"I do not know, O'Hara--perhaps two days, perhaps two months. There
is no way of telling time in the cities of the Degraded. There is
no sun and no moon, and no need for time, for time is a measure of
accomplishment and nothing is accomplished here. We exist, and that is
all."
The child sat up. He yawned.
"He must sleep now," said Nedra, and moved quickly to pick him up. "We
must not talk, we would disturb him--"
"Nedra, this is not possible. We're speaking as if we were together
in that exquisite little room, yet only hours ago--or days ago--I saw
you drowning, and I unable to break through the yielding wall to save
you from it. And only hours after that--or was it days or months?--you
suddenly were back with me in that exquisite room, bringing the child,
after those endless days and nights of solitude in which I did not
know--"
"What troubles you?"
"Time troubles me. Time and the vagueness of what has happened in it.
And you trouble me, Nedra! This is not the way you were, content to
have a semblance of me showing on a screen."
"Ah, you see, O'Hara?" She smiled. "This is that dying process that
I warned you of, this is what happens in the cities of the Degraded.
Your mind is steeped in clouds. You are frantic now, but soon enough
you will not care. You will not know it. And that will be much worse
than that death which could have come easily for us upon the mountain.
Remember now? Remember that you told me we could always die?"
"Yes, Nedra, I remember."
"We cannot do it now."
"I can die now, I can climb these tiers of books and leap--"
"But I cannot. And you would never leave me."
O'Hara bowed his head. At last he asked, "Where were you all that time
I was alone in that exquisite room? Where was the baby born?"
"I was with the Father. A woman of the masses was with me."
"I have seen no masses here in Washington."
"Nonetheless they are here. Millions, millions--like those we saw
jammed together in the corridors of Emporia, jamming the corridors
below the upper levels of the capital. They exist, down there, as we
exist up here--as worms exist within concentric rings in a decaying
log. The baby is sleepy, O'Hara. And I am sleepy too."
She stretched herself upon a couch that he remembered, holding the baby
closely in her arms, and she was smiling drowsily up toward the screen
when the light upon it ebbed.
"Nedra! Don't leave."
"But I am not leaving. As long as the Father wishes it, I shall be
here, as close to you as if we were upon two couches in this same
exquisite room, able always to see each other and to speak."
"Which is worse than death!"
The light was gone upon the screen. Her voice, sleepy, came to him once
more. "Are you sure of that? Are you so certain that death will not be
this way?"
And he was not certain. Nothing now seemed certain. Nothing had
reality. But soon, re-echoing Nedra's words, he would not care. He
would not care!
Days passed. At least the glow would come again upon the screen and
Nedra would be there, talking to him as though they were together
in that exquisite room, smiling or laughing at the child upon the
floor, angry when O'Hara's frustrated calls awakened it, scolding. Or
whispering through the darkness on the screen.
"Nedra, Nedra--"
"What is it, O'Hara?"
"Where are you in that darkness? Let me hear your voice. Speak to me,
Nedra!"
"But I am here."
"Yes, you are there, wherever that may be, and I am here, in this
enormous room of books, entombed in centuries of written facts while
you--you cannot see, but now I touch this screen, my hands are feeling
for you in that dark, toward the whisper of your voice. And touch cold
metal! Nedra--"
"Yes, O'Hara."
"It does not matter to you that we are apart like this?"
"But you sent me away from you, O'Hara."
"And you will never forgive me."
"Oh, yes. I do forgive you, O'Hara. But I shan't pity you, as you seem
to wish. I have not forgotten that when you wished to talk of solemn,
stuffy things, philosophizing with the Father, you sent me to bed. And
you'd do that again, for all men do it. It is only in the night, like
this, when you want me, O'Hara, that our separation is a torture to
you. Why don't you read those books?"
He pounded both his fists against the metal screen.
But there were nights when O'Hara did read. Dust had collected on these
volumes now for better than a century, the last archivist's entry being
dated 2124. And the name signed to it was the Father's--Stephen Bryce.
It was a daily journal that O'Hara discovered on the last shelf at the
far end of the hall.
"It has been a tragic mistake," was written in beautiful, rolling
script. "We have gambled and lost. Maria died last week--and today,
when I tried to awaken him, Wilson's hands were clutched around
the crucifix he always wore, as if with his last breath he prayed
forgiveness for our sin. I am now the last of us, unless in the
mountains beyond the Mississippi, where the pollution is not so
intense, some of those who fled our perfect civilization still exist in
their imperfect way.
"Yet in this last week of his life," was written on the yellowed page,
"Wilson developed his ultimate formula. He could have taken it and been
with me today. He preferred instead to die.
"And I prefer to die. But what of these creatures whom our blunders
have brought forth upon these continents? Is it not my obligation to
keep striving to redeem our race? Am I free to choose life or death?
I think not. I must live, I must preserve what we have left while I
continue seeking to regenerate. For to any problem there must be an
answer. There will be one for this!!"
Some mathematical calculations followed, and then came the notation:
"We wanted too much. And we have got too much for us. Along the way
somewhere we let our aspirations push us past the point of prudence,
yet it was not wrong for us to aspire. Perhaps even now, if I were to
lift the Atomic Curtain--but I don't dare! I cannot trust Eurasia even
now. I must work this out alone."
And at the bottom of the page, as if it were an afterthought:
"One way out is the volume on the first shelf of the left front wall."
O'Hara found it. The covers of it were stamped cleanly from magnesium,
and as he picked it up, seeing only that it must contain a single metal
page, the hushed voice of the Father filled the Library.
"You have it now, O'Hara. Place it inside your jacket, for you do
not yet need it. Remember my pledge, that if I die, you will be
instantly with Nedra and your son. I am sending you down now to the
integrocalculators. As before, hold your breath, open your mouth--this
will be very swift and terrible for you."
There was a great rush of chilling air and the library went black, and
in that blackness O'Hara felt himself exploding, dying, passing through
death into magnetic space, becoming part of space, losing identity.
Then out of this serenity he felt himself congeal again.
He was standing before a vast oblong machine, inside the glass casing
that enclosed it. There was no entrance to the casing. And beyond the
glass, upon all sides, a pale gray depthless liquid kept the casing
perpetually suspended.
"Observe it quickly, O'Hara," came the Father's whispered voice. "For
soon your nuclear heat will disturb it. Already its counteractors have
begun to hum a warning to me. You are the first to have passed into
it since it was suspended there, insusceptible to shock, beyond all
foreseeable change. And you must be the last. You have streamed into
it in the mesons and neutrons that compose you, and what you think
is flesh and blood, your body, clings together only through the wave
lengths of your brain. You have no real finite shape or substance now,
you are only what you think. And you must think! Absorb it all, and
quickly--this is the key, O'Hara! The board I hold is only to assist
your focusing your brain. It is recorded, isn't it? Now, you must
return--"
The chill air and the overwhelming blackness smothered him.
When he revived he was upon the library floor, kneeling as if in
prayer. He raised his eyes. "It could not be," he whispered. "It did
not happen--"
"What did not happen?" Nedra asked him, and was visible upon the
screen. "And where have you been these weeks, O'Hara? Where were you
all these nights I tried to call you to the screen?" Her voice was
petulant. "I am beginning to wonder now, O'Hara--you told me that you
came from beyond the Curtain but you seem to be marvelously at home
here among the Degraded. And except for your ages, you and the Father
are becoming much alike. Did you really come from Washington when you
approached my mountains in your flying thing?"
O'Hara shrugged. Was this so different from the tirades of the
housewives of London, Cairo or of Stockholm? Were women anywhere,
once they were mated to their satisfaction, different? Except for the
ceremonial warclub that she'd left behind in her cave in the Rocky
Mountains, Nedra was as women were everywhere.
"Did you really miss me, Nedra?"
"Yes. Of course I did."
"Of course," he sighed, and started walking toward the tiers of books.
But much as he learned in the library during the ensuing weeks, it
was his journey through the Tube to New York that taught him most of
what America had been before the Third World War. The subterranean
city, built since the establishment of the Curtain and glutted with
its multi-millions of naked and hairless masses shambling along from
feeding hall to feeding hall, sleeping together indiscriminately in
those wide cushioned bunks everywhere along the city's corridors and
herded always by the Sons with their atomic guns, was another and
larger Emporia, and from the density of its population must itself
be approaching a similar Deluge. It would be coming any day, the Son
attached to O'Hara anticipated.
"Only the Father knows the hour," the Son explained. "He counts the
masses as they multiply, and when there are too many for the Tube to
feed, the Deluge mercifully will come."
"You call it mercy?" asked O'Hara.
"Yes, that is the word that we were taught."
"It does not hurt you to know what happens to the masses?"
"Hurt me? I do not understand. I am in the Guild when it occurs."
"But one of these women who will be dissolved may have been your
mother. That one--she who carries her baby against her breast--she
may indeed be your mother. And these--your sisters, and if they had
received the training at the Father's schools in Washington that
you received, they would have been as you are, articulate, able to
comprehend--"
"Are you referring to these females?" the Son asked, puzzled.
"Don't you know the word _mother_?"
"It was not taught to us. It must be nonessential."
"But you do know about the birth of babies."
"Oh, yes, an entirely artificial process."
"The female who bears the baby in her womb nonetheless is its mother.
It is her flesh and her blood that sustains it before its birth, and
there is nothing artificial in that phase of it. Her blood has fed you.
She has felt the pain and I think she must have felt some joy at your
birth. Yes, despite your customs, despite the soulless processes the
Father has enforced, or been driven to enforce, the word should mean
something, it is not nonessential, and you can never aspire--"
"One moment, please!"
"--you can never aspire to emulate the men your fathers were, decades
ago, unless--"
"One moment, please," the Son repeated courteously. "For I remember
something that happened once, which has sometimes disturbed me. I had
been sent to collect the babies for the measurement of their brain
waves, to determine those who should be sent to Washington to become
Sons. There was a female who resisted--"
The Son fell silent. He was staring at O'Hara, but his eyes were
vacant, unseeing, or seeing very dimly back into the past. Then his
voice resumed in a whispered hush:
"And I though that was--beautiful."