until the play approached its end. At last he heard the dear high familiar voice speaking in Hamlet’s last scene:

Rod shook the cube very gently and the scene sped down a few lines. Hamlet was still talking: 

Rod put down the cube very gently.

The bright little figures disappeared.

The room was silent.

But he had the answer and it was wisdom. And wisdom, coeval with man, comes unannounced, unbidden, and unwelcome into every life. Rod found that he had discovered the answer to a basic problem.

But not his own problem. The answer was Houghton Syme’s, Old Hot and Simple. It was the Hon. Sec. who was already dying of a wounded name. Hence the persecution. It was the Onseck who had the “fell sergeant, death” acting strictly in his arrest, even if the arrest were only a few decades off instead of a few minutes. He, Rod McBan, was to live; his old acquaintance was to die; and the dying — oh, the dying, always, always! — could not help resenting the survivors, even if they were loved ones, at least a little bit.

Hence the Onseck.

But what of himself?

Rod brushed a pile of priceless, illegal manuscripts out of the way and picked up a small book marked, Reconstituted Late Inglish Language Verse. At each page, as it was opened, a young man or woman seven centimeters high stood up brightly on the page and recited the text. Rod ruffled the pages of the old book so that the little figures appeared and trembled and fled like weak flames seen on a bright day. One caught his eye and he stopped the page at midpoem. The figure was saying:

He glanced at the foot of the page and saw the name, Casimir Colegrove. Of course, he had seen that name before. An old poet. A good one. But what did the words mean to him, Rod McBan, sitting in a hidden hole within the limits of his own land? He was a Mister and Owner, in all except final title, and he was running from an enemy he could not define. “The hostile justice of my self-contempt…” That was the key of it! He was not running from the Onseck. He was running from himself. He took justice itself as hostile because it corresponded with his sixty-odd years of boyhood, his endless disappointment, his compliance with things which would never, till all worlds burned, be complied with. How could he hier and spiek like other people if somewhere a dominant feature had turned recessive? Hadn’t real justice already vindicated him and cleared him?