"I will! And no matter what you're told, never believe--"
"I shan't, O'Hara."
Then the sound track was dead again and he knew it. The Father, lying
upon that immense bed within that incredibly vast hall, wherever that
now was in Washington, and watching in the screen above the dais, had
shut off the key that had made Nedra's and O'Hara's voices audible to
each other, and was himself speaking again.
"I have regretted doing this, O'Hara. But if all the regrets of my life
were to come back upon me suddenly, I should as surely drown in them
as Nedra and your baby were drowning a moment ago. Now I promise their
lives to you, if you are faithful. The walls again are receding, as you
see--"
The walls were receding and the floor upon which O'Hara stood was
rising and Nedra and the baby in her arms had vanished once more
into that chaos of shifting walls and floors and ceilings, and again
O'Hara was conscious of the rapidly increasing velocity with which
he was moving through the space of Washington--conscious of it only
momentarily, and then the black pall of vertigo smothered him.
But the voice that pervaded the spatial geometry of the underground
metropolis never stopped speaking to him, counseling him even as he
lay in a coma, as if it were a dream voice, the voice of a god that
was dimly remembered from a childhood revelation, and very slowly, as
his senses returned to him and once more he could see the tangibles of
metal and stone and his own flesh, he began to feel as if the voice
spoke only to himself, O'Hara--as if those about him, later, could not
hear it. This became an obsession that he never clearly recognized for
what it was, the Messiah complex in its early stages, the conviction,
never really questioned by himself, that the omnipotent being of the
Western Hemisphere spoke only to him and listened only to him, an
absurdity that ten months before--when he was beyond the Curtain--he
would have derided. In the end, when he was done with delusions, he was
to understand how well the Father realized the magic of the Voice from
Space, a psychological device that was implemented by physical control
over those whom O'Hara loved.
"You must get up now, O'Hara," the voice was telling him. "For even
at this moment Anstruther is approaching you--Anstruther does not yet
know where you are, nor is he actually searching for you. He is in
fact going about the futile business of trying to find his way into
this hall where I exist--he and his dissident Sons, relying upon the
juvenile techniques of your mythical Monte Cristo, digging or boring
or cutting, completely unaware that within an instant's time I can
transfer him twenty miles away. Anstruther does not know the secret of
the integrocalculator and will never know it, even should I be forced
to use him if you fail me. But do not fail--and you shall know that
secret, O'Hara. Some vessels will contain water and some will contain
hydrogen, some will contain molten magnesium and some will contain only
eiderdown, but few will contain them all. You will, O'Hara--you will
contain what you must, I think--so long as I keep my fingers on the
fibers of your heart. Arise."
O'Hara got up. He was standing in a small circular room at the end
of one of those glaring corridors, as if in running he had come at
last upon that point in infinity which the corridors always seemed to
promise, a room with a diameter of forty feet, its sheer walls rising
to a dome that opened on a tiny patch of brilliant blue, much like the
blue of O'Hara's now shapeless uniform. Was it the sky he saw, the
heavens that he'd known before descending into the subsurface warrens
of this lost atomic world? He did not know--illusion had become so
routine that the fact seemed always suspect now. Yet it could be the
sky, a pledge of things to be, as Nedra and the baby had become in
memory.
"Are you listening, Stephen Bryce?"
"What is it now, O'Hara?"
"The ceiling--?"
"A symbol. And only you in this hemisphere can understand it."
"I don't."
"It is inevitable, O'Hara, that the mechanics of this hemisphere as we
have been forced to organize it would tend to create in your mind the
impression that I am divine. Is that not true?"
"It is stronger than an impression, Father. If you have lived, as you
say, nearly three centuries, if you control this spatial city and the
Curtain and the Tube--and I know you do--it becomes extremely difficult
to think of you as mortal."
"You see? In spite of your reason, in spite of the scoffing tone you
force into your voice, you are beginning to believe. The genesis of
faith is most often the misinterpretation of truths. And so I have made
that tiny patch of celestial heaven visible to you. For you--and you
alone--must understand that I am not God, that I am not immortal, that
I am subject to the laws of nature and eternity regardless of how long
I manage to evade them.
"That patch of sky is there to bolster your sanity, O'Hara. For you
must be sane. No matter how deeply involved you may become in the game
of playing the Chosen Son, you must retain your sanity, or the purpose
of the game will be defeated by the zest of it. Remember this, you have
few realities to cling to--that patch of sky is one of them, and the
senile tremor of my fingertips, and the receptive loins of your wife,
and your baby's cry, and the inerasable memory of the world beyond the
Curtain. Cling to these, O'Hara, for you will need them. Anstruther is
approaching."
Anstruther was indeed approaching, but O'Hara was not prepared for the
manner of his entrance. As the voice died away, the metal sheathing
of the corridor immediately beyond the circular room bulged suddenly
and then became molten, flowing down from the living rock it shielded
in a silver stream, and a great yellow mass of fire erupted out into
the corridor, becoming instantly a mottled red and magenta that in
turn, and as instantly, was a fuming cloud, gray and black and flecked
with ocherous matter and roiling constantly within itself, until in
a fraction of time it was sucked up through recessed ventilators in
the flame-seared ceiling, the fumes and the fire and their resultant
heat gone simultaneously, so that O'Hara who was crouching only twenty
feet away felt only that first scorching blast, as if the fire door
of a furnace had swung open, and the next moment smelled the sweat of
it drying on his skin and the sharp odor of burnt hair--his beard and
eyebrows crumbling at his touch. The flash left him blinded. Then he
heard a cry:
"O'Hara! O'Hara! Thank God I am in time."
It was Anstruther's voice. And the joy of that cry, the jubilating ring
of overwhelming relief in it, brought tears involuntarily into O'Hara's
sightless eyes. He stood there weeping as if suddenly he had come
blundering against his only friend.
Nor did he question that Anstruther was his friend. All the warnings
of the Father moments earlier were lost in this excruciating feeling
of reunion and deliverance. He was saved, he was freed at last of the
exhausting nerve-drag of these long months in the Western Hemisphere,
behind the Curtain, never daring once in all that time to trust even
the woman he loved, never completely, and menaced, even while he slept,
by an omniscient and omnipresent living fable--the Father.
Now, at last, he felt, here was a man from his own time and world, and
with his own sense of what a man should be--Anstruther. He stretched
out his hands.
"Anstruther, I--can't see--"
"The blast," Anstruther explained briskly, and immediately strong arms
were lifting O'Hara's helpless body. "We have a remedy for that. Don't
be afraid, O'Hara. You're safe now, you're free. We who have had to
live with Stephen Bryce know what that means. All slaves are blind."