And it well might be. O'Hara himself had been exposed steadily now for the better part of an hour to a degree of contamination that the International Patrol considered beyond dangerous, and in his flights to the east and west he had plunged through belts exceeding .300 milliroentgens an hour. Was it not probably that these Americans in establishing their Atomic Curtain had simultaneously contaminated their two continents beyond endurance? The suicide of a race?
In an instant of panic, O'Hara swung in a tight arc to the north. He had, he felt, only the one chance to escape—a dash at maximum speed back to the Curtain and through it.
But, as instantly, he discarded that. Whatever it was that had got him through the Curtain in the first place could not be expected to work twice. He was convinced that it had been a kind of providential accident, something to do with that splitting blast of electrical power in the thunderhead, and he was here, within this Western Hemisphere, inescapably cut off.
His reason, too, came quickly to his rescue. These mountains and the far slope toward the Pacific Coast were smothered in their forests. And trees were life—biological life. If there was plant life there would be germination, bacteria—surely animal bacteria, surely animal life at however low a scale. Though perhaps not men.
Perhaps not men! Then this was indeed the grand adventure. He headed south again.
All these speculations and the resultant skittering about, as O'Hara said, had eaten into his flying time and he had not made the progress that he had anticipated, yet it was not quite two o'clock, not ninety minutes after he had crashed through the Curtain, when O'Hara saw a compelling flash of light upon his right. It was the first time that he had been conscious of the increasing clarity of the sun, no longer so obscured by clouds or ice fogs. O'Hara spiraled down toward a wide plateau, ringed with a lesser inner range of mountains.
The flash, he discovered, was reflected from a rectangular object, rather like a huge jewel, set into the face of a tall pile of masonry that reached some thirty stories high, a single needle rising from the snow-clad plain. Losing altitude fast, very nearly making of it a power dive, O'Hara pulled out of it level with the tower—for that was what it proved to be, a giant tower of stone and metal, expertly fashioned, a glittering and soaring pinnacle unlike anything that he had ever seen.
The flash was a reflection from the gemlike surface, which apparently was glass. The upper story seemed to be a kind of solarium, with six facets so arranged that they caught the sun constantly. The stories below it lacked openings of any sort, and O'Hara concluded that if in fact the tower had once been used for offices or dwellings those who lived there had relied entirely upon indirect lighting.
He was convinced that it was deserted now. There was a complete deadness to it, a stone and metal tower rising abruptly from a snow-blanketed plain, long abandoned, long forgotten. And descending lower, he could make out the geometric patterns of low structures and broad avenues, but with a skeletal emptiness about them, the roofs collapsed, the walls themselves in many places having toppled into the general ruin. A dead city, certainly, yet once it must have been a metropolis, culminating in its strange, massive tower before it died.
"Forgotten names from forgotten histories came back to me," he said. "The northwest coast—not Vancouver? Not Seattle? No, for both of them had been upon the coast itself. Spokane, then? Or possibly some city that had flourished after the establishment of the Curtain? But it did not matter, the place was dead, with the anonymity of the dead. A graveyard of a civilization that had been the mightiest on earth. Yet the proof that this civilization actually had existed—that it was no myth—was enormously stimulating to me. It was my second big moment."
The tower and the ruined city had taken his attention from the business of flying. Now suddenly he was startled by the rapid-fire of his scintillometer. It was recording .400 milliroentgens an hour—unendurable!
"The dead," said O'Hara, "were reaching out for me. They wanted me, an alien probing through the skies above their tomb. And I felt their hostility, as if a shower of warheads had come roaring up. The contamination was as murderous as any warheads would have been."
The tautness of his steep climb skyward and sharp swerve back toward the spinal cord of the continent precluded any further observations. He was now acutely alarmed. He expected at any moment to discover upon his body the raw violence of radioactive burns, he anticipated bleeding and there was at the hinges of his jaws a definite sensation of nausea. Yet moments passed without development of these symptoms. The nausea abated. He was not stricken yet, or if he was, the effects were not yet obvious. And this raised possibilities of conditioning to the contamination that had never been explored—that no one, in the world he knew, had dared to explore. It might yet prove to be that man could exist in these extremes of radioactivity.
Large mottled patches now were appearing between the pale blue-white stretches of endless snow. The mountain peaks and the high plateaus still presented their heavily drifted appearance, but in the deeper valleys an occasional ice-free river twisted, seeking its outlet either toward the east or west—the east, O'Hara remembered, would lead to the intricate arterial system that would at last merge into the Mississippi River, the continental sewer that dumped its burden of silt and debris into the swampland delta of—what was it? Louisiana? The whole once-familiar pattern of maps he had intensely studied as a child now was coming back vividly—the two mountain systems, Appalachian and Rockies, the great valley of the Mississippi, the Atlantic and Pacific coastlands, the spider web of fabulous cities, names like New York and Washington, Chicago and Kansas City, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and somewhere in these Rockies which he was now following were—or had been—Salt Lake City and Denver.
There was a definite excitement in these names that for O'Hara rolled back the drab present to that glittering past, when the wordtomorrowhad meant more than a repetition of today.
O'Hara felt positive now that he had established a second major fact. For almost two hours he had been flying these forbidden skies, yet no patrol—save the atomic radiation of the dead city—had so far challenged him. It was inconceivable that any important civilization could exist upon the northernmost of the two Lost Continents without patrolling its skies, and consequently, if a civilization did exist, it must have shifted to the south, leaving these wastes. But for some minutes past, he had observed a peculiar series of geometric designs, resembling the drawings of ancient Cretan labyrinths, far below him on the frozen surface. He now was approaching another of these, extending for miles upon the floor of a wide valley, and very cautiously, with his eyes constantly flicking back to his scintillometer, he began to descend toward it, diving.
As rapidly, his milliroentgen count began to climb, reaching .290 within the first five thousand feet of descent, then to .300 when his altitude was down to 30,000 and jumping very sharply at 24,000 feet to .325. The strange labyrinth was much too hot for inspection. But the regularity of its form seemed proof that it was man-made, and that decided O'Hara. He continued down until his altimeter registered 5,000 feet.
The labyrinth's pattern was precise. It was composed of an almost infinite number of thick parallel lines, joined at the ends, so that it actually resembled an endless pipe, though various segments of it were colored in a multiplicity of pastel shades—a vast farm of pipes, reaching for miles across the valley's floor, its purpose not apparent to O'Hara. His milliroentgen count now was approaching .400, and again he made that steep climb back to 40,000 feet.
These pipe farms soon were visible in every major valley, and further toward the east, upon the great slope of the plains toward the Mississippi, they were everywhere like the squares of a continental checkerboard, in some places partly obscured by snow drifts and in others lying exposed to the sun's brilliance.
For 130 minutes of continuous flying through this long corridor south of the Atomic Curtain the milliroentgen count had remained almost steady at .295, but at 2:30 P.M., and without an obvious physical reason for it, the count suddenly made an abrupt rise even at the 40,000-foot level at which he was flying. O'Hara tried swerving both to the east and west, also changing altitudes, but the contamination continued rising above .400 with every second's flying time. Here was a new phenomenon—a density of radiation that indicated some intense new barrier, and moments later O'Hara saw a strange, enormous white oblong reaching from east to west, not quite to the horizons but effectively spanning the area that he had determined composed the north-south corridor of least contamination. And such was the milliroentgen count that O'Hara felt it must in some way be a source—or excessive consumer—of atomic power. O'Hara's latitude calculation fixed his position as the southern part of the state of Colorado. The long corridor was in truth a closed rectangle, a box—a coffin without escape. He could only turn north again into it.
But the arc of his explorations had swung him well toward the east, and in these seconds he passed once more above the ruined debris of an empty city, the same pattern of collapsed roofs and time-desiccated walls extending for miles around a single sky-piercing tower of stone and metal with that glass-encased solarium at its summit. And this time, although it was gone in an instant, a place name fixed itself in O'Hara's mind, corroborated by his memory of latitude and longitude—the sky-high city of Denver.
His milliroentgen count was dropping back toward the .285 level he had anticipated, but all at once his motors cut out on him. His fuel was exhausted.
"There are such things as heroes," said O'Hara, and paused, tilting back in the comfortable easy chair of his Bloomsbury flat, a fresh drink in his hand. He took a long pull at the glass, reflectively. And for a moment it was as if we were stepping back across the Atomic Curtain, both of us, back from the Lost Continent, taking within a second's time a giant stride from unreality into the stodginess of present-day London. O'Hara smiled crookedly. "Yes," he continued, "there are such things as heroes—Tournant is rather close to it, I think. He has the courage to do what he can do, and to reject what he cannot. That's a hero in my book. But I'm not and never was, and when I heard the last unhappy cough from my motors and realized quite definitely that I was in for it, my knees were wax. No, not that crusty—they were jelly. When I understood that I was going down and that my craft, which until then had given me some sense of decision, was nothing now, dead metal under me—well, fear does crazy things to you. I screamed. It's true, I bellowed like a gored ox, striking both fists at my altimeter, shattering it. Until at last the needle, broken, jammed."
After that, he said, he was much too busy for theatricals. The peaks were coming up toward the belly of the plane like sharks' snouts in an open sea. He stalled to cut his landing speed, and at the last second pancaked on a meadow free of trees, cushioned by deep snow.
His craft was not damaged. With fuel, and without the waist-deep snow, he could have taken off again. These were the things a flyer automatically would check, the normal things. He was out of the craft, checking the terrain, when the third thing came to him and he stood there, cursing in the four languages that he knew best. He had forgotten his wireless. As instantly as he had gotten through the Curtain, whether help was or was not possible, he should have messaged his Wrangell base, for the only factor of this personal disaster that had actual significance was that the Curtain could be pierced—not once in ten thousand times, perhaps, but it could be done. And that information should have been relayed at once to Wrangell.
For the next half hour O'Hara worked furiously for contact, with only the nasty mocking whine of space coming back to him. He had flown too far. They could not hear him.
"It closed my record in the logs of the Patrol. Like Anstruther, I'd vanished, leaving nothing but hysterical last words, as valueless to science and my people as the twitterings of starlings on a summer evening."
Night deepened his gloom. He shut himself inside his craft, placing his automatic on the seat beside him, a loneliness that was like coma sapping him.
"Old Hendrik Hudson—drifting in an open boat among the floes. I think I really understood at last. For time had ceased to telescope for me. Time, too, had frozen. As it must in death."
But once, awakened in the night by a sudden howling that was shriller than the wind would be, he gripped his automatic, peering out, watching a ball of fire not far above the surface of the ground that vanished suddenly, as if puffed out. It did not come again. Or if it did, he was asleep, his will a victim of exhaustion and despondency.
When he awoke, the sun was high above the surrounding peaks. O'Hara broke out his emergency rations, afterward climbing from the craft to scoop up and swallow a handful of snow.
"What am I waiting for?" he wondered.
Yet he hated to leave the craft. It was his fortress, both physical and mental, his one link with the world beyond the Atomic Curtain—though a useless link now, he knew. It was futile to stay with it and, so far as he could foresee, futile to leave it. At last the very pressure of idleness drove him to action and he took his automatic, loaded it and strapped it beneath his flyer's jacket, then with his ice ax chopped down a score of small conifers and arranged them around and above his craft in a crude camouflage. He turned toward the forest that encircled the meadow and began trudging through the snow. But just beyond the first line of trees he stopped.
The snow there was trampled as if through the night a Rugby team had had a go of it, and lying there, used up, blackened with smudge, was a flambeau of sorts—a length of wood with charred brush lashed to it. O'Hara ran his finger through the soot. It left a smear of oil.
Petroleum! Life for the motors of his craft. And somewhere near—his search had purpose now.
"I don't know what the devil I really thought I'd do with fuel," said O'Hara. "Fly around in that infernal corridor, I suppose, like a bullfinch in an aviary, free as all getout until I wanted to go somewhere beyond it. The truth is, all that seemed to matter was the chance of taking off again. That's what the Patrol does to you—puts pinfeathers on your brains. I wanted that fuel. And bad."
The trail led backward through the forest, a series of lines converging as if the individuals of a herd had searched in scattered formation toward this one meadow on the top of this one mountain, yet a preponderance of feet had trampled south by east, and O'Hara followed that line, keeping his jacket open for quick access to his automatic and using his ice ax when he needed it to chop through underbrush.
"You've seen a gull walk, haven't you? He's out of his natural element and he waddles—fine enough flying, and very good in the water, but he walks—well, like a gull. That was how I felt on foot, scrabbling through that forest," said O'Hara. "Most of it was downhill work, which helped, and presently the brush thinned out and the trees got larger and fewer and I was doing a passing fair job of it, following that trail until it was well after noonday, when I leaned against a ledge of granite for a breath."
But he did not quite get it.
"I gulped at it—and then I gave it up entirely. For crouching on the ledge above was an enormous cat. When I say enormous, don't imagine a lion. The king of beasts is a stinking coward, but this creature stalking me was making a little game of it, a kind of homicidal little game—its eyes pale yellow with insanity and its two fangs a greenish yellow and larger than the tusks of a walrus. Had it leaped, I would not have known it, not for more than the instant it takes a severed jugular to spurt your life's blood out. As I say, I did not get that breath—I fired, quite sillily without aiming, but the bullet splattered through one of those yellow eyes into its brain."
And while it threshed, O'Hara walked less like a gull. But he was not altogether getting away from the creature. The sight of those tusklike fangs kept coming back to him, insistently, hammering away at some obscure little wrinkle of his memory, until at last the two words formed and were upon his lips, "Saber-tooth!"
It was absurd. It could not possibly be that. And yet it was—the cat had been a saber-tooth, or surely like the skeletons of those long-vanished, blood-imbibing killers of the North American continent.
O'Hara could not bring himself to put his automatic inside his jacket after that. He stuck to the trail of trampled snow, following it down the slopes of the mountain. Gradually the tracks seemed fresher, the snow less melted after it had been disturbed. He began to move more cautiously.
He was passing through a defile, toward an opening in the rock beyond, when he first realized that he was being watched. How long this had been going on he could not guess, for the indication was not conclusive—a shower of loose rock slid down from above. When O'Hara looked up, he thought he saw a head disappearing into the overhanging brush. He halted instantly but there was no sound, nor did the head reappear. After a few seconds he realized the stupidity of remaining exposed in this narrow passage, a clay pigeon for whatever might be hiding on the ledges above him, and he began running.
Once more small rocks came cascading down toward him, and this strange barrage continued, always just behind him, driving him along the trail of trampled snow through the defile. Whoever had preceded him had managed to get through, and O'Hara kept at it, breaking finally into the open—a sort of natural amphitheater. And there the trail ended. The footprints now diverged toward the walls of sheer rock, on which there was no snow to preserve them.
"I was trapped," said O'Hara. "They had driven me into it as you might drive a hare. It was possible, of course, to get out of that bowl—for they had got out of it!—by climbing up those walls, thirty or more feet, but for that I'd want an Alpine guide, preferably with the rope to pull me up. I turned back instantly toward the defile and made a run for it."
This time, when rock came down, it came in slabs. Nor was he able this time to detect any movement in the brush above.
"I might have got through," said O'Hara. "They might have missed me. But they seemed a little too expert and I preferred to wait, well back from the sides of the bowl, with my automatic ready."
They let him wait until after dusk. Then, very deliberately, a lighted flambeau was thrust out from behind a boulder high above him, definitely a test to see what he would do. He stayed where he was and did nothing.
Other flambeaux now began appearing, neither advancing nor wavering, but fixing him in the center of their glare for a purpose not yet obvious. It was a game they played, O'Hara felt, a childish hanky-panky. But there had been nothing childish in those slabs of rock.
A wild shout from the rocks above now startled him, and through the defile, with ceremonial lack of haste, a lone adversary was advancing, armed only with a tapering wooden club and wearing a garment made of skins that reminded O'Hara of Scottish Highland kilts, the feet and lower legs thickly encased in furs bound with spiraling rawhide thongs, a heavy parka covering the head and face—expert work, all of it. The intruder, although of lesser stature, moved forward with such confidence that O'Hara's automatic felt ridiculous to him.
"Unsportsmanlike," he said. "You just don't shoot a man whose only weapon is a piece of carved wood, particularly not when you know that perhaps a hundred of his crowd are hiding in the rocks above you. I shoved the automatic inside my jacket. As you know, I used to wrestle, and while I measured him at possibly one hundred eighty pounds, I thought I could manage, if they'd keep those slabs off me."
As they turned, facing each other in the dark, O'Hara was conscious that the number of flambeaux above him had increased and were inching forward, and very dimly now he could detect the outlines of their parka-covered heads. The game was approaching a climax.
It came with a rush. His opponent leaped suddenly, swinging the carved club straight for O'Hara's head, a blow that would have crushed his skull had it struck home, but he ducked beneath its arc, coming up under the descending arm. He grabbed it, whirled and threw his heavy shoulder up, sending his opponent flying through the air.
O'Hara picked up the club. His opponent, recovering quickly, now scrambled up and charged again, and O'Hara, his mind concerned most with the throng above, made his second decision—he dropped the club and stood there waiting. The next instant he was knocked from his feet by the ferocity of the charge, but in falling he locked his arms around his opponent's neck, attempting again a variation of the trick he'd used before, but momentum broke his hold and he fell backward. Instantly he saw the warclub rising.
The blow crashed into the muscles of his shoulder. He rolled beneath it, got onto his knees just as a second blow splashed blood into his eyes, then plunged again. His groping fingers found the club and wrenched it loose and this time he forgot it was a game—in close, he struck. His opponent toppled backward and lay still.
"I felt," said O'Hara, "rather like reciting a few lines from Horatio at the bridge. Or Spartacus. For my head was splitting. But the flambeaux were moving closer. I could see who carried them now—big fellows, perching up there in the box seats as if they might start throwing pennies to me. I waved the club to them. At the moment I think I would have fought the pack of them, for I was boiling—I'd been roughed up and I never had liked that. And then something touched my foot."
His adversary had crawled across the snow and was reaching out, hand supplicant. The parka had fallen back. It was a woman.
"She held on to my knees and looked up at my face, a mass of waist-long auburn hair now loose upon her back. And she was beautiful—her hair reflecting firelight from flambeaux, deeply auburn, her eyes the blue of glacier ice—a classic face, exquisite, but no tenderness as we know it. Only passion.
"Quickly she got to her feet, her arms locking me close against her splendid breasts, an Amazon who worshiped only strength, which I was glad I had, for those above us now were coming down the sheer walls of the amphitheater like so many chamois, bringing their flambeaux with them. Let me repeat—big fellows! Six-six on the average, and running upward of two-thirty, chests like bulls. And so damned agile! To see them scamper down that precipice toward me, depending on the quickness of their feet where I would certainly have found my hands not adequate, depressed me. I had the warclub and of course my .38, but if they meant to take me, neither was enough."
Instead, they lined up on both sides of him, then waiting while the woman motioned him to follow her, and began to lead the way. So at last they moved off in that strange procession, guided by flambeaux through the night, much as a bridal couple might move underneath an arch of swords.
"The simple act of splitting her noggin seemed to have inflamed—be damned if I'll tell it. Most natural thing in the world, I suppose, when it's the local custom. Yet it was embarrassing. And the studied indifference of our escort made it worse. How does one make love on the march, surrounded by a hundred men? For hours!"
Gradually they were descending the mountain, coming finally beneath an overhanging cliff into a narrow chasm, and there, around immense bonfires, a swarm of women and children waited—had waited, O'Hara now felt certain, throughout the long absence of their men, for all at once, silent but busier than ants, they began dragging great haunches of meat from a series of caves which were eroded deep into the stone face of the cliff, arranging them upon the fires to roast. O'Hara's woman indicated that they were to sit, and the men now ground out in the sand their smoking flambeaux and squatted beside them, silent, impassive, waiting.
Primeval, said O'Hara. There could have been nothing like it since—what were those ancient caves in France? Cro-Magnon man? The old boys who drew perfect little sketches of buffalo on the stone walls of caves? These silent giants, these women with their thick, abundant hair, the cliff and the caverns, the smell of roasting flesh, the constant scampering of fur-swaddled babies in the sand—primeval, certainly. The tribe—the clan!
Someone was chanting. It was the oldest of the men, using words that were no language that O'Hara knew, yet vaguely familiar. And as others joined in, the men's voices rich in a monotonous refrain, the women's working out a hymnlike counterpoint, O'Hara's woman arose and took him by the hands.
The chant changed now, a lament in it, a grieving for lost things, the women's voices dominating, keening, almost crystalline in iciness, like music locked within the chill stone of cathedral towers. O'Hara's woman led him toward one of the caverns, moving slowly, somberly erect. Within, deep in the gloom, a log fire smoldered. Smoke made fantastic shadows leaping on the living rock. She turned at last and stood there rigid, facing him.
Outside, the chant was changing now, a jubilating chorus of men's voices, gaining tempo until suddenly they ceased, and from the breathless silence finally a voice incredibly high, seeming incredibly remote, sang adoration.
O'Hara's woman freed his hand, then loosening a thong across her shoulders, shook herself, and stood there in the firelight nude. And the next instant she leaped at him, her hands like claws, tearing at his face and throat, driving him backward toward the entrance of the cave, back toward the clan. It was repetition of the struggle in the natural amphitheater, savage, passionate, and with O'Hara understanding now that he must master her or die. He swung his wooden club.
"She fell," he said. "I was getting expert at it—she fell, and that was it. Brutal, you think? Perhaps. I will not argue that. What mattered was that Nedra did not think of it that way. That was her name, Nedra—I learned that, as I was to learn so many things within the next few days."
But that learning came swiftly only after he understood their language. It was a decadent English, elided and bastardized and purified of abstracts, a working language for mountain people, verbs and nouns, only the simplest adjectives. The trick of understanding it was not to attempt to get it word for word—the words themselves no longer had their English identity—but by complete sentences, for three syllables might express an idea which in the original of his school days would have required ten or more words. Much of it depended of course on inflections, whether a question or a command or a statement of fact. And yet, slurred in his mind's ear, repeated rapidly, it suggested the more complex English structure, always excepting the abstract. Or ideas born since the establishment of the Atomic Curtain. It was not difficult, once O'Hara had grasped the basic sounds.
His key to it, his teacher, was Nedra. For two days and nights, by custom of the clan, O'Hara was not permitted to leave the nuptial cave, Nedra herself going only to procure what was necessary in food and water, returning then at once and always with that mating ferocity of her people.
"Violence," said O'Hara, "but not the implied violence of our corrupted European customs, not the ring and the finger, not the bridal veil—actual violence, the club and the ripping hands, and finally submission to the master sex, was implicit in their rituals as it was in their lives constantly. The original combat in that snow-packed amphitheater actually was our marriage by their custom, later consecrated in the chants outside the cavern. Neither a ceremony taken lightly—and not one forgotten readily. Not a blurred memory of dress uniforms and flowers but as sacred, I think. And vastly more impressive. As for courtship, as we know it, what is it but a rather futile attempt at premarital adjustment? Nedra had watched me kill the saber-tooth, and while I claim no valiance in it she had thought it admirable. She'd wanted me. I'd proved myself sufficiently before her people in the amphitheater. It was that simple.
"But with passion and loyalty and respect—which she demanded that I earn—did not come tenderness. Not then or ever. I had to learn that lesson. Nedra was not for the meek. And weakness would have sickened her. It was, I confess, disturbing to learn that I must always be on guard, that between us there could be no gentleness, that the carved wooden club, the symbol of marriage, must ever be ready to strike, but once I had got over my namby-pamby notions, I found myself—well, smug about it. I too could rule my cave."
Yes, a cave-dwelling people, said O'Hara, but not quite so primitive as he had supposed. It was on his third day with the clan, after he and Nedra had at last emerged from the nuptial cavern—O'Hara could follow the language by now, usually getting it the second or third time that something was said to him—that he discovered a facet of their culture that amazed him. He had gone with the gray-haired leader of the ceremonial chant, called simply the Elder—men's names, he was to learn, were functional, last names inconsequential—just beyond the chasm of the caves along a mountain trail with a group of children who were hauling fallen timber, when from a bank of dense ferns a giant bear reared up, a bear resembling the Kodiak that O'Hara had known in Siberia, beyond the Atomic Curtain, but vastly larger, an immense shaggy beast, awing, the rumble of the thunder in its throat.
The children froze. And before O'Hara could get out the .38 strapped inside his jacket, the Elder stepped forward, leveled his fist and fired—the spurt of smoke and flame and the sharp clack of firearms—then continuing boldly to advance, pouring shot after shot into the massive animal until it toppled.
O'Hara's surprise was intense. "I did not know you had these weapons," he said, and the Elder smiled. It was a .45 revolver, the butt of it worn smooth through countless decades of use, a type of gun that O'Hara had never seen.
"Weapon?" said the Elder. "It is called Colt, not weapon. We have always had them. Our people brought them when they came into these mountains."
"Then you were not always here?"
It was the Elder's turn to be amazed. "Always? No—it was not the best place to be always. We came here only to escape the sickness, in the time of my fathers' fathers. Long ago."
"The sickness?"
"You are one of us, you are of our people," said the Elder. "We know that because you use gunpowder, for we saw you kill the saber-tooth. If you had used an atomic gun we would have fled, for they are stronger than Colt—Colt cannot fight the atomic gun. But you are one of us, you must know these things."
"I don't know them," said O'Hara. The children were by now busily cutting up the giant bear, preparing it to take back to the caves. "I came from beyond the Curtain—"
"What does this mean, beyond the Curtain?"
"Beyond the Atomic Curtain, which shields this continent from that other world, my world, the Eastern Hemisphere. Beyond the oceans. Europe, Asia, Africa."
"These sounds mean nothing to us—Europe, Asia, Africa. Are they other mountains, perhaps along the Coast? We have not been there—it is too far and the risk of death is too great."
"You never go down from these mountains?"
"None of us. It would be death from the sickness—or worse than death, were we caught. Below the mountains is tabu for us. Were I to go, one of my people would fire Colt at me. It is our law."
"But you permit others of your people to come here?"
"That is permitted, yet it has never happened until you came. We saw you far above us, in that great flying thing you rode. We had never seen that thing before, but there are stories—myths the older people told when I was young—of the flying thing that men could ride across the skies in, as the condor does. Did you come in it from another mountain, beyond the regions of the Degraded?"
"From the north," said O'Hara. "Beyond the ice and the Curtain. But what are the Degraded?"
"The atomic people, if you can call them people. Those who live in the lowlands below the mountains."
"A different people?"
The Elder looked incredulous. "You must know these things. It is impossible not to know these things."
"But I do not know them," said O'Hara. "Beyond the Curtain we know nothing. Who are these atomic people and how are they different from you? And the sickness you mention. Tell me—"
But it could not come all at once, not while there remained the chore of cutting up the giant bear and gathering wood for the clan's fires burning on the floor of the chasm. The Elder talked as he worked, instructing the children—they were, O'Hara learned, considered the clan's children, not the children of individual couples, for the idea of the family had been expanded to include the entire clan. One family, with the Elder heading it, two hundred of them living communally, owning nothing. Even their weapons—Colts—were property of the clan, handed down from generation to generation. They worked as a unit, directed by the Elder, with strange little islands of technology in their otherwise crude culture. For instance, they knew about ores—they smelted metals and were expert in fashioning them, making the utensils of their working lives, the bowls and pots and knives they used, and the cartridges for Colt. Their mountains were rich in both copper and iron, and when later O'Hara saw their diggings, the evidence was there of long usage and a more advanced technology, much of which the clansmen no longer understood. Among the Elder's most treasured possessions was a large glass retort, once part of a rather extensive chemical laboratory that now lay in ruins, its purpose no longer known to the clansmen, who did not know the manufacture of glass. The Elder considered his retort a sacred vessel—sacred through antiquity alone, however.
"Our fathers who came here from the lowlands understood these things," he explained. "It was a magic, perhaps, that they needed there—perhaps it saved them from the sickness. But we have not needed them and their use is forgotten. We no longer know the ceremonies for them."
"This clan is the only one to escape the sickness of the lowlands?"
"No, there are others. Many of us came together from the lowlands, fleeing together—some of us came here, others went to other ranges there, and beyond there," said the Elder, pointing. "And beyond there—many clans, but not so many as those who stayed in the lowlands and were lost."
"You see these clans?"
They never saw them. They were related peoples, but without any political or blood ties, for the constant incursion of the atomic peoples—the Degraded—made any close association of these mountain clans impossible. Always, the Elder said, the thousands of the Degraded swarmed up through the valleys, searching for the mountain people, hunting them.
"For them, the Degraded, there is never any work—they do not need wood for fires or animals for food or copper for their utensils," said the Elder. "There is no risk in their lives, other than the risk of hunting us. They do not want to destroy us—they want only to take us to replenish their blood, to halt the sickness. But we wish death to mating with them. They are animals. Surely you know?"
"I do not know."
"They were like us once," said the Elder. "That is the story of my fathers' fathers—they were like us once, when all of us lived in the lowlands, the great plains toward the rivers. But that was in the first years."
"What do you mean by the first years?"
The Elder tried to answer. "It was a time of great things and great triumphs. No one was hungry and no one needed to hunt for food. Have you seen from the flying thing the vast glistening colored objects lying in the valleys? That is a part of it—that was left from the first years. People lived in piles of stones and the sun provided them with everything they needed. But it was long ago. It has no meaning now, no real meaning that I understand. For something happened that had to do with the sickness and our people fled from it. I had heard the old men of the clan, when I was a child, thirty years ago, attempt to explain what they remember their fathers telling them and they could not make it clear to me."
"Thirty years ago. You were a child then?"
"Yes, thirty years ago. That is an old age, older than most."
"These children—?"
"Two and three—with us they mature slowly. Among the Degraded they are old at twenty, older at twenty than I am at thirty."
"Tell me," asked O'Hara, "what is Nedra's age?"
"She has lived nine winters. This is the tenth of them."
O'Hara felt as if the earth had shuddered under his feet. Nedra was ten—for a moment he thought that possibly they reckoned time differently, but the Elder's own words refuted that reasoning—nine winters! She was in her tenth year, mature—in many ways much more mature than women of his own world at the mating age, certainly without the protective claptrap of sentimentality and romantic misconceptions. Was it, then, strange that the degenerated emotions of old age were absent from these people? Passion and ferocity, which were the attributes of youth, but not malice and tenderness. When the life span was cut so short there was not time for these. Returning later to his cavern, he entered with a sense of active guilt, of shame, but the intricately carved wooden club was lying on the floor, significantly, and Nedra was waiting with that look of adoration that he now recognized as the adoration of a child's mind, but she was not a child—she was magnificently dangerous, splendidly strong and quick, knowing what she wanted, and without absurd squeamishness about it.
"I am waiting for you, O'Hara."
"Yes—I see you are. But never mind that club. We'll get along without it—"
"How?" She asked it simply. She could not conceive of placid submission, nor, after that, could O'Hara. It was another turning point.
What the Elder had meant by the first years was never made clearer, but O'Hara, remembering the long-forgotten books of those musty Oxford cellars—the books that had so fascinated him in school—concluded that the first years meant the decades immediately after the establishment of the Atomic Curtain, an historic milestone that these mountain clansmen no longer understood, now lost to them after the rapid succession of many generations, one each ten years. But concerning the sickness of the lowlands, the Elder was better informed. For it was a continuing thing, present among the atomic peoples even now, and the constant dread and loathing of the clansmen.
"What they eat," said the Elder, "is abomination. It grows in the lowlands in those immense systems of colored objects that are like pipes—if you did not see them from your flying thing I will take you to a peak from which you can see them. And these pipes are contaminated, making their food a poisonous stuff—yet they no longer have any other way to feed. Nor do they wish to feed in any other way. For everything is done for them by atomic power—"
"Who does these things by this power for them?"
"These things are fixed. No one needs to do them."
"They are automatic?"
"We do not know your word, but no one needs to do things for the atomic peoples. Everything is done. They have contrivances to work for them—the colored pipes to grow their food, and the water that they drink and that flows in these pipes they draw from the ocean that is said to be beyond the mountains toward the west, but the water also is contaminated. The earth itself—the soil of the lowlands—is contaminated, soaked with atomic wastes. Their cities—"
"What about their cities?"
"None of us has seen them, but we have heard that they exist. Our fathers' fathers told these things—once they built places out of stones and metals, like mountains with many caves, but they fled from them in the first years. That was before our people left. They were driven by the sickness—"
"How does the sickness injure them?"
"It is in their get."
"Only in their get?"
"Only in their get—it does not injure those already born, but their get become different. Each generation they become more and more like animals. Undeniably animals, though once they were like us. Now their arms are much longer than ours and their feet are different, their jaws are thrust out, their heads are shaped oddly, sloping back above the brows of their eyes—"
"Like apes?"
"Apes?" asked the Elder, puzzled.
"Never mind. You say this sickness comes from what they eat and drink and the cities that they live in?"
"From everything that is about their lives. The Tubes, the Sun Beneath the Earth—"
"What are these?"
"We do not know. We have never seen them. They were devised after the first years, when our fathers' fathers fled. But the legends are that the Tubes run everywhere beneath the crust of the earth, as the trails lie across the mountains, and that somewhere among these Tubes there is a Sun that glows, giving heat and light and power—and something else that we do not understand, a strange protection, not against us, but against a great evil—"
"The Curtain!"
"You know what this evil is?"
"Perhaps. And I'll learn more. But tell me one thing now—why did your people flee this sickness?"
The Elder's dignity was impressive. "I've told you that—what happens to their get. It is better to fight and to struggle for your life. Man was not meant to exist, as a worm does, pallid and content beneath a log."
And that was as close to an expression of religious belief as O'Hara was to hear among these mountain clansmen. Security was evil in itself.
Considering this, O'Hara decided that in those first years these clansmen who had fled the fat and effortless life of the atomic regions had discovered that security had an inevitable price, and it had been a price that they would not pay. They had turned their backs upon it, fleeing from it, escaping the greatest of all scientific wonders because of the greatest of all scientific mistakes—an unforeseeable error that they grasped only by seeing its result, without understanding of the cause. Yet they must have known it once.
O'Hara knew it.
Atomic contamination, never quite deadly, low enough to be tolerated, nonetheless had wrought its havoc in the genes of the race.
It had reversed the process of evolution.
The people of the lowlands, the atomic peoples, were reverting, returning toward the ape, and at a pace incredibly speeded up by some mutation within the reproductive genes that forced maturity at ten years of age, a generation every decade, ten to a century—twenty-seven since the establishment of the Atomic Curtain! But the rate of retrogression was immeasurably swifter than had been the slow climb upward since the dawn of time. For with the reversal of the process of evolution, an atomic disaster within the genes, had also come the reversal of the law that only the fittest could survive—the perfect atomic state, with security for all, was preserving and multiplying the predominant strain, those who were unfit!
Even these mountain clans who had fled, they too had taken that first short stride back toward the dawn. They had got back to the simplicity of life and the magnificent stature of Cro-Magnon times. For even here, remote from the pipe farms and the reservoirs of distilled and contaminated sea water, the radioactive food and drink of the lowlands, the dangerously hot power plants—even here there was always a degree of radiation. O'Hara's scintillometer had shown .285 milliroentgens an hour just before his craft had crashed—not dangerous, as veterans of the International Patrol reckoned danger, but over a period of time a factor never fully evaluated.
Adults at ten! Old men at thirty! And, as the Elder said, even sooner in the lowlands.
The Elder had described the atomic peoples as animals—as apes—but O'Hara was puzzled by these accounts of scientific achievement, the atomic weapons, the vast pipe farms which were the sources of food, the distillation of oceans, and the Curtain itself. Surely these were not the product of inferior minds, and as surely there must be somewhere in the lowlands another people, a superior people who had conceived and who directed the operation of these superb contrivances. But if there was such a people, the Elder did not know of them.
"The people of the mountains and the Degraded—there are no others," he insisted. "There cannot possibly be others, for if they lived there, they too would have the sickness."
O'Hara could not believe this. Yet he confessed it did not seem to be a greater contradiction of the possible than that a cave-dwelling race should employ gunpowder and understand the lightning properties of petroleum.
The petroleum remained for him a goal to be attained. The Elder was evasive, and Nedra, who would have told him anything she knew, considered it a mystery she neither comprehended nor cared about.
"Why talk of their torches?" she demanded. "If we need them, they will give them to us. Am I not enough to amuse you?"
"Yes, Nedra, but I want to know—"
"Are you really one of us, O'Hara? You ask questions that could interest only an old man of thirty, yet you cannot be more than twelve. You are restless, you are unhappy with me. I am not beautiful to you."
"No woman anywhere is quite as beautiful."
"There is something that you want. Is it babies, O'Hara? Soon we will have them."
"For the clan, I suppose?"
"For the clan, of course. Would you like to take them with us and leave the clan, go to another mountain? Is that what you want? But the Degraded would catch us. Would you want your sons and daughter to breed with the Degraded? No, we must stay with the clan and our babies must be for the clan."
"Our babies," he said, for he had forgotten that. There would be babies. And before he was an old man they would be older men. And Nedra—Nedra would be gone.
"In the place that you came from in the flying thing, O'Hara," Nedra was saying, "are the people there like me?"
"Not like you, Nedra. But they would admire you."
"As you admire me?"
"Yes."
Then, peremptorily, "Admire me, O'Hara, and let us begin to have our babies."
The eternal antidote! Wherever women were, they had this cure for restlessness. And there was something to it. He was not going to find, on either side of the Curtain, a life more idyllic than this. They had drawn a screen of skins across the mouth of the cavern and their log fire gave sufficient light and warmth; they had eaten together and now they were lying together on a heavy pad of furs, Nedra luxuriating in the tigrish grace of her naked body. Was there more than this?
"Nedra," he said at last, "I've got to know about the torches."
"The Elder knows these things. Ask him."
"Where does he get the petroleum?"
"That is a secret word. I do not know it."
"The oil—the stuff that burns in them. The black water."
"Why do you need to know about the black water?"
"For my—for the flying thing."
"That makes it fly?"
"Yes, Nedra."
"You want to fly away again?"
"I want to fly, though perhaps not far away. Perhaps that can't be done—not far."
"You wish to fly above the lands of the Degraded?"
"Perhaps."
"Then I will kill you."
"No," he said, "you won't. You must understand this, Nedra. As it is your nature to love, it is my nature to fly."
"Then I have not been a strong mate for you. I have been too weak, but I—"
"Leave the club where it is," O'Hara laughed. "And I'll talk no more to you of torches."
But with the Elder he was finally more successful. It came about through the Elder's reverence for the weapon he called Colt. The mechanics of it had an almost ecstatic fascination for him. He would take hours to explain the workings of each part, diagraming it in the sand before the caves, stopping from time to time to recite some victory he had won with it, a giant bear, a saber-tooth, a monster ground sloth that had come wandering from the lowlands.
"And do you know what makes it eternal?" he asked O'Hara. "It is the black water of our torches."
"I understand about the black water," said O'Hara instantly, determined now to trade on the Elder's reverence. "For that is what takes my flying thing into the air, like a bird."
"The black water does that?"
"When certain things have first been done to the black water. Would you like to see it?"
The Elder drew himself erect, a gaunt six feet eight, his face turned upward to the sky. "I would like to see the flying thing go up."
"Then I must have the black water."
"We will go to the place tomorrow."
"And we must boil it. We must build a machine, something like the machines you use for smelting copper. Come into the cavern, I will draw the parts for it in secret for you. I will show you on the walls of the cavern how it must be done."
"We can make this machine?"
"It will take time. But if you can make the cartridges for Colt, you can make this machine. We will do it together."
Using a pointed splinter of obsidian, O'Hara tediously worked out the design for a rudimentary still, sufficient, he was certain, for refracting kerosene. "This part must be copper," he explained to the Elder. "A retort to contain the black water."
"I see it, O'Hara."
"And here we must have pipes. Like a hollow reed, like the barrel of Colt. Can you do this?"
"It can be done. We will make a rod of clay and dip it into molten copper. When it cools we will wash out the clay."
"That will do it. You must have a very hot fire here—I think that if we spray black water on a bed of coals—with perhaps a bellows here—"
"You must draw that."
"Here it is. And we will need these coils—we will bend the copper pipes for this—"
O'Hara rapidly continued drawing. The sketches were making some kind of sense to the Elder.
"They are like the bright clear metal that I showed you in the old place," he suggested, and O'Hara nodded—like the glass retorts in the abandoned laboratory.
"This is the machine," he said. "The black water will become colorless, and with it, then, the flying thing will soar into the sky. But first we must have black water."
"We will go for it in the morning," said the Elder. "It will take two days to reach the lake that has it. I must go now—your woman is angry. Women do not like these secret things."
When the Elder left, Nedra seized O'Hara's arm. "It was evil of you to make these drawings," she burst out, angry. "They are like the drawings of women who design new pots. They are unmanly."
"You think I am unmanly, Nedra?"
"When you draw these things, yes."
"You think so, Nedra?" He moved backward quickly, seizing the carved club and then walking very slowly toward her.
When at last it was over, and she turned sleepily on the bearskin at his side, her voice, for once, seemed almost gentle. "We have begun our babies, O'Hara. And I will never leave you now."
With dawn, the Elder marshaled his caravan for the journey to the lake that had the black water—a natural pool of petroleum, O'Hara felt certain. And Nedra, alone of all the women, was going. The Elder had his say upon that issue—a scornful speech, addressed to O'Hara, concerning the proper management of women. But Nedra ignored it. Her arms were taut around O'Hara's neck, her face obstinately buried against the brilliant blue of his jacket.
"She will delay us," the Elder insisted. "And we must travel swiftly a great distance. We must cross the valley below us, and if there is trouble we cannot wait for a woman to keep pace."
O'Hara smoothed Nedra's hair. "Nonetheless, she is going."
"Then she is your burden."
"Yes, my burden. I understand."
The Elder lashed out the order of the march, and the youngest clansmen fanned out in front as scouts, a hundred yards apart, with those who followed moving now in groups of two at intervals of five minutes, dispersal against a fire-power far more deadly than the guns O'Hara knew. The Elder stationed O'Hara and Nedra as the second of these groups, so that their pace would be determined by the scouts out front. In this order, and proceeding at a dog-trot, the party swiftly descended the flank of the mountain toward the small valley intervening before the next range.
They were soon down upon the valley's floor, moving steadily through head-high grass broken now and then by densely wooded groves of aspen, and by noon they were crossing the ice of a narrow stream, heading toward a thicket. The Elder, pressing up from behind, now urged O'Hara to increase his speed—the scouts, he warned, having crossed the stream, were running for the lower slopes of the mountain across the valley.
"They are almost beyond danger," he explained, "and you cannot blame them. This is the point of risk, when they are not scouting carefully."
But Nedra needed no urging. They were climbing now, the grade curving sharply upward, exhausting, the icy wind of December cutting into the tissue of their lungs as if they were breathing acid. They reached the first shaggy line of snow-clad conifers and were pausing there, trying to determine where the route now led, when far ahead of them up the slope, a great burst of sound came roaring and a thin column of ocherish fuming matter shot up toward the sky, flattened at the top, changed coloration rapidly toward mottled red, then seemed to sag, drifting down toward the earth again.
Nedra seized O'Hara's hand.
Then down below them, just beyond the stream they'd crossed, another blast of sound came simultaneously with that tortured, soaring column of dark yellow matter, pustulant, and like a pustule bursting at the top, fuming into a blackish red, the color of dried blood. Obscene, O'Hara thought—it was obscene. A fire of filth.
Nedra was pulling at his arm. "Get down," she whispered. "Crawl—they do not see well and if we stay down, going from rock to rock, it may be that they'll miss us—"
"They?"
"It is the Degraded. Down below us in the valley."
O'Hara took out his .38, kneeling by Nedra and watching for movement on the slope below. "Nedra," he whispered, "is that it, that fuming matter—the atomic weapon?"
She did not answer. He reached out, touching her, and slowly turned. She was staring straight ahead.
And standing there beside a mass of crumbled granite, gray like the stone itself, his hulking body naked, neither clad nor furred, incredibly long arms now swinging as his weak eyes focused under bone-ridged brows, a man—though not a man—was raising in his ugly hand a shining tubelike object.
"Fire now, O'Hara," Nedra was saying. "Make them destroy us. They are around us now. They want to take us, not to kill. You see, that one—and that—"
"Nedra, I want you to run. When I fire—"
"It is too late. Kill me, O'Hara."
"No, Nedra," he said, but he pressed the .38 against her side. "We can always die, and if they try to separate us, I will do it. But it's you they want—if they see I'll kill you, they'll spare both of us. Can you tell him that?"
"She does not need to tell me that," said the Degraded. "You live while she lives. Now, come—the Father waits for you in Washington."
PART THREE
"Suppose," O'Hara said to me, leaning forward suddenly, his empty glass in his hand, "you were to fly tomorrow to the Prefecture of Switzerland—leave London, say, at noon, and arrive there twenty minutes later and alight at the Bern airstrip and then start walking, away from the town into the countryside—into the mountains. You'd have the feeling of London clinging to you. At any moment, you'd think, you could return to the airstrip and be again in London—in Bloomsbury, here—within twenty minutes, if you wished.
"Now, suppose further, that while you're walking through those Swiss mountains, you come upon a magnificent woman, larger than most women of Europe and more beautiful by far, auburn-haired, blue-eyed, dressed strangely in furs in a costume very like a Highlander's. And within a half hour's time she has attempted to knock out your brains and you, in defending yourself, have instead been forced to flatten her, and then have found that this was exactly what she'd hoped you would be able to do, and that henceforward she is your woman—not your slave but your mate—the mother of children who will be yours but who will not call you their father.
"And still further, suppose that suddenly from these same Swiss Alps, not twenty minutes from where we're sitting this moment, drinking ourselves into a mild sort of bender, a horde of manlike creatures, uglier than apes because they are men and not apes, surrounds you and destroys the illusion of an ancient time—destroys it with atomic weapons and the evidences of atomic-powered industry—ah, you see?
"We have not telescoped only the time involved since the establishment of the Atomic Curtain around the two Lost Continents of the Western Hemisphere. We have also telescoped time as far back as one hundred thousand years ago—we have got back to the Java Man, and yet we're also far ahead of where Europe and Asia are today, all within the present moment. For you're only twenty minutes from London!"
"It would take more than twenty minutes to get from here to the Rockies of North America," I pointed out.
O'Hara laughed. "It would take," he said, "two hours of straight flying time. And the Twelve Old Men of Geneva are now aware of that. Two hours—imagine it—from where we sweat and scrabble for our daily bread, and we could live forever without so much as wiggling our smallest toes. The abundant life, old man—food for the taking, shelter and absolute peace and freedom, and only those who are bored with that engage in anything resembling human struggle as we know it. And we can have that. All of us. Have it there in North America—or here, if we wish—for by now the Twelve Old Men must be reading my report, sent on from Croydon after I landed just a while ago. What do you think they'll do about it?"
"I don't know, O'Hara. You have not finished."
"No," he said, and filled our glasses, "I haven't finished, have I?" He drank, his eyes intently watching me. "You want the full picture, don't you? Well, you shall have it. Let your mind step back into that plane I mentioned, and take that two hours' flight across to the Rockies, to southern Colorado, beyond the Atomic Curtain. We're in a mountain valley, remember—? Nedra, and I, facing a gentleman who speaks that strangely bastardized English I've described for you—and speaks it with a certain dignity, as if used to command. And in his ugly hand he holds that shining tubelike object that creates those hideous explosions that destroy—and without trace—his enemies. The atomic gun.
"I have described him. Apelike yet hairless, stooped and hulking, his skin as gray as the granite of that mountain, a revolting thing, though I've seen men in London's streets quite as revolting. What perplexed me—amazed me—was the paradox of his speech, for as I say, it had a certain dignity that could come only from a mind that had been schooled. But the others of his patrol who now were coming around the rocks toward us, moving quite slowly as their weak eyes constantly kept watching for the scattered mountain clansmen, were, I was to learn, by far his inferiors. They were the horde, the masses if you please, while he—and by sheer accident of birth, for in that society of which he was a member, to be born with intelligence is indeed an accident—belonged to that most tyrannic of all aristocracies, the oligarchy of brains. They called him the Son."
Nedra, O'Hara said, was pressing tremblingly against the muzzle of the .38 he was holding at her side, watching the Son with an expression of absolute loathing, nor did she then or ever see the Son as any different from the members of the horde—the difference in intellect being meaningless to her. "A blow," said O'Hara, "to the bright boys of this earth, had they seen her face as I was seeing it. But I do not think it was a blow to the Son. He expected only loathing from Nedra, and if he could have had her, physically, her loathing would not have mattered to him. He knew—that is, he had been taught—that women of her kind were desirable for breeding purposes, as a means of retarding the reverse process of evolution, desirable from the standpoint of the race, but he was utterly lacking in aesthetics—a lovely woman or an ugly one, the flower or the weed, he did not and could not differentiate. And not through lack of intelligence, for he had something resembling that—but because, I think, the essence of romance and the appreciation of beauty is escape. And from what was he escaping, he and his kind? They had everything—everything, including the sickness. That alone perhaps they wished to escape, and that was a simple matter of biology.
"The real truth is," said O'Hara, "they wished to escape the sickness only because the thought of escaping it had been thumped into their brains from the moment when it was first realized that they had brains—so few of them had. It was no inherent wish. Actually the masses were quite content to go along as they were going, back toward the ape, the lizard, the fish, the primal scum. The masses of North America—both the Americas—are quite content. It is that thought that must be terrifying at this instant the Twelve Old Men of Geneva. For the masses anywhere always are striving toward contentment, and now—well, they can achieve it! Our masses, too. The Twelve Old Men know that now. And yet they also know—as Nedra knew instinctively—the price of it."
The Son, said O'Hara, now indicated the route they were to follow, pointing down the valley. "We must go at once," he announced, "for the cold of night will come swiftly. You-who-fly," he said, his eyes meeting O'Hara's, "are responsible for the woman's life. Remember, if she dies by the metal rod that you are holding against her, you will die instantly. Now, march."
For two hours they proceeded, but with nothing of the cautious and skillful precision that the mountain clansmen had effected before the attack, for although the Son remained just behind them, constantly ready to prevent their escape, the rest of the horde, three hundred when assembled, shambled aimlessly along in groups of two or ten or fifty, pausing now and then to explore an unusual rock formation or to feel the bark of trees, to tear an insect's tiny body to pieces, or simply to stop, having for the moment apparently forgotten where they were going, or why. Only a sharp command from the Son made them resume the march, always apathetically, neither resentful nor willingly, as a troop of small rhesus monkeys might proceed through a particularly interesting part of the forest.
"You called me 'you-who-fly,'" said O'Hara, speaking to the Son. "How did you know?"
"You were watched," said the Son. "When you came through the Curtain, The Father knew of it at once. The Father knows everything that happens."
"And you are taking us to him?"
"Yes. In Washington."
"Does he know you've captured us?"
The Son looked puzzled, the skin above his bony eye sockets wrinkling up. He seemed uncertain of his answer for a moment, but then his scowl relaxed. "The Father knows everything," he said, as if that bit of catechism demolished any doubts. "He thinks of everything. He sent us here into the mountains to return with you."
There was some interest in this game, watching the Son's mind struggling with unscheduled questions. "Suppose," O'Hara asked, "we had not come down into this valley today? How would you have captured us?"
"It would have been done."
"I see—the Father would have thought of something else?"
"Yes."
"But what?"
"Whatever would have been the best thing possible. If he wished, the Father could have destroyed these mountains. All of them."
"Why doesn't he? The mountain people are your enemies."
"Oh, no, we have no enemies." The Son was speaking now with greater surety, for these were obviously lessons he'd been taught. "The mountain people are instead a medicine. As the Father cultivates some medicines in test tubes, so he cultivates the mountain people in the medium in which they thrive."
"He permits them to exist?"
"He encourages them to exist," the Son replied. "He stimulates them."
"How?"
"By sending us to fight with them."
"But that destroys them."
"Only some of them. And that stimulates those who survive. Also, it rids their stock of those unfit to multiply."
"An admirable arrangement," said O'Hara. "As you say, the Father thinks of everything. I am beginning to want to meet him."
"You will," the Son said. "You will meet him soon."
They were coming out now into the thickly forested valley that opened eastward toward a rolling plain, then abruptly, sheered off, either by blast or fire, the forest ceased, and before them lay one of those vast and multi-hued farms of pipes which O'Hara had seen earlier from the air. Each section of pipe was roughly four feet in diameter, its surface slick and with a temperature that O'Hara by touch estimated at eighty degrees, the ends joined as he had observed so that it was in fact an endless coil, extending for miles.
"You must climb over these," the Son explained.
"What are they?"
"Photosynthetrons for western Kansas, although not all of their produce is used here—the solar rays in this region are more favorable for this particular food, much of which is needed in the cities of the Atlantic East. We send it there in the Tube."
"The Tube?"
"We are nearing its local terminal." The Son was pointing toward the approximate center of the pipe farm, from which now a sudden new eruption of these hairless manlike animals—despite their speech, O'Hara could not think of them as men—came clambering, their faces stamped with that unthinking emptiness of the masses, herded along toward the approaching party by another of their kind, who, like the Son, bore in his hand the shining tubelike weapon that O'Hara was to learn was both the symbol and enforcer of authority. "These are," the Son explained, "Emporians—their city is a very ancient one, although its site was often transferred in the old times, before the deluges began. The Son you see among them tells me that they expect another deluge soon to remedy their serious overpopulation. You will go with him."
"Another Son?"
"Oh, yes. The Father does not lack for Sons. I leave you now—my assignment is the valleys of this mountain range."
And while he turned, the two masses were commingling, so that the task of separating them was like the task of shepherd dogs with sheep—a division of the herd, not by specific individuals, but numerically, the two Sons shouting as they cleaved the shambling and always apathetic horde apart. To O'Hara it seemed an astonishing performance, the docility of the masses, for surely behind their dim eyes must be some semblance of a brain—surely they must know that those who went toward the mountains were to be used for combat purposes, exposed at least to the minor risk from the Colts of the mountain clansmen, yet apparently it did not matter to them, whether war or the placid test-tube existence of a city like Emporia, the sole difficulty that the Sons encountered arising from the inability of the masses to grasp the fact that they must be separated, that before the tumult could cease some of them must direct themselves toward the mountains and some return to the city. It was like the insensate division of an amoeba—a division directed perhaps by a sublime intelligence but without either the acquiescence or comprehension of the masses.
More and more, observing the Degraded—the only less than bestial stupidity of the horde and the derived intelligence or trained reflexes of the Sons—O'Hara was conscious of feeling that it was indeed a sublime intelligence that guided them, something they accepted without challenge as infallible, which in the inevitable pattern of such conceptions that spoke of as the Father but which more probably was a cabal of the more superior of the Sons, a ruling organism probably not unlike the Twelve Old Men of Geneva.
But to Nedra such reflections were not only senseless, they were silly. The masses of the Degraded, the Sons and even the Father were only varying terms for describing a loathsome people—worms, the clansmen called them. And only his curiosity kept O'Hara from tending to agree with that.