refused to deliver up, was a double handicap. Immediately
upon its loss, Shar had set himself to reproduce it from mem-
ory; but unlike the more religious of his ancestors, he had
never regarded it as holy writ, and hence had never set him-
self to memorizing it word by word. Even before the theft, he
had accumulated a set of variant translations of passages pre-
senting specific experimental problems, which were stored in
his library, carved in wood. Most of these translations, how-
ever, tended to contradict each other, and none of them re-
lated to spaceship construction, upon which the original had
been vague in any case.
No duplicates of the cryptic characters of the original had
ever been made, for the simple reason that there was nothing
in the sunken universe capable of destroying the originals,
nor of duplicatihg their apparently changeless permanence.
Shar remarked too late that through simple caution they
should have made a number of verbatim temporary records
but after generations of green-gold peace, simple caution
no longer covers preparation against catastrophe. (Nor, for
that matter, does a culture which has to dig each letter of its
simple alphabet into pulpy water-logged wood with a flake of
stonewort encourage the keeping of records in triplicate.)
As a result, Shar’s imperfect memory of the contents of the
history plate, plus the constant and miUenial doubt as to the
accuracy of the various translations, proved finally to be the
worst obstacle to progress on the spaceship itself.
“Men must paddle before they can swim,” Lavon observed