"I will not betray him."
"You saw her agony when she was struggling to keep the child afloat?"
"I see that agony now, Father. It is my agony. But I will not betray Anstruther. Do as you will, but quickly, Father—in this final cruelty be merciful."
"My hand is on the key, O'Hara. Must I?"
"Quick!"
"I commend your resolution," said the Father quietly. "Now I promise you that I will not destroy Anstruther, or will I detain him from the fate he wishes for himself. Is this enough?"
"You promise this?"
"You can enforce it. I cannot work through you unless you wish." The Father's voice sank to a whisper now. "Open your eyes. For you are in that small point in infinity—the room that seemed forever unattainable, the end of these long corridors of Washington. Anstruther and the Sons are sleeping there with you. Awaken them and do as I have said."
O'Hara was now conscious of opening his eyes. The illusion that the Father's voice was audible only to himself was overpowering at this time, for had he not been violently in argument with the Father in this room, where Anstruther and the Sons still were sleeping? Anstruther had not moved from the bunk across the room, or had the Sons stirred from the grotesque line upon the floor where they had fallen. Or, it seemed, had O'Hara himself moved since he first had sat there on the bunk, discussing with Anstruther the Father's tyranny. And all that seemed to have intervened since then—his return to the Father, his weeks of study in the library behind the dais, his strangely visual life with Nedra by means of the screen, his descent down to the unattainable integrocalculators, his journey through the Tube to the three cities of New York, and his surprising colloquy with the Son who first had guarded him there, the Son who had remembered that a female once had fought to keep her child and who had thought that it was somehow beautiful, and who had died for thinking that—none of these events that had transpired since he first left this little point that was infinity now seemed a portion of his conscious life. They were only dreams, he told himself.
"Yes, they were dreams, only the product of disordered sleep," he told himself.
Then his hand touched something sharp within his jacket. It was the metal book—the way out that as yet he did not need.
And so it was no dream. O'Hara returned the book to his jacket. He crossed the room and bent over Anstruther. Would it be a betrayal now to awaken him and lead him as the remembered voice of the Father had commanded? Yet it was true, his reason told him, that he himself could enforce the Father's promise neither to destroy Anstruther nor to detain him from the fate he wished for himself.
"Anstruther," he whispered.
The Sons stirred sluggishly upon the floor. One of them hunched himself up to his feet. Another fumbled for the shining tube of his authority.
"Anstruther," said O'Hara, shaking him.
The Sons were focusing upon him now with their weak eyes, and moving toward him silently, their faces blank, seeming malignant in their utter lack of expression.
"Anstruther!" cried O'Hara, whirling toward the Sons. "Wake up, Anstruther!"
And Anstruther leaped up. The pale blue of his eyes was swallowing the pupils. "Yes—yes, now!" he cried. "The hour!"
The Sons fell back, as silently as they had advanced, their hands loose on the shining tubes they swept in little arcs.
O'Hara said, "I can lead you to the Father."
"Yes—I know—"
"But you risk your life. The Father may destroy you."
"Yes."
"The choice is yours."
"I have no choice. I seek him."
"Then follow me," O'Hara said, and turned into the corridor. Anstruther and the Sons came after him.
Beyond the blasted wall a panel opened in the seamless bright magnesium, and when all had passed through it and began to climb the steps, the panel shut them into darkness. O'Hara halted now and turned again.
"You have your atom guns. You can blast your way back into the corridor. I must tell you that the Father knows that you are approaching. He asked me to lead you."
"Yes. Lead on."
"I will not do it, Anstruther. Despite his pledge and despite the logic of his argument to support it, I will not lead you further into what is certainly a trap for you."
"What is the way to go?" Anstruther asked impatiently.
"But what do you hope to accomplish?"
"All that any man can accomplish—to meet with evil and combat it."
"Regardless of whether the Father is evil, you cannot combat him. Your only chance of ultimate success is to avoid him until the Sons and the masses everywhere will rise against him."
"But unless I meet him, they will never rise."
"You mean unless you die?"
In the darkness their voices had sunk to whispers. The turgid, thick-nosed breathing of the Sons made hearing difficult, yet neither of them noticed it. For each of them knew both the questions and the answers that must come.
"Yes. Unless I die."
O'Hara knew now that Anstruther could not be stopped. He had set for himself this course toward inevitable death; he had been constantly seeking it; he meant to give the Sons whom he had taught and the masses that he had not yet been able to teach, and might never have been able to teach, a martyr.
Still, O'Hara refused to lead Anstruther to the Father. It was Anstruther himself who pushed O'Hara aside and strode upward at last through the darkness until his groping hand touched metal above him and he thrust against it and it yielded to him. He climbed slowly out of the dark into the brilliance of the sun above him and disappeared into it. And when the Sons too had passed and vanished, O'Hara followed.
Anstruther was standing rigid and defiant halfway up the dais toward the enormous bed from which, as O'Hara emerged among the cowed and kneeling Sons, the fragile hand of Stephen Bryce was beckoning to them all. And beyond the pitifully small mound that Stephen Bryce's wasted body made beneath its coverlet, Nedra was standing with her baby in her arms—Nedra magnificently tall, robed in the thick, rich tresses of her auburn hair.
And of those gathered there, herself, Stephen Bryce, Anstruther and the Sons, and O'Hara, only Nedra seemed tranquil. Only Nedra seemed waiting for what must now happen with serene indifference—the total serenity of woman everywhere who knows that after blood is shed, she conquers.
It was Nedra's indifference that inflamed O'Hara. At the foot of the dais in that incalculably vast hall, with the hairless nude bodies of the Sons now hulking between him and the bed upon which Stephen Bryce was very slowly dying, and below Anstruther who had frozen halfway to the bed, O'Hara reckoned his chances.
He might just reach Nedra before the atom guns of Anstruther's Sons obliterated him. He might get there, but it would only be to die with her in his arms. He had had that chance before, to die with her, and he repeatedly had rejected it—he rejected it now, for it was to live with her that he wanted. Yet with the fever of death about that enormous bed O'Hara could feel surging within himself the mad and heroic drive toward immolation, to die with Nedra, as she had wished before.
The Father spoke sharply. "Stay where you are, O'Hara!"
A Son's hand touched him. He whirled and drove his fist into the hairless face, exulting in the splattered flesh and bone.
"O'Hara, stop! Nedra will not die and does not wish to die, and you yourself will not die unless you wish it. You have a mind—you must use it."
And Nedra said, "Wait now, O'Hara."
"Yes," said Anstruther, "wait. This is my hour."
One of the Sons was now pressing his shining weapon against O'Hara's back, but his eyes were moving irresolutely, watching both Anstruther's upraised hand and O'Hara's half-crouched body and aware—constantly and fearfully aware—of the silent small form prostrate on the enormous bed above them. And the miracle of the vast hall, that the Father's voice was a senile whisper when heard upon the dais but an overwhelming and godlike roar a few feet from it, gave those Sons further from the bed the strange obsession of listening to a deity's words come thundering from dying lips.
"It is indeed Anstruther's hour," said Stephen Bryce, and the Sons pressed forward to the steps of the dais.
Anstruther lowered his hand. "You have brought me here at last, Stephen Bryce," he said, "into this hall which is the symbol and the origin of your power. It was for this meeting that my craft was guided by a power more sublime than yours through the Atomic Curtain into Patagonia, and that the Sons then sent me northward through the Tube, that I might meet you here and take from you those keys and their control of the integrocalculators I might once again restore these people to the dignity of men—"
"You hear, O'Hara?" said the Father. "None of this springs from Anstruther's will. This is the classic attitude of the Messiah. Avoid this attitude, never believe that what you do is not the fruit of your own thinking and your volition."
Anstruther's own voice now again was audible, but he was looking past the Father and the keyboard now, toward Nedra.
"—and to restore the dignity of woman's motherhood, the peopling of the earth, the sacred adoration of their sons—"
"Worship comes from within," the Father said. "It does not need Messiahs to restore it. This is emotion speaking, blind emotion."
"—deliver to me now the keyboard of the integrocalculators. The weapons of the Sons whom you debased are turned upon you now—"
"You see, O'Hara, this violence will not be his. He has aroused the Sons, he led them in revolt, yet when the climax of it comes he shrinks from recognizing that the act is his. He blames the Sons, or pins it on a power beyond us all, and in this way he sheds responsibility for what he surely knows must end in death for all of us if I so will. This is the way of emotion, this is the weakling's way, O'Hara, this is the maddened posturing of a fool insensible to all except how he must seem just now in Nedra's eyes—the Chosen Male, the Dedicated Man. And she is seeing him that way! Don't you foresee how all of this must end, O'Hara? One moment more—"
"Answer, Stephen Bryce," Anstruther cried. "Answer, or die. Give me the key!"
The Father's voice broke coldly now into the sudden hush. "No, my son, I am sorry—the key is not for you, and I cannot now save you from yourself, as I had wished to do. For the worst of all human diseases is upon you, the one disease for which we never yet have found a palliative—your own vanity."
"Give me the key!" Anstruther screamed out in hysteria. "Or by my own hand, I—"
"Anstruther, stop!" O'Hara cried.
The kneeling Sons rose up in sudden frenzy, leaping for the steps. And in that moment of confusion Anstruther struck wildly downward at the Father's skull. The sound of it was like the bursting of an egg, Anstruther rocked, as if it were himself that had received the blow, and then, his arms extending cataleptically, he gripped the keyboard and drew back with it.
The Sons, now milling on the dais, seemed lost and leaderless, a shambling herd again, until from their slack apelike mouths issued a low, despairing wail, as animals in panic raise their senseless cry, then all at once, as panicked animals will swerve, they turned toward Anstruther, their long arms lashing out toward him.
"No," cried Anstruther, reeling back. "No, don't—this was for you!"
But a wild horror was upon them, a blood-lust born of their shocked sense of guilt, and their immense hands tore at him, gouging at his eyes, ripping his face to shreds. He rushed beyond the enormous bed upon which the Father lay inert, and reaching Nedra, flung himself prostrate at her feet, then raising eyes that welled with sudden tears he sobbed, "We might—have led them! You and I—"
The Sons went swarming after him. Nedra was standing motionless, serene—dazed or serene, O'Hara could not tell. Anstruther's hand slid down along her thigh, and then, defiantly, he smashed his fist into the myriad of keys upon the board. Then the tide of leaping hairless bodies swept down on him, and as O'Hara snatched Nedra away from them, Anstruther screamed again, a scream of agony that rose half muffled from the writhing mass. They tore him apart, dismembered him, lay wallowing in bestial fury in his flesh and blood.
"O'Hara! O'Hara!"
It was the Father's voice. The hall's vast walls were now receding toward infinity, and from above, sped by the impulse that Anstruther's blow upon the keys had loosed, the intricately embellished ceiling now was plunging toward them and a great roaring from a greater distance drowned the babbling of the Sons. The Father's hand rose up. And fell. O'Hara bent down to the bed.
"This was—the solution of the problem. Death for both extremes, O'Hara—death just a little earlier than it should have come. Now both of us, Anstruther and myself, commit into your hands the redemption of these continents. You understand, you hear?"
"Yes, Father—yes, I hear."
"You must go back through the Atomic Curtain. You must convince them that our skill can save their continents from their real enemies, hunger and disease. You must convince them, O'Hara, for this is their last chance, I think, as it is ours. Convince them that we want their colonists to build again, as they once built, a new and stronger race within this hemisphere—new blood to strengthen ours. And then return quickly, for it will be your task to carry on my work, to avoid my mistakes, to practice the restraint I should have shown, ridding this hemisphere at last of its pollution—"
"But the Atomic Curtain, Father?"
"You—will—pass through. The keyboard—quick! It is a means of concentration, of translating thought into fact. Think and the integrocalculators will respond. Think quickly—take your woman and your baby in your arms and concentrate—the Tube—"
"You, Father?"
"—to the Pits of Yellowstone. You see—?"
The roaring from the space around them now drowned out the Father's voice, and his eyelids shriveled shut. And while the Sons at last turned from Anstruther's mangled body and knelt down in worship at the bed, slots opened in the rapidly descending ceiling and the amber torrents of the Deluge came cascading down.
O'Hara cried, "The Tube! The Tube! The Tube!"
Darkness engulfed him. A great wind shrieked through his last consciousness. Long after that, it seemed, he was wrapped in a silence that was endless and sublime, as death might be, yet he felt certain that it was not death. And after that, long after that, he sensed that he was in the cylinder within the Tube. He struggled up. Nedra was lying at his feet, her baby locked tight in her shielding arms.
And so the Father had disclosed in death this final truth to him, and they had escaped through it—the actual power of thought. It was destructive thought, intensified with Anstruther's mind and focused through the keyboard, that had freed the impulse that caused the integrocalculators to disarrange the spatial structure of the subterranean capital, then loosing in the great hall of the Father and indeed all Washington the devouring torrents of the Deluge. And it was his own thought, O'Hara's thought, attuned to these integrocalculators which once more had moved his body through these walls of stone and seamless magnesium—his body and Nedra's and the child's—streaming as Stephen Bryce had sent him from the library downward, unchained energy, and now into the cylinder of the Tube that at this moment hurtled them toward the west.
Deceleration flung him forward in the cylinder. When its momentum died he crawled to Nedra, lying motionless.
"Nedra," he called to her.
Her lips moved silently, as if the trick of speech were lost to her. Her sluggish breathing seemed a part of that subhuman torpor he had seen before, when they were in the Tube arriving at its terminus in Washington. And as before, her apathy enraged him. It was the fury of a man who cannot dodge his guilt. He recognized it now. He stayed his hand.
"Nedra," he said, "however wrong I may have been before, this time—this time at least, I have been right. We are returning, Nedra, rising from these depths, and you must help me rise this time. Do you hear me, Nedra?"
Her lips moved painfully. "I do hear you, O'Hara."
"We have escaped," he cried. "We've gotten out of Washington despite your fears. And you yourself, this time at least, refused the chance to die."
"No one escapes, O'Hara."
"But that is the worst of all delusions, for we have done it. We've gotten out of Washington at last, and if we can do that, we can go on."
"Where would we go."
"To your people in the mountains. And after that—"
"It has never happened."
Grimly he answered, "They have always told you this—that it could not happen. Perhaps that is why it has never happened before. Perhaps it is part of your people's philosophy of death, your hankering after death—perhaps they were afraid to have it happen, Nedra! For nothing is impossible when men are willing to endure, and to dare, and most of all to think."
"It cannot happen, O'Hara."
"It's going to happen now," he warned. "And since I must, I shall make it happen in the one way that you really understand. Give me your hand."
"I can't—"
Deliberately, he swung his open palm sharply against her face. Nor this time did he loathe himself for striking her. He struck again, and as her chin came slowly up, he said, "Yes, Nedra, yes, it's happening," knowing that if he could dislodge her one obsessive thought—and he was doing it—she would become again the Nedra he had met and conquered in that mountain amphitheater months before.
He was being very calm, a paradox of gentle brutality and masculinity, when her own hand shot out and seized his throat.
As he staggered back, her long nails slashed his cheeks and she came after him, not sluggish now but lithe and murderously quick, and leaped upon him, locking her strong legs around him, and thus driving him down hard upon the cushioned surface of the cylinder while her tensed fingers stabbed toward his eyes.
O'Hara rolled from beneath her. The apathy had vanished from her eyes. What he saw in them was that wild, tigrish mating lust of the Nedra he had loved, and loved now, and must conquer or as surely die. Again she pinioned him, again tearing at his face, and with a final desperate thrust he broke away from her and staggered up. She leaped for him at once. Through the blood in his eyes, he saw her chin and swung for it. And this time it was she who dropped.
She lay at his feet. Her fingers moved unguided and found his ankles. She dragged herself toward him, painfully, and when he saw the fierce and untamed admiration in her eyes, he flung himself down blind with desire.
Yes, there were limits to the possibilities of thought. There were some things that called for more than the will to endure and to dare, as he had meant it, and it was arguable, he now confessed, that these might be the most important things of all.
In that little flat in Bloomsbury, the floor of which he had been pacing all this time so constantly, O'Hara now paused, shrugged his great shoulders and reached toward the glass that had remained untouched for better than an hour while he had told me this. He was back with me once more, back in mind as well as body, from those lost continents beyond the Atomic Curtain. He was back to the dirt and the poverty and the insecurity of the world as he had known it as a boy, and as if he felt the change was too abrupt he lifted his glass to the level of his eyes, and staring moodily into it, whispered:
"To Stephen Bryce, the Father."
"To Stephen Bryce," I echoed.
O'Hara smashed the glass against the wall. Then he turned again to me and the smile came once more to his wide, strong mouth. "Well, he's gone, has Stephen Bryce, for nothing human could have cheated the Deluge pouring into that vast hall in Washington—Stephen Bryce and his adoring Sons who turned at last against their self-appointed Messiah, Anstruther. But don't think that I would discredit Anstruther. He was more than a man. He was a force, a spirit—the little, stupid things Messiahs do die with them, but their message, the cause for their being, lives on and grows. And so it will with Anstruther. He gave them a word they had forgotten—men. And some will remember and spread it. Yes, Anstruther in death can triumph over all those masterworks that trammeled him in life. And I—"
A low cry came to us from the room beyond. O'Hara whirled, his dark eyes seeming to flash fire. His great fists tightened quickly, then he forced them open, very carefully, as if it hurt him. He stared a moment longer, and then he said:
"There's a little more and I must finish it. I left you with us in that cylinder of the Tube, its momentum gone, and Nedra and myself completely one again, but not free yet, still trapped. I must get us out of that. It is too much like the ending of a chapter in those serials you used to write—you're hanging from a cliff, and the pond below you swarms with hungry crocodiles. You're slipping, you're certain to fall—but we mustn't worry too much. With a quick flourish of your pen—I suppose you actually use a typewriter—you'll whisk away the crocodiles and place a haymow in the pond to receive you gently when at last you fall.
"With myself and Nedra and our baby it was not quite that easy. We were sealed inside the cylinder. And no Son now appeared above us at the hatch. We were sealed in there as completely as we had been sealed, months before, in that exquisite hexagonal room in Washington. But now there was no omnipresent voice to lull us, and we meant to try.
"The hatch was kept rigidly in place by a thick metal spring, protecting us from the vacuum of the Tube during our passage. I glanced around that empty cylinder for some sort of lever to pry against the spring, and then absurdly—for the first time in months—I remembered the pistol strapped inside my jacket. Now I drew it out and fired twice against the coiled metal before it snapped. The hatch sprang open.
"We climbed out warily. Once more we stood in a deserted corridor of glittering magnesium, its endless distances reaching toward infinity. But this time no one opened panels in the walls for us. We marched, a long, long march to nowhere, prisoners still, yet knowing this time in our hearts that space alone could never vanquish us. Nor were we wrong, for finally we made an oblique turn and there before us lay the Guild. And as we entered it, the Sons rose from their knees before a blindingly bright screen. And a god's voice was droning:
"'Now they will come to you—this darkly bearded man and this red-haired woman with a boy child in her arms. Take them to the surface of Emporia, and there deliver them unto the Son who guards the valleys toward the mountains. He must see that they reach the mountainside and leave them there. This is your task. This is your task—'
"The voice droned on repetitively in that same pitch of godliness that I had first heard in the subterranean city of Emporia, beating the order endlessly into their brains until it was—as so much of their guidance was—hypnotic. A voice from the grave—rather, a voice out of the depthless Pits of Yellowstone. Yes, Stephen Bryce's voice, recorded sometime in the hours before his death while he lay waiting for Anstruther and myself to come to him. Knowing that he was to die, and planning to achieve in death the goal he sought for me. And I had thought he would not open panels in the walls!
"Now the Sons were rising from their knees, and they came at once to us—they never doubted that we would be waiting there—and motioned that we were to follow."
The ensuing march, led by the Son whose duty was to take them to the surface, had nothing of the horror of their first descent into Emporia, for it had been the swarming masses of the Degraded that had made it horrible, the shambling tens of thousands, naked and vilely apathetic, aimless. Now there were no masses. And the Son now marching with them knew what he was doing.
"Are you not lonely here without the masses?" asked O'Hara.
"Lonely?"
"Do you not miss those who were swallowed by the Deluge here?"
"Oh, no."
"You realize what caused the Deluge?"
"Yes. The Father caused it."
"And if I told you that the Father too was swallowed by the Deluge?"
"That could not happen."
"But if I say I saw it happen?"
"No," said the Son. "For even now the Father speaks to us. And even now the Tube brings new food from the photosynthetrons. And soon the Tube will bring more females to repopulate Emporia."
"Do you not know what has occurred in Washington?"
"None of us ever knows what has occurred in Washington. It is not necessary that we know, for the Father speaks, and the food continues coming, and the water from the oceans of the west, and we the Sons need nothing more than that. No," said the Son, neither obstinately nor shaken, "we need nothing more, and we need to know nothing more, not while the Voice still comes to give us tasks."
O'Hara himself, certain of what he knew, certain of what he understood must yet be done, could not feel in this moment of such faith that all of this, the whole vast system of existence and regeneration stemming from the fixed impulses of the integrocalculators, must in time run down. For one brief instant he forgot the Father's constant warning that he must not put his trust in miracles, and it seemed possible that these lost continents could go on as they were, unguided, automatically, until their retrogressive doom in time left these glistening corridors only the moist warm droplets of the primal ooze.
And was that actually so terrible? Might as well feel pity for bacteria as for these mindless creatures. But then, in New York, there had been that Son who had recalled a female of the masses who had fought to keep her child. And that Son had remembered it as beautiful.
However dim, perhaps not sharper than the anguish of a wobbly tooth, the anguish of the soul was not yet gone from them. And on that anguish he could build.
"This is the shaft," the Son beside him said.
So O'Hara and Nedra and their child ascended once more to the surface above Emporia and went across the multi-hued coiling of the photosynthetrons and again upon that long march into the upland valleys. And there the Son turned back.
"Good-by," O'Hara called to him.
The Son stood silently. His weak eyes focused for a moment, then he shook his head. "But you will be returning," he said. "The Father frees you for a purpose that is known to him. When you have achieved it, he will send us again to take you back to him."
"You do believe that, don't you?" said O'Hara. "You do believe—"
But the Son was gone.
For the next five days O'Hara and Nedra and the child wandered higher into the mountains. And the beauty of growing things, the trees that soared toward the intense blue skies, and the soft thick mosses and grass beneath their feet, and the birds that fluttered suddenly off when they approached, and the frogs and insects that hopped away or crawled from under rocks, the bite of the wind that came whining down the far white slopes ahead, the gaggle of water searching its path through pebbles, the heat of a true sun in the heavens, all these—and freedom from oppressive walls and more oppressive destiny—awakened them slowly from the long timeless stupor of the lowlands. Nor did they know how deeply, if how troubled they had slept.
"I am hungry," said Nedra.
"I shall hunt for food."
"You have forgotten how to do it."
"An empty belly is a rapid teacher."
"But what will teach you to become a man again?"
"That too I shall learn," O'Hara laughed. He had not laughed for months.
The third night of their wandering it snowed, and they took refuge underneath a ledge of granite, and Nedra toiled for hours with dry bark and some twigs until she had a fire. But a very small fire.
"I am cold now," she said accusingly.
"I shouldn't wonder," said O'Hara. "The fact is, Nedra, you've got to put on some clothes. Which means, I'm sure, that I shall have to get to providing them. I had forgotten what a chore it is to be a husband in this world."
The snow did not stop. On the fourth day of it O'Hara shot a giant timber wolf. Its flesh was coarse and its hide, when they had baked it out, had an amazing stench, but Nedra fashioned it into a sort of kirtle, not so expertly made as that which had concealed her sex the first time that O'Hara saw her, but serviceable.
"Beyond the Curtain," he said, "men buy perfumes for their women, but I doubt, Nedra, that any ever bought a perfume such as this."
"You do not think that I am beautiful in this?"
But it had been a long day's climb and O'Hara was weary. He did not feel that he was in the best of shape for battle. "Yes, Nedra, beautiful," he sighed, and for this night at least she let him lie a coward.
On the sixth day, as they were trudging slowly upward along a snow-drifted trail, the brush ahead of them parted suddenly and from it stepped the gaunt, commanding figure of the clansmen's Elder, his Colt aimed menacingly at O'Hara's breast.
But Nedra said, "Is this the way you welcome us? Where are the others of the clan?"
And they came out of hiding along the trail behind the Elder.
It was not a time for conversation. The Elder now turned his back upon them and began to lead the way, and the clansmen closed in quickly around them, and together at a trot they proceeded along the trail toward the sandy chasm.
In the days that followed, with Nedra reigning placidly once more within the deep gloom of the cavern, O'Hara prepared himself for what he knew must follow. Now that he was free, now that he felt himself again a factor in his destiny, he was reluctant. It was the Elder who at last convinced him, after hearing one night the strange abominations of the lowlands.
"It is a time of strange things," said the Elder cautiously. "I too have heard and seen strange things since you were with us. Do you recall the day you vanished in the valley? Those of us who escaped the Degraded continued on until we reached the lake that had the black water. In time we returned here with it, and made the long copper pots that you designed upon the walls of the cavern—"
"Oh, yes, the still for refracting petroleum."
"—and then we prepared the water that you wished, the colorless water, to give to the flying thing. We wished despite your absence to send it into the air. We took the colorless water in jars and we placed the jars before the flying thing and waited. And presently we heard a voice that spoke the way you spoke when you first came to us. Again and again, as a wolf calls for its missing whelp, it called for you: 'O'Hara—O'Hara—come in, O'Hara! This is Tournant calling, this is Wrangell calling—can you come in, O'Hara?'"
"Tournant!"
"The voice kept saying that. Yet there was no one in the flying thing, no man to speak these words to you."
"Of course! Of course! A voice—the wireless—speaking through three thousand miles of space. And through the Curtain."
"Is this not strange, O'Hara?"
But O'Hara seized his arm. "The voice! The craft! And you took the fuel there? Then I—I can fly again!"
It was that overwhelming yearning to be taking off again that sent him rushing to the cavern.
"Nedra!" And when she turned. "I'm going to fly again."
She wiped the baby's mouth. She rubbed her hands together slowly, with sand between them, to rid them of the fat of a wild fowl she was roasting. She placed a log upon the smoldering fire.
"Where will you fly?" she asked.
"Does it matter, Nedra?"
"Yes."
"All right, I shall go straight up as long as the motors will push me, and then I shall circle around as a condor might do it, and I'll feel like a condor, too, a king of the skies—"
"I am going with you."
That sobered him up. And he took her hands: "There is a chance, always a chance, that the flying thing will fall. And the baby, Nedra, your child—our child?"
"The baby is the clan's. But I, O'Hara, am yours."
"But Nedra, if I—well, if I don't come back to these mountains—?"
"Ah." She smiled. "I knew!" And clenched the ceremonial warclub and advanced.
It was the Elder who managed things. At dawn they departed, the men and the younger women of the clan going swiftly upward through the heavy snowdrifts and O'Hara with Nedra trotting grimly among them until at last they reached that upland meadow where he had first set his craft down on the continent. The craft—and the jars of fuel—waited there.
Nedra got into the cockpit. Then O'Hara directed the task of clearing a runway through the snow. When they had finished, O'Hara climbed in, touched his instruments very carefully, then touched them in earnest and felt the living throb of motors. They coughed and then died.
"Once more," he whispered to himself.
This time they roared.
The Elder flung himself face down into the snow. The younger clansmen scattered. O'Hara shook his fist at them. The craft shot forward. Before it reached the wall of trees it knifed into the sky.
For some minutes O'Hara was too busy with the glory of his wings, driving higher, soaring, to observe that Nedra had now shut her eyes. The ticking of his scintillometer broke in upon his absorption finally, its milliroentgen count a steady .285. Then he heard a more staccato clicking, and it was Nedra.
"Here, your teeth are chipping. Take this jacket, Nedra."
He pulled it off. And the metal book that he had taken from the library in Washington dropped onto his knees. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he flicked wide the covers. Upon the single sheet of bright magnesium was this:
"December 20, 12:35:01 P.M. Save for these ten seconds, only you can do it."
Nedra called his name but he did not hear her. His mind was working like an exquisitely refined machine. He was counting, squeezing the fractional lost months and weeks and days and hours, the minutes and seconds of the past twelve months into a pattern, calculating time, estimating his position by the daytime pinpoints of the stars.
"O'Hara, O'Hara! Our mountains have vanished—"
December 20—and precisely at 12:35:01 P.M.—and for the ensuing ten seconds.
Sweat poured from his body. Infinitesimal memories arranged themselves. He could not be certain. But then he could never be certain again on this side of the Curtain. To the day, yes! And to the hour and possibly quite close to the minute—but never to the second! He would have to feel his way into it, watching his milliroentgen count, and if the Curtain was there, he would have to turn back. Yet this fuel would not last him back from the Curtain to Nedra's mountains. It would be a chance—a frightful chance.
"O'Hara, tell me—"
"We're going through the Curtain, Nedra."
And she nodded somberly.
At fifty thousand feet O'Hara leveled off. As he accelerated past two thousand miles an hour he checked and re-checked his calculations of the day and hour. His problem, as he analyzed it, was to reach the Curtain before 12:35:01 P.M., and to continue swinging into it and away from it until—at the miraculous proper moment—his scintillometer reading dropped below the danger point, and then, upon the inward arc of his ellipse of flying, to smash through.
It would be best to approach first in a dive from his maximum altitude, at his maximum speed. It was true that he might thus smash into the Curtain before the ten-second interval in which it did not exist, during the changing of the reactors, but at least this time he would know what he was about to do—he would not be senseless from a bolt of lightning.
This was his plan. And it worked.
It shot him back across the Arctic, deep into Asia, deep into the hemisphere of Delhi, Rome and Paris and the Twelve Old Men of Geneva.
"You've got to have luck for anything like that," O'Hara admitted. "The luck of a Columbus. Would you have bet on us?"
He laughed, then he corked the bottle. There would be no more tippling in that little flat in Bloomsbury.
"I would not bet against your luck, O'Hara."
"But there was more than luck to it," he answered. "For I was beginning to learn the most difficult of the arts—to think. The Father had taught me how to start learning. Ninety-nine hundredths of the best motor you and I have got is never used—ninety-nine hundredths of each of our brains lies idle. Perhaps in Washington I learned to use another hundredth. At least I had begun to learn how to learn, and once that has begun no problem can remain insoluble."
"Almost the words of the Father," I pointed out.
"Yes, almost the words of the Father. And if you link them with the words I found in that magnesium book—the words I forgot in my extreme concentration upon the matter of the ten seconds in which the Curtain would not be before me—if you recall those words—"
"Only you can do it," I quoted.
"—then you know why I am here tonight," he said. "Do you think I'd desert them?"
"Desert whom, O'Hara? Your son?"
"Yes," he said, "my son—and the Son who remembered a woman of the masses who had fought to keep her child, that Son who had died for thinking it was beautiful and the tens of thousands of others now shambling dully through those subterranean corridors, their bellies full, without anxiety as we know it, yet haunted—dimly haunted by the memory of love. For Stephen Bryce told me that tyranny is in essence not the existence of a tyrant, but the debased minds of the people, and it is their lost faculty of love that most debases them. Of course I'm going back to them. Do you know a comparable challenge?"
"We have a challenge here," I insisted. "The deserts of China and Africa, the hunger of our billions. What you have learned—and what you know of guiding us—can end all that."
"Are you trying to convince me?" he smiled, and took my hand. "Listen carefully, Arthur Blair—tonight I am returning through the Curtain. Don't ask me how, for I have told you, the words in that magnesium book, the moment when the Father died in Washington—I am going back! I know I am going back despite all that the Twelve Old Men and their Security Bureau may attempt. I shall be there in Washington tomorrow. I will have much to do, and for the next three months you will not hear from me. But when those three months end my voice will come to you, not on a screen that blinds you with its incandescence—by wireless, Arthur Blair. I shall be speaking for the Western Hemisphere to you and all these billions. For you need us. And we so desperately need you. My voice will come through the Curtain, and when I am finished speaking there will be no Curtain. I will have lifted it forever.
"We can save our two worlds, Arthur, but it won't be easy. The Twelve Old Men, those timid guardians of the past, are going to fight you. You must fight back, and fast—inform the peoples. Give them the facts, the dangers most of all. Don't raise false dreams, for nothing is accomplished without sweating. Yes, you have got your work cut out for you, Arthur—and only you can do it!"
He freed my hand. He stooped, and when he rose again, he held the ceremonial club tight in his hand.
"I'm going to open that door," he said, "and for just one instant you'll see the most magnificent woman on this earth. Then out you go, old boy! Stand back—stand back!"