Chapter VI: Part FOUR: O'Hara put down his empty glass (2)

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 word _mother_?"

"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."