Chapter V: Part FOUR: O'Hara put down his empty glass (1)

"I have had enough of this," he said, and got up, as an angered lion might get up--that kind of throttled wrath, restrained only by the dignity of his huge and thickly muscled body, for the pent-up loathing that he had felt for Stephen Bryce--the Father, the only brain guiding the destinies of the hundreds of millions swarming through the subterranean cities of the Western Hemisphere--was burning through him, even here in London, in this flat of his in Bloomsbury, much as if he had gotten into his veins a dose of that caustic solution that he had seen dissolving the masses of overpopulated Emporia.

"You see?" he asked, and whirled abruptly toward me, his darkly tanned face twisting sardonically beneath his tousled dark hair, his blue flight jacket of the International Patrol now completely unbuttoned, for the drinks we had had and his rapid pacing of the floor of that little flat and the pace of his report, and above all his tension, had dappled him with sweat. "You see, do you--I'm utilized! I've lost whatever grip I had. Or perhaps I never had it. When there's no stress, we can all of us think ourselves cucumbers. But when I was walking at last away from that immense bed upon the dais in Stephen Bryce's unthinkably vast hall in Washington, my pity for the Father was drowned in disgust for any man who could do what I had just seen him do, and I dreaded him more than I feared the dangers now loosed in the endless corridor outside the hall.

"For I could deal with Anstruther. Insane or not, Anstruther could not seem too dangerous, the way that I remembered him. His rather womanish blue eyes and fair hair and his romantic boyishness--weakness, I told myself--could never be formidable. Yes, I could deal with Anstruther. And as I left the Father and went toward the distant wall where Nedra was waiting with my infant son, I meant to do it.

"Let me make the situation clear. I had been without hope. It had seemed incredible that I could escape with Nedra and my son from the labyrinth of Washington, retracing my way along the glittering and utterly deserted corridors through panels that slid open without detectable human motivation, back to the Tube and through it back into Emporia, now a dead metropolis, and up again by its only shaft to the surface of the earth and through the patrols of the Degraded in western Kansas once again into those mountains where Nedra's kinsmen were. No one--I had had the clansmen's word for this--had ever escaped once he had sunk into the cities of the lowlands. It was that absolute hopelessness that had driven me unresisting forward to the Father, and yet now--

"Now I believed there was a way to do it. I had only to learn from the Father the mechanism of the integrocalculators, the key-studded board he kept beneath his blue-veined hands, and to make my peace with Anstruther who surely understood this maze of a city and who, as the Father himself had said, controlled a dissident faction of the Sons, and the way would be clear for Nedra and my child and me.

"That's hope for you. The impossible at once becomes a very simple thing. I had only to do this, and only to arrange that. I wonder now how I supposed the Father, so readily to be outwitted, had been able to endure for two hundred and seventy years behind the Atomic Curtain. The truth is of course that I was not thinking--I was engaging in the opposite of thought, which is hope. And hope blinded me. Or rather, purpose blinded me. I had been so long without either."

He had been, he said, quite certain of his direction when he started walking away from the dais. He had seen Nedra going toward the apartment built into the distant wall, and he had thought that he had only to go that way himself to join her. Yet in the absorption of his speculations he walked for some fifteen minutes without the distance once occurring clearly to him, and it was only the sensation of walls closing in upon him that finally halted him.

He was in a corridor. Somehow he had passed from the vast hall of the Father.

"I was to learn that in the city of Washington there were no walls as we know them. They had the thickness and the height of walls, but the Father, constantly watching in the screen above his bed, could with the touch of his little finger disarrange and reassemble those immense sections of stone and metal in a thousand patterns, all preconceived it is true, to cope with all conceivable situations. I was to see the giant gears that could elevate within an instant the lowest depths of the city to the topmost level and transfer the Dome itself, that amazing architectural illusion, into the very bowels of the earth, miles below the muddy bottom of the Potomac. In all of the city only the Tube was fixed, and that solely because the shifting of its continental span was too monstrous an engineering feat even for those masters of the early days immediately after the establishment of the Atomic Curtain. It would have involved the balancing of the crust of the earth itself, and as in the case of Archimedes with his global lever, where was there such a fulcrum?

"But the city, Washington, was a myriad of interchangeable parts, and at no moment since its construction could there possibly have been a master plan for it--nothing that any enemy could definitely say was thus and so, the plexus here, the exact place to strike at. Within the broad limit of its thousand patterns and countless thousands of lesser integral dispersions it existed only as the Father wanted it, and through his keyboard could instantly set it up.

"I say that the lone exception was the Tube. That is true, the Tube was fixed, but its terminus could be sent whirling away from it, sealing it off. Conceive of the city, if you wish, as a series of spheres, one within the other, like a child's gyroscope, revolving when the impulse came from the integrocalculators, or expanding through the integration of chords from a larger outer sphere which then contracted into the lesser orbit. Too tough? It was for me.

"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."