The frail hand collapsed upon the Father's breast. His eyelids
flickered jerkily above his blazing eyes and for a moment the rise and
sinking of his bosom ceased. The pale lips parted, the fingers seemed
about to slide from the keyboard beneath them.
It was the fingers that O'Hara leaped to seize, for he remembered what
the Father had warned him, that if the pressure ceased, Nedra would
drown inside that translucent room. But the Father's sinews stiffened.
His lips again were moving:
"Not yet! Not yet! I am not dead."
O'Hara recoiled. And as he stood there the horror of Emporia seemed
vague beside this new horror, that all life of this hidden hemisphere
depended in these instants upon a brain that was hovering so very near
the line between the living and the dead. The Father's life was life
for millions now.
"I did not die!"
It was a cry of triumph. The voice was hoarsely jubilant. "I did not
die!" the Father cried again. "But do you know how close it was? So
near that I could see beyond. And I am ready!" his eyes opened very
wide. "This problem must be resolved, and now. While I consider it,
go behind the dais into the library. You will find more than books to
amuse you there."
O'Hara moved backward slowly. In his mind was the apprehension that
those fingers might in death relax their pressure on the key. But the
Father whispered:
"Go quickly, O'Hara!"
"But Father, if you die while I am absent?"
"Then instantly you will be with your wife and son, free to make
your way back to the mountains, if you can. I am giving the
integrocalculators the impulse to accomplish that. Do as I tell you
and you have this pledge. But--I shall not die! Now, go."
O'Hara turned and descended the steps and passed through the door
behind the dais. It slid down behind him. He was standing in a
tremendous tiered hall, stacked from floor to ceiling upon each wall
with books, while occupying the center of the hall were countless
exhibits of machinery and clothing, weapons and utensils, all the
implements of the civilizations that had been piled one upon the other
here in this subterranean capital of the Western Hemisphere. Against
the farthest wall was an immense bright screen, like those that he
had seen in the corridors and public buildings everywhere upon the
continent, and on this screen, at the moment that he entered, Nedra was
visible.
Nedra was nursing the child. At the sound of O'Hara's cry, she looked
up slowly, as if she was expecting to find him in the room with her,
wherever that might be, until finally her eyes were raised, and O'Hara
knew that she was peering into the screen in that lost, small room of
hers.
"Nedra," he called to her, "does my voice come through to you?"
"Oh, yes," she said calmly, "and I see you on the screen above me. It
is as though you were standing here beside me."
"Do you know where you are?"
"But surely you recognize this little room, O'Hara."
It was the exquisite room in which they had spent so many months
together, the perfect little room, hexagonal and thickly carpeted, its
ceiling vaulted and displaying shades of blue that darkened toward the
apex. "Yes, I know that room," O'Hara whispered bitterly.
"And do you know your son?" she asked, and pushed the child gently
from her breast. She was as he had last seen her in that translucent
water-filled room, lying upon the floor--completely nude, her majestic
body serenely recumbent, her deep breasts forward as she rested on her
elbow, watching the child, which now rolled from his back upon the
floor, and smiling up into the screen began to crawl toward it.