"Yes--I know--"
"But you risk your life. The Father may destroy you."
"Yes."
"The choice is yours."
"I have no choice. I seek him."
"Then follow me," O'Hara said, and turned into the corridor. Anstruther
and the Sons came after him.
Beyond the blasted wall a panel opened in the seamless bright
magnesium, and when all had passed through it and began to climb the
steps, the panel shut them into darkness. O'Hara halted now and turned
again.
"You have your atom guns. You can blast your way back into the
corridor. I must tell you that the Father knows that you are
approaching. He asked me to lead you."
"Yes. Lead on."
"I will not do it, Anstruther. Despite his pledge and despite the logic
of his argument to support it, I will not lead you further into what is
certainly a trap for you."
"What is the way to go?" Anstruther asked impatiently.
"But what do you hope to accomplish?"
"All that any man can accomplish--to meet with evil and combat it."
"Regardless of whether the Father is evil, you cannot combat him. Your
only chance of ultimate success is to avoid him until the Sons and the
masses everywhere will rise against him."
"But unless I meet him, they will never rise."
"You mean unless you die?"
In the darkness their voices had sunk to whispers. The turgid,
thick-nosed breathing of the Sons made hearing difficult, yet neither
of them noticed it. For each of them knew both the questions and the
answers that must come.
"Yes. Unless I die."
O'Hara knew now that Anstruther could not be stopped. He had set for
himself this course toward inevitable death; he had been constantly
seeking it; he meant to give the Sons whom he had taught and the masses
that he had not yet been able to teach, and might never have been able
to teach, a martyr.
Still, O'Hara refused to lead Anstruther to the Father. It was
Anstruther himself who pushed O'Hara aside and strode upward at last
through the darkness until his groping hand touched metal above him and
he thrust against it and it yielded to him. He climbed slowly out of
the dark into the brilliance of the sun above him and disappeared into
it. And when the Sons too had passed and vanished, O'Hara followed.
Anstruther was standing rigid and defiant halfway up the dais toward
the enormous bed from which, as O'Hara emerged among the cowed and
kneeling Sons, the fragile hand of Stephen Bryce was beckoning to them
all. And beyond the pitifully small mound that Stephen Bryce's wasted
body made beneath its coverlet, Nedra was standing with her baby in her
arms--Nedra magnificently tall, robed in the thick, rich tresses of her
auburn hair.
And of those gathered there, herself, Stephen Bryce, Anstruther and the
Sons, and O'Hara, only Nedra seemed tranquil. Only Nedra seemed waiting
for what must now happen with serene indifference--the total serenity
of woman everywhere who knows that after blood is shed, she conquers.
It was Nedra's indifference that inflamed O'Hara. At the foot of the
dais in that incalculably vast hall, with the hairless nude bodies of
the Sons now hulking between him and the bed upon which Stephen Bryce
was very slowly dying, and below Anstruther who had frozen halfway to
the bed, O'Hara reckoned his chances.
He might just reach Nedra before the atom guns of Anstruther's Sons
obliterated him. He might get there, but it would only be to die with
her in his arms. He had had that chance before, to die with her, and he
repeatedly had rejected it--he rejected it now, for it was to live with
her that he wanted. Yet with the fever of death about that enormous
bed O'Hara could feel surging within himself the mad and heroic drive
toward immolation, to die with Nedra, as she had wished before.