"It was much too tough a problem for me, and when I found myself enclosed within the comparatively narrow confines of that corridor, beyond the Father's—and Nedra's hall—I felt for the first time since Nedra's return with her newborn child that complete and imbecilic frustration that must come over those poor deviled rodents that psychologists force to pop through little doors to establish their reflex patterns. I stood stock still, my brain suddenly as empty as the corridor about me, numbed beyond comprehension for how long I do not know, until at last I became conscious of the spasms of my fingers."
And within the passing of the next five minutes, said O'Hara, his mind went through the progressive stages of the full cycle of evolution—inert at first, then active only as a salt solution might react electrically, then numbly timorous as a hypersensitive vegetable, and finally aware. The worm recoils from surfaces too hot or cold. He was aware like that, until somewhere along toward the rapid reassertion of the human mind he met and conquered, if not fear, at least the impossibility of fearing.
To fear, he said, and to know the reason for it, constitutes the greatest single stride up from the primal ooze.
"Nedra!" his first cry was. And then, "Oh, Father, Father, help me! Help me—"
And the voice came to him gently:
"You see, O'Hara? Are you so measurably superior to that dawn child who worshiped the fire that burnt him? You call upon me now as if indeed I were a god, and solely because I seem to injure you."
"Father, you mock me."
"Yes, O'Hara, I mock you—but only to help you regain your reason. There is something you should know, O'Hara—you must understand that a man who has lived in authority as long as I have has seen all the pitifully few reactions of men under duress. As you were walking away from me, I knew that you were considering how you would plot against me. I cannot read your mind, but given the man you are, trained as you are, it was inevitable that you would react in that manner. I could, I believe, reduce all this to an understandable equation, just as I can shuffle about the components of this city into the pattern I desire without thinking in detail of the various phases of it. The integrocalculators do that detail thinking for me. That should be comprehensible to you, for all these little mechanical marvels were rooted in the world as it existed here before the Curtain, and exist now beyond it. Equations of the brain—we had the fundamentals of them in the years before the Third World War; and the origins of spatial architecture lay in those experimental buildings in which the walls were movable, of course only horizontally, but not remote in mathematical technique from the vertical and spherical construction of this city. A matter of imagination only, isn't it?
"And memory, O'Hara. My memory for the keys upon this board, and the integrocalculators' automatic memory of the meaning of successive stabs of power.
"And so I think I can write the equation of your being, O'Hara—an equation in terms of the years you have existed and the times you have faced death and love—I must include love, however ephemerally your poets think of it. Yes, love, O'Hara, for there as you undoubtedly have suspected is a complex thing, mystical beyond the caress of a woman's arms or a baby's breath, intellectual beyond the tables of multiplication that you studied as a youth—the soul of man in fact. Surely you've recognized it as that. Your woman of the mountains, Nedra, lacks your capacity for love, which after all is tenderness, and so you do not understand her always, do you, O'Hara? The soul—you would dispute this with me? Then take the next gradation below Nedra that we have within this hemisphere, the people of the masses. What essentially have they lost? Yes, you do know that! Their souls, the capacity for love, decreasing in direct proportion to their retrogression. If they possessed it there might be some hope for them—but they do not. Oh, yes, O'Hara, I can write that equation—physical and mental strength, and the capacity for love—or soul—these are the algebraic terms of man. I bore you?"
"My wife and my baby, Father?"
"Safe with me. You see, I even ape the attributes of a god—the things you love forever are attainable by keeping faith with me. Hostages, shall I say? As the pledge of immortality keeps your kind in hostage. Yes, they will be here with me, awaiting you, when you have finished the task I set for you."
"The task?"
"Ultimately your task will be as I have outlined it for you, the return to the Eastern Hemisphere to obtain those sires of future generations of Americans. But now, before that can be possible, you must salvage Anstruther for me."
"But you yourself, Father, told me Anstruther was mad."
"Demented, yes, by the vision of the woman Nedra. But he can be salvaged. He must be salvaged. For if I lose you, O'Hara—should something go wrong during your flight back into the Eastern Hemisphere—I will have at least Anstruther. And I have no time now to depend on the chance again that some adventurous or befuddled pilot of the International Patrol will crash through the Curtain."
"You'd risk a madman with the task you set for me?"
"Only if I must. I don't belittle that risk. But for that matter, how sure am I of you? Once beyond the Curtain, what pledges your return except the woman you love? And that reed is too thin to be my sole reliance. You must reclaim Anstruther for me, you must bring him to me, where I can get at him."
"I am to be his Judas, is that it?"
The Father's voice, a silken whisper in that glittering corridor, lashed out, "Your posturings annoy me. We are not discussing morals, we are discussing what you will do. Have you so soon forgotten the months you spent alone in that magnificent little room? And Nedra and your baby?"
"Whom you dare not harm! They are your only hold on me."
"Don't underestimate what I dare, O'Hara. Nor overestimate your value to me. I could decide, if I must, to work with lesser tools if necessary. But as for your scruples, if I had wished to destroy Anstruther, he would be dissolved by now. I can do it at this moment, simply by touching the key beneath my finger. No, you would not be destroying him by bringing him to me. You would in fact relieve me of the possible necessity of eliminating him."
"You are too clever a logician for me, Father. But I refuse."
"Do you indeed?" the Father said. "Then I must show you something. As you observe, the walls of the corridor are now rushing suddenly away from you, O'Hara—"
And instantly he was swallowed in space, a void, the ceiling and the walls vanishing toward infinity, miles, within a second, so that he felt impacted into himself, shrinking, yet knowing that the macro-cosmic city still contained him. And even as he clung to that shred of reason, the floor beneath him began to sink, so that once again walls were surrounding him as he descended. And presently far above him a metal surface closed darkly while the wall upon his left began receding and the segment of floor that bore him followed it at a speed so terrific that his senses could not bear up under it, and he blacked out.
He was lying face down when he recovered, and for a long while he remained there, unable to move, then at last he heard a faint, strangling cry, and lifting himself by driving his knuckles hard against the floor, he saw not ten feet from him, behind a translucent wall, Nedra and the child—Nedra holding the baby far above her head and swimming frantically in water that was rising rapidly around her throat.
Almost at once the water was above the level of her head, churning in from invisible sluices that must be somewhere across the translucent room, and Nedra turned a despairing face toward him and then sank beneath the surface, although continuing by her desperate struggle to keep the baby's head above the water. He could see her mouth open as if to scream to him. He could see the violent threshing of her legs and he knew instantly how long that could last, and he plunged his shoulder against the translucent wall, as if to smash it.
But the wall yielded back from his weight as if it were a jelly, pliable but impervious, for he could not get through it. With his giant's strength he could smash his fists within inches of her body, he could drive his fingers toward her and grasp for her thrashing arms and legs, but he could not quite feel them—he could not quite touch them. He could not save her.
She was kicking desperately again, the fur kirtle working loose from her body in the fury of her struggle, and once more she managed to drive her chin above the surface of the water, and continuing that frantic treading she was keeping the baby from drowning while O'Hara, ramming himself continuously into the pliable wall, slashed with both fists in futile efforts to reach her. Now suddenly he heard Nedra's choked voice, above the splashing of her body, as if the sound track of a movie had resumed after some minutes' silence:
"I can't, O'Hara—can't keep—going—"
And she sank once more. This time her sagging legs were not able to support the child above the surface, and her arms sank helplessly, the child revolving slowly in the water toward her, wide-eyed, grasping with its tiny fingers, and O'Hara saw them both drifting downward in that aimless, dying way that half-bouyant matter has.
"Father!" he screamed. "Stephen Bryce—"
"Yes, O'Hara," the gentle voice came from the space about him. "Yes, I understand. You see, I have already reversed the flow of the water. The room is draining."
O'Hara could not speak. He sank upon his knees, watching the level of the water drop toward the bodies drifting on the floor of the translucent room. And almost instantly that room was drained. And Nedra was lying with the baby beside her, her arms limply—unconsciously, O'Hara knew—enfolding him, and the water now dripping in small rivers from her loose, rich hair that had swirled like a shawl across her body.
"They need my full attention now, O'Hara," the Father was saying very softly. "You must go now upon your mission—I will be with you constantly. I will be watching, and when it seems wise I shall talk with you. But remember, whenever I wish it, I can again return you to a translucent wall like this one that will yield to your touch without ever admitting you, and beyond it, so very near to you, Nedra and the child will drown."
"She needs you quickly, Father—"
"And she needs your voice to sustain her. Speak to her."
"Nedra," he whispered, unable to believe that she would hear. But her eyelids opened. "Nedra," he whispered, "if I am able to return—"
Her lips were moving now. "You will, O'Hara."
"I will! And no matter what you're told, never believe—"
"I shan't, O'Hara."
Then the sound track was dead again and he knew it. The Father, lying upon that immense bed within that incredibly vast hall, wherever that now was in Washington, and watching in the screen above the dais, had shut off the key that had made Nedra's and O'Hara's voices audible to each other, and was himself speaking again.
"I have regretted doing this, O'Hara. But if all the regrets of my life were to come back upon me suddenly, I should as surely drown in them as Nedra and your baby were drowning a moment ago. Now I promise their lives to you, if you are faithful. The walls again are receding, as you see—"
The walls were receding and the floor upon which O'Hara stood was rising and Nedra and the baby in her arms had vanished once more into that chaos of shifting walls and floors and ceilings, and again O'Hara was conscious of the rapidly increasing velocity with which he was moving through the space of Washington—conscious of it only momentarily, and then the black pall of vertigo smothered him.
But the voice that pervaded the spatial geometry of the underground metropolis never stopped speaking to him, counseling him even as he lay in a coma, as if it were a dream voice, the voice of a god that was dimly remembered from a childhood revelation, and very slowly, as his senses returned to him and once more he could see the tangibles of metal and stone and his own flesh, he began to feel as if the voice spoke only to himself, O'Hara—as if those about him, later, could not hear it. This became an obsession that he never clearly recognized for what it was, the Messiah complex in its early stages, the conviction, never really questioned by himself, that the omnipotent being of the Western Hemisphere spoke only to him and listened only to him, an absurdity that ten months before—when he was beyond the Curtain—he would have derided. In the end, when he was done with delusions, he was to understand how well the Father realized the magic of the Voice from Space, a psychological device that was implemented by physical control over those whom O'Hara loved.
"You must get up now, O'Hara," the voice was telling him. "For even at this moment Anstruther is approaching you—Anstruther does not yet know where you are, nor is he actually searching for you. He is in fact going about the futile business of trying to find his way into this hall where I exist—he and his dissident Sons, relying upon the juvenile techniques of your mythical Monte Cristo, digging or boring or cutting, completely unaware that within an instant's time I can transfer him twenty miles away. Anstruther does not know the secret of the integrocalculator and will never know it, even should I be forced to use him if you fail me. But do not fail—and you shall know that secret, O'Hara. Some vessels will contain water and some will contain hydrogen, some will contain molten magnesium and some will contain only eiderdown, but few will contain them all. You will, O'Hara—you will contain what you must, I think—so long as I keep my fingers on the fibers of your heart. Arise."
O'Hara got up. He was standing in a small circular room at the end of one of those glaring corridors, as if in running he had come at last upon that point in infinity which the corridors always seemed to promise, a room with a diameter of forty feet, its sheer walls rising to a dome that opened on a tiny patch of brilliant blue, much like the blue of O'Hara's now shapeless uniform. Was it the sky he saw, the heavens that he'd known before descending into the subsurface warrens of this lost atomic world? He did not know—illusion had become so routine that the fact seemed always suspect now. Yet it could be the sky, a pledge of things to be, as Nedra and the baby had become in memory.
"Are you listening, Stephen Bryce?"
"What is it now, O'Hara?"
"The ceiling—?"
"A symbol. And only you in this hemisphere can understand it."
"I don't."
"It is inevitable, O'Hara, that the mechanics of this hemisphere as we have been forced to organize it would tend to create in your mind the impression that I am divine. Is that not true?"
"It is stronger than an impression, Father. If you have lived, as you say, nearly three centuries, if you control this spatial city and the Curtain and the Tube—and I know you do—it becomes extremely difficult to think of you as mortal."
"You see? In spite of your reason, in spite of the scoffing tone you force into your voice, you are beginning to believe. The genesis of faith is most often the misinterpretation of truths. And so I have made that tiny patch of celestial heaven visible to you. For you—and you alone—must understand that I am not God, that I am not immortal, that I am subject to the laws of nature and eternity regardless of how long I manage to evade them.
"That patch of sky is there to bolster your sanity, O'Hara. For you must be sane. No matter how deeply involved you may become in the game of playing the Chosen Son, you must retain your sanity, or the purpose of the game will be defeated by the zest of it. Remember this, you have few realities to cling to—that patch of sky is one of them, and the senile tremor of my fingertips, and the receptive loins of your wife, and your baby's cry, and the inerasable memory of the world beyond the Curtain. Cling to these, O'Hara, for you will need them. Anstruther is approaching."
Anstruther was indeed approaching, but O'Hara was not prepared for the manner of his entrance. As the voice died away, the metal sheathing of the corridor immediately beyond the circular room bulged suddenly and then became molten, flowing down from the living rock it shielded in a silver stream, and a great yellow mass of fire erupted out into the corridor, becoming instantly a mottled red and magenta that in turn, and as instantly, was a fuming cloud, gray and black and flecked with ocherous matter and roiling constantly within itself, until in a fraction of time it was sucked up through recessed ventilators in the flame-seared ceiling, the fumes and the fire and their resultant heat gone simultaneously, so that O'Hara who was crouching only twenty feet away felt only that first scorching blast, as if the fire door of a furnace had swung open, and the next moment smelled the sweat of it drying on his skin and the sharp odor of burnt hair—his beard and eyebrows crumbling at his touch. The flash left him blinded. Then he heard a cry:
"O'Hara! O'Hara! Thank God I am in time."
It was Anstruther's voice. And the joy of that cry, the jubilating ring of overwhelming relief in it, brought tears involuntarily into O'Hara's sightless eyes. He stood there weeping as if suddenly he had come blundering against his only friend.
Nor did he question that Anstruther was his friend. All the warnings of the Father moments earlier were lost in this excruciating feeling of reunion and deliverance. He was saved, he was freed at last of the exhausting nerve-drag of these long months in the Western Hemisphere, behind the Curtain, never daring once in all that time to trust even the woman he loved, never completely, and menaced, even while he slept, by an omniscient and omnipresent living fable—the Father.
Now, at last, he felt, here was a man from his own time and world, and with his own sense of what a man should be—Anstruther. He stretched out his hands.
"Anstruther, I—can't see—"
"The blast," Anstruther explained briskly, and immediately strong arms were lifting O'Hara's helpless body. "We have a remedy for that. Don't be afraid, O'Hara. You're safe now, you're free. We who have had to live with Stephen Bryce know what that means. All slaves are blind."
O'Hara asked, "But wasn't my blindness your doing?"
"Yes. But there are blindnesses that don't involve the eyes."
"Mine does."
Anstruther laughed softly. "The physical man. You were always that, O'Hara—always concerned most with the health of your body and doubtful of the health of other men's minds. Forget your eyes, that is nothing," he said, and as he continued speaking, the sound of his voice moved away, and O'Hara realized that it was not Anstruther who was lifting him. He was being lowered now, coming to rest upon a cushioned bunk. Anstruther was saying, "We were not expecting to find you beyond that last wall, O'Hara—it was the Father we expected there. Stephen Bryce," he continued harshly. "And if we had found him—if we had found him we would have no time for you. I am going to bathe your eyes. This will burn some, but if you clench your hands—"
O'Hara felt live coals inside his skull. His spine arched tautly upward from the bunk and whorls of flame shot through that portion of his brain that stored the memories of color—purple, yellow, green and the red of blood. Sweat drenched him. Then the tautness broke and his eyes felt cool again and wet, and he collapsed.
"Can you see now?"
O'Hara opened his eyes. Beside him, hulking nakedly, his apelike body crouched as if to lift O'Hara once again, one of the Sons now held the vial that Anstruther had just passed to him, and behind him were other Sons each bearing the shining tubelike weapon that O'Hara had first seen beyond Emporia—armed Sons, in this, the empty subterranean metropolis of Washington, the danger that the Father had first warned him against, and led by a man equally naked, though frail, rigidly erect, his bright blond beard fringing downward upon his narrow chest, his pale blue eyes made more myopic-seeming by the tiny capillaries that had burst in their irises, a face with an intensity of purpose that made normal strength seem weak, a face to which emotion supplied a look of superior courage, a zealot's face.
"Give me your hand," Anstruther said, and clasped it.
O'Hara sensed the torrent of emotion in that touch.
"You are one of us now," Anstruther said. Then he turned to the Sons. "This man is my comrade, my brother. This man will be your brother. He too has come into your world by some power infinitely beyond our understanding, and he too will join strength with yours in overthrowing Stephen Bryce, who calls himself the Father."
Involuntarily, the Son beside O'Hara bent his knee and said, "The Father," whispering it, reflexively devotional. Anstruther took no notice of it.
"The Deluge," he was saying, "has just been loosed upon Emporia. The tens of thousands who dwelt there have gone now to the Pits of Yellowstone. Some among you were born there, in Emporia, and your mothers are no more. Stephen Bryce has destroyed them. Do you understand what I am telling you—Stephen Bryce has destroyed your mothers, as he will destroy you when the need for you has passed. As he would have destroyed me long ago had he dared. Do you understand?"
"We understand," the Son beside O'Hara said. "Stephen Bryce, the Father—"
"Who calls himself the Father!"
"—who calls himself the Father, has loosed the Deluge on Emporia. And will loose it on us."
"Unless we destroy him first."
"Unless we destroy him first," echoed the Son. And the others said, as if it were a litany, "Unless we destroy him first."
"We are not free until Stephen Bryce is dead," said Anstruther.
The chorus answered gravely, "We are not free until Stephen Bryce is dead."
"We are prepared to die—"
"We are prepared to die—"
"To free those who come after us."
"To free those who come after us," the Sons repeated.
Anstruther clapped his hands. Instantly, in unison, the Sons sank down where they had stood and lay upon the floor, resting their faces torpidly upon their heavy arms, and instantly they were asleep, some forty of them lying in a grotesque ragged row with Anstruther still standing in their midst, though silent now, his blue eyes peering down at O'Hara upon the bunk.
"They are like newborn infants," he said finally, a strange tenderness in his voice. "They drop to sleep at once, O'Hara, forgetting the danger of their future, oblivious of the horror of their past, slipping down into the sweet senselessness that their exhaustion craves. Do you know how long we worked to reach this corridor?"
O'Hara said, "They don't know what danger is. But you do, Anstruther."
"Six days and six nights without stopping to rest, if time down here were measurable," Anstruther continued raptly. "Working all that time, searching endlessly, sure that at last they were nearing Stephen Bryce, yet when again they realized that once more I had failed them, they sank down to sleep as you saw them do, trusting me, O'Hara, to lead them past this failure finally to triumph."
"Anstruther, you're mad."
The pale eyes closed. "Is it mad to work against the worst tyranny the earth has ever known? Then I am mad."
"But you can't win, Anstruther. You can't beat the Father. If he wished it, he could loose upon you at this instant the Deluge that he turned into Emporia. And these poor, stupid and deluded Sons would never awaken from their torpor."
"It is not the loss of his Sons that stays him, O'Hara."
"Nor would it be you or I, were we to endanger him. He is watching you now, he hears what you are saying, and if he believed—"
"I know all this, O'Hara," said Anstruther wearily, and sat down upon the cushioned bunk, now cupping his zealot's face within his soft, small hands. "I know Stephen Bryce and his power. Yes, he'd destroy me instantly if he believed that I endangered him. But he does not think that I do. His faith in himself is quite as absolute as my abhorrence of what he has done to these people. Look at them, O'Hara—they're men! Or they were men, their fathers were men, before Stephen Bryce stamped out their souls. And they can be men again."
"If you continue to lead them?"
"Yes, if I—if anyone continues who believes in them."
"Is this the reason for your revolt against the Father?"
"Could there be another reason?"
O'Hara nodded soberly. "You, too, might aspire to be the Father."
"And if I were—"
"You see, the thought is in your mind!"
"If I were," continued Anstruther, "I could not possibly do worse by them than Stephen Bryce has done. But I will never be the Father, O'Hara. Didn't Stephen Bryce tell you that?"
"He is listening to you now," O'Hara warned.
"I'm sure he is. He knows every word I've said, perhaps he knows every thought that I have had, since I came through the Curtain. That is why he does not dare to use me unless he must. But there's another reason why I cannot waste my days in dreaming that I might become the Father in his stead—a reason that dispels the curse of vanity that all men are prey to. I can live for two years only with the amazing medications that Stephen Bryce and his fellow scientists of the early days developed, and then my illness, a cancer of the brain, will destroy me as surely as the tyranny of Stephen Bryce has destroyed these men. Do you think that a man with a destiny of death could think only of ambition?"
"All men have a destiny of death."
"That is true enough. All men have it, but with most men the time is not fixed. How long have you been in Washington, O'Hara?"
"Eleven months."
"And has it seemed so long?"
"Incredibly long—and incredibly short, too, like a nightmare of the instant before awakening."
"A nightmare of the instant before awakening—that is how you sum up these eleven months. And I have only twice that long to live, and to me too a year seems like a nightmarish instant—two instants of life before me, O'Hara! That makes ambition an impossible mockery. Would you dispute it?"
O'Hara looked steadily into Anstruther's pale, straining eyes. What was he searching for in them, he asked himself. For arrogance? For the bright marsh fires of insanity? For weakness? None of these were there. For Anstruther, once the charming and imaginative boy, had gained stature, and the boyishness was gone. And even as with Stephen Bryce, himself facing the same approaching certainty of death, the purpose of his being now was solely the future of the hemisphere.
It was impossible to doubt Anstruther's motives. To question his methods, yes—but not the motive behind them. Which was true also of the Father. O'Hara could loathe the individual acts of each, yet at the same time he respected their sincerity. It was a cosmic irony that these two men, instinctive enemies, opposites, should be working toward a goal that was identical, yet by their natures working toward it through irreconcilable methods. For Stephen Bryce meant to breed out the race of the Degraded, both masses and Sons, while Anstruther believed the elimination of the Father, as a move toward a new environment, would solve the problems of the continents.
As for O'Hara himself, he could not choose between the cold science of the Father and the emotional approach of Anstruther, but stronger at the moment in his heart remained the horror of Emporia. He held out his hand.
"I believe you, Anstruther."
"You mean, don't you, that you want to believe me?"
"That's it," O'Hara answered simply. "I do mean that. I want to believe you."
"Good! For it is more important to me that you should want to believe me, despite any uncertainty in your mind, than that you should believe without question. Faith itself can be shattered, but the yearning after faith is indestructible." He took O'Hara's hand, and at last got up from the bunk. "Tomorrow," he said, "or when we next awaken, we resume. Now tell me, for you must have come recently from Stephen Bryce, which was the direction and what the distance? Back along this corridor how far?"
"I cannot tell you, Anstruther."
"But you came into this room—"
"Unconscious," said O'Hara, which was the truth as far as it went. He did not dare to mention the integrocalculators. Yet as warily he drove from his mind the memory of Nedra and his son sinking down toward the bottom of that water-filled room. His path in this struggle seemed obscure—his feeling was to follow Anstruther, to help him and these sleeping Sons, and yet he could not bring himself to follow absolutely, he could not reveal the Father's purpose, or could he permit himself to think of Nedra and the baby, for agitation would defeat him. He must grope through this, betraying neither Anstruther nor the Father. Nor himself.
The middle ground, he told himself—the middle ground, always seeming to both extremes contemptible, weak and confused. And perhaps confusion really was the virtue of it, veering this way for a while, then that, but persevering devious and without dogma toward the goal, toward saving Nedra and his child. Was that contemptible? He could not think that it was. In the first phase of mankind, before codes and ideologies, there had been only the preservation of the family and a dim concept of God—and so, O'Hara felt, would be the final phase.
"I was unconscious," he repeated.
"Then we are lost again," said Anstruther gloomily. But instantly his eyes were light again. "It does not matter. However long it takes, we will find our way to him. We have come in a straight line this far, and we will continue it until we reach the outer shell of Washington, which must be close to this room. Then we shall cut back again through the heart of the city, never leaving between the lines we cut the space that Stephen Bryce's vast throne room occupies. Somewhere, someday, we'll find the heart of this."
O'Hara asked, "You too, Anstruther, were unconscious when you left the Father's hall?"
"I have never been there. After I crashed in Patagonia, the Sons brought me to Washington through the North-South Tube, which plunges underneath the Gulf of Mexico from Yucatan—the second of the two great Tubes that are the arteries of these continents. As you know, there are smaller, lateral Tubes—"
"I know very little, Anstruther. And I ought to know."
"The two great Tubes," said Anstruther, "converge at Washington, the Transcontinental and the North-South Tube. The lesser Tubes branch off to all key points, to the Pits of Yellowstone and to the vast plutonium plant in southern Colorado—"
"I flew into its radiation zone," O'Hara said, remembering.
"—to the Arctic outposts in Alaska and Labrador, to the plants in South Carolina and at Hanford that generate the Atomic Curtain, to the major population centers. You, whose family was once American, would know the names of most of them, but they are no longer cities as you and I remember cities—they had no purpose now, except as warrens for the masses. No trade, no growth, no manufactures. A few repair shops at strategic points, with almost nothing to repair, though they have the skill for it. Everything has been done here, everything is finished, and only man—or what is left of man—is subject now to change. That has been true almost from the day they established the Atomic Curtain. At once, behind its absolute security, the moral fiber of the masses started to decay. Only the elite, the scientists, were able to preserve a kind of integrity, for all too soon they were confronted with the challenge of the retrogression of the masses of the continents, the reversal of evolution, resulting from the gradual pollution of the continents by their atomic-powered plants in every phase of life. But after those first scientists, there were no more—no minds that came out of the masses had the capacity for exploratory thought. And gradually these scientists died off through these three centuries, until there was only the last of them, the Father, Stephen Bryce. No, I have never seen the Father's vast hall—he did not raise me from the pit when I arrived."
"I recall the pit," O'Hara said.
"He raised you out of it, up to the level where he stood, because he had to take that chance at last, to trust his life with you, O'Hara. Or possibly he knows you better than you know yourself. That was true with me, for I was not antagonistic when I stood beneath him in that pit. But he sensed the path I would choose, siding with the Sons. He has not let me come into the hall. Instead he comes into the Guild of the Sons, or in the corridors, appearing in some manner that I do not understand, emerging despite locked doors and seamless walls. It was in the Guild, upon the screen, that I first saw you and the woman, Nedra—"
"Yes?"
"—and knew that with your help I might at last destroy this tyranny. Soon after that, I tried to come to you. The Father intercepted me in the corridor. Do you know the rest?"
"You broke his arms?"
"And he broke more than that. He drove me away, though promising again to let me go on with my work among the Sons. That was the task he gave me when I came to Washington, teaching the Sons, trying to make them seem like men, as you and I and Stephen Bryce remember men. Now I am trying to fulfill that task, but now I find that Stephen Bryce opposes it." Anstruther crossed the room and dropped upon a bunk. "Yet I shall fulfill it. With your help, O'Hara," he said quietly, "before I leave the Western Hemisphere, I shall fulfill that task."
He did not move again. The sound of his breathing became the quiet sound of sleep.
O'Hara's brain was staggering with fresh doubts. Surely the Father, whom he knew had heard all this, understood now that he could not reclaim Anstruther. Nor could O'Hara say with certainty that if the thing were possible he would attempt it now. This too the Father, who boasted of the equations of the mind that he could write, must know. Somewhere in this morass of unattainables and doubts must lie a deeper aim.
"O'Hara?"
"Yes, Father?"
"O'Hara, you must not question me. You must not think that you can challenge me. You are wavering, O'Hara—despite the evidence of the translucent room, despite Emporia, despite the shifting of your body through the space of Washington, you are not yet convinced that what I wish to do within these continents will be done. You have permitted your reason to be shaken by emotion, and yet I know that in the end of this you will not fail me. You must leave that room now. You must walk into the corridor—"
O'Hara leaped up. "You are taking me away from Anstruther?"
"Yes," said the Father patiently, "I must take you away for a while, for there is much that you must learn. Go into the corridor at once, for I am sending an anesthetic into that little room, as I once sent it mercifully to you when Nedra bore her child. Keep walking, O'Hara—further—and further—and you must close your eyes, for this will be very swift—"
O'Hara clenched his fists against a sudden rush of pressure. His knees were buckling and his mouth stretched wide and in the blackness that swirled over him his senses reeled.
"You may approach my bed," the Father whispered.
And it had been done. O'Hara was again inside the great hall of the Father, just below the dais. The Father's feeble hand was beckoning.
"Just so far, O'Hara, and watch my hand upon this board—don't think that if I relax my touch upon this key you could save Nedra and the child. I do not like to threaten you, but you have permitted Anstruther to convert you, O'Hara. The absurdity of defying death for a mistaken altruism does impress a man your age. But do you really believe, O'Hara, that I am as wicked as he thinks?"
"I saw the masses dying in Emporia. I saw my wife and baby sinking in that translucent room."
"Cruelty is comparative, O'Hara. And not all of it, anywhere, is personal. Do you suppose that I alone shaped this hemisphere and am alone responsible for the evils in it? You must go now into the library behind this dais, O'Hara—you must read how these things really happened. I did not alone erect the Curtain. I did not build the atomic reactors that made the Curtain possible. I did not make the initial choice. All these things were done, after the Third World War, by men who were mature when I was still a child. I inherited the conduct of these continents as you have found them. I have built nothing, achieved nothing, save to stay alive for two hundred and seventy years while all my peers were perishing.
"Two hundred and seventy years," he whispered. "Surely that would amaze the doctors of your world—surely one at least of them would wish to return with you through the Curtain solely to learn how I have lived this long. And it is so simple—I prolong my life the way your doctors empty bowels. I take little pills, O'Hara, that any chemist of your world can easily compound. Yet were your doctor to come through the Curtain for this secret, I would not talk with him of how to prolong life, but of euthanasia. I am tired, O'Hara.
"And now you too think I am a tyrant. Let me tell you this, O'Hara—were I to cast aside this keyboard and forget the masses that you think I tyrannize, what has happened at Emporia would be multiplied in deadliness a thousand times. No, not by the Deluge but by the scourges it prevents, pestilence and hunger.
"Who do you condemn for pestilence and hunger in your hemisphere? The truth is, isn't it, that you consider them unavoidable—yet by the Deluge I avoid them here. And by preserving life within my brain, long after I have lost the joy of life, I do maintain these continents as they came to me.
"Anstruther calls this tyranny. I happen to call it my duty. But perhaps you think Anstruther is right about it. Perhaps I should summon him here and explain to him the working of the integrocalculators through this keyboard. He could destroy me then, and assume my functions. And he could continue, for the two years that remain to him, to try to awaken in the dead brains of the Sons the spark of their bred-out intelligence.
"Do you know his possibilities of success? If all atomic pollution of this Hemisphere were suddenly to end and decontamination were in time achieved, then in this pollution-free hemisphere Anstruther could breed a race of thinking men, starting with the Sons and the women of the masses—in time he could do it. If he could live five hundred thousand years he might accomplish it. But he has just two years.
"But let us suppose he had his five hundred thousand years. What do you think would happen to his youthful altruism in that time, when I, within a modest three centuries, have become such a callous tyrant?
"Now you must go into the library, O'Hara, and later I shall show you how the integrocalculators think for you, and still later you must see the City of New York, the restored city, duplicating to the last dirty tenement that city of the twentieth century that was ravaged in the Third World War. And I think then that you will begin to understand the broader aspects of a tyranny like mine. You will perhaps discover that from evil sometimes comes a little good.
"For I am granting now that the Atomic Curtain is an evil thing. It has brought this hemisphere the security we sought, both against aggression and want, but what has happened here is infinitely more tragic than war. Grant it—the Curtain is evil. But what do you think it is that keeps the peace for Europe and Asia and Africa? What unifies them, O'Hara? It is only the terror of what exists behind this Curtain. And if they of your hemisphere thought tomorrow that the Curtain could be pierced, what do you think would happen to that peace and unity? And if indeed this hemisphere were helpless, what do you think your continents would do to us?
"So in that respect, at least, the Curtain is not altogether evil. For all those that it has destroyed within this hemisphere, it has saved equally as many on your side of it.
"But as you observe the integrocalculators, notice that we are not really helpless. I can still enforce this peace. If I touch this little key, I release toward the major population areas of your hemisphere a barrage of rockets that would make the holocausts of the Third World War seem trivial. When you return home, O'Hara, if you must tell them that the Curtain can be pierced, also remind them that the piercing works both ways, and that what seems to be the possibility of conquering this hemisphere—breaching these centuries of peace—is in fact a terrible delusion.
"And observe, O'Hara, as you study the integrocalculators, that the charted position of the Atomic Curtain depends solely upon the adjustment of regulators for latitude and longitude. And were I now to touch this key—this one!—the Curtain would everywhere advance, crossing the seas, pushing through your helpless continents, but leaving in its wake as it progressed only the wastelands of radioactive pollution. Remember this, O'Hara, when you speak to your comrades of the International Patrol. With the quiver of my finger I can wipe their aircraft from the skies.
"And also observe, O'Hara, that the scintillometers of Washington are working perfectly. And were the scientists of your Eastern Hemisphere to set in action any new atomic ovens, I would know it instantly. I could release my rockets. I could advance the Curtain. They would have to move very swiftly to forestall me, O'Hara. And I do not believe they could do it soon enough.
"Yet even if you had such excellently trained scientists, and could set up your reactors and place your warheads in your rockets and launch them before my rockets or my Curtain were to reach you, your rockets would thunder down only upon the wastelands that compose the surface of these western continents. You would destroy our photosynthetrons, the source of our food, but that is all. You would not reach our subterranean cities, or the vast reservoirs of food and water beneath the surface or the intricate tunnels of the Tube. You would hurt us, yes—but you would not destroy us, O'Hara. And within minutes, then, we would as surely wipe your continents clean of life as with this shaking hand I wipe the perspiration from my forehead.
"Such is the actual power this keyboard—or what it stands for—gives me. Anstruther thinks I am the tyrant of a degraded race, and the degrader of it. I could as easily become the master of the entire earth, were I to wish it. But I don't, O'Hara. My burdens here are sufficient. Is this the thinking of an evil tyrant?"
O'Hara said, "Tyranny is only a word, Father. But Emporia was a fact."
The frail hand collapsed upon the Father's breast. His eyelids flickered jerkily above his blazing eyes and for a moment the rise and sinking of his bosom ceased. The pale lips parted, the fingers seemed about to slide from the keyboard beneath them.
It was the fingers that O'Hara leaped to seize, for he remembered what the Father had warned him, that if the pressure ceased, Nedra would drown inside that translucent room. But the Father's sinews stiffened. His lips again were moving:
"Not yet! Not yet! I am not dead."
O'Hara recoiled. And as he stood there the horror of Emporia seemed vague beside this new horror, that all life of this hidden hemisphere depended in these instants upon a brain that was hovering so very near the line between the living and the dead. The Father's life was life for millions now.
"I did not die!"
It was a cry of triumph. The voice was hoarsely jubilant. "I did not die!" the Father cried again. "But do you know how close it was? So near that I could see beyond. And I am ready!" his eyes opened very wide. "This problem must be resolved, and now. While I consider it, go behind the dais into the library. You will find more than books to amuse you there."
O'Hara moved backward slowly. In his mind was the apprehension that those fingers might in death relax their pressure on the key. But the Father whispered:
"Go quickly, O'Hara!"
"But Father, if you die while I am absent?"
"Then instantly you will be with your wife and son, free to make your way back to the mountains, if you can. I am giving the integrocalculators the impulse to accomplish that. Do as I tell you and you have this pledge. But—I shall not die! Now, go."
O'Hara turned and descended the steps and passed through the door behind the dais. It slid down behind him. He was standing in a tremendous tiered hall, stacked from floor to ceiling upon each wall with books, while occupying the center of the hall were countless exhibits of machinery and clothing, weapons and utensils, all the implements of the civilizations that had been piled one upon the other here in this subterranean capital of the Western Hemisphere. Against the farthest wall was an immense bright screen, like those that he had seen in the corridors and public buildings everywhere upon the continent, and on this screen, at the moment that he entered, Nedra was visible.
Nedra was nursing the child. At the sound of O'Hara's cry, she looked up slowly, as if she was expecting to find him in the room with her, wherever that might be, until finally her eyes were raised, and O'Hara knew that she was peering into the screen in that lost, small room of hers.
"Nedra," he called to her, "does my voice come through to you?"
"Oh, yes," she said calmly, "and I see you on the screen above me. It is as though you were standing here beside me."
"Do you know where you are?"
"But surely you recognize this little room, O'Hara."
It was the exquisite room in which they had spent so many months together, the perfect little room, hexagonal and thickly carpeted, its ceiling vaulted and displaying shades of blue that darkened toward the apex. "Yes, I know that room," O'Hara whispered bitterly.
"And do you know your son?" she asked, and pushed the child gently from her breast. She was as he had last seen her in that translucent water-filled room, lying upon the floor—completely nude, her majestic body serenely recumbent, her deep breasts forward as she rested on her elbow, watching the child, which now rolled from his back upon the floor, and smiling up into the screen began to crawl toward it.
O'Hara pressed his face into his palms. "How long have I been gone?"
"I do not know, O'Hara—perhaps two days, perhaps two months. There is no way of telling time in the cities of the Degraded. There is no sun and no moon, and no need for time, for time is a measure of accomplishment and nothing is accomplished here. We exist, and that is all."
The child sat up. He yawned.
"He must sleep now," said Nedra, and moved quickly to pick him up. "We must not talk, we would disturb him—"
"Nedra, this is not possible. We're speaking as if we were together in that exquisite little room, yet only hours ago—or days ago—I saw you drowning, and I unable to break through the yielding wall to save you from it. And only hours after that—or was it days or months?—you suddenly were back with me in that exquisite room, bringing the child, after those endless days and nights of solitude in which I did not know—"
"What troubles you?"
"Time troubles me. Time and the vagueness of what has happened in it. And you trouble me, Nedra! This is not the way you were, content to have a semblance of me showing on a screen."
"Ah, you see, O'Hara?" She smiled. "This is that dying process that I warned you of, this is what happens in the cities of the Degraded. Your mind is steeped in clouds. You are frantic now, but soon enough you will not care. You will not know it. And that will be much worse than that death which could have come easily for us upon the mountain. Remember now? Remember that you told me we could always die?"
"Yes, Nedra, I remember."
"We cannot do it now."
"I can die now, I can climb these tiers of books and leap—"
"But I cannot. And you would never leave me."
O'Hara bowed his head. At last he asked, "Where were you all that time I was alone in that exquisite room? Where was the baby born?"
"I was with the Father. A woman of the masses was with me."
"I have seen no masses here in Washington."
"Nonetheless they are here. Millions, millions—like those we saw jammed together in the corridors of Emporia, jamming the corridors below the upper levels of the capital. They exist, down there, as we exist up here—as worms exist within concentric rings in a decaying log. The baby is sleepy, O'Hara. And I am sleepy too."
She stretched herself upon a couch that he remembered, holding the baby closely in her arms, and she was smiling drowsily up toward the screen when the light upon it ebbed.
"Nedra! Don't leave."
"But I am not leaving. As long as the Father wishes it, I shall be here, as close to you as if we were upon two couches in this same exquisite room, able always to see each other and to speak."
"Which is worse than death!"
The light was gone upon the screen. Her voice, sleepy, came to him once more. "Are you sure of that? Are you so certain that death will not be this way?"
And he was not certain. Nothing now seemed certain. Nothing had reality. But soon, re-echoing Nedra's words, he would not care. He would not care!
Days passed. At least the glow would come again upon the screen and Nedra would be there, talking to him as though they were together in that exquisite room, smiling or laughing at the child upon the floor, angry when O'Hara's frustrated calls awakened it, scolding. Or whispering through the darkness on the screen.
"Nedra, Nedra—"
"What is it, O'Hara?"
"Where are you in that darkness? Let me hear your voice. Speak to me, Nedra!"
"But I am here."
"Yes, you are there, wherever that may be, and I am here, in this enormous room of books, entombed in centuries of written facts while you—you cannot see, but now I touch this screen, my hands are feeling for you in that dark, toward the whisper of your voice. And touch cold metal! Nedra—"
"Yes, O'Hara."
"It does not matter to you that we are apart like this?"
"But you sent me away from you, O'Hara."
"And you will never forgive me."
"Oh, yes. I do forgive you, O'Hara. But I shan't pity you, as you seem to wish. I have not forgotten that when you wished to talk of solemn, stuffy things, philosophizing with the Father, you sent me to bed. And you'd do that again, for all men do it. It is only in the night, like this, when you want me, O'Hara, that our separation is a torture to you. Why don't you read those books?"
He pounded both his fists against the metal screen.
But there were nights when O'Hara did read. Dust had collected on these volumes now for better than a century, the last archivist's entry being dated 2124. And the name signed to it was the Father's—Stephen Bryce. It was a daily journal that O'Hara discovered on the last shelf at the far end of the hall.
"It has been a tragic mistake," was written in beautiful, rolling script. "We have gambled and lost. Maria died last week—and today, when I tried to awaken him, Wilson's hands were clutched around the crucifix he always wore, as if with his last breath he prayed forgiveness for our sin. I am now the last of us, unless in the mountains beyond the Mississippi, where the pollution is not so intense, some of those who fled our perfect civilization still exist in their imperfect way.
"Yet in this last week of his life," was written on the yellowed page, "Wilson developed his ultimate formula. He could have taken it and been with me today. He preferred instead to die.
"And I prefer to die. But what of these creatures whom our blunders have brought forth upon these continents? Is it not my obligation to keep striving to redeem our race? Am I free to choose life or death? I think not. I must live, I must preserve what we have left while I continue seeking to regenerate. For to any problem there must be an answer. There will be one for this!!"
Some mathematical calculations followed, and then came the notation:
"We wanted too much. And we have got too much for us. Along the way somewhere we let our aspirations push us past the point of prudence, yet it was not wrong for us to aspire. Perhaps even now, if I were to lift the Atomic Curtain—but I don't dare! I cannot trust Eurasia even now. I must work this out alone."
And at the bottom of the page, as if it were an afterthought:
"One way out is the volume on the first shelf of the left front wall."
O'Hara found it. The covers of it were stamped cleanly from magnesium, and as he picked it up, seeing only that it must contain a single metal page, the hushed voice of the Father filled the Library.
"You have it now, O'Hara. Place it inside your jacket, for you do not yet need it. Remember my pledge, that if I die, you will be instantly with Nedra and your son. I am sending you down now to the integrocalculators. As before, hold your breath, open your mouth—this will be very swift and terrible for you."
There was a great rush of chilling air and the library went black, and in that blackness O'Hara felt himself exploding, dying, passing through death into magnetic space, becoming part of space, losing identity. Then out of this serenity he felt himself congeal again.
He was standing before a vast oblong machine, inside the glass casing that enclosed it. There was no entrance to the casing. And beyond the glass, upon all sides, a pale gray depthless liquid kept the casing perpetually suspended.
"Observe it quickly, O'Hara," came the Father's whispered voice. "For soon your nuclear heat will disturb it. Already its counteractors have begun to hum a warning to me. You are the first to have passed into it since it was suspended there, insusceptible to shock, beyond all foreseeable change. And you must be the last. You have streamed into it in the mesons and neutrons that compose you, and what you think is flesh and blood, your body, clings together only through the wave lengths of your brain. You have no real finite shape or substance now, you are only what you think. And you must think! Absorb it all, and quickly—this is the key, O'Hara! The board I hold is only to assist your focusing your brain. It is recorded, isn't it? Now, you must return—"
The chill air and the overwhelming blackness smothered him.
When he revived he was upon the library floor, kneeling as if in prayer. He raised his eyes. "It could not be," he whispered. "It did not happen—"
"What did not happen?" Nedra asked him, and was visible upon the screen. "And where have you been these weeks, O'Hara? Where were you all these nights I tried to call you to the screen?" Her voice was petulant. "I am beginning to wonder now, O'Hara—you told me that you came from beyond the Curtain but you seem to be marvelously at home here among the Degraded. And except for your ages, you and the Father are becoming much alike. Did you really come from Washington when you approached my mountains in your flying thing?"
O'Hara shrugged. Was this so different from the tirades of the housewives of London, Cairo or of Stockholm? Were women anywhere, once they were mated to their satisfaction, different? Except for the ceremonial warclub that she'd left behind in her cave in the Rocky Mountains, Nedra was as women were everywhere.
"Did you really miss me, Nedra?"
"Yes. Of course I did."
"Of course," he sighed, and started walking toward the tiers of books.
But much as he learned in the library during the ensuing weeks, it was his journey through the Tube to New York that taught him most of what America had been before the Third World War. The subterranean city, built since the establishment of the Curtain and glutted with its multi-millions of naked and hairless masses shambling along from feeding hall to feeding hall, sleeping together indiscriminately in those wide cushioned bunks everywhere along the city's corridors and herded always by the Sons with their atomic guns, was another and larger Emporia, and from the density of its population must itself be approaching a similar Deluge. It would be coming any day, the Son attached to O'Hara anticipated.
"Only the Father knows the hour," the Son explained. "He counts the masses as they multiply, and when there are too many for the Tube to feed, the Deluge mercifully will come."
"You call it mercy?" asked O'Hara.
"Yes, that is the word that we were taught."
"It does not hurt you to know what happens to the masses?"
"Hurt me? I do not understand. I am in the Guild when it occurs."
"But one of these women who will be dissolved may have been your mother. That one—she who carries her baby against her breast—she may indeed be your mother. And these—your sisters, and if they had received the training at the Father's schools in Washington that you received, they would have been as you are, articulate, able to comprehend—"
"Are you referring to these females?" the Son asked, puzzled.
"Don't you know the wordmother?"
"It was not taught to us. It must be nonessential."
"But you do know about the birth of babies."
"Oh, yes, an entirely artificial process."
"The female who bears the baby in her womb nonetheless is its mother. It is her flesh and her blood that sustains it before its birth, and there is nothing artificial in that phase of it. Her blood has fed you. She has felt the pain and I think she must have felt some joy at your birth. Yes, despite your customs, despite the soulless processes the Father has enforced, or been driven to enforce, the word should mean something, it is not nonessential, and you can never aspire—"
"One moment, please!"
"—you can never aspire to emulate the men your fathers were, decades ago, unless—"
"One moment, please," the Son repeated courteously. "For I remember something that happened once, which has sometimes disturbed me. I had been sent to collect the babies for the measurement of their brain waves, to determine those who should be sent to Washington to become Sons. There was a female who resisted—"
The Son fell silent. He was staring at O'Hara, but his eyes were vacant, unseeing, or seeing very dimly back into the past. Then his voice resumed in a whispered hush:
"And I though that was—beautiful."
O'Hara paused a moment. Then he asked, "What did you do?"
The Son glanced hastily toward the great screen in the hall. He straightened his back. "I destroyed her at once. She was consigned to the Pits of Yellowstone."
"And did the Father know that?"
"The Father," replied the Son, "knows everything."
"Yes," said the Father's voice, while a blazing light came suddenly upon the screen, "Even what you are thinking now, O'Hara. But I did not know that he remembered—I did not think it possible. I suppose I must consider it as dangerous. If you will come this way, O'Hara, toward the screen, I shall give you another little lesson in morality—"
And O'Hara did as he was told, leaving the Son who now was kneeling with his eyes downcast. Another Son came forward, aimed his tubelike weapon at the kneeling, hairless apelike hulk, and fired. The Son who had remembered vanished in the flame.
"You have seen enough of the subterranean city," said the Father presently. "You must go now to the island where the ancient city stood, O'Hara. And then to the Monument."
The Tube beneath the river took O'Hara and his new escort to the island where a shaft ascended. O'Hara emerged again for the first time since he had descended into the earth at Emporia. His eyes involuntarily swept in every direction, seeing the swift, free-flowing waters of the mighty river, the strangely wonderful irregular contours of the earth, and above all the sky—the limitless pale sky that seemed, as it had never seemed before, celestial—the heavens, freedom, not of man. His lungs were gulping deeply of an air he had forgotten.
"This sight amazes you?" the Son beside him said.
"It awakens me."
"You have been sleeping?"
"Dreaming."
"I understand dreams," the Son said sympathetically. "In Washington they taught us what they meant. They are a memory of things we should forget—and do forget when we awake."
"You dream?" O'Hara asked.
"Oh, yes—all of us dream sometimes. Even the masses. We dream of cities such as this before us, great heaps of rubble, and fire is raining down upon us and we die in heaps untidily, or live untidily, and our bellies are empty, and we must fight with one another. These things were actuality before the early days, before the destruction of this city that you see ruined before us. Here," said the Son, "a tower once stood. Now, as you see, it is only some bits of metal and crumbled stone. Our ancestors lived in whole corridors of such towers."
"I know," O'Hara said. "I have seen photographs of it within the library at Washington."
"But there was no resemblance to the photographs, only miles and miles of heaped-up earth and flame-seared rubble with rusting beams and steel protruding from the surface. Small stunted shrubs had sprouted in the ruins, and a strange yellow leafless vine that matted itself thickly close against the ground. A jagged fragment of stone blocks was thrust far up.
"The greatest tower of all," the Son explained. "Hundreds of feet it soared above the earth, yet when the rockets came, it crashed as quickly as the least of them. They say that some of those who dwelt here managed to escape, being shielded from atomic fire by those whose bodies lay above them, and so they fled across the river, living for a while upon the surface above where we have built our subterranean city. But most of them died of diseases that some of the rockets brought. A few at last went north, toward what was then called Canada—"
"I know," O'Hara said. "I've read of it."
"And more died there. Only the strongest then were able to escape toward the west, perhaps into the mountains where they say a strange new race now dwells, huge red-haired creatures, as large as yourself, with short arms and stiff spines, unprepossessing creatures and enemies of the Father."
"Unprepossessing?"
"Yes. But do not take offense. Since you have come from Washington we do not mind you. I have heard it said," he whispered, "that even the Father himself—is not like us. Nor should he be, of course," the Son said hastily, and resumed his speech: "There were in this ancient city some ten or more millions of inhabitants before the Third World War, but they were situated very stupidly, grouped together densely, and we have avoided that mistake in rebuilding our new subterranean New York. Also as an object lesson of how foolishly our race once planned, the Monument was built—a replica of the ancient city as it was before its destruction. We go there now."
For four days O'Hara wandered through the empty Monument.
The fifth day, he stood before the great screen in the Guild of the subterranean city across the river and listened to the Father's voice.
"Have you seen it, O'Hara?"
"I have been there, Father."
"Is there more you wish to see?"
"Nothing."
"What did you think of it?"
O'Hara said, "I thought this, Father: that kind of city could not possibly have grown up behind your Curtain. There is too much of the greatness and the cheapness of the human soul in it. There is too much of free and human aspiration, unsafe for you perhaps, maudlin I feel certain, yet almost by the fact of these defects fare more glorious in its total achievement than all the glittering corridors and vast chambers of your geometrical metropolises."
The Father's voice seemed melancholy. "That is true, O'Hara. What you say is true. Yet only my Curtain could have saved that city. Such is the paradox that I have faced alone through all these years, until this hour. You must return to me now. I have solved my dilemma. And possibly I can solve yours."
PART FIVE
O'Hara went alone into the cylinder that rested at the terminus of the Tube within the Guild of the Sons in subterranean New York. The Son who had attended him, standing by to bolt down the hatch, glanced covertly toward the great screen in the center of the hall.
"You will see the Father?" he whispered.
"Yes, I will see the Father," said O'Hara. "If he wishes it."
"I have always heard his voice come from the screen. I have never seen him. A brilliantly unbearable radiation comes upon the screen and that is all."
"You wish to know what he is like?"
The Son drew his brutish body up to its great height, his long arms swinging loose, his weak eyes focusing intently upon O'Hara's face. He was in that moment at least something more than subhuman, for a beseeching huskiness came quickly into his voice, not the piteous whine of an animal but the humility of a man.
"I wish to know what he is like," he whispered.
"He is like yourself."
The Son's jaw muscles flexed. His nostrils flared.
"He is not as large as you, or as strong as you, or as content as you," O'Hara said, "but he is more cunning, and more consciously merciless—"
"Stop that! He listens."
"—and he would destroy the one man who would lead you back into the glory of your kind, the lost glory of the fact of being man and not a soulless animal. One man alone would help you, Anstruther—"
"Stop it! Don't speak again!"
"Then you have heard of him? The word is traveling. And once the word again is on the lips of those who would be men, no power as yet conceived—"
"Liar and renegade! Beast of the upper earth—"
The Father's voice came wearily, "Enough, O'Hara—do not preach to him. Our problem has been solved. Descend."
The hatch clanged shut. O'Hara felt the shock of the cylinder's sudden acceleration and sprawled helplessly upon its foamlike cushioning, and as before, when he regained his feet, the quick deceleration flung him down again. And the hatch was opening.
"The Father awaits," a Son above him said.
But this time there was to be no long ascent by corridors and stairs and shafts to reach the awe-inspiring architecture of the Dome. When he left the cylinder, a panel opened in the wall beyond the terminus of the Tube, and after O'Hara had passed through, the Son stepped quickly back, the panel slid down instantly, and in the rushing dark O'Hara heard the Father's silken voice, now faint, now roaring through his brain, now very faint and weak again:
"I am returning you at once to Anstruther. When you have regained your senses, awaken him. You have only to tell him that you have at last remembered the way to reach me. He and his Sons will follow willingly enough.
"But this time I shall not guide you by my voice. A panel will open in the corridor beyond the point at which Anstruther blasted through. Lead them through that panel. Ascend the stairs you will then find. At the top of them, push up the metal covering. And you will find yourselves before this dais."
O'Hara gasped, "Anstruther was that close to you?"
"Anstruther always has been that close to me, but men who live by their emotions never quite achieve their goals. He feels. I think. That is our difference."
"Ah, Father, there is more than that."
"So you believe, O'Hara. Emotion is contagious, and you have caught the fever of it—but few men ever catch the fire of thought. You will, you will! But until I have rid you of this delusion you are useless to me. When you are here with Anstruther we shall then see how altruistic tyranny can be, when it is based on thought. And how completely senseless and destructive pure emotion is."
"I will not betray Anstruther to you."
"Do you forget your wife and child?"