"You must go together into the Tube at once. The Sons will not hinder
you."
"You are watching, Father? You understand about the gun?"
"Yes, I understand--I watch, as I watch everything. As I know
everything. That uniform of yours--the International Patrol. You were
based on Wrangell Island north of the Siberian Coast. Before that,
you were based in the Falklands, flying southward to Antarctica. Born
an Englishman of émigré descent--of American descent. Your ancestors
were from this continent, before the establishment of the Curtain. You
see, O'Hara? I know!" The reflected light now glowed as would the sun
itself, and O'Hara was remembering the clansman's myth--the Sun Beneath
the Earth. "You are afraid of me now, O'Hara?" asked the voice.
"Afraid of knowledge?"
"I am not afraid of knowledge."
"Then you will come, you and your woman--now. I need you here."
The power of that voice, matched by the sunlike intensity upon the
surface of the giant mirror, lent a sublimity to these words that
kept the Sons in postures of obeisance, yet to O'Hara the tone seemed
instead beseeching, as if the Father were himself afraid--as if
dreading lest O'Hara might destroy himself. What else could possibly be
the purpose of that display of knowledge of events beyond the Curtain?
And that last phrase--"I need you here."
The Father needed him. He knew, as he considered it, that he was going.
And Nedra knew it.
"O'Hara--no!"
Thrusting the .38 inside his jacket, he whirled, and seizing Nedra's
hands, he lifted her, then going quickly down the steps and through the
hatch into the cylinder. The Sons were leaping toward it all at once,
and then the hatch snapped shut.
With a tremendous thrust, the cylinder shot forward, hurling O'Hara
backward through the space inside. Both he and Nedra fell, landing
upon the soft resilience of the foamlike rubber material that had
lined the wide bunks of the slumber chambers of Emporia. The interior
of the cylinder was barren of all else--a long, completely cushioned
projectile that now glided smoothly with the sensation of motion
eliminated by the lack of any way of reckoning it, no openings, no
vibration, until within seconds as O'Hara managed to regain his balance
and got up, seeing Nedra lying motionless six feet away, the cylinder
began to lose acceleration rapidly. O'Hara again was jerked off his
feet.
And as immediately, the hatch above them opened. The face of a Son
appeared.
"You are in Washington," he said. "The Father awaits you."
Seconds, said O'Hara. Not more than twenty seconds since the hatch had
shut, yet in those twenty seconds they had traveled in the Tube from
western Kansas to Washington, a speed unthinkable if Washington were
where it once had been.
Nedra was getting up.
He had been prepared for Nedra to fly into her tigrish rage and come
dangerously toward him, compelling him once again to meet her in the
endless struggle of a mountain clansman with his mate--a struggle that
had begun to be exhilarating--she did not now so much as look at him.
She stood with her eyes averted, her shoulders drooped, her bosom
motionless, completely apathetic.
"Nedra?" he called. And she did not answer. She did not move. Her arms
were hanging slackly, the palms of her hands limp against her thighs.
O'Hara spun her around, looking into her eyes. If she saw him at all,
she perfectly concealed it. Her eyes were glazed, her lips seeming
loose. "Nedra," he cried, and shaking her, "Nedra, what is it? Do you
hear me, Nedra?"
"Yes," she said. "I hear you."
Above them again, at the hatch of the cylinder, the Son was saying,
"The Father waits for you. You must come now."
And for an instant, O'Hara heard in the Son's toneless voice an echo
of Nedra's--the same flatness, a mindless monotone. Now, in confused
panic, he was remembering the relative degrees of contamination he had
discovered earlier, low when above the mountains, extremely high both
toward the east and west of them and presumably even higher in these
atomic-powered cities--remembering too that the people of the mountains
had already taken that first stride back toward the dawn of man. And
had this sudden intensification of atomic pollution struck Nedra,
changing her, since daybreak, into another of these apelike people?
The thought of it revolted him. His reaction was violent.
Unforgivable, he called it--forever unforgivable, for in the next
moment he was guilty of that crime of crimes, unthinking passion, the
closest that man ever comes to bestiality--these words were his own,
the opinion that he voiced in Bloomsbury. He slashed his open hand
across her face.
The blow did not stagger her. When he could see again, she had not
moved--she was standing there before him, staring at him blankly, a
thin smear of blood coming from her mouth.
"Nothing I can say, nothing I've done since, can possibly atone for
that," said O'Hara. "For that was the ugly revulsion of a man who
strikes his misshapen son, loathing the tortured image of himself. All
men are capable of it, as I was capable of it. And even as it was done,
while the palm of my hand was aching from the blow I'd struck, the
abysmal shame of doing it was squeezing chilling fingers on my heart.
And something was changed, something was dead--passion perhaps was
dead. She was more to me than passion could possibly encompass after
that. A man must get down from the high horse of his masculinity to
know what I knew then, at last--I loved her. She was my bride at last.
My wife."
He stooped, placing one arm gently beneath her knees and then lifting
her unresisting body, and with his head bowed above her, he climbed the
steps that led out of the cylinder.
The Son who had been waiting now turned his back upon them, saying,
"You must follow me." He began at once, moving with the clumsy gait of
the Degraded along the vast magnesium-walled corridor. And O'Hara with
Nedra in his arms went after him.
The corridor was deserted. The Son, going in front, was without the
tubelike atomic weapon that the Sons had carried in Emporia, the
only quick way of distinguishing them from the masses. Yet here, in
Washington, the city of the Father, there seemed to be no masses,
nor in this long corridor were there any of the bunks or feeding
cauldrons of Emporia. The endless procession with the bare feet of the
Son soundless upon the metal flooring while O'Hara's heels echoed and
re-echoed made it seem as if he were walking alone in the most horrible
of nightmares--empty space. It continued undeviating, past the point of
bearing, with O'Hara's arms losing any sense of feeling from the dead
weight of Nedra's body, until abruptly, without explanation, the Son
wheeled toward the wall and waited until O'Hara reached his shoulder.
The wall was suddenly slid up before them, revealing a narrow flight of
countless small metal steps, disappearing in distance infinitely far
above the level of O'Hara's vision.
These steps they now continued to ascend, going very slowly, for
O'Hara's iron strength was ebbing, until at last they reached a second
level of the city, an immense hall, circular in design and with its
walls fashioned of the same glaring magnesium that reflected the green
lights recessed into the ceiling--a light that magnified the sensation
of astronomical space and emptiness, as if this were an edifice beyond
the earth, and not beneath it. Exhausted as he was, O'Hara still was
able to conclude that this vastness was calculated, its purpose to awe,
for it could not have had another use. Even the masses of Emporia,
the teeming naked hundred thousands swirling in that satellite city's
halls, would have been lost in this tremendous glittering void.
At the center of this enormous hall was a cylindrical shaft, and upon
reaching this the Son again halted. A second panel shot open and the
Son silently indicated that O'Hara was to enter.
"With you," O'Hara insisted.
"I cannot go further," said the Son. "It is forbidden."
"The Father forbids you to go further?"
"Yes."
"What would happen if you did?"
"I do not know."
"You are afraid?"
"I am not afraid. The Father watches me."
"He is watching you now?"
"The Father always watches. You must go now."
"You'll wait for my return?"
"But you are not returning. None who enters does."
O'Hara hesitated. But he knew already that there was no way of
returning through the Tube to Emporia and through subterranean city to
the plains and beyond the photosynthetron to the mountains. There were
no odds at all. It was impossible. His only path was forward to the
Father. He turned, and passed through the panel which closed instantly
behind him, shutting off the sight of the kneeling Son.
The floor of the shaft now began rising swiftly. When at last it
stopped, another panel opened, and O'Hara with Nedra in his arms walked
out into the radiance of the sun itself.
He was uncertain how long he stood there, his sightless eyes aching.
And if this brilliance also had the purpose of humbling him, it failed,
for anger became defiance, the crazy courage of all trapped animals.
"If I could see," he cried aloud. "If only I could see--"
"You shall see, O'Hara," said the voice. "And I rejoice that you have
chosen me above death."
As the sentence was done, the volume of the voice was dropping so
swiftly that the final words seemed no more than a whisper, close. The
brilliancy too was diminishing, and light was taking form and shape.
"When you have seen," the voice was whispering, "you will no longer
be angry, O'Hara. You too will rejoice. Consider this, all your adult
life you have constantly wondered what would lie beyond the Atomic
Curtain, what had transpired in these two hundred and seventy years
within the two Lost Continents, and here particularly, within the
United States--within its Capital of Washington. Now you are going
to know. I am going to show you. To teach you, O'Hara. I have wished
so often in these years that it could be told to someone who could
understand it. I have thought at times that the man had come, a real
Son, O'Hara, for you are not the first to cross the Curtain. But the
others were inadequate. They failed me, and I--perhaps I too was not
quite adequate. Now you are here. Can you see, O'Hara?"
The glare was gone, but utter darkness had succeeded it.
"I can see nothing. These tricks of light and dark are stupid, Father.
If you intend by them to frighten me--"
"It is only the contraction of the pupils of your eyes," the Father
said. "They will adjust. Surely I have not brought you here to frighten
you. Do you see yet?"
"I cannot--wait!--a wall--"
"You are now at the bottom of a pit. I cannot always trust those who
come to me."
"--above me, twenty feet, and on the parapets of it--a bearded man, as
fragile as the Twelve Old Men--"
"Yes, I am old. You see me now?"
"I see you now," O'Hara answered. "Very dimly, I see you. They call you
the Father?"
"It was wise to have them call me that. But you need not. My name is
Bryce--Stephen Bryce--Stephen Bryce, how very odd that sounds! I have
not heard my name for better than a century. Let me hear it now--"
"Stephen Bryce."
"You humor me, O'Hara. I thank you for it. But you must come up to me.
No, please don't move--you must learn that of all the great machines,
only man's body cannot be replaced. Conserve it always. You see, you
are rising now. This is that glorious age when the pressing of a button
can achieve all things, except the things that matter."
The bottom of the pit was indeed rising, lifting O'Hara and Nedra
toward the level upon which stood the reed-thin figure of an aged man,
a wisp of a man in robes of shimmering and overlaid transparent cloth,
a man with scattered hair no longer white but yellowish as parchment
is, the beaked and collapsed face of a prophet, toothless, the pallid
mouth moving slowly in the sparse, blanched beard, but the eyes young
and large and blazingly bright, their blue made darker by the darkness
of their sockets, amazing eyes in a body that was skin-sheathed bone.
"I welcome you, O'Hara," said the Father. "You and the woman from the
mountains, welcome. But you are weary."
"Yes, Father," said O'Hara, and then instantly amended it: "Yes,
Stephen Bryce, and if it is permitted, if we may rest--"
"This," said the Father, with an indicative gesture, "is called the
Dome, a hall useful in that time when many came to me as you have come
to me today. The great height of this arched ceiling was designed as
you have suspected to be impressive, as if a visitor were standing at
the core of the earth--a thousand feet to that ceiling, yet only fifty
from wall to wall. A masterpiece of illusion. But through that arch
upon your left--that way, O'Hara--you will discover that our architects
were not altogether inhuman. Go through into the room beyond. You see?
Beds, food and drink, the necessities. You must rest now. You must
sleep. In this room you must shed the apprehensions you have felt.
Remember, if I had not needed you, you would not have come here to
Washington. Yet I trust," he said, "you will forgive a last precaution.
Move back--the door!"
A panel clanged down from above. O'Hara and Nedra were alone.
It was an exquisite room. Hexagonal in shape, its floors were deeply
cushioned with a carpeting of woven plastic threads. Its walls were
carved intricately in stone so that the semblance of an open window
centered each facet and yet there were actually no windows, no exits
visible now that the panel had clanged shut. The ceiling was vaulted,
fashioned of a glasslike material that shaded from the palest blue
toward blue black at its apex. Against the far wall were two immense
beds, or divans, side by side, and a refectory table wrought from
polished and dark metal, with various bowls and beakers containing the
multi-hued liquid foods of the photosynthetrons.
O'Hara strode with Nedra to the beds. And as he slid her burden from
his numbing arms, a strange low music filled the room, the sweetness
and ethereal thinness of flutes but with a sustained tone, yet without
the throatiness of an organ--close, he thought, to the human voice,
in octaves incredibly high and with a quality incredibly lyric. The
music of sirens, the music of desire, a music that a man might hear in
dreams. But Nedra was at last awakening.
She was lying there motionless, her long rich hair disheveled on the
bed, her eyes now wide, her full lips whispering, and as he knelt
beside her quickly she was saying, "--not even they could have done
this to me. I could have made them destroy me, O'Hara. But you refused,
you were too weak, you will be the father of my child--"
He threw himself upon the bed beside her. "No, Nedra, you are wrong, it
is not weakness but violence that I hold against myself. We have lost
nothing that we had. We retain the privilege of death."
"You believe that, O'Hara?"
"I am certain of it. I have the means here," he said, tapping his
jacket.
"But you haven't the will. That is the trouble now, O'Hara. This thirst
of yours to know what happens next is like a disease. Your hand becomes
more reluctant each time you stay it, and now that you have seen the
Father, what else is there? There are no more wonders. Why do you wait?
Let me tell you, O'Hara--"
"Nedra, you are obsessed with dying. Is there no strength in learning
to endure?"
"Endure for what purpose? Yes, if there is a purpose, but we
cannot escape, we can only sink deeper and deeper into these slick
abominations."
"You're learning to think, Nedra, and I'm not sure that it's desirable.
Yet less than half an hour ago the fear that you might never think
again was terrifying me. What does a man really want?"
"I know what you want. To talk."
"Why, yes," he said. "To talk--"
The opalescent light was dying out. The music now faint.
"To talk," O'Hara said, "and sleep, and wake again. Yes, Nedra, if
we can be sure to wake again. Eternal life! Remind me to explain to
you--though later on--"
But it was the Father who reminded him, and much later. For when
O'Hara awoke the room was filled once more with that opalescent light
that symbolized day, for actually, in this city of the Father, this
capital of the Lost Continents behind the Atomic Curtain, there was
neither day nor night. It was true that there were fourteen hours of
synthetic light, radiating from the ever-present tubing recessed into
the ceilings of the great halls and subterranean avenues, and these
fourteen hours were succeeded by ten hours of darkness in the chambers
used for sleep. But there was no real night.
O'Hara, then, awakening into this synthetic day, and finding Nedra
still asleep beside him, was in no hurry to arise, but lay there
staring toward the vaulted ceiling, remembering Nedra's bitter
accusation, "We can only sink deeper and deeper into these slick
abominations."
But even if they were forever to remain here, prisoners, would it be
unendurable? If their cavern in the mountains had been pleasant, why
was it less so here? Suppose that door were never to be unlocked?
Never?
The thought of it was smothering. It was in that instant as if he were
strapped down upon the bed, and a cold sweat burst out on his body and
he clenched his fists, crying aloud, "Father, Father--"
And the room was filled with a quiet voice: "You are unhappy here,
O'Hara?"
The door was locked. The voice of the Father came again:
"I shan't insult you, O'Hara--these are not miracles. It is a simple
contrivance. Doubtless you have it beyond the Curtain--electronic disks
in the ceiling above you. I can hear you and see you, although I am
some distance away in my own quarters. I was preparing to come to you
when I heard you calling me. Are you unhappy?"
O'Hara said, "I am not unhappy, Father. I am--shall I call it restless?
Caged!"
"I understand--you miss the illusion of choice. You are vastly more
comfortable in that room than you were in your aircraft in the Arctic,
and within those walls at least you have your liberty. An illusion,
I insist--a matter of degree. Yet it is irritating to you, isn't
it? I have a remedy for that--the stimulation of your mind. And in
time you will achieve patience. There is work for you. While you
were sleeping with your woman, I have considered a new concept for
the Americas--interesting! The first development in a hundred years,
O'Hara, and so delightfully simple that I cannot understand why I did
not discover it before. You've seen what has happened to my people?"
"The Degraded?" O'Hara answered. "And the Sons?"
The Father's voice was silken. "Are there none beyond the Curtain who
would change places with those you describe as the Degraded? Are there
none in your world, O'Hara, as deserving of that ungracious term?"
"I am sorry, Father. I used a clansmen's word."
"And there is truth in it. The physiological facts are obvious. That is
why I am vain about my Sons--the same stock, yet so perfectly trained
that even you, I suppose, believe they have an intelligence superior to
that of the masses."
"I have heard how they were selected as babies."
"And trained! That is the fact of it. Are there still dogs in your
world beyond the Curtain?"
"Yes, Father. Our world has not changed."
"Once we had dogs. And it was possible to train them so that they made
amazing use of their inherent faculties. They could never be taught to
speak, for dogs never had that ability, but they made expert use of
their paws and their noses in the way that was inherent to them. Now,
the Sons, who are the children of women of the masses, are descended,
as are the Degraded themselves, from speaking and thinking men. Like
yourself, O'Hara. And I have trained them to recover their lost
faculties. Without that training you could not distinguish them from
the masses. But no amount of patience will instill in them--recover
from their lineal past--the power to think beyond instinctive things.
We need a new pattern, a thinking pattern. I have wasted too much of
my allotted time in trying to salvage. I must create now. That is, you
must create, O'Hara--a new caste, a new race."
"That will soon go the way of the Degraded, Father?"
"Yes, in time. The law of retrogression is exact, and for two
generations--"
The Father's voice broke off abruptly. Then, in a moment, it came back
with amazing sharpness. And O'Hara knew that the Father was speaking
now to someone else, and in anger. "Why are you here? You will return
at once to your work with the Sons!"
The voice that answered was hysterical. "No, Father--oh, no! I won't
return to the Sons. I've seen him on the screen, I know he's here,
and I'm going to warn him, Father. He won't surrender to your bloody,
murderous--"
"I am calling the Sons," the Father cried.
"Call them and be damned. These arms of yours are so much cheese,
Father, I can snap them in my fingers. You see? You feel?
Pain--pain--you had forgotten what it was, hadn't you? Make the Sons
return!"
"The Sons are coming now," the Father said. "You have your choice.
Return at once to your work, and the promise that I've made to you--"
"A promise I no longer trust."
"You have your choice," the Father said again. "If I do not keep my
promise, you know what lies ahead for you. You do prefer to trust me,
don't you, Anstruther?"
The shrill voice rose. "I want to believe! I've got to believe you,
Father--"
"Then return at once."
O'Hara heard a sob.
When the Father spoke again, his words came very slowly. "I have been
injured, O'Hara. I cannot talk to you today. That imbecile who crossed
the Curtain--Anstruther, who knew you when he flew for the Patrol--I'm
sorry. You must be patient. Contemplate. Time need mean nothing to you,
as it means nothing to me. Nothing, O'Hara! Think. And wait--"
Time need mean nothing. Think--and wait!
These, said O'Hara, were slogans that the Twelve Old Men of Geneva
might well have used. "The old," he said, "have this at least in common
on both sides of the Atomic Curtain--delay, for change is dangerous.
And if they base their thinking on the greatest political fact of both
our worlds, the Curtain, the slogan is sound. For we of Europe and
Asia and Africa have become completely static, our minds paralyzed by
the aftermath of that Third World War, while they--the people of the
Western Hemisphere--have reaped the whirlwind of spectacular advance,
and both because of that one change--the Curtain. And both of us have
lost the future we once had."
In Bloomsbury, with the decadent smell of London in our noses and that
strange insight that sometimes precedes intoxication stealing over him,
O'Hara's voice now seemed to reach a pitch close to evangelical.
"Which is better?" he was saying. "To starve in Bengal or to shamble
naked and unreasoning through the subterranean avenues of Emporia? A
hard choice, isn't it? No choice at all, I'd say, if that were all we
had to choose between. If that were all, there'd be no hope for men.
I wish I could tell you that even then the Father, Stephen Bryce, was
less fear-ridden than our Twelve Old Men. But it was not true at that
moment. It was to come later, with adversity. The greatest of our
teachers.
"Philosophy, old man, but cheap stuff. I am no Socrates, no Kant. At
best I am--or was--a pilot for the International Patrol, an observer
and no more. It is absurd that I should speculate upon the fate of
man when I, in that exquisite room in Washington, could not with
accuracy foresee what that strange conversation would portend for me
within the next few months. But the fact that Anstruther was alive--and
the absolute hysteria of his voice--the realization that he was not
far from me within this _terra incognita_ shook me, left my throat
constricted and parched. I can feel it yet, that parched constriction.
And you must yourself, don't you, Arthur? May I fill your glass?"
He was pacing the floor, his pounding tread a counterpoint for ideas
that he felt instinctively were much too vast for discussion in that
ordinary little flat. And while I helped myself once more from his
liquor cabinet he continued speaking, or rather resumed speaking, after
suddenly halting nervously and picking up that hand-worn ceremonial
club.
"Anstruther, too! And in such mental anguish that the city which I had
thought deserted now became at once a sinister catacomb where voices
came from nowhere and a man who was everywhere, yet nowhere, was
constantly watching me--Nedra and I! The goldfish bowl! Spied on by
that old skeleton with the living mind, Stephen Bryce, the Father.
"And yet I thought it bearable.
"But bearable for months? Think! And wait! I did not then know that
with those words the Father was sealing us in that room for eight
months. Or perhaps sealed is the wrong word, it only seemed sealed--for
the door was opened or some undiscoverable panel in the walls rolled
up, but only when that synthetic day had passed, only when we were
asleep, anesthetized!
"The architects of Washington had indeed thought of everything. This
can only be my guess--for neither Nedra nor I actually saw the seal
upon that exquisite room broken for the next eight months--but somehow,
as sound and air could be piped in, so could an anesthetic that made
robots of us each night, dead robots, out of service. And with the
coming of each synthetic day there was always fresh food, the gruelly
stuff from the photosynthetrons, palatable enough, and the necessary
sanitation had been effected by means less final than the Deluge, but
other than that we might as well have been within our tomb.
"Dead robots--that was the key to it. The Father was conditioning us.
We were locked in a paradise of effortless well-being, the most subtle
way of stamping out man's soul, but as with a fever that wastes away
the body, so our minds were approaching frenzy through those damned
eight months--the frenzy that would break, as a fever breaks, and leave
us acceptably pliable.
"Eight months of endless days, each identical with the day before,
except that Nedra now was growing big with our child. And I think it
was the fact of the small life in her womb that saved us. Our fears
were concentrated upon it. Our child, prenatally exposed to ceaseless
radiation--was it to be another of those soulless ape men? I believed
and still believe that Nedra throughout those months was toughening her
resolve, she who forever found the answer to all evil things in death,
to destroy the infant if--
"Do you understand now? It saved us. The contemplation of a greater
tragedy was restorative, the established principle of medicine, the
counterirritant. It also works with minds. It kept me sane--Nedra and
the child!
"Then one morning Nedra was gone."
That was the morning of hell. That was the bottom of the pit, the
breaking of the frenzy, said O'Hara. For hours, alone, within that
hideously exquisite room, he beat his fists against the unyielding
stone, or screamed the name of the Father toward the disks concealed in
the vaulted ceiling.
"Send her back to me! Send her back, Stephen Bryce! Whatever you wish,
ask it of me, but send her back!"
Or, when entreaties failed:
"I have the gun! Had you forgotten, Father? Do you suppose that when at
last the door is opened, I shall stand here broken? Or that I shall
permit myself to sleep beneath your anesthesia? I have the gun!"
Never an answer. Never the slightest whisper coming from the disks
concealed in that room. For the Father understood too well that while
there still remained the faintest hope that Nedra was alive, and might
return, O'Hara was not going to end his life.
Yet possibly this was not altogether intended as torture, said O'Hara.
There was torture in it, and surely the Father was indifferent to that,
but that was not the sole purpose of this ninth and most terrible month
of solitude. The Father himself had been injured. And a god could not
permit that to be known. The Father, too, O'Hara was to learn, had
also sealed himself away, using the fraudulent blazing mirrors of his
electronic network to direct the hemisphere. He knew--he heard it hour
by hour--O'Hara's raging, but his own acute problem and his grasp of
O'Hara's mind made any other action seem to him unwise. And the wisdom
of rulers is not always gentle.
Think! And wait!
Ten months of that, and the last two months of it at a plane of tension
that made thinking seem like the flash of electricity through a vacuum.
Thought and contemplation can achieve humility or they can achieve an
equally super-normal arrogance of frozen wrath. Yet within a moment it
was ended.
For O'Hara awoke one morning with a small cry singing in his ears. He
turned upon his bed--and there was Nedra beside him, and at her breast
was the child.
In every man's life there is a moment that he cannot perfectly remember
afterward, for the moment is too emotional to be lived through twice.
He has at last approached the reason for his being, and for O'Hara it
had come with Nedra. And the child.
He wept.
When he could bring himself to touch them, the child was beautiful,
the magic of slumber still doelike in its wide blue eyes, vigor in the
clasp of its small fingers.
"He knows you, O'Hara."
Yes. Why shouldn't he? My child, my son, my own son--yes, he knows me.
"Nedra--"
"Not now." Her fingers touched his lips. "A little while--"
Then the voice from nowhere, absent all these months, came back.
"Good evening, O'Hara. You forgive me now, don't you?" Softly, very
softly: "It has been difficult for you, but there was no other way.
Without my guidance, you would have destroyed yourself, your woman and
the child--and not with your gun. You must come to me at once."
"With Nedra and my son."
"They will be safer there."
"It is your word against my thinking, Father. Either they come--"
"Bring them, O'Hara. But keep your weapon ready."
The panel through which they had entered months before now was sliding
up, revealing the empty corridor beyond.
"You will come into the corridor and turn toward your left," the Father
was saying. "Only my voice will guide you. That is correct--now proceed
until you hear me. And keep your weapon ready!"
Nedra walked slowly at O'Hara's side, the child asleep within her arms.
The panel closed behind them. They were within a seemingly endless
metal-lined tunnel that receded in each direction toward infinity, the
glaringly reflected light obscuring the convergence of its geometric
lines, and for a long while they walked as if each second might bring
sudden death, completely tense, O'Hara with the .38 in his hand.
"Now you must turn again, this time toward your right," the Father
commanded, and simultaneously a second panel opened in the wall. "You
must come inside--and put away your weapon now, O'Hara. Only in the
corridor was there any danger."
"What was the danger, Father?"
The second panel closed. They were within a vast rectangular hall, its
ceiling far above them, azure pale, its walls a fretwork of marvelously
carved stone, polished like glass. And deep back into it, against the
farthest wall, upon a four-tiered dais of translucent stone was an
enormous bed.
"This is where I exist, O'Hara--where I sleep and work, and where you
and your woman and the child will live. There is privacy in space and
space enough for us. Danger, you ask? A disturbance among some of the
younger Sons, Anstruther's group, but I can settle it in time. Approach
me closely--here, upon this dais."
The voice was everywhere around them, from every corner of the
enormously spacious room, as the voice of a divinity would be, yet
O'Hara understood that it was coming from the bed upon the dais, and
toward that, with Nedra beside him--Nedra with the sleeping infant
held against her breast--he was now moving, as the first man with the
first woman must have moved from the Garden, scourged by the voice of
wrath. It was like that. It was no less than that--awe and humility and
perhaps terror, although he knew it was the voice of Stephen Bryce, a
wasted man with eyes that burned more brightly than the sun itself.
Sublime, O'Hara insisted.
"Come near to me, O'Hara. For I--cannot get up."
And the spell was shattered. It was the pathos of the words that did
it. The Father was helpless, the Father whose mind was the germ of
life for these two continents, the only real intelligence within the
hemisphere, was lying now upon a vast bed in a vaster hall, a cripple,
a brain no longer able to effect for itself the simplest functions of
the grossest of the masses.
Yes, the spell was shattered. But a man of O'Hara's stature would
finally have rebelled against mere sublime authority, had it attempted
to drive him to do the things he normally abhorred. But the authority
of a cripple was infinitely more terrible--a cripple's power lay in the
innate will of all men to be kind. And had Stephen Bryce so planned
it, he could not have planned better. From the moment that O'Hara
discovered how completely helpless Stephen Bryce had now become, and
how dependent upon him, his own will was faltering.
"You see, O'Hara?" the voice was saying from all corners of the immense
hall, although O'Hara now was standing close beside the bed. "At
this moment it is you who have the privilege to do what could not be
accomplished by the Muscovite--you can destroy these continents. For if
I die, these people die."
The lids were closed above the blazing youthful eyes and Stephen Bryce
had thus become a wasted, ancient skull, alive but only that. His
blue-veined hand lay fragilely upon the coverlet, close to a metal
panel that was studded countlessly with unmarked keys.
"You pass the privilege?" the Father said ironically, his voice a
whisper within inches of his lips, yet booming from the corners of the
hall, an acoustical arrangement that O'Hara did not notice for the
first few seconds, so intent was he upon the substance of his words.
"I have delayed for your arrival," the Father was saying, "the Deluge
at Emporia. But these ten additional months of life have not surprised
them, or are they grateful. My people," he said, and his eyes seemed
to burst open, "are incapable of either surprise or gratitude, which
limits the satisfaction that I get from playing God. As you observe,
I'm not a god--not quite, I suppose, any longer a creature of flesh and
blood, but certainly not a god. Few here, behind the Atomic Curtain,
are aware of that. Yourself, and Anstruther--and it was also Anstruther
who restored to me the realization that neither am I quite immortal.
I'd almost forgotten that. You heard, perhaps--a matter of two broken
arms and the debilitation that resulted from the shock of it. That
is why I am here, upon this grandiose bed, the old lion bearded,
O'Hara--the old stag at bay at last. Done for, O'Hara."
The hand rose slowly, fluttering. "And now, the decencies of life.
I have things to show you that a woman might not wish to see. And
things to tell you that no child should hear, whether it comprehends
or not. Send them away--send them toward the wall upon your left, it
is prepared for them. At any time you can recall them if you wish, for
the slightest whisper on this dais is magnified to thunder--oh, you've
noticed that? Send them--at once--the decencies; I have not forgotten."
The eyes were closing. The hand had dropped upon the coverlet. It was
as if the Father were already dead. For a moment O'Hara remained beside
the bed, then he turned and descended the steps of the dais to Nedra,
and after explaining what the Father had requested--Nedra left at once,
without a glance at him--he returned again to the bedside of Stephen
Bryce.
"Thank you, O'Hara. You are more gracious than the circumstances," said
the Father, now opening his eyes again, while weariness dragged at the
corners of his pallid mouth. "A new race, O'Hara," he whispered. "We
need it here. You will remember that I mentioned it to you? Come, now,
don't glare at me so sanctimoniously--I am mathematician enough to know
that a new race cannot be bred from a single woman, your woman, nor the
handful of women I might have the Sons take from the mountains. Are
you a student of husbandry? There are books here--behind this dais a
doorway leads into the library where I once used to study. Among these
books are many from the days before the Curtain, and in that section,
if you wish, you may learn all we've ever learned of genetics. We have
no cattle now. Our only animals"--the pale lips twisted--"but you
know them--men! Your brothers, O'Hara, the masses of Washington and
Emporia, New York and Chicago, all our cities. In husbandry, O'Hara,
the soundest concept was that rundown stock was easiest improved by
crossing the prevailing females with a superior male. The get of any
single male is almost limitless, provided--"
"This was explained to me," O'Hara interrupted, "by one of the Sons at
Emporia. Artificial insemination."
"I heard his explanation, O'Hara. Yes, the males of the masses are
sterile, although not impotent. And actually the tests which we make
at birth do not determine intelligence as such, but fertility. The
relation of those two factors is no coincidence. The stupid-fertile,
once a predominant strain, have bred themselves out with the vanishing
of the reason for their existence, which was hunger--the substitution
of one physical satisfaction for another. The intelligent-sterile,
toward which the ruling classes tended in the days before the Curtain,
likewise have passed, and for the same cause--with the necessities of
life available to all without effort, intelligence, in itself, lost its
survival virtues.
"What now remain are the two breeds that our way of life brought to the
front--the stupid-sterile and the intelligent-fertile, a geneticist's
dream come true, the fruit of our atomic civilization. We should be
reaching the millennium, O'Hara.
"But while we have got the two best strains predominating now, the
unforeseeable reversal of the laws of evolution has shoved both strains
ever backward, although comparably for each. The keel is on the bottom
still, the mast upon the deck, but the ship is sinking. And nature has
confounded man once more.
"And so, O'Hara--so through these endless years alone I have been
forced to tinker--selective breeding, elimination of the weak,
artificial insemination--tricks, all tricks, all little stratagems to
stall off the immutable. Each generation slides back further than its
sires. Your son--forgive me--will be not quite you, and his son will be
neither you nor his mother. And your son's son will see his newborn son
with horror. It is exact. But if a new race suddenly were spawned into
the hemisphere, recapturing the ground lost in these generations since
the Curtain--"
"Father, you'd still be tinkering."
"But the possibilities of this tinkering are extensive. Beyond the
Curtain, fortunately, exists an inexhaustible source of uncontaminated
sires."
"How would you get them here?"
"That is your task."
"My task? I could not count upon a providential thunderstorm to get me
through the Curtain again."
"Providence we cannot reckon in planning the future of a hemisphere,
and never have. It is true that chance--pure chance--enabled you, and
Anstruther before you, and others now dead before both of you, to pass
through the Curtain. But it was not Providence. Any man flying in the
correct direction at the exact second that you were flying--and at any
point in the Curtain--would have got through."
"I'm not sure I understand you. At any point in the Curtain at that
exact second?"
"Within those exact ten seconds, O'Hara, hundreds of pilots in your
International Patrol must ram into the Curtain every decade, yet if
all of them were to hit it at the correct speed, flying the correct
course, at the correct time, they would all get through. Chance enters
into it only in that you happened to be doing all of these. Once
each year, and for an interval of ten seconds, our Carolina reactor
shuts off automatically and the Hanford or West Coast reactor takes
over supplying the power for the Curtain. That has been happening now
for the two hundred and seventy years since the establishment of the
Curtain--the reactors were so arranged in the beginning. Completely
automatic, you understand, as are the Tubes, the photosynthetrons, the
East and West Coast distillation plants, the Deluges--as everything
must be within this hemisphere. And there is this interval of ten
seconds between the shutting off of the Carolina reactor and the
generation of the Hanford reactor--ten seconds in which the Curtain
does not exist!"
O'Hara closed his eyes. The taste of blood, saline and hot, was in his
mouth--his heart now pounding with trip-hammer force. For here, within
a sentence, was the determining great secret of the two halves of the
earth--"There is an interval of ten seconds in which the Curtain does
not exist!"
"It cannot vary by even a fractional concept of time," the Father was
continuing. "And there, O'Hara, is how your task can be accomplished.
You have your known factor of time, and in the lower Rockies, you have
your plane. When it is brought to Washington, it can be duplicated on a
more adequate scale, for the Sons, under guidance, are not bad workmen.
Time and method are problems we can master, and there is only the issue
of your willingness to obtain from beyond the Curtain--"
"My willingness? Do you believe, Father, that men--men as I've always
known them, not your masses and Sons--would voluntarily enter into this
proposition?"
"Do you believe that they would not? For a full belly, for a life
without exertion, without the strain of thought--really, O'Hara, I have
not forgotten what your world was like."
"Remove the strains they know, and they will discover other strains. In
time, for instance, they will rebel against becoming your automatons."
"I am aware of that--I am now dealing with Anstruther. But that at
least is a problem I can solve. Let me show you how I deal with human
problems, O'Hara--let me show you the city of Emporia, where you first
saw my people. Observe upon the wall behind this dais a metal screen,
such as you saw in every hall and every corridor of Emporia, and as
exist in every city of this hemisphere, even our dead cities--remember
Spokane? The giant tower with its solarium? Remember you were
curious and flew down close to it? Remember Denver? Those cities we
abandoned soon after the establishment of the Curtain, as soon as our
subterranean metropolises were built--for in those days we were not
certain just how quickly the nations beyond the Curtain might construct
atomic plants. True, we had our scintillometers, we were constantly on
our guard, we had our rockets ready, but the physical plant could be
built, prepared for instant operation, and we had by then no accurate
reports of what your scientists might be thinking--we had learned that
thinking was more vital than the last incidents of construction. We
had no surety except our rocket barrages that you would not get these
suppositional plants into production before we could destroy you,
which meant of course that we too might be destroyed. We had with us
the frightful memory of that Third World War, and how very close the
outcome seemed at first. So we took no risks. We went beneath the
earth, leaving dead cities where once we had lived. We built new cities
up into the Arctic, outpost cities, as far as the northern coast of
Canada, leaving only that chain of mountains, where the engineering
problems were prohibitive, beyond the network of our automatic
civilization. Now, this metal panel--" The Father's fragile fingers
poised above the unmarked keys. "I touch, as you observe, and instantly
you are seeing what is happening across the continent in Emporia."
The screen above the dais now glowed. And when the brilliant light
adjusted into patterns, O'Hara saw the glittering corridor outside
the Guild, the hall of the Sons at Emporia. The shambling naked tens
of thousands of the masses passed before his eyes, as aimless as he'd
seen them when he had been there, the women with their babies in their
arms, the nude and hairless apelike men, feeding by thousands at the
photosynthetron troughs, sleeping by thousands in the wide-bunked
slumber halls--a mass of life as purposeless as maggots, living and
devouring.
"The Sons again have gone within the Guild," the Father said. "And now
I touch this key--"
Above the corridors of Emporia, slots opened in the ceilings and from
them poured a tidelike wave of palely amber liquid, cascading down
upon the swarming masses, engulfing them, yet as O'Hara watched, those
caught up in the tide were vanishing--not sinking down, but actually
vanishing, while those who fled in screaming panic, milling as a
scalded colony of ants might do, leaping above the fallen bodies of
those trampled in the crush, when once touched by the amber tide jerked
back from it, but where an arm had been, a leg, a head, was nothing.
"Dissolved," the Father said. "The Deluge is a caustic solution that
will cleanse Emporia of all filth, all population except those in the
Guild--all that should not endure. Observe--this key--the solution now
is pouring down through slots beneath the corridor, draining into that
pipe within the Tube which carries it--and them, for they are only
liquid now--into the Pits of Yellowstone, the continental sewerage
plant, where the caustic is decanted and restored to tanks for future
use. You see approximately three hundred thousand of these--call them
men!--disappearing now, all except the Sons. Observe the screen--it
flashes now inside the Guild, and this is even more adroit."
The pattern changed, and when it reshaped, O'Hara recognized the vast
hall of the Sons, and saw them staring as they knelt, obeisant as they
watched the metal screen within their own hall. That screen, inside the
Guild, was glowing now, the brilliance of the sun upon its surface and
a booming voice exhorting them--the Father's voice as O'Hara had first
heard it in Emporia.
"That voice," the Father said, "my own, also is automatic, the
electronic impulse which released the Deluge also starting the voice.
All these details were co-ordinated in the beginning and are now
effected through batteries of integrocalculators here in Washington.
The single touch of a key sets in motion the chain of events, another
key modifies it or ends it--although at all times I can shift these
operations to manual and direct them step by step. Suppose now we go to
one of the slumber chambers, distant from the heart of Emporia, where
the Deluge has only now begun. You will see them asleep or in their
more intimate existence, and you will realize how really painless all
this is."
"No, Father," said O'Hara. "No, Stephen Bryce. No more."
"Compassion, O'Hara?"
"Disgust. Loathing."
"For me. I can understand that. When I was younger there were times
when I felt it too. But how else can the problem of overpopulation be
solved, O'Hara?"
"You have the means. There are no births except at your direction."
"You would have me deprive the women of the masses of their sole
amusement, which is the bearing of children? And further, you forget
the declining ratio of potential Sons among the newborn--to keep
constant the total of Sons, the birth rate of the women of the
masses constantly must be stepped up--we must have more babies, more
population to select from, but our supply of food material is constant,
adequate for a constant population, which through these periodic
Deluges I achieve. An instant's agony--no worse than that experienced
in that painless institution of your hemisphere, the electric
chair--avoids the months and years of slow starvation which your own
estimable system, O'Hara--the system of your hemisphere--enforces.
Which do you actually believe to be less cruel?"
"But in our hemisphere there is no volition--"
"The truth is, isn't it, that no one will accept the responsibility for
managing society?"
"We have had such men. We called them monsters."
"You are not yet quite adults. But I have lived now for almost three
hundred years. I was born before the establishment of the Curtain,
while a people of your hemisphere were loosing upon our cities a
murderous rain of warheads, destroying among others the city of my
birth, killing my father and my mother and my small brother--I have
lived, O'Hara, long enough to remember the monsters of your hemisphere,
and remember them acutely, not as vague names in history. And also I
have lived long enough to recognize the immutable facts of a mechanical
world, and to lose, I suppose, my childish scruples. And yet, had I
any choice at all in these matters, had I less responsibility, had I
someone to lean upon, someone with the physical abilities that I no
longer have--yourself, O'Hara."
"I reject you, Stephen Bryce. For after all of your excuses you remain
a monster who has lived too long to value life."
"And will live long enough to fit you into my purposes."
"If I don't destroy you now."
"Destroy a cripple? You haven't the capacities for it. And destroy
all of my people in this hemisphere? You call me a monster, O'Hara?
Come now, tell me--is that the ethics of the world beyond the Curtain
nowadays? To shrink from necessary cruelties to perform those that
would be incalculably more terrible?"
"It is a matter--a matter of intentions--"
"Bosh! Kill millions to spare thousands--that isn't even good economy.
Spare the inhabitants of Emporia, but not spare me--and not the tens
of millions of these continents who depend upon my knowledge? And
not yourself? And not your woman, O'Hara? And not your child? Let's
try to avoid these absurdities--you are going to do as I wish you
to do, at least until I have taught you how this panel operates the
integrocalculators. Is that not true?"
O'Hara met those blazing eyes a moment. Then his own eyes closed. "Yes,
Father. It's true."
The Father smiled wanly. "I welcome you again. You may join your woman
and your child now, for I must sleep. I am exhausted by the rare
experience of argument. Later on, we must work together on the problem
of Anstruther and the younger Sons. I shall need, I think, more than
my brain for that. For at this moment, just beyond the door through
which you entered this hall, they are coming now, the danger that I
warned you of. And he, whom once I welcomed as I welcome you--he who
is screaming that he means to save his comrade of the International
Patrol, yourself--is motivated chiefly by another vision that he saw
upon this screen, a vision that has cracked his fragile brain--it was
the woman, Nedra. Another complex from your world that I'd forgotten."