O'Hara put down his empty glass.
"I have had enough of this," he said, and got up, as an angered lion
might get up--that kind of throttled wrath, restrained only by the
dignity of his huge and thickly muscled body, for the pent-up loathing
that he had felt for Stephen Bryce--the Father, the only brain guiding
the destinies of the hundreds of millions swarming through the
subterranean cities of the Western Hemisphere--was burning through him,
even here in London, in this flat of his in Bloomsbury, much as if he
had gotten into his veins a dose of that caustic solution that he had
seen dissolving the masses of overpopulated Emporia.
"You see?" he asked, and whirled abruptly toward me, his darkly tanned
face twisting sardonically beneath his tousled dark hair, his blue
flight jacket of the International Patrol now completely unbuttoned,
for the drinks we had had and his rapid pacing of the floor of that
little flat and the pace of his report, and above all his tension,
had dappled him with sweat. "You see, do you--I'm utilized! I've lost
whatever grip I had. Or perhaps I never had it. When there's no stress,
we can all of us think ourselves cucumbers. But when I was walking
at last away from that immense bed upon the dais in Stephen Bryce's
unthinkably vast hall in Washington, my pity for the Father was drowned
in disgust for any man who could do what I had just seen him do, and I
dreaded him more than I feared the dangers now loosed in the endless
corridor outside the hall.
"For I could deal with Anstruther. Insane or not, Anstruther could not
seem too dangerous, the way that I remembered him. His rather womanish
blue eyes and fair hair and his romantic boyishness--weakness, I told
myself--could never be formidable. Yes, I could deal with Anstruther.
And as I left the Father and went toward the distant wall where Nedra
was waiting with my infant son, I meant to do it.
"Let me make the situation clear. I had been without hope. It had
seemed incredible that I could escape with Nedra and my son from the
labyrinth of Washington, retracing my way along the glittering and
utterly deserted corridors through panels that slid open without
detectable human motivation, back to the Tube and through it back into
Emporia, now a dead metropolis, and up again by its only shaft to
the surface of the earth and through the patrols of the Degraded in
western Kansas once again into those mountains where Nedra's kinsmen
were. No one--I had had the clansmen's word for this--had ever escaped
once he had sunk into the cities of the lowlands. It was that absolute
hopelessness that had driven me unresisting forward to the Father, and
yet now--
"Now I believed there was a way to do it. I had only to learn from
the Father the mechanism of the integrocalculators, the key-studded
board he kept beneath his blue-veined hands, and to make my peace with
Anstruther who surely understood this maze of a city and who, as the
Father himself had said, controlled a dissident faction of the Sons,
and the way would be clear for Nedra and my child and me.
"That's hope for you. The impossible at once becomes a very simple
thing. I had only to do this, and only to arrange that. I wonder now
how I supposed the Father, so readily to be outwitted, had been able
to endure for two hundred and seventy years behind the Atomic Curtain.
The truth is of course that I was not thinking--I was engaging in the
opposite of thought, which is hope. And hope blinded me. Or rather,
purpose blinded me. I had been so long without either."
He had been, he said, quite certain of his direction when he started
walking away from the dais. He had seen Nedra going toward the
apartment built into the distant wall, and he had thought that he had
only to go that way himself to join her. Yet in the absorption of his
speculations he walked for some fifteen minutes without the distance
once occurring clearly to him, and it was only the sensation of walls
closing in upon him that finally halted him.
He was in a corridor. Somehow he had passed from the vast hall of the
Father.
"I was to learn that in the city of Washington there were no walls
as we know them. They had the thickness and the height of walls, but
the Father, constantly watching in the screen above his bed, could
with the touch of his little finger disarrange and reassemble those
immense sections of stone and metal in a thousand patterns, all
preconceived it is true, to cope with all conceivable situations. I
was to see the giant gears that could elevate within an instant the
lowest depths of the city to the topmost level and transfer the Dome
itself, that amazing architectural illusion, into the very bowels of
the earth, miles below the muddy bottom of the Potomac. In all of the
city only the Tube was fixed, and that solely because the shifting of
its continental span was too monstrous an engineering feat even for
those masters of the early days immediately after the establishment of
the Atomic Curtain. It would have involved the balancing of the crust
of the earth itself, and as in the case of Archimedes with his global
lever, where was there such a fulcrum?
"But the city, Washington, was a myriad of interchangeable parts, and
at no moment since its construction could there possibly have been a
master plan for it--nothing that any enemy could definitely say was
thus and so, the plexus here, the exact place to strike at. Within the
broad limit of its thousand patterns and countless thousands of lesser
integral dispersions it existed only as the Father wanted it, and
through his keyboard could instantly set it up.
"I say that the lone exception was the Tube. That is true, the Tube was
fixed, but its terminus could be sent whirling away from it, sealing
it off. Conceive of the city, if you wish, as a series of spheres, one
within the other, like a child's gyroscope, revolving when the impulse
came from the integrocalculators, or expanding through the integration
of chords from a larger outer sphere which then contracted into the
lesser orbit. Too tough? It was for me.
"It was much too tough a problem for me, and when I found myself
enclosed within the comparatively narrow confines of that corridor,
beyond the Father's--and Nedra's hall--I felt for the first time since
Nedra's return with her newborn child that complete and imbecilic
frustration that must come over those poor deviled rodents that
psychologists force to pop through little doors to establish their
reflex patterns. I stood stock still, my brain suddenly as empty as the
corridor about me, numbed beyond comprehension for how long I do not
know, until at last I became conscious of the spasms of my fingers."
And within the passing of the next five minutes, said O'Hara, his
mind went through the progressive stages of the full cycle of
evolution--inert at first, then active only as a salt solution might
react electrically, then numbly timorous as a hypersensitive vegetable,
and finally aware. The worm recoils from surfaces too hot or cold. He
was aware like that, until somewhere along toward the rapid reassertion
of the human mind he met and conquered, if not fear, at least the
impossibility of fearing.
To fear, he said, and to know the reason for it, constitutes the
greatest single stride up from the primal ooze.
"Nedra!" his first cry was. And then, "Oh, Father, Father, help me!
Help me--"
And the voice came to him gently:
"You see, O'Hara? Are you so measurably superior to that dawn child who
worshiped the fire that burnt him? You call upon me now as if indeed I
were a god, and solely because I seem to injure you."
"Father, you mock me."
"Yes, O'Hara, I mock you--but only to help you regain your reason.
There is something you should know, O'Hara--you must understand that
a man who has lived in authority as long as I have has seen all the
pitifully few reactions of men under duress. As you were walking away
from me, I knew that you were considering how you would plot against
me. I cannot read your mind, but given the man you are, trained as
you are, it was inevitable that you would react in that manner. I
could, I believe, reduce all this to an understandable equation, just
as I can shuffle about the components of this city into the pattern
I desire without thinking in detail of the various phases of it.
The integrocalculators do that detail thinking for me. That should
be comprehensible to you, for all these little mechanical marvels
were rooted in the world as it existed here before the Curtain, and
exist now beyond it. Equations of the brain--we had the fundamentals
of them in the years before the Third World War; and the origins of
spatial architecture lay in those experimental buildings in which the
walls were movable, of course only horizontally, but not remote in
mathematical technique from the vertical and spherical construction of
this city. A matter of imagination only, isn't it?
"And memory, O'Hara. My memory for the keys upon this board, and the
integrocalculators' automatic memory of the meaning of successive stabs
of power.
"And so I think I can write the equation of your being, O'Hara--an
equation in terms of the years you have existed and the times you have
faced death and love--I must include love, however ephemerally your
poets think of it. Yes, love, O'Hara, for there as you undoubtedly
have suspected is a complex thing, mystical beyond the caress of a
woman's arms or a baby's breath, intellectual beyond the tables of
multiplication that you studied as a youth--the soul of man in fact.
Surely you've recognized it as that. Your woman of the mountains,
Nedra, lacks your capacity for love, which after all is tenderness,
and so you do not understand her always, do you, O'Hara? The
soul--you would dispute this with me? Then take the next gradation
below Nedra that we have within this hemisphere, the people of the
masses. What essentially have they lost? Yes, you do know that!
Their souls, the capacity for love, decreasing in direct proportion
to their retrogression. If they possessed it there might be some
hope for them--but they do not. Oh, yes, O'Hara, I can write that
equation--physical and mental strength, and the capacity for love--or
soul--these are the algebraic terms of man. I bore you?"
"My wife and my baby, Father?"
"Safe with me. You see, I even ape the attributes of a god--the things
you love forever are attainable by keeping faith with me. Hostages,
shall I say? As the pledge of immortality keeps your kind in hostage.
Yes, they will be here with me, awaiting you, when you have finished
the task I set for you."
"The task?"
"Ultimately your task will be as I have outlined it for you, the return
to the Eastern Hemisphere to obtain those sires of future generations
of Americans. But now, before that can be possible, you must salvage
Anstruther for me."
"But you yourself, Father, told me Anstruther was mad."
"Demented, yes, by the vision of the woman Nedra. But he can be
salvaged. He must be salvaged. For if I lose you, O'Hara--should
something go wrong during your flight back into the Eastern
Hemisphere--I will have at least Anstruther. And I have no time now to
depend on the chance again that some adventurous or befuddled pilot of
the International Patrol will crash through the Curtain."
"You'd risk a madman with the task you set for me?"
"Only if I must. I don't belittle that risk. But for that matter, how
sure am I of you? Once beyond the Curtain, what pledges your return
except the woman you love? And that reed is too thin to be my sole
reliance. You must reclaim Anstruther for me, you must bring him to me,
where I can get at him."
"I am to be his Judas, is that it?"
The Father's voice, a silken whisper in that glittering corridor,
lashed out, "Your posturings annoy me. We are not discussing morals, we
are discussing what you will do. Have you so soon forgotten the months
you spent alone in that magnificent little room? And Nedra and your
baby?"
"Whom you dare not harm! They are your only hold on me."
"Don't underestimate what I dare, O'Hara. Nor overestimate your
value to me. I could decide, if I must, to work with lesser tools
if necessary. But as for your scruples, if I had wished to destroy
Anstruther, he would be dissolved by now. I can do it at this moment,
simply by touching the key beneath my finger. No, you would not be
destroying him by bringing him to me. You would in fact relieve me of
the possible necessity of eliminating him."
"You are too clever a logician for me, Father. But I refuse."
"Do you indeed?" the Father said. "Then I must show you something. As
you observe, the walls of the corridor are now rushing suddenly away
from you, O'Hara--"
And instantly he was swallowed in space, a void, the ceiling and
the walls vanishing toward infinity, miles, within a second, so
that he felt impacted into himself, shrinking, yet knowing that the
macro-cosmic city still contained him. And even as he clung to that
shred of reason, the floor beneath him began to sink, so that once
again walls were surrounding him as he descended. And presently far
above him a metal surface closed darkly while the wall upon his left
began receding and the segment of floor that bore him followed it at a
speed so terrific that his senses could not bear up under it, and he
blacked out.
He was lying face down when he recovered, and for a long while he
remained there, unable to move, then at last he heard a faint,
strangling cry, and lifting himself by driving his knuckles hard
against the floor, he saw not ten feet from him, behind a translucent
wall, Nedra and the child--Nedra holding the baby far above her head
and swimming frantically in water that was rising rapidly around her
throat.
Almost at once the water was above the level of her head, churning in
from invisible sluices that must be somewhere across the translucent
room, and Nedra turned a despairing face toward him and then sank
beneath the surface, although continuing by her desperate struggle to
keep the baby's head above the water. He could see her mouth open as if
to scream to him. He could see the violent threshing of her legs and he
knew instantly how long that could last, and he plunged his shoulder
against the translucent wall, as if to smash it.
But the wall yielded back from his weight as if it were a jelly,
pliable but impervious, for he could not get through it. With his
giant's strength he could smash his fists within inches of her body, he
could drive his fingers toward her and grasp for her thrashing arms and
legs, but he could not quite feel them--he could not quite touch them.
He could not save her.
She was kicking desperately again, the fur kirtle working loose from
her body in the fury of her struggle, and once more she managed to
drive her chin above the surface of the water, and continuing that
frantic treading she was keeping the baby from drowning while O'Hara,
ramming himself continuously into the pliable wall, slashed with both
fists in futile efforts to reach her. Now suddenly he heard Nedra's
choked voice, above the splashing of her body, as if the sound track of
a movie had resumed after some minutes' silence:
"I can't, O'Hara--can't keep--going--"
And she sank once more. This time her sagging legs were not able to
support the child above the surface, and her arms sank helplessly, the
child revolving slowly in the water toward her, wide-eyed, grasping
with its tiny fingers, and O'Hara saw them both drifting downward in
that aimless, dying way that half-bouyant matter has.
"Father!" he screamed. "Stephen Bryce--"
"Yes, O'Hara," the gentle voice came from the space about him. "Yes, I
understand. You see, I have already reversed the flow of the water. The
room is draining."
O'Hara could not speak. He sank upon his knees, watching the
level of the water drop toward the bodies drifting on the floor
of the translucent room. And almost instantly that room was
drained. And Nedra was lying with the baby beside her, her arms
limply--unconsciously, O'Hara knew--enfolding him, and the water now
dripping in small rivers from her loose, rich hair that had swirled
like a shawl across her body.
"They need my full attention now, O'Hara," the Father was saying
very softly. "You must go now upon your mission--I will be with you
constantly. I will be watching, and when it seems wise I shall talk
with you. But remember, whenever I wish it, I can again return you to
a translucent wall like this one that will yield to your touch without
ever admitting you, and beyond it, so very near to you, Nedra and the
child will drown."
"She needs you quickly, Father--"
"And she needs your voice to sustain her. Speak to her."
"Nedra," he whispered, unable to believe that she would hear. But her
eyelids opened. "Nedra," he whispered, "if I am able to return--"