"And if I were--"
"You see, the thought is in your mind!"
"If I were," continued Anstruther, "I could not possibly do worse by
them than Stephen Bryce has done. But I will never be the Father,
O'Hara. Didn't Stephen Bryce tell you that?"
"He is listening to you now," O'Hara warned.
"I'm sure he is. He knows every word I've said, perhaps he knows every
thought that I have had, since I came through the Curtain. That is why
he does not dare to use me unless he must. But there's another reason
why I cannot waste my days in dreaming that I might become the Father
in his stead--a reason that dispels the curse of vanity that all men
are prey to. I can live for two years only with the amazing medications
that Stephen Bryce and his fellow scientists of the early days
developed, and then my illness, a cancer of the brain, will destroy
me as surely as the tyranny of Stephen Bryce has destroyed these men.
Do you think that a man with a destiny of death could think only of
ambition?"
"All men have a destiny of death."
"That is true enough. All men have it, but with most men the time is
not fixed. How long have you been in Washington, O'Hara?"
"Eleven months."
"And has it seemed so long?"
"Incredibly long--and incredibly short, too, like a nightmare of the
instant before awakening."
"A nightmare of the instant before awakening--that is how you sum up
these eleven months. And I have only twice that long to live, and to
me too a year seems like a nightmarish instant--two instants of life
before me, O'Hara! That makes ambition an impossible mockery. Would you
dispute it?"
O'Hara looked steadily into Anstruther's pale, straining eyes. What
was he searching for in them, he asked himself. For arrogance? For the
bright marsh fires of insanity? For weakness? None of these were there.
For Anstruther, once the charming and imaginative boy, had gained
stature, and the boyishness was gone. And even as with Stephen Bryce,
himself facing the same approaching certainty of death, the purpose of
his being now was solely the future of the hemisphere.
It was impossible to doubt Anstruther's motives. To question his
methods, yes--but not the motive behind them. Which was true also
of the Father. O'Hara could loathe the individual acts of each, yet
at the same time he respected their sincerity. It was a cosmic irony
that these two men, instinctive enemies, opposites, should be working
toward a goal that was identical, yet by their natures working toward
it through irreconcilable methods. For Stephen Bryce meant to breed
out the race of the Degraded, both masses and Sons, while Anstruther
believed the elimination of the Father, as a move toward a new
environment, would solve the problems of the continents.
As for O'Hara himself, he could not choose between the cold science of
the Father and the emotional approach of Anstruther, but stronger at
the moment in his heart remained the horror of Emporia. He held out his
hand.
"I believe you, Anstruther."
"You mean, don't you, that you want to believe me?"
"That's it," O'Hara answered simply. "I do mean that. I want to believe
you."
"Good! For it is more important to me that you should want to believe
me, despite any uncertainty in your mind, than that you should believe
without question. Faith itself can be shattered, but the yearning after
faith is indestructible." He took O'Hara's hand, and at last got up
from the bunk. "Tomorrow," he said, "or when we next awaken, we resume.
Now tell me, for you must have come recently from Stephen Bryce, which
was the direction and what the distance? Back along this corridor how
far?"
"I cannot tell you, Anstruther."
"But you came into this room--"
"Unconscious," said O'Hara, which was the truth as far as it went. He
did not dare to mention the integrocalculators. Yet as warily he drove
from his mind the memory of Nedra and his son sinking down toward the
bottom of that water-filled room. His path in this struggle seemed
obscure--his feeling was to follow Anstruther, to help him and these
sleeping Sons, and yet he could not bring himself to follow absolutely,
he could not reveal the Father's purpose, or could he permit himself
to think of Nedra and the baby, for agitation would defeat him. He must
grope through this, betraying neither Anstruther nor the Father. Nor
himself.
The middle ground, he told himself--the middle ground, always seeming
to both extremes contemptible, weak and confused. And perhaps confusion
really was the virtue of it, veering this way for a while, then that,
but persevering devious and without dogma toward the goal, toward
saving Nedra and his child. Was that contemptible? He could not
think that it was. In the first phase of mankind, before codes and
ideologies, there had been only the preservation of the family and a
dim concept of God--and so, O'Hara felt, would be the final phase.
"I was unconscious," he repeated.
"Then we are lost again," said Anstruther gloomily. But instantly his
eyes were light again. "It does not matter. However long it takes, we
will find our way to him. We have come in a straight line this far,
and we will continue it until we reach the outer shell of Washington,
which must be close to this room. Then we shall cut back again through
the heart of the city, never leaving between the lines we cut the space
that Stephen Bryce's vast throne room occupies. Somewhere, someday,
we'll find the heart of this."
O'Hara asked, "You too, Anstruther, were unconscious when you left the
Father's hall?"
"I have never been there. After I crashed in Patagonia, the Sons
brought me to Washington through the North-South Tube, which plunges
underneath the Gulf of Mexico from Yucatan--the second of the two great
Tubes that are the arteries of these continents. As you know, there are
smaller, lateral Tubes--"
"I know very little, Anstruther. And I ought to know."
"The two great Tubes," said Anstruther, "converge at Washington, the
Transcontinental and the North-South Tube. The lesser Tubes branch off
to all key points, to the Pits of Yellowstone and to the vast plutonium
plant in southern Colorado--"
"I flew into its radiation zone," O'Hara said, remembering.
"--to the Arctic outposts in Alaska and Labrador, to the plants in
South Carolina and at Hanford that generate the Atomic Curtain, to the
major population centers. You, whose family was once American, would
know the names of most of them, but they are no longer cities as you
and I remember cities--they had no purpose now, except as warrens for
the masses. No trade, no growth, no manufactures. A few repair shops at
strategic points, with almost nothing to repair, though they have the
skill for it. Everything has been done here, everything is finished,
and only man--or what is left of man--is subject now to change. That
has been true almost from the day they established the Atomic Curtain.
At once, behind its absolute security, the moral fiber of the masses
started to decay. Only the elite, the scientists, were able to preserve
a kind of integrity, for all too soon they were confronted with the
challenge of the retrogression of the masses of the continents, the
reversal of evolution, resulting from the gradual pollution of the
continents by their atomic-powered plants in every phase of life.
But after those first scientists, there were no more--no minds that
came out of the masses had the capacity for exploratory thought. And
gradually these scientists died off through these three centuries,
until there was only the last of them, the Father, Stephen Bryce. No,
I have never seen the Father's vast hall--he did not raise me from the
pit when I arrived."
"I recall the pit," O'Hara said.
"He raised you out of it, up to the level where he stood, because he
had to take that chance at last, to trust his life with you, O'Hara. Or
possibly he knows you better than you know yourself. That was true with
me, for I was not antagonistic when I stood beneath him in that pit.
But he sensed the path I would choose, siding with the Sons. He has not
let me come into the hall. Instead he comes into the Guild of the Sons,
or in the corridors, appearing in some manner that I do not understand,
emerging despite locked doors and seamless walls. It was in the Guild,
upon the screen, that I first saw you and the woman, Nedra--"
"Yes?"
"--and knew that with your help I might at last destroy this tyranny.
Soon after that, I tried to come to you. The Father intercepted me in
the corridor. Do you know the rest?"
"You broke his arms?"
"And he broke more than that. He drove me away, though promising again
to let me go on with my work among the Sons. That was the task he gave
me when I came to Washington, teaching the Sons, trying to make them
seem like men, as you and I and Stephen Bryce remember men. Now I am
trying to fulfill that task, but now I find that Stephen Bryce opposes
it." Anstruther crossed the room and dropped upon a bunk. "Yet I shall
fulfill it. With your help, O'Hara," he said quietly, "before I leave
the Western Hemisphere, I shall fulfill that task."
He did not move again. The sound of his breathing became the quiet
sound of sleep.
O'Hara's brain was staggering with fresh doubts. Surely the Father,
whom he knew had heard all this, understood now that he could not
reclaim Anstruther. Nor could O'Hara say with certainty that if the
thing were possible he would attempt it now. This too the Father, who
boasted of the equations of the mind that he could write, must know.
Somewhere in this morass of unattainables and doubts must lie a deeper
aim.
"O'Hara?"
"Yes, Father?"
"O'Hara, you must not question me. You must not think that you can
challenge me. You are wavering, O'Hara--despite the evidence of the
translucent room, despite Emporia, despite the shifting of your body
through the space of Washington, you are not yet convinced that what
I wish to do within these continents will be done. You have permitted
your reason to be shaken by emotion, and yet I know that in the end of
this you will not fail me. You must leave that room now. You must walk
into the corridor--"