"You see?" said Nedra. "You should have killed me earlier, in the mountains, for this is the way it goes when you deal with the Degraded—you are passed from band to band, always deeper into the contamination in which they live, always with less and less chance of escaping them. They will be taking us now down into this city of theirs, Emporia, and how then, O'Hara, do you propose that we shall ever get away?"
There was truth in this. But O'Hara could not see that they were really worse off than before. "Let me coin a phrase or two," he said ironically. "While there's life, there's hope, and we can only die once."
"Those are the worst of lies," Nedra answered, her chin set stubbornly. "You can die a thousand times, each time more horribly than the times before, and while there is life it sometimes happens that it's only life to die again. Are you afraid to die, O'Hara?"
"Not afraid, but reluctant."
"Why? Are better nights coming in our lives than those we passed together in our cavern?"
"Not better, Nedra—but as interesting, perhaps, and certainly I would not wish to cancel out that possibility. A man who is dying of thirst in the middle of the desert does not seek death because the water that he may reach will not be sweeter than the water that he once had drunk. But it's more than that—more than the carrot dangled always just beyond the donkey's nose. In my world, beyond the Curtain, we cling to the belief that life itself is sacred and that always, finally, we may achieve redemption."
"What is redemption?"
"Life after death—a finer life than we have lived."
"You think only of yourselves," said Nedra, "and thinking only of yourselves, that notion may be true. But what of the clan? Have you forgotten, O'Hara, what the sickness does? We have got it now, you and I, as the Degraded have always had it—and what it has made of them it will make of the child that I am carrying."
"That you—?" he said, and gave it up, for there was no answer. None at all in logic, and Nedra had no concept of religion. Instead, he touched his lips against her face, a quick caress before she spoke again.
For the horde was separated at last, and those who were to go into the mountain valleys were already clambering back across the endless colored coiling of the photosynthetron, while the second of the Sons, his atom gun held cautiously, was now approaching them.
"We must go down into Emporia at once," he warned. "The Deluge is coming soon, and you should be safely in the Tube before it happens. The Father does not wish you to be drowned."
O'Hara tightened his arm around Nedra's waist, to avoid any surprise, and keeping his .38 beneath her ribs began to follow the horde further into the maze of pipes.
Six hundred yards deeper, between two pipes of an intense vermilion color, a square of some forty feet of opaque glass or metal or plastic now began to tilt upward as they approached, revealing beneath it a platform of what apparently was magnesium, and onto this platform the Son led O'Hara and Nedra and as many of the Degraded as it would accommodate. The platform now began to sink rapidly, without sound, down a shaft immaculately tooled from a similar glistening metal, descending for what O'Hara estimated to be two hundred feet before it reached bottom. A wall of the enclosing shaft now slid up, and they left the platform, which as instantly began to rise again toward the surface, while the panel closed automatically behind them. They were in the underground city of Emporia.
O'Hara, describing this, could not conceal, even in prosaic Bloomsbury, the intense excitement that he'd felt upon first seeing this fantastic culmination of an epoch. "The atomic epoch," he continued, "the world that Europe might have become except for that Third World War. If you were standing now, as I stood then, in the exact center of that strange and yet contemporary subterranean metropolis, I doubt you'd ever write another bit of pseudoscientific nonsense for those Youth League fans of yours. Because you are an amateur, old man—what your picked old brains consider rather weird, and hence commendable from the standpoint of a fiction writer, is in truth nearer facts—though there was more of weirdness in Emporia than you ever dreamed of. More astonishing probably than the Curtain itself, weirder than the Degraded, and vastly further into the domain of the inconceivable than a clan of Cro-Magnon people walking magnificently through the caverns of the Rockies, not two hours' flying time from where we're sitting now. I should have known—I am mildly psychic, a throwback possibly to some wild Boston Irishman of the twentieth century or a gandy dancer for the Santa Fe. These names confuse you, gandy dancer, Boston Irishman? I read them, later, in the incalculably tremendous library that the Father keeps in Washington, the archives of a dead democracy. Yes, there's Celtic blood in me, thinned out but quite sufficient to be psychic in such matters, and I should have known, when I heard Anstruther scream the day he vanished off the coast of Patagonia, that there were stranger things on earth than an impenetrable wall.
"You've seen the Roman catacombs? Marveled at them, that men can burrow into the earth like that? Then faintly, though very faintly, you understand how I felt standing there, with Nedra pressed close against me, shuddering—the glistening magnesium walls and avenues of subterranean Emporia extending in all directions from the shaft that pierced the city's roof, the lone communication with the surface of the earth.
"The shaft rose from a sort of plaza, a wide space, rectangular, with avenues dug through the living stone and lined with metal, top and bottom as well as both sides, and with the various compartments that would correspond to our buildings honeycombed out from each avenue, so that there really was no feeling of a city as we know it—only of immense tunnels, intersecting, none of the relief of roofs and chimney pots and varying architectural façades—a triumph of cubism, a nightmare of magnesium that reflected a pale green light from opalescent tubing recessed everywhere into the city's roof. And through these vast avenues the masses of the Degraded swarmed in aimless and quite effortless contentment.
"Literally," said O'Hara, "tens of thousands. The avenues were choked. It was worse than Trafalgar Square on a holiday, worse than the crush of devotees at the Grand National. Continuously they pressed through swinging doors into the food and slumber chambers of Emporia—vast rooms without the variance of so much as a welded seam, where, in great cauldronlike contrivances, the substance that was manufactured by the sun's rays in the photosynthetrons was constantly available, different foods, colored differently, tasting differently, all piped in from the reservoirs into which the photosynthetrons were drained—all automatic, not a hand raised to achieve the feeding of the populace except that which would guide the ladle to the mouth. The populace was fed—not quite like pigs, but with as little ceremony or appreciation.
"The slumber rooms were uniform. Around the walls were tiers of bunks, each six feet wide and eight feet long, each cushioned with a yielding dry material much like foam rubber but incredibly enduring. It was impossible to tear it, impossible to wear it out from the small friction it received. As a matter of record, it had been in those bunks, unchanged, for nearly two centuries.
"Sanitation? That was one of the major purposes of the Deluge, as they called it—a purging of the city, ridding it of both surplus population and uncleanliness, an alkaline solution that—but wait, I've got ahead of how I learned these things.
"The city of Emporia was impressive. Believe me, engineering reached its peak in those first years behind the Atomic Curtain, when fear and want had been abolished and all the genius of man was channeled into the creation of the perfect civilization—perfect, it seemed! And Emporia was sealed completely, locked in magnesium in its cavern blasted into the rock, its air a manufactured substance like its food, its drink pumped in along the Tube that terminated at Los Angeles, where the enormous purifying plant distilled sea water for half of the continent. But great as were these utterly nonmanual works, the most astonishing phase of life was life itself—the horde, the shambling tens of thousands eating there and sleeping there and breeding—
"You've always been libidinous. And I suppose you'd think there'd be a furor if a hundred thousand women, nude, came through the streets. But there was none—no furor, not so much as a wolf call, not a whistle in those choked streets of Emporia. One hundred thousand naked women, mind you, their bodies delicately green in that reflected light, frailer than the men, their breasts like pockets turned inside out, their hair as short as the men's and as bristling and their long arms clasping more often than not their strange little babies with the fierce protectiveness of all biological things—the rat fights for its young, and the hare, and the wren—but without real affection. One hundred thousand nude and speechless women, apathetically shambling among one hundred thousand naked men—"
A scene, said O'Hara, from Dante's hell. Men and women without emotion and without souls, or if souls cannot be bred out of the race, then without the intelligence to express them.
The particular band of the Degraded with which he and Nedra had descended into Emporia now had dispersed among these swarming thousands, but the Son who was guarding them remained, and O'Hara, as they proceeded along a glittering, nameless avenue, passing through several of the slumber and feeding chambers where the masses were eating or lying in their bunks, both together and separately, without shame, no longer could believe that there was any purpose or direction in their movement.
"Where are you taking us?" he asked the Son.
"Toward the Guild," replied the Son. "The Tube from Washington comes there. Also, all the Sons allotted to Emporia are bound there now, to escape the Deluge."
"The Sons escape the Deluge."
"The Sons and all those babies who have the prerequisites of Sons. We collect them from the women after we have tested their intelligence. That is done at birth, their brain waves proving those who will be eligible."
"Tested by a machine?"
"How else?"
"Their mothers don't object?"
"Why should the mothers object? When they have borne them, their task is done. It is we, the Sons, who have the tasks of collecting them and sending them to Washington for training there. It is we, the Sons, who have the task of fertilizing—"
"Only the Sons?"
"The males of the masses are sterile. That task is ours."
"There must be many Sons," said O'Hara.
"No, unfortunately. The ratio of Sons to masses constantly grows smaller and nowadays it is only by artificial insemination that the task can be accomplished. You will go this way," the Son said, indicating a door. "This is the Guild."
The chamber which they were now entering differed from the other immense halls of Emporia only in two particulars—the entrance through which they were passing consisted of double doors, like waterlocks, and in the center of the hall the metallic floor was cut away, with steps descending toward a series of still lower and smaller tunnels, the top halves of which had been removed. In one of these semi-exposed tunnels was resting at the moment a huge metal cylinder, some sixty feet long, with a hatch at its top into which various of the Sons were now descending, each bearing in his arms an infant, returning moments later empty-handed. After ten minutes of this, the last of the Sons emerged, the hatch was snapped shut and bolted, and the cylinder began moving, disappearing within a second past a valve into its tunnel.
A booming voice now filled the hall. The Sons turned from all sides toward a giant metal mirror, upon which, without apparent source, a brilliant light seemed reflected.
"The infants have departed?" asked the voice, and a chorus of the Sons answered in the stylized manner of a chant, "They have departed, Father."
"The man who flies has departed?"
"He has just arrived, Father."
"Send him to me. The hour of the Deluge is at hand."
The Son with O'Hara and Nedra motioned them toward a second cylinder now sliding in from its tunnel. "You must go at once," he commanded. "But you alone, not the red-haired woman of the mountains."
And Nedra turned. "You promised me, O'Hara."
"I promised you," he said, watching the Son's atomic gun. He remembered then the sudden, vile extrusion of the belching fire upon the mountain's side. It would happen easily. And now that it was here at last, his reluctance was gone—there was no fear, only an exaltation that was blinding to him, the first quick phase of death. "Are you ready, Nedra?"
"Yes," she said, and turning, drew her arms around him. "Now—"
The voice came booming through the hall. "O'Hara! Wait!"
And in that instant those among the Sons close to them crouched.
"Send both of them to me," the voice commanded, and the light upon the mirror gained intensity, becoming pure incandescence. "Send both of them," the voice repeated. "Will you put away your weapon now, O'Hara?"
He faced the light. "Only when we go together."
"You must go together into the Tube at once. The Sons will not hinder you."
"You are watching, Father? You understand about the gun?"
"Yes, I understand—I watch, as I watch everything. As I know everything. That uniform of yours—the International Patrol. You were based on Wrangell Island north of the Siberian Coast. Before that, you were based in the Falklands, flying southward to Antarctica. Born an Englishman of émigré descent—of American descent. Your ancestors were from this continent, before the establishment of the Curtain. You see, O'Hara? I know!" The reflected light now glowed as would the sun itself, and O'Hara was remembering the clansman's myth—the Sun Beneath the Earth. "You are afraid of me now, O'Hara?" asked the voice. "Afraid of knowledge?"
"I am not afraid of knowledge."
"Then you will come, you and your woman—now. I need you here."
The power of that voice, matched by the sunlike intensity upon the surface of the giant mirror, lent a sublimity to these words that kept the Sons in postures of obeisance, yet to O'Hara the tone seemed instead beseeching, as if the Father were himself afraid—as if dreading lest O'Hara might destroy himself. What else could possibly be the purpose of that display of knowledge of events beyond the Curtain? And that last phrase—"I need you here."
The Father needed him. He knew, as he considered it, that he was going. And Nedra knew it.
"O'Hara—no!"
Thrusting the .38 inside his jacket, he whirled, and seizing Nedra's hands, he lifted her, then going quickly down the steps and through the hatch into the cylinder. The Sons were leaping toward it all at once, and then the hatch snapped shut.
With a tremendous thrust, the cylinder shot forward, hurling O'Hara backward through the space inside. Both he and Nedra fell, landing upon the soft resilience of the foamlike rubber material that had lined the wide bunks of the slumber chambers of Emporia. The interior of the cylinder was barren of all else—a long, completely cushioned projectile that now glided smoothly with the sensation of motion eliminated by the lack of any way of reckoning it, no openings, no vibration, until within seconds as O'Hara managed to regain his balance and got up, seeing Nedra lying motionless six feet away, the cylinder began to lose acceleration rapidly. O'Hara again was jerked off his feet.
And as immediately, the hatch above them opened. The face of a Son appeared.
"You are in Washington," he said. "The Father awaits you."
Seconds, said O'Hara. Not more than twenty seconds since the hatch had shut, yet in those twenty seconds they had traveled in the Tube from western Kansas to Washington, a speed unthinkable if Washington were where it once had been.
Nedra was getting up.
He had been prepared for Nedra to fly into her tigrish rage and come dangerously toward him, compelling him once again to meet her in the endless struggle of a mountain clansman with his mate—a struggle that had begun to be exhilarating—she did not now so much as look at him. She stood with her eyes averted, her shoulders drooped, her bosom motionless, completely apathetic.
"Nedra?" he called. And she did not answer. She did not move. Her arms were hanging slackly, the palms of her hands limp against her thighs. O'Hara spun her around, looking into her eyes. If she saw him at all, she perfectly concealed it. Her eyes were glazed, her lips seeming loose. "Nedra," he cried, and shaking her, "Nedra, what is it? Do you hear me, Nedra?"
"Yes," she said. "I hear you."
Above them again, at the hatch of the cylinder, the Son was saying, "The Father waits for you. You must come now."
And for an instant, O'Hara heard in the Son's toneless voice an echo of Nedra's—the same flatness, a mindless monotone. Now, in confused panic, he was remembering the relative degrees of contamination he had discovered earlier, low when above the mountains, extremely high both toward the east and west of them and presumably even higher in these atomic-powered cities—remembering too that the people of the mountains had already taken that first stride back toward the dawn of man. And had this sudden intensification of atomic pollution struck Nedra, changing her, since daybreak, into another of these apelike people?
The thought of it revolted him. His reaction was violent. Unforgivable, he called it—forever unforgivable, for in the next moment he was guilty of that crime of crimes, unthinking passion, the closest that man ever comes to bestiality—these words were his own, the opinion that he voiced in Bloomsbury. He slashed his open hand across her face.
The blow did not stagger her. When he could see again, she had not moved—she was standing there before him, staring at him blankly, a thin smear of blood coming from her mouth.
"Nothing I can say, nothing I've done since, can possibly atone for that," said O'Hara. "For that was the ugly revulsion of a man who strikes his misshapen son, loathing the tortured image of himself. All men are capable of it, as I was capable of it. And even as it was done, while the palm of my hand was aching from the blow I'd struck, the abysmal shame of doing it was squeezing chilling fingers on my heart. And something was changed, something was dead—passion perhaps was dead. She was more to me than passion could possibly encompass after that. A man must get down from the high horse of his masculinity to know what I knew then, at last—I loved her. She was my bride at last. My wife."
He stooped, placing one arm gently beneath her knees and then lifting her unresisting body, and with his head bowed above her, he climbed the steps that led out of the cylinder.
The Son who had been waiting now turned his back upon them, saying, "You must follow me." He began at once, moving with the clumsy gait of the Degraded along the vast magnesium-walled corridor. And O'Hara with Nedra in his arms went after him.
The corridor was deserted. The Son, going in front, was without the tubelike atomic weapon that the Sons had carried in Emporia, the only quick way of distinguishing them from the masses. Yet here, in Washington, the city of the Father, there seemed to be no masses, nor in this long corridor were there any of the bunks or feeding cauldrons of Emporia. The endless procession with the bare feet of the Son soundless upon the metal flooring while O'Hara's heels echoed and re-echoed made it seem as if he were walking alone in the most horrible of nightmares—empty space. It continued undeviating, past the point of bearing, with O'Hara's arms losing any sense of feeling from the dead weight of Nedra's body, until abruptly, without explanation, the Son wheeled toward the wall and waited until O'Hara reached his shoulder. The wall was suddenly slid up before them, revealing a narrow flight of countless small metal steps, disappearing in distance infinitely far above the level of O'Hara's vision.
These steps they now continued to ascend, going very slowly, for O'Hara's iron strength was ebbing, until at last they reached a second level of the city, an immense hall, circular in design and with its walls fashioned of the same glaring magnesium that reflected the green lights recessed into the ceiling—a light that magnified the sensation of astronomical space and emptiness, as if this were an edifice beyond the earth, and not beneath it. Exhausted as he was, O'Hara still was able to conclude that this vastness was calculated, its purpose to awe, for it could not have had another use. Even the masses of Emporia, the teeming naked hundred thousands swirling in that satellite city's halls, would have been lost in this tremendous glittering void.
At the center of this enormous hall was a cylindrical shaft, and upon reaching this the Son again halted. A second panel shot open and the Son silently indicated that O'Hara was to enter.
"With you," O'Hara insisted.
"I cannot go further," said the Son. "It is forbidden."
"The Father forbids you to go further?"
"Yes."
"What would happen if you did?"
"I do not know."
"You are afraid?"
"I am not afraid. The Father watches me."
"He is watching you now?"
"The Father always watches. You must go now."
"You'll wait for my return?"
"But you are not returning. None who enters does."
O'Hara hesitated. But he knew already that there was no way of returning through the Tube to Emporia and through subterranean city to the plains and beyond the photosynthetron to the mountains. There were no odds at all. It was impossible. His only path was forward to the Father. He turned, and passed through the panel which closed instantly behind him, shutting off the sight of the kneeling Son.
The floor of the shaft now began rising swiftly. When at last it stopped, another panel opened, and O'Hara with Nedra in his arms walked out into the radiance of the sun itself.
He was uncertain how long he stood there, his sightless eyes aching. And if this brilliance also had the purpose of humbling him, it failed, for anger became defiance, the crazy courage of all trapped animals.
"If I could see," he cried aloud. "If only I could see—"
"You shall see, O'Hara," said the voice. "And I rejoice that you have chosen me above death."
As the sentence was done, the volume of the voice was dropping so swiftly that the final words seemed no more than a whisper, close. The brilliancy too was diminishing, and light was taking form and shape.
"When you have seen," the voice was whispering, "you will no longer be angry, O'Hara. You too will rejoice. Consider this, all your adult life you have constantly wondered what would lie beyond the Atomic Curtain, what had transpired in these two hundred and seventy years within the two Lost Continents, and here particularly, within the United States—within its Capital of Washington. Now you are going to know. I am going to show you. To teach you, O'Hara. I have wished so often in these years that it could be told to someone who could understand it. I have thought at times that the man had come, a real Son, O'Hara, for you are not the first to cross the Curtain. But the others were inadequate. They failed me, and I—perhaps I too was not quite adequate. Now you are here. Can you see, O'Hara?"
The glare was gone, but utter darkness had succeeded it.
"I can see nothing. These tricks of light and dark are stupid, Father. If you intend by them to frighten me—"
"It is only the contraction of the pupils of your eyes," the Father said. "They will adjust. Surely I have not brought you here to frighten you. Do you see yet?"
"I cannot—wait!—a wall—"
"You are now at the bottom of a pit. I cannot always trust those who come to me."
"—above me, twenty feet, and on the parapets of it—a bearded man, as fragile as the Twelve Old Men—"
"Yes, I am old. You see me now?"
"I see you now," O'Hara answered. "Very dimly, I see you. They call you the Father?"
"It was wise to have them call me that. But you need not. My name is Bryce—Stephen Bryce—Stephen Bryce, how very odd that sounds! I have not heard my name for better than a century. Let me hear it now—"
"Stephen Bryce."
"You humor me, O'Hara. I thank you for it. But you must come up to me. No, please don't move—you must learn that of all the great machines, only man's body cannot be replaced. Conserve it always. You see, you are rising now. This is that glorious age when the pressing of a button can achieve all things, except the things that matter."
The bottom of the pit was indeed rising, lifting O'Hara and Nedra toward the level upon which stood the reed-thin figure of an aged man, a wisp of a man in robes of shimmering and overlaid transparent cloth, a man with scattered hair no longer white but yellowish as parchment is, the beaked and collapsed face of a prophet, toothless, the pallid mouth moving slowly in the sparse, blanched beard, but the eyes young and large and blazingly bright, their blue made darker by the darkness of their sockets, amazing eyes in a body that was skin-sheathed bone.
"I welcome you, O'Hara," said the Father. "You and the woman from the mountains, welcome. But you are weary."
"Yes, Father," said O'Hara, and then instantly amended it: "Yes, Stephen Bryce, and if it is permitted, if we may rest—"
"This," said the Father, with an indicative gesture, "is called the Dome, a hall useful in that time when many came to me as you have come to me today. The great height of this arched ceiling was designed as you have suspected to be impressive, as if a visitor were standing at the core of the earth—a thousand feet to that ceiling, yet only fifty from wall to wall. A masterpiece of illusion. But through that arch upon your left—that way, O'Hara—you will discover that our architects were not altogether inhuman. Go through into the room beyond. You see? Beds, food and drink, the necessities. You must rest now. You must sleep. In this room you must shed the apprehensions you have felt. Remember, if I had not needed you, you would not have come here to Washington. Yet I trust," he said, "you will forgive a last precaution. Move back—the door!"
A panel clanged down from above. O'Hara and Nedra were alone.
It was an exquisite room. Hexagonal in shape, its floors were deeply cushioned with a carpeting of woven plastic threads. Its walls were carved intricately in stone so that the semblance of an open window centered each facet and yet there were actually no windows, no exits visible now that the panel had clanged shut. The ceiling was vaulted, fashioned of a glasslike material that shaded from the palest blue toward blue black at its apex. Against the far wall were two immense beds, or divans, side by side, and a refectory table wrought from polished and dark metal, with various bowls and beakers containing the multi-hued liquid foods of the photosynthetrons.
O'Hara strode with Nedra to the beds. And as he slid her burden from his numbing arms, a strange low music filled the room, the sweetness and ethereal thinness of flutes but with a sustained tone, yet without the throatiness of an organ—close, he thought, to the human voice, in octaves incredibly high and with a quality incredibly lyric. The music of sirens, the music of desire, a music that a man might hear in dreams. But Nedra was at last awakening.
She was lying there motionless, her long rich hair disheveled on the bed, her eyes now wide, her full lips whispering, and as he knelt beside her quickly she was saying, "—not even they could have done this to me. I could have made them destroy me, O'Hara. But you refused, you were too weak, you will be the father of my child—"
He threw himself upon the bed beside her. "No, Nedra, you are wrong, it is not weakness but violence that I hold against myself. We have lost nothing that we had. We retain the privilege of death."
"You believe that, O'Hara?"
"I am certain of it. I have the means here," he said, tapping his jacket.
"But you haven't the will. That is the trouble now, O'Hara. This thirst of yours to know what happens next is like a disease. Your hand becomes more reluctant each time you stay it, and now that you have seen the Father, what else is there? There are no more wonders. Why do you wait? Let me tell you, O'Hara—"
"Nedra, you are obsessed with dying. Is there no strength in learning to endure?"
"Endure for what purpose? Yes, if there is a purpose, but we cannot escape, we can only sink deeper and deeper into these slick abominations."
"You're learning to think, Nedra, and I'm not sure that it's desirable. Yet less than half an hour ago the fear that you might never think again was terrifying me. What does a man really want?"
"I know what you want. To talk."
"Why, yes," he said. "To talk—"
The opalescent light was dying out. The music now faint.
"To talk," O'Hara said, "and sleep, and wake again. Yes, Nedra, if we can be sure to wake again. Eternal life! Remind me to explain to you—though later on—"
But it was the Father who reminded him, and much later. For when O'Hara awoke the room was filled once more with that opalescent light that symbolized day, for actually, in this city of the Father, this capital of the Lost Continents behind the Atomic Curtain, there was neither day nor night. It was true that there were fourteen hours of synthetic light, radiating from the ever-present tubing recessed into the ceilings of the great halls and subterranean avenues, and these fourteen hours were succeeded by ten hours of darkness in the chambers used for sleep. But there was no real night.
O'Hara, then, awakening into this synthetic day, and finding Nedra still asleep beside him, was in no hurry to arise, but lay there staring toward the vaulted ceiling, remembering Nedra's bitter accusation, "We can only sink deeper and deeper into these slick abominations."
But even if they were forever to remain here, prisoners, would it be unendurable? If their cavern in the mountains had been pleasant, why was it less so here? Suppose that door were never to be unlocked?
Never?
The thought of it was smothering. It was in that instant as if he were strapped down upon the bed, and a cold sweat burst out on his body and he clenched his fists, crying aloud, "Father, Father—"
And the room was filled with a quiet voice: "You are unhappy here, O'Hara?"
The door was locked. The voice of the Father came again:
"I shan't insult you, O'Hara—these are not miracles. It is a simple contrivance. Doubtless you have it beyond the Curtain—electronic disks in the ceiling above you. I can hear you and see you, although I am some distance away in my own quarters. I was preparing to come to you when I heard you calling me. Are you unhappy?"
O'Hara said, "I am not unhappy, Father. I am—shall I call it restless? Caged!"
"I understand—you miss the illusion of choice. You are vastly more comfortable in that room than you were in your aircraft in the Arctic, and within those walls at least you have your liberty. An illusion, I insist—a matter of degree. Yet it is irritating to you, isn't it? I have a remedy for that—the stimulation of your mind. And in time you will achieve patience. There is work for you. While you were sleeping with your woman, I have considered a new concept for the Americas—interesting! The first development in a hundred years, O'Hara, and so delightfully simple that I cannot understand why I did not discover it before. You've seen what has happened to my people?"
"The Degraded?" O'Hara answered. "And the Sons?"
The Father's voice was silken. "Are there none beyond the Curtain who would change places with those you describe as the Degraded? Are there none in your world, O'Hara, as deserving of that ungracious term?"
"I am sorry, Father. I used a clansmen's word."
"And there is truth in it. The physiological facts are obvious. That is why I am vain about my Sons—the same stock, yet so perfectly trained that even you, I suppose, believe they have an intelligence superior to that of the masses."
"I have heard how they were selected as babies."
"And trained! That is the fact of it. Are there still dogs in your world beyond the Curtain?"
"Yes, Father. Our world has not changed."
"Once we had dogs. And it was possible to train them so that they made amazing use of their inherent faculties. They could never be taught to speak, for dogs never had that ability, but they made expert use of their paws and their noses in the way that was inherent to them. Now, the Sons, who are the children of women of the masses, are descended, as are the Degraded themselves, from speaking and thinking men. Like yourself, O'Hara. And I have trained them to recover their lost faculties. Without that training you could not distinguish them from the masses. But no amount of patience will instill in them—recover from their lineal past—the power to think beyond instinctive things. We need a new pattern, a thinking pattern. I have wasted too much of my allotted time in trying to salvage. I must create now. That is, you must create, O'Hara—a new caste, a new race."
"That will soon go the way of the Degraded, Father?"
"Yes, in time. The law of retrogression is exact, and for two generations—"
The Father's voice broke off abruptly. Then, in a moment, it came back with amazing sharpness. And O'Hara knew that the Father was speaking now to someone else, and in anger. "Why are you here? You will return at once to your work with the Sons!"
The voice that answered was hysterical. "No, Father—oh, no! I won't return to the Sons. I've seen him on the screen, I know he's here, and I'm going to warn him, Father. He won't surrender to your bloody, murderous—"
"I am calling the Sons," the Father cried.
"Call them and be damned. These arms of yours are so much cheese, Father, I can snap them in my fingers. You see? You feel? Pain—pain—you had forgotten what it was, hadn't you? Make the Sons return!"
"The Sons are coming now," the Father said. "You have your choice. Return at once to your work, and the promise that I've made to you—"
"A promise I no longer trust."
"You have your choice," the Father said again. "If I do not keep my promise, you know what lies ahead for you. You do prefer to trust me, don't you, Anstruther?"
The shrill voice rose. "I want to believe! I've got to believe you, Father—"
"Then return at once."
O'Hara heard a sob.
When the Father spoke again, his words came very slowly. "I have been injured, O'Hara. I cannot talk to you today. That imbecile who crossed the Curtain—Anstruther, who knew you when he flew for the Patrol—I'm sorry. You must be patient. Contemplate. Time need mean nothing to you, as it means nothing to me. Nothing, O'Hara! Think. And wait—"
Time need mean nothing. Think—and wait!
These, said O'Hara, were slogans that the Twelve Old Men of Geneva might well have used. "The old," he said, "have this at least in common on both sides of the Atomic Curtain—delay, for change is dangerous. And if they base their thinking on the greatest political fact of both our worlds, the Curtain, the slogan is sound. For we of Europe and Asia and Africa have become completely static, our minds paralyzed by the aftermath of that Third World War, while they—the people of the Western Hemisphere—have reaped the whirlwind of spectacular advance, and both because of that one change—the Curtain. And both of us have lost the future we once had."
In Bloomsbury, with the decadent smell of London in our noses and that strange insight that sometimes precedes intoxication stealing over him, O'Hara's voice now seemed to reach a pitch close to evangelical.
"Which is better?" he was saying. "To starve in Bengal or to shamble naked and unreasoning through the subterranean avenues of Emporia? A hard choice, isn't it? No choice at all, I'd say, if that were all we had to choose between. If that were all, there'd be no hope for men. I wish I could tell you that even then the Father, Stephen Bryce, was less fear-ridden than our Twelve Old Men. But it was not true at that moment. It was to come later, with adversity. The greatest of our teachers.
"Philosophy, old man, but cheap stuff. I am no Socrates, no Kant. At best I am—or was—a pilot for the International Patrol, an observer and no more. It is absurd that I should speculate upon the fate of man when I, in that exquisite room in Washington, could not with accuracy foresee what that strange conversation would portend for me within the next few months. But the fact that Anstruther was alive—and the absolute hysteria of his voice—the realization that he was not far from me within thisterra incognitashook me, left my throat constricted and parched. I can feel it yet, that parched constriction. And you must yourself, don't you, Arthur? May I fill your glass?"
He was pacing the floor, his pounding tread a counterpoint for ideas that he felt instinctively were much too vast for discussion in that ordinary little flat. And while I helped myself once more from his liquor cabinet he continued speaking, or rather resumed speaking, after suddenly halting nervously and picking up that hand-worn ceremonial club.
"Anstruther, too! And in such mental anguish that the city which I had thought deserted now became at once a sinister catacomb where voices came from nowhere and a man who was everywhere, yet nowhere, was constantly watching me—Nedra and I! The goldfish bowl! Spied on by that old skeleton with the living mind, Stephen Bryce, the Father.
"And yet I thought it bearable.
"But bearable for months? Think! And wait! I did not then know that with those words the Father was sealing us in that room for eight months. Or perhaps sealed is the wrong word, it only seemed sealed—for the door was opened or some undiscoverable panel in the walls rolled up, but only when that synthetic day had passed, only when we were asleep, anesthetized!
"The architects of Washington had indeed thought of everything. This can only be my guess—for neither Nedra nor I actually saw the seal upon that exquisite room broken for the next eight months—but somehow, as sound and air could be piped in, so could an anesthetic that made robots of us each night, dead robots, out of service. And with the coming of each synthetic day there was always fresh food, the gruelly stuff from the photosynthetrons, palatable enough, and the necessary sanitation had been effected by means less final than the Deluge, but other than that we might as well have been within our tomb.
"Dead robots—that was the key to it. The Father was conditioning us. We were locked in a paradise of effortless well-being, the most subtle way of stamping out man's soul, but as with a fever that wastes away the body, so our minds were approaching frenzy through those damned eight months—the frenzy that would break, as a fever breaks, and leave us acceptably pliable.
"Eight months of endless days, each identical with the day before, except that Nedra now was growing big with our child. And I think it was the fact of the small life in her womb that saved us. Our fears were concentrated upon it. Our child, prenatally exposed to ceaseless radiation—was it to be another of those soulless ape men? I believed and still believe that Nedra throughout those months was toughening her resolve, she who forever found the answer to all evil things in death, to destroy the infant if—
"Do you understand now? It saved us. The contemplation of a greater tragedy was restorative, the established principle of medicine, the counterirritant. It also works with minds. It kept me sane—Nedra and the child!
"Then one morning Nedra was gone."
That was the morning of hell. That was the bottom of the pit, the breaking of the frenzy, said O'Hara. For hours, alone, within that hideously exquisite room, he beat his fists against the unyielding stone, or screamed the name of the Father toward the disks concealed in the vaulted ceiling.
"Send her back to me! Send her back, Stephen Bryce! Whatever you wish, ask it of me, but send her back!"
Or, when entreaties failed:
"I have the gun! Had you forgotten, Father? Do you suppose that when at last the door is opened, I shall stand here broken? Or that I shall permit myself to sleep beneath your anesthesia? I have the gun!"
Never an answer. Never the slightest whisper coming from the disks concealed in that room. For the Father understood too well that while there still remained the faintest hope that Nedra was alive, and might return, O'Hara was not going to end his life.
Yet possibly this was not altogether intended as torture, said O'Hara. There was torture in it, and surely the Father was indifferent to that, but that was not the sole purpose of this ninth and most terrible month of solitude. The Father himself had been injured. And a god could not permit that to be known. The Father, too, O'Hara was to learn, had also sealed himself away, using the fraudulent blazing mirrors of his electronic network to direct the hemisphere. He knew—he heard it hour by hour—O'Hara's raging, but his own acute problem and his grasp of O'Hara's mind made any other action seem to him unwise. And the wisdom of rulers is not always gentle.
Think! And wait!
Ten months of that, and the last two months of it at a plane of tension that made thinking seem like the flash of electricity through a vacuum. Thought and contemplation can achieve humility or they can achieve an equally super-normal arrogance of frozen wrath. Yet within a moment it was ended.
For O'Hara awoke one morning with a small cry singing in his ears. He turned upon his bed—and there was Nedra beside him, and at her breast was the child.
In every man's life there is a moment that he cannot perfectly remember afterward, for the moment is too emotional to be lived through twice. He has at last approached the reason for his being, and for O'Hara it had come with Nedra. And the child.
He wept.
When he could bring himself to touch them, the child was beautiful, the magic of slumber still doelike in its wide blue eyes, vigor in the clasp of its small fingers.
"He knows you, O'Hara."
Yes. Why shouldn't he? My child, my son, my own son—yes, he knows me.
"Nedra—"
"Not now." Her fingers touched his lips. "A little while—"
Then the voice from nowhere, absent all these months, came back.
"Good evening, O'Hara. You forgive me now, don't you?" Softly, very softly: "It has been difficult for you, but there was no other way. Without my guidance, you would have destroyed yourself, your woman and the child—and not with your gun. You must come to me at once."
"With Nedra and my son."
"They will be safer there."
"It is your word against my thinking, Father. Either they come—"
"Bring them, O'Hara. But keep your weapon ready."
The panel through which they had entered months before now was sliding up, revealing the empty corridor beyond.
"You will come into the corridor and turn toward your left," the Father was saying. "Only my voice will guide you. That is correct—now proceed until you hear me. And keep your weapon ready!"
Nedra walked slowly at O'Hara's side, the child asleep within her arms. The panel closed behind them. They were within a seemingly endless metal-lined tunnel that receded in each direction toward infinity, the glaringly reflected light obscuring the convergence of its geometric lines, and for a long while they walked as if each second might bring sudden death, completely tense, O'Hara with the .38 in his hand.
"Now you must turn again, this time toward your right," the Father commanded, and simultaneously a second panel opened in the wall. "You must come inside—and put away your weapon now, O'Hara. Only in the corridor was there any danger."
"What was the danger, Father?"
The second panel closed. They were within a vast rectangular hall, its ceiling far above them, azure pale, its walls a fretwork of marvelously carved stone, polished like glass. And deep back into it, against the farthest wall, upon a four-tiered dais of translucent stone was an enormous bed.
"This is where I exist, O'Hara—where I sleep and work, and where you and your woman and the child will live. There is privacy in space and space enough for us. Danger, you ask? A disturbance among some of the younger Sons, Anstruther's group, but I can settle it in time. Approach me closely—here, upon this dais."
The voice was everywhere around them, from every corner of the enormously spacious room, as the voice of a divinity would be, yet O'Hara understood that it was coming from the bed upon the dais, and toward that, with Nedra beside him—Nedra with the sleeping infant held against her breast—he was now moving, as the first man with the first woman must have moved from the Garden, scourged by the voice of wrath. It was like that. It was no less than that—awe and humility and perhaps terror, although he knew it was the voice of Stephen Bryce, a wasted man with eyes that burned more brightly than the sun itself.
Sublime, O'Hara insisted.
"Come near to me, O'Hara. For I—cannot get up."
And the spell was shattered. It was the pathos of the words that did it. The Father was helpless, the Father whose mind was the germ of life for these two continents, the only real intelligence within the hemisphere, was lying now upon a vast bed in a vaster hall, a cripple, a brain no longer able to effect for itself the simplest functions of the grossest of the masses.
Yes, the spell was shattered. But a man of O'Hara's stature would finally have rebelled against mere sublime authority, had it attempted to drive him to do the things he normally abhorred. But the authority of a cripple was infinitely more terrible—a cripple's power lay in the innate will of all men to be kind. And had Stephen Bryce so planned it, he could not have planned better. From the moment that O'Hara discovered how completely helpless Stephen Bryce had now become, and how dependent upon him, his own will was faltering.
"You see, O'Hara?" the voice was saying from all corners of the immense hall, although O'Hara now was standing close beside the bed. "At this moment it is you who have the privilege to do what could not be accomplished by the Muscovite—you can destroy these continents. For if I die, these people die."
The lids were closed above the blazing youthful eyes and Stephen Bryce had thus become a wasted, ancient skull, alive but only that. His blue-veined hand lay fragilely upon the coverlet, close to a metal panel that was studded countlessly with unmarked keys.
"You pass the privilege?" the Father said ironically, his voice a whisper within inches of his lips, yet booming from the corners of the hall, an acoustical arrangement that O'Hara did not notice for the first few seconds, so intent was he upon the substance of his words.
"I have delayed for your arrival," the Father was saying, "the Deluge at Emporia. But these ten additional months of life have not surprised them, or are they grateful. My people," he said, and his eyes seemed to burst open, "are incapable of either surprise or gratitude, which limits the satisfaction that I get from playing God. As you observe, I'm not a god—not quite, I suppose, any longer a creature of flesh and blood, but certainly not a god. Few here, behind the Atomic Curtain, are aware of that. Yourself, and Anstruther—and it was also Anstruther who restored to me the realization that neither am I quite immortal. I'd almost forgotten that. You heard, perhaps—a matter of two broken arms and the debilitation that resulted from the shock of it. That is why I am here, upon this grandiose bed, the old lion bearded, O'Hara—the old stag at bay at last. Done for, O'Hara."
The hand rose slowly, fluttering. "And now, the decencies of life. I have things to show you that a woman might not wish to see. And things to tell you that no child should hear, whether it comprehends or not. Send them away—send them toward the wall upon your left, it is prepared for them. At any time you can recall them if you wish, for the slightest whisper on this dais is magnified to thunder—oh, you've noticed that? Send them—at once—the decencies; I have not forgotten."
The eyes were closing. The hand had dropped upon the coverlet. It was as if the Father were already dead. For a moment O'Hara remained beside the bed, then he turned and descended the steps of the dais to Nedra, and after explaining what the Father had requested—Nedra left at once, without a glance at him—he returned again to the bedside of Stephen Bryce.
"Thank you, O'Hara. You are more gracious than the circumstances," said the Father, now opening his eyes again, while weariness dragged at the corners of his pallid mouth. "A new race, O'Hara," he whispered. "We need it here. You will remember that I mentioned it to you? Come, now, don't glare at me so sanctimoniously—I am mathematician enough to know that a new race cannot be bred from a single woman, your woman, nor the handful of women I might have the Sons take from the mountains. Are you a student of husbandry? There are books here—behind this dais a doorway leads into the library where I once used to study. Among these books are many from the days before the Curtain, and in that section, if you wish, you may learn all we've ever learned of genetics. We have no cattle now. Our only animals"—the pale lips twisted—"but you know them—men! Your brothers, O'Hara, the masses of Washington and Emporia, New York and Chicago, all our cities. In husbandry, O'Hara, the soundest concept was that rundown stock was easiest improved by crossing the prevailing females with a superior male. The get of any single male is almost limitless, provided—"
"This was explained to me," O'Hara interrupted, "by one of the Sons at Emporia. Artificial insemination."
"I heard his explanation, O'Hara. Yes, the males of the masses are sterile, although not impotent. And actually the tests which we make at birth do not determine intelligence as such, but fertility. The relation of those two factors is no coincidence. The stupid-fertile, once a predominant strain, have bred themselves out with the vanishing of the reason for their existence, which was hunger—the substitution of one physical satisfaction for another. The intelligent-sterile, toward which the ruling classes tended in the days before the Curtain, likewise have passed, and for the same cause—with the necessities of life available to all without effort, intelligence, in itself, lost its survival virtues.
"What now remain are the two breeds that our way of life brought to the front—the stupid-sterile and the intelligent-fertile, a geneticist's dream come true, the fruit of our atomic civilization. We should be reaching the millennium, O'Hara.
"But while we have got the two best strains predominating now, the unforeseeable reversal of the laws of evolution has shoved both strains ever backward, although comparably for each. The keel is on the bottom still, the mast upon the deck, but the ship is sinking. And nature has confounded man once more.
"And so, O'Hara—so through these endless years alone I have been forced to tinker—selective breeding, elimination of the weak, artificial insemination—tricks, all tricks, all little stratagems to stall off the immutable. Each generation slides back further than its sires. Your son—forgive me—will be not quite you, and his son will be neither you nor his mother. And your son's son will see his newborn son with horror. It is exact. But if a new race suddenly were spawned into the hemisphere, recapturing the ground lost in these generations since the Curtain—"
"Father, you'd still be tinkering."
"But the possibilities of this tinkering are extensive. Beyond the Curtain, fortunately, exists an inexhaustible source of uncontaminated sires."
"How would you get them here?"
"That is your task."
"My task? I could not count upon a providential thunderstorm to get me through the Curtain again."
"Providence we cannot reckon in planning the future of a hemisphere, and never have. It is true that chance—pure chance—enabled you, and Anstruther before you, and others now dead before both of you, to pass through the Curtain. But it was not Providence. Any man flying in the correct direction at the exact second that you were flying—and at any point in the Curtain—would have got through."
"I'm not sure I understand you. At any point in the Curtain at that exact second?"
"Within those exact ten seconds, O'Hara, hundreds of pilots in your International Patrol must ram into the Curtain every decade, yet if all of them were to hit it at the correct speed, flying the correct course, at the correct time, they would all get through. Chance enters into it only in that you happened to be doing all of these. Once each year, and for an interval of ten seconds, our Carolina reactor shuts off automatically and the Hanford or West Coast reactor takes over supplying the power for the Curtain. That has been happening now for the two hundred and seventy years since the establishment of the Curtain—the reactors were so arranged in the beginning. Completely automatic, you understand, as are the Tubes, the photosynthetrons, the East and West Coast distillation plants, the Deluges—as everything must be within this hemisphere. And there is this interval of ten seconds between the shutting off of the Carolina reactor and the generation of the Hanford reactor—ten seconds in which the Curtain does not exist!"
O'Hara closed his eyes. The taste of blood, saline and hot, was in his mouth—his heart now pounding with trip-hammer force. For here, within a sentence, was the determining great secret of the two halves of the earth—"There is an interval of ten seconds in which the Curtain does not exist!"
"It cannot vary by even a fractional concept of time," the Father was continuing. "And there, O'Hara, is how your task can be accomplished. You have your known factor of time, and in the lower Rockies, you have your plane. When it is brought to Washington, it can be duplicated on a more adequate scale, for the Sons, under guidance, are not bad workmen. Time and method are problems we can master, and there is only the issue of your willingness to obtain from beyond the Curtain—"
"My willingness? Do you believe, Father, that men—men as I've always known them, not your masses and Sons—would voluntarily enter into this proposition?"
"Do you believe that they would not? For a full belly, for a life without exertion, without the strain of thought—really, O'Hara, I have not forgotten what your world was like."
"Remove the strains they know, and they will discover other strains. In time, for instance, they will rebel against becoming your automatons."
"I am aware of that—I am now dealing with Anstruther. But that at least is a problem I can solve. Let me show you how I deal with human problems, O'Hara—let me show you the city of Emporia, where you first saw my people. Observe upon the wall behind this dais a metal screen, such as you saw in every hall and every corridor of Emporia, and as exist in every city of this hemisphere, even our dead cities—remember Spokane? The giant tower with its solarium? Remember you were curious and flew down close to it? Remember Denver? Those cities we abandoned soon after the establishment of the Curtain, as soon as our subterranean metropolises were built—for in those days we were not certain just how quickly the nations beyond the Curtain might construct atomic plants. True, we had our scintillometers, we were constantly on our guard, we had our rockets ready, but the physical plant could be built, prepared for instant operation, and we had by then no accurate reports of what your scientists might be thinking—we had learned that thinking was more vital than the last incidents of construction. We had no surety except our rocket barrages that you would not get these suppositional plants into production before we could destroy you, which meant of course that we too might be destroyed. We had with us the frightful memory of that Third World War, and how very close the outcome seemed at first. So we took no risks. We went beneath the earth, leaving dead cities where once we had lived. We built new cities up into the Arctic, outpost cities, as far as the northern coast of Canada, leaving only that chain of mountains, where the engineering problems were prohibitive, beyond the network of our automatic civilization. Now, this metal panel—" The Father's fragile fingers poised above the unmarked keys. "I touch, as you observe, and instantly you are seeing what is happening across the continent in Emporia."
The screen above the dais now glowed. And when the brilliant light adjusted into patterns, O'Hara saw the glittering corridor outside the Guild, the hall of the Sons at Emporia. The shambling naked tens of thousands of the masses passed before his eyes, as aimless as he'd seen them when he had been there, the women with their babies in their arms, the nude and hairless apelike men, feeding by thousands at the photosynthetron troughs, sleeping by thousands in the wide-bunked slumber halls—a mass of life as purposeless as maggots, living and devouring.
"The Sons again have gone within the Guild," the Father said. "And now I touch this key—"
Above the corridors of Emporia, slots opened in the ceilings and from them poured a tidelike wave of palely amber liquid, cascading down upon the swarming masses, engulfing them, yet as O'Hara watched, those caught up in the tide were vanishing—not sinking down, but actually vanishing, while those who fled in screaming panic, milling as a scalded colony of ants might do, leaping above the fallen bodies of those trampled in the crush, when once touched by the amber tide jerked back from it, but where an arm had been, a leg, a head, was nothing.
"Dissolved," the Father said. "The Deluge is a caustic solution that will cleanse Emporia of all filth, all population except those in the Guild—all that should not endure. Observe—this key—the solution now is pouring down through slots beneath the corridor, draining into that pipe within the Tube which carries it—and them, for they are only liquid now—into the Pits of Yellowstone, the continental sewerage plant, where the caustic is decanted and restored to tanks for future use. You see approximately three hundred thousand of these—call them men!—disappearing now, all except the Sons. Observe the screen—it flashes now inside the Guild, and this is even more adroit."
The pattern changed, and when it reshaped, O'Hara recognized the vast hall of the Sons, and saw them staring as they knelt, obeisant as they watched the metal screen within their own hall. That screen, inside the Guild, was glowing now, the brilliance of the sun upon its surface and a booming voice exhorting them—the Father's voice as O'Hara had first heard it in Emporia.
"That voice," the Father said, "my own, also is automatic, the electronic impulse which released the Deluge also starting the voice. All these details were co-ordinated in the beginning and are now effected through batteries of integrocalculators here in Washington. The single touch of a key sets in motion the chain of events, another key modifies it or ends it—although at all times I can shift these operations to manual and direct them step by step. Suppose now we go to one of the slumber chambers, distant from the heart of Emporia, where the Deluge has only now begun. You will see them asleep or in their more intimate existence, and you will realize how really painless all this is."
"No, Father," said O'Hara. "No, Stephen Bryce. No more."
"Compassion, O'Hara?"
"Disgust. Loathing."
"For me. I can understand that. When I was younger there were times when I felt it too. But how else can the problem of overpopulation be solved, O'Hara?"
"You have the means. There are no births except at your direction."
"You would have me deprive the women of the masses of their sole amusement, which is the bearing of children? And further, you forget the declining ratio of potential Sons among the newborn—to keep constant the total of Sons, the birth rate of the women of the masses constantly must be stepped up—we must have more babies, more population to select from, but our supply of food material is constant, adequate for a constant population, which through these periodic Deluges I achieve. An instant's agony—no worse than that experienced in that painless institution of your hemisphere, the electric chair—avoids the months and years of slow starvation which your own estimable system, O'Hara—the system of your hemisphere—enforces. Which do you actually believe to be less cruel?"
"But in our hemisphere there is no volition—"
"The truth is, isn't it, that no one will accept the responsibility for managing society?"
"We have had such men. We called them monsters."
"You are not yet quite adults. But I have lived now for almost three hundred years. I was born before the establishment of the Curtain, while a people of your hemisphere were loosing upon our cities a murderous rain of warheads, destroying among others the city of my birth, killing my father and my mother and my small brother—I have lived, O'Hara, long enough to remember the monsters of your hemisphere, and remember them acutely, not as vague names in history. And also I have lived long enough to recognize the immutable facts of a mechanical world, and to lose, I suppose, my childish scruples. And yet, had I any choice at all in these matters, had I less responsibility, had I someone to lean upon, someone with the physical abilities that I no longer have—yourself, O'Hara."
"I reject you, Stephen Bryce. For after all of your excuses you remain a monster who has lived too long to value life."
"And will live long enough to fit you into my purposes."
"If I don't destroy you now."
"Destroy a cripple? You haven't the capacities for it. And destroy all of my people in this hemisphere? You call me a monster, O'Hara? Come now, tell me—is that the ethics of the world beyond the Curtain nowadays? To shrink from necessary cruelties to perform those that would be incalculably more terrible?"
"It is a matter—a matter of intentions—"
"Bosh! Kill millions to spare thousands—that isn't even good economy. Spare the inhabitants of Emporia, but not spare me—and not the tens of millions of these continents who depend upon my knowledge? And not yourself? And not your woman, O'Hara? And not your child? Let's try to avoid these absurdities—you are going to do as I wish you to do, at least until I have taught you how this panel operates the integrocalculators. Is that not true?"
O'Hara met those blazing eyes a moment. Then his own eyes closed. "Yes, Father. It's true."
The Father smiled wanly. "I welcome you again. You may join your woman and your child now, for I must sleep. I am exhausted by the rare experience of argument. Later on, we must work together on the problem of Anstruther and the younger Sons. I shall need, I think, more than my brain for that. For at this moment, just beyond the door through which you entered this hall, they are coming now, the danger that I warned you of. And he, whom once I welcomed as I welcome you—he who is screaming that he means to save his comrade of the International Patrol, yourself—is motivated chiefly by another vision that he saw upon this screen, a vision that has cracked his fragile brain—it was the woman, Nedra. Another complex from your world that I'd forgotten."
PART FOUR
O'Hara put down his empty glass.
"I have had enough of this," he said, and got up, as an angered lion might get up—that kind of throttled wrath, restrained only by the dignity of his huge and thickly muscled body, for the pent-up loathing that he had felt for Stephen Bryce—the Father, the only brain guiding the destinies of the hundreds of millions swarming through the subterranean cities of the Western Hemisphere—was burning through him, even here in London, in this flat of his in Bloomsbury, much as if he had gotten into his veins a dose of that caustic solution that he had seen dissolving the masses of overpopulated Emporia.
"You see?" he asked, and whirled abruptly toward me, his darkly tanned face twisting sardonically beneath his tousled dark hair, his blue flight jacket of the International Patrol now completely unbuttoned, for the drinks we had had and his rapid pacing of the floor of that little flat and the pace of his report, and above all his tension, had dappled him with sweat. "You see, do you—I'm utilized! I've lost whatever grip I had. Or perhaps I never had it. When there's no stress, we can all of us think ourselves cucumbers. But when I was walking at last away from that immense bed upon the dais in Stephen Bryce's unthinkably vast hall in Washington, my pity for the Father was drowned in disgust for any man who could do what I had just seen him do, and I dreaded him more than I feared the dangers now loosed in the endless corridor outside the hall.
"For I could deal with Anstruther. Insane or not, Anstruther could not seem too dangerous, the way that I remembered him. His rather womanish blue eyes and fair hair and his romantic boyishness—weakness, I told myself—could never be formidable. Yes, I could deal with Anstruther. And as I left the Father and went toward the distant wall where Nedra was waiting with my infant son, I meant to do it.
"Let me make the situation clear. I had been without hope. It had seemed incredible that I could escape with Nedra and my son from the labyrinth of Washington, retracing my way along the glittering and utterly deserted corridors through panels that slid open without detectable human motivation, back to the Tube and through it back into Emporia, now a dead metropolis, and up again by its only shaft to the surface of the earth and through the patrols of the Degraded in western Kansas once again into those mountains where Nedra's kinsmen were. No one—I had had the clansmen's word for this—had ever escaped once he had sunk into the cities of the lowlands. It was that absolute hopelessness that had driven me unresisting forward to the Father, and yet now—
"Now I believed there was a way to do it. I had only to learn from the Father the mechanism of the integrocalculators, the key-studded board he kept beneath his blue-veined hands, and to make my peace with Anstruther who surely understood this maze of a city and who, as the Father himself had said, controlled a dissident faction of the Sons, and the way would be clear for Nedra and my child and me.
"That's hope for you. The impossible at once becomes a very simple thing. I had only to do this, and only to arrange that. I wonder now how I supposed the Father, so readily to be outwitted, had been able to endure for two hundred and seventy years behind the Atomic Curtain. The truth is of course that I was not thinking—I was engaging in the opposite of thought, which is hope. And hope blinded me. Or rather, purpose blinded me. I had been so long without either."
He had been, he said, quite certain of his direction when he started walking away from the dais. He had seen Nedra going toward the apartment built into the distant wall, and he had thought that he had only to go that way himself to join her. Yet in the absorption of his speculations he walked for some fifteen minutes without the distance once occurring clearly to him, and it was only the sensation of walls closing in upon him that finally halted him.
He was in a corridor. Somehow he had passed from the vast hall of the Father.
"I was to learn that in the city of Washington there were no walls as we know them. They had the thickness and the height of walls, but the Father, constantly watching in the screen above his bed, could with the touch of his little finger disarrange and reassemble those immense sections of stone and metal in a thousand patterns, all preconceived it is true, to cope with all conceivable situations. I was to see the giant gears that could elevate within an instant the lowest depths of the city to the topmost level and transfer the Dome itself, that amazing architectural illusion, into the very bowels of the earth, miles below the muddy bottom of the Potomac. In all of the city only the Tube was fixed, and that solely because the shifting of its continental span was too monstrous an engineering feat even for those masters of the early days immediately after the establishment of the Atomic Curtain. It would have involved the balancing of the crust of the earth itself, and as in the case of Archimedes with his global lever, where was there such a fulcrum?
"But the city, Washington, was a myriad of interchangeable parts, and at no moment since its construction could there possibly have been a master plan for it—nothing that any enemy could definitely say was thus and so, the plexus here, the exact place to strike at. Within the broad limit of its thousand patterns and countless thousands of lesser integral dispersions it existed only as the Father wanted it, and through his keyboard could instantly set it up.
"I say that the lone exception was the Tube. That is true, the Tube was fixed, but its terminus could be sent whirling away from it, sealing it off. Conceive of the city, if you wish, as a series of spheres, one within the other, like a child's gyroscope, revolving when the impulse came from the integrocalculators, or expanding through the integration of chords from a larger outer sphere which then contracted into the lesser orbit. Too tough? It was for me.