"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. "Gor Zan was a throwback to my own savage day, a natural scientist who believed nothing he was told and reasoned with a deadly logic that nothing created by nature can be perfect, but must be improved by the thought and effort of man. Today we slew him, reluctantly, because he had taken the final irrevocable step that branded him a heretic and an outlaw. "Gor Zan made a Machine." He stretched out a hand to Ortho and they rose together, the abashed eyes of the neophyte not meeting those of the high-priest. "Come," Kaliz said, "and behold the thing with your own eyes. I have kept it intact to convince you beyond doubt of Gor Zan's heresy." They went back into the priest-cave, past the long tiers of Books, crumbling and yellow with age, to stand in awed silence over the thing Gor Zan had made. Ortho stared, shivering, feeling the cold aura of unsentient, alien power that radiated from the Machine. It was a crude affair, built upon two wooden shafts that slanted upward to end in a pair of rough handles. Across them were lashed shorter sticks that supported a woven basket. At the forward end was a thin disc made of wooden segments, a little wooden axle running through the center and holding the disc upright between the joined ends of the shafts. "Gor Zan tired of making two trips to his cave with firewood and fruit," old Kaliz said sombrely, "so he created a Machine which would carry a greater load than his shoulders would bear. In my own age the thing was called a Wheelbarrow, but the name of it is not important now because there will never be another. "We will destroy it now, and with its destruction we will forget what Gor Zan had rediscovered, which is the first principle of the Machine that enslaved and then destroyed mankind--the Wheel." End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Wheel is Death, by Roger Dee