Rog sweltered under the mistreatment ... but this trouble was as nothing compared to the burning curiosity to know what he had done the last time he went to the globe. Even Lo could not be let in on such a secret. She, too, would class him with Ta, then. The day came when he could stand it no longer. Almost without his own volition he found himself far back in the hills, making swiftly towards the museum. He did not rush in as heretofore when he reached it. He crept up and poked his head inside the portal, wide-eyed and breathing hard. There was the sound of a twig's breaking behind him, and he whirled, flattening out against the wall. "Do not be afraid." It was the smiling patriarch who spoke. "I am Johann Adam, the man you restored to life. I am here to help you." But Rog could not understand the strange, musical sounds he made. He continued to crouch there, waiting. The old man spread his hands. "I have slept long, if you represent man of today. But follow me." And he gestured to the boy, passing on into the sphere. Then there followed an hour of the most thrilling, most baffling, conversation he had ever known. Johann Adam took a big pad and a writing-stick and made picture after picture, while Rog crouched near him, fearing to stay, and yet hating the thought of missing anything by leaving. The first time Adam extended the pad to him to see what he had written, he shrank back and almost ran away. Somehow he knew that it was ridiculous, his being afraid of a man so much feebler than he, and he stiffened his feeble courage. But there was a tiny voice inside him that whispered that the ancient had a power that transcended that of mere muscles. Rog remembered the smoking sticks that killed bears.... Finally he glanced at the pad, and then took it. The diagram was a repetition of the old man and child in the chart in the room above. A smile claimed his features. He pointed upward and gave the pad back. Adam was pleased. He seemed to inventory Rog's quick eyes and his smooth, broad brow. Then he was writing again. The younger man's fear broke down completely under the force of his desire for learning. Within a few minutes he was sitting on the floor beside Johann Adam, nodding and grinning and sometimes frowning in puzzlement. But a story was unfolding to him. He was learning how the sphere happened to be. Laboriously he pieced together the fact that Adam and nine other men had foreseen what was to happen to the earth and its super-civilization. Knowing that destruction of modern culture was on the way, they had sought to preserve some part of it for humanity when--and if--men emerged from the darkness at some future time. They had constructed the globe and filled it with every scrap of knowledge known to man. Then they constructed the last room of all, the chamber in which Adam was to lie awaiting the renewal of his suspended life, or the death that would be complete.