"Suppose," O'Hara said to me, leaning forward suddenly, his empty
glass in his hand, "you were to fly tomorrow to the Prefecture of
Switzerland--leave London, say, at noon, and arrive there twenty
minutes later and alight at the Bern airstrip and then start walking,
away from the town into the countryside--into the mountains. You'd have
the feeling of London clinging to you. At any moment, you'd think, you
could return to the airstrip and be again in London--in Bloomsbury,
here--within twenty minutes, if you wished.
"Now, suppose further, that while you're walking through those Swiss
mountains, you come upon a magnificent woman, larger than most women
of Europe and more beautiful by far, auburn-haired, blue-eyed, dressed
strangely in furs in a costume very like a Highlander's. And within a
half hour's time she has attempted to knock out your brains and you, in
defending yourself, have instead been forced to flatten her, and then
have found that this was exactly what she'd hoped you would be able to
do, and that henceforward she is your woman--not your slave but your
mate--the mother of children who will be yours but who will not call
you their father.
"And still further, suppose that suddenly from these same Swiss Alps,
not twenty minutes from where we're sitting this moment, drinking
ourselves into a mild sort of bender, a horde of manlike creatures,
uglier than apes because they are men and not apes, surrounds you and
destroys the illusion of an ancient time--destroys it with atomic
weapons and the evidences of atomic-powered industry--ah, you see?
"We have not telescoped only the time involved since the establishment
of the Atomic Curtain around the two Lost Continents of the Western
Hemisphere. We have also telescoped time as far back as one hundred
thousand years ago--we have got back to the Java Man, and yet we're
also far ahead of where Europe and Asia are today, all within the
present moment. For you're only twenty minutes from London!"
"It would take more than twenty minutes to get from here to the Rockies
of North America," I pointed out.
O'Hara laughed. "It would take," he said, "two hours of straight
flying time. And the Twelve Old Men of Geneva are now aware of that.
Two hours--imagine it--from where we sweat and scrabble for our daily
bread, and we could live forever without so much as wiggling our
smallest toes. The abundant life, old man--food for the taking, shelter
and absolute peace and freedom, and only those who are bored with that
engage in anything resembling human struggle as we know it. And we can
have that. All of us. Have it there in North America--or here, if we
wish--for by now the Twelve Old Men must be reading my report, sent on
from Croydon after I landed just a while ago. What do you think they'll
do about it?"
"I don't know, O'Hara. You have not finished."
"No," he said, and filled our glasses, "I haven't finished, have I?" He
drank, his eyes intently watching me. "You want the full picture, don't
you? Well, you shall have it. Let your mind step back into that plane
I mentioned, and take that two hours' flight across to the Rockies,
to southern Colorado, beyond the Atomic Curtain. We're in a mountain
valley, remember--? Nedra, and I, facing a gentleman who speaks that
strangely bastardized English I've described for you--and speaks it
with a certain dignity, as if used to command. And in his ugly hand
he holds that shining tubelike object that creates those hideous
explosions that destroy--and without trace--his enemies. The atomic gun.
"I have described him. Apelike yet hairless, stooped and hulking,
his skin as gray as the granite of that mountain, a revolting thing,
though I've seen men in London's streets quite as revolting. What
perplexed me--amazed me--was the paradox of his speech, for as I say,
it had a certain dignity that could come only from a mind that had been
schooled. But the others of his patrol who now were coming around the
rocks toward us, moving quite slowly as their weak eyes constantly kept
watching for the scattered mountain clansmen, were, I was to learn, by
far his inferiors. They were the horde, the masses if you please, while
he--and by sheer accident of birth, for in that society of which he was
a member, to be born with intelligence is indeed an accident--belonged
to that most tyrannic of all aristocracies, the oligarchy of brains.
They called him the Son."
Nedra, O'Hara said, was pressing tremblingly against the muzzle of
the .38 he was holding at her side, watching the Son with an expression
of absolute loathing, nor did she then or ever see the Son as any
different from the members of the horde--the difference in intellect
being meaningless to her. "A blow," said O'Hara, "to the bright boys
of this earth, had they seen her face as I was seeing it. But I do
not think it was a blow to the Son. He expected only loathing from
Nedra, and if he could have had her, physically, her loathing would
not have mattered to him. He knew--that is, he had been taught--that
women of her kind were desirable for breeding purposes, as a means
of retarding the reverse process of evolution, desirable from the
standpoint of the race, but he was utterly lacking in aesthetics--a
lovely woman or an ugly one, the flower or the weed, he did not and
could not differentiate. And not through lack of intelligence, for he
had something resembling that--but because, I think, the essence of
romance and the appreciation of beauty is escape. And from what was he
escaping, he and his kind? They had everything--everything, including
the sickness. That alone perhaps they wished to escape, and that was a
simple matter of biology.
"The real truth is," said O'Hara, "they wished to escape the sickness
only because the thought of escaping it had been thumped into their
brains from the moment when it was first realized that they had
brains--so few of them had. It was no inherent wish. Actually the
masses were quite content to go along as they were going, back
toward the ape, the lizard, the fish, the primal scum. The masses
of North America--both the Americas--are quite content. It is that
thought that must be terrifying at this instant the Twelve Old
Men of Geneva. For the masses anywhere always are striving toward
contentment, and now--well, they can achieve it! Our masses, too. The
Twelve Old Men know that now. And yet they also know--as Nedra knew
instinctively--the price of it."
The Son, said O'Hara, now indicated the route they were to follow,
pointing down the valley. "We must go at once," he announced, "for
the cold of night will come swiftly. You-who-fly," he said, his eyes
meeting O'Hara's, "are responsible for the woman's life. Remember, if
she dies by the metal rod that you are holding against her, you will
die instantly. Now, march."
For two hours they proceeded, but with nothing of the cautious and
skillful precision that the mountain clansmen had effected before the
attack, for although the Son remained just behind them, constantly
ready to prevent their escape, the rest of the horde, three hundred
when assembled, shambled aimlessly along in groups of two or ten or
fifty, pausing now and then to explore an unusual rock formation or to
feel the bark of trees, to tear an insect's tiny body to pieces, or
simply to stop, having for the moment apparently forgotten where they
were going, or why. Only a sharp command from the Son made them resume
the march, always apathetically, neither resentful nor willingly, as
a troop of small rhesus monkeys might proceed through a particularly
interesting part of the forest.
"You called me 'you-who-fly,'" said O'Hara, speaking to the Son. "How
did you know?"
"You were watched," said the Son. "When you came through the Curtain,
The Father knew of it at once. The Father knows everything that
happens."
"And you are taking us to him?"
"Yes. In Washington."
"Does he know you've captured us?"
The Son looked puzzled, the skin above his bony eye sockets wrinkling
up. He seemed uncertain of his answer for a moment, but then his scowl
relaxed. "The Father knows everything," he said, as if that bit of
catechism demolished any doubts. "He thinks of everything. He sent us
here into the mountains to return with you."
There was some interest in this game, watching the Son's mind
struggling with unscheduled questions. "Suppose," O'Hara asked, "we had
not come down into this valley today? How would you have captured us?"
"It would have been done."
"I see--the Father would have thought of something else?"
"Yes."
"But what?"
"Whatever would have been the best thing possible. If he wished, the
Father could have destroyed these mountains. All of them."
"Why doesn't he? The mountain people are your enemies."
"Oh, no, we have no enemies." The Son was speaking now with greater
surety, for these were obviously lessons he'd been taught. "The
mountain people are instead a medicine. As the Father cultivates some
medicines in test tubes, so he cultivates the mountain people in the
medium in which they thrive."
"He permits them to exist?"
"He encourages them to exist," the Son replied. "He stimulates them."
"How?"
"By sending us to fight with them."
"But that destroys them."
"Only some of them. And that stimulates those who survive. Also, it
rids their stock of those unfit to multiply."
"An admirable arrangement," said O'Hara. "As you say, the Father thinks
of everything. I am beginning to want to meet him."
"You will," the Son said. "You will meet him soon."
They were coming out now into the thickly forested valley that opened
eastward toward a rolling plain, then abruptly, sheered off, either
by blast or fire, the forest ceased, and before them lay one of those
vast and multi-hued farms of pipes which O'Hara had seen earlier from
the air. Each section of pipe was roughly four feet in diameter, its
surface slick and with a temperature that O'Hara by touch estimated at
eighty degrees, the ends joined as he had observed so that it was in
fact an endless coil, extending for miles.
"You must climb over these," the Son explained.
"What are they?"
"Photosynthetrons for western Kansas, although not all of their produce
is used here--the solar rays in this region are more favorable for this
particular food, much of which is needed in the cities of the Atlantic
East. We send it there in the Tube."
"The Tube?"
"We are nearing its local terminal." The Son was pointing toward the
approximate center of the pipe farm, from which now a sudden new
eruption of these hairless manlike animals--despite their speech,
O'Hara could not think of them as men--came clambering, their faces
stamped with that unthinking emptiness of the masses, herded along
toward the approaching party by another of their kind, who, like the
Son, bore in his hand the shining tubelike weapon that O'Hara was to
learn was both the symbol and enforcer of authority. "These are," the
Son explained, "Emporians--their city is a very ancient one, although
its site was often transferred in the old times, before the deluges
began. The Son you see among them tells me that they expect another
deluge soon to remedy their serious overpopulation. You will go with
him."
"Another Son?"
"Oh, yes. The Father does not lack for Sons. I leave you now--my
assignment is the valleys of this mountain range."
And while he turned, the two masses were commingling, so that the task
of separating them was like the task of shepherd dogs with sheep--a
division of the herd, not by specific individuals, but numerically, the
two Sons shouting as they cleaved the shambling and always apathetic
horde apart. To O'Hara it seemed an astonishing performance, the
docility of the masses, for surely behind their dim eyes must be some
semblance of a brain--surely they must know that those who went toward
the mountains were to be used for combat purposes, exposed at least to
the minor risk from the Colts of the mountain clansmen, yet apparently
it did not matter to them, whether war or the placid test-tube
existence of a city like Emporia, the sole difficulty that the Sons
encountered arising from the inability of the masses to grasp the fact
that they must be separated, that before the tumult could cease some
of them must direct themselves toward the mountains and some return to
the city. It was like the insensate division of an amoeba--a division
directed perhaps by a sublime intelligence but without either the
acquiescence or comprehension of the masses.
More and more, observing the Degraded--the only less than bestial
stupidity of the horde and the derived intelligence or trained reflexes
of the Sons--O'Hara was conscious of feeling that it was indeed a
sublime intelligence that guided them, something they accepted without
challenge as infallible, which in the inevitable pattern of such
conceptions that spoke of as the Father but which more probably was a
cabal of the more superior of the Sons, a ruling organism probably not
unlike the Twelve Old Men of Geneva.
But to Nedra such reflections were not only senseless, they were silly.
The masses of the Degraded, the Sons and even the Father were only
varying terms for describing a loathsome people--worms, the clansmen
called them. And only his curiosity kept O'Hara from tending to agree
with that.
"You see?" said Nedra. "You should have killed me earlier, in the
mountains, for this is the way it goes when you deal with the
Degraded--you are passed from band to band, always deeper into the
contamination in which they live, always with less and less chance
of escaping them. They will be taking us now down into this city of
theirs, Emporia, and how then, O'Hara, do you propose that we shall
ever get away?"
There was truth in this. But O'Hara could not see that they were
really worse off than before. "Let me coin a phrase or two," he said
ironically. "While there's life, there's hope, and we can only die
once."
"Those are the worst of lies," Nedra answered, her chin set stubbornly.
"You can die a thousand times, each time more horribly than the times
before, and while there is life it sometimes happens that it's only
life to die again. Are you afraid to die, O'Hara?"
"Not afraid, but reluctant."
"Why? Are better nights coming in our lives than those we passed
together in our cavern?"
"Not better, Nedra--but as interesting, perhaps, and certainly I would
not wish to cancel out that possibility. A man who is dying of thirst
in the middle of the desert does not seek death because the water that
he may reach will not be sweeter than the water that he once had drunk.
But it's more than that--more than the carrot dangled always just
beyond the donkey's nose. In my world, beyond the Curtain, we cling to
the belief that life itself is sacred and that always, finally, we may
achieve redemption."
"What is redemption?"
"Life after death--a finer life than we have lived."
"You think only of yourselves," said Nedra, "and thinking only of
yourselves, that notion may be true. But what of the clan? Have you
forgotten, O'Hara, what the sickness does? We have got it now, you and
I, as the Degraded have always had it--and what it has made of them it
will make of the child that I am carrying."
"That you--?" he said, and gave it up, for there was no answer. None at
all in logic, and Nedra had no concept of religion. Instead, he touched
his lips against her face, a quick caress before she spoke again.
For the horde was separated at last, and those who were to go into
the mountain valleys were already clambering back across the endless
colored coiling of the photosynthetron, while the second of the Sons,
his atom gun held cautiously, was now approaching them.
"We must go down into Emporia at once," he warned. "The Deluge is
coming soon, and you should be safely in the Tube before it happens.
The Father does not wish you to be drowned."
O'Hara tightened his arm around Nedra's waist, to avoid any surprise,
and keeping his .38 beneath her ribs began to follow the horde further
into the maze of pipes.
Six hundred yards deeper, between two pipes of an intense vermilion
color, a square of some forty feet of opaque glass or metal or plastic
now began to tilt upward as they approached, revealing beneath it a
platform of what apparently was magnesium, and onto this platform
the Son led O'Hara and Nedra and as many of the Degraded as it would
accommodate. The platform now began to sink rapidly, without sound,
down a shaft immaculately tooled from a similar glistening metal,
descending for what O'Hara estimated to be two hundred feet before it
reached bottom. A wall of the enclosing shaft now slid up, and they
left the platform, which as instantly began to rise again toward the
surface, while the panel closed automatically behind them. They were in
the underground city of Emporia.
O'Hara, describing this, could not conceal, even in prosaic Bloomsbury,
the intense excitement that he'd felt upon first seeing this fantastic
culmination of an epoch. "The atomic epoch," he continued, "the world
that Europe might have become except for that Third World War. If you
were standing now, as I stood then, in the exact center of that strange
and yet contemporary subterranean metropolis, I doubt you'd ever write
another bit of pseudoscientific nonsense for those Youth League fans
of yours. Because you are an amateur, old man--what your picked old
brains consider rather weird, and hence commendable from the standpoint
of a fiction writer, is in truth nearer facts--though there was more
of weirdness in Emporia than you ever dreamed of. More astonishing
probably than the Curtain itself, weirder than the Degraded, and vastly
further into the domain of the inconceivable than a clan of Cro-Magnon
people walking magnificently through the caverns of the Rockies, not
two hours' flying time from where we're sitting now. I should have
known--I am mildly psychic, a throwback possibly to some wild Boston
Irishman of the twentieth century or a gandy dancer for the Santa Fe.
These names confuse you, gandy dancer, Boston Irishman? I read them,
later, in the incalculably tremendous library that the Father keeps in
Washington, the archives of a dead democracy. Yes, there's Celtic blood
in me, thinned out but quite sufficient to be psychic in such matters,
and I should have known, when I heard Anstruther scream the day he
vanished off the coast of Patagonia, that there were stranger things on
earth than an impenetrable wall.
"You've seen the Roman catacombs? Marveled at them, that men can
burrow into the earth like that? Then faintly, though very faintly,
you understand how I felt standing there, with Nedra pressed close
against me, shuddering--the glistening magnesium walls and avenues of
subterranean Emporia extending in all directions from the shaft that
pierced the city's roof, the lone communication with the surface of the
earth.
"The shaft rose from a sort of plaza, a wide space, rectangular, with
avenues dug through the living stone and lined with metal, top and
bottom as well as both sides, and with the various compartments that
would correspond to our buildings honeycombed out from each avenue,
so that there really was no feeling of a city as we know it--only
of immense tunnels, intersecting, none of the relief of roofs and
chimney pots and varying architectural façades--a triumph of cubism,
a nightmare of magnesium that reflected a pale green light from
opalescent tubing recessed everywhere into the city's roof. And through
these vast avenues the masses of the Degraded swarmed in aimless and
quite effortless contentment.
"Literally," said O'Hara, "tens of thousands. The avenues were choked.
It was worse than Trafalgar Square on a holiday, worse than the crush
of devotees at the Grand National. Continuously they pressed through
swinging doors into the food and slumber chambers of Emporia--vast
rooms without the variance of so much as a welded seam, where, in great
cauldronlike contrivances, the substance that was manufactured by the
sun's rays in the photosynthetrons was constantly available, different
foods, colored differently, tasting differently, all piped in from the
reservoirs into which the photosynthetrons were drained--all automatic,
not a hand raised to achieve the feeding of the populace except that
which would guide the ladle to the mouth. The populace was fed--not
quite like pigs, but with as little ceremony or appreciation.
"The slumber rooms were uniform. Around the walls were tiers of
bunks, each six feet wide and eight feet long, each cushioned with a
yielding dry material much like foam rubber but incredibly enduring.
It was impossible to tear it, impossible to wear it out from the small
friction it received. As a matter of record, it had been in those
bunks, unchanged, for nearly two centuries.
"Sanitation? That was one of the major purposes of the Deluge, as they
called it--a purging of the city, ridding it of both surplus population
and uncleanliness, an alkaline solution that--but wait, I've got ahead
of how I learned these things.
"The city of Emporia was impressive. Believe me, engineering reached
its peak in those first years behind the Atomic Curtain, when fear
and want had been abolished and all the genius of man was channeled
into the creation of the perfect civilization--perfect, it seemed!
And Emporia was sealed completely, locked in magnesium in its cavern
blasted into the rock, its air a manufactured substance like its food,
its drink pumped in along the Tube that terminated at Los Angeles,
where the enormous purifying plant distilled sea water for half of the
continent. But great as were these utterly nonmanual works, the most
astonishing phase of life was life itself--the horde, the shambling
tens of thousands eating there and sleeping there and breeding--
"You've always been libidinous. And I suppose you'd think there'd be a
furor if a hundred thousand women, nude, came through the streets. But
there was none--no furor, not so much as a wolf call, not a whistle in
those choked streets of Emporia. One hundred thousand naked women, mind
you, their bodies delicately green in that reflected light, frailer
than the men, their breasts like pockets turned inside out, their hair
as short as the men's and as bristling and their long arms clasping
more often than not their strange little babies with the fierce
protectiveness of all biological things--the rat fights for its young,
and the hare, and the wren--but without real affection. One hundred
thousand nude and speechless women, apathetically shambling among one
hundred thousand naked men--"
A scene, said O'Hara, from Dante's hell. Men and women without emotion
and without souls, or if souls cannot be bred out of the race, then
without the intelligence to express them.
The particular band of the Degraded with which he and Nedra had
descended into Emporia now had dispersed among these swarming
thousands, but the Son who was guarding them remained, and O'Hara, as
they proceeded along a glittering, nameless avenue, passing through
several of the slumber and feeding chambers where the masses were
eating or lying in their bunks, both together and separately, without
shame, no longer could believe that there was any purpose or direction
in their movement.
"Where are you taking us?" he asked the Son.
"Toward the Guild," replied the Son. "The Tube from Washington comes
there. Also, all the Sons allotted to Emporia are bound there now, to
escape the Deluge."
"The Sons escape the Deluge."
"The Sons and all those babies who have the prerequisites of Sons. We
collect them from the women after we have tested their intelligence.
That is done at birth, their brain waves proving those who will be
eligible."
"Tested by a machine?"
"How else?"
"Their mothers don't object?"
"Why should the mothers object? When they have borne them, their task
is done. It is we, the Sons, who have the tasks of collecting them and
sending them to Washington for training there. It is we, the Sons, who
have the task of fertilizing--"
"Only the Sons?"
"The males of the masses are sterile. That task is ours."
"There must be many Sons," said O'Hara.
"No, unfortunately. The ratio of Sons to masses constantly grows
smaller and nowadays it is only by artificial insemination that
the task can be accomplished. You will go this way," the Son said,
indicating a door. "This is the Guild."
The chamber which they were now entering differed from the other
immense halls of Emporia only in two particulars--the entrance through
which they were passing consisted of double doors, like waterlocks, and
in the center of the hall the metallic floor was cut away, with steps
descending toward a series of still lower and smaller tunnels, the top
halves of which had been removed. In one of these semi-exposed tunnels
was resting at the moment a huge metal cylinder, some sixty feet
long, with a hatch at its top into which various of the Sons were now
descending, each bearing in his arms an infant, returning moments later
empty-handed. After ten minutes of this, the last of the Sons emerged,
the hatch was snapped shut and bolted, and the cylinder began moving,
disappearing within a second past a valve into its tunnel.
A booming voice now filled the hall. The Sons turned from all sides
toward a giant metal mirror, upon which, without apparent source, a
brilliant light seemed reflected.
"The infants have departed?" asked the voice, and a chorus of the
Sons answered in the stylized manner of a chant, "They have departed,
Father."
"The man who flies has departed?"
"He has just arrived, Father."
"Send him to me. The hour of the Deluge is at hand."
The Son with O'Hara and Nedra motioned them toward a second cylinder
now sliding in from its tunnel. "You must go at once," he commanded.
"But you alone, not the red-haired woman of the mountains."