"Yes," said Anstruther, "wait. This is my hour."
One of the Sons was now pressing his shining weapon against O'Hara's
back, but his eyes were moving irresolutely, watching both Anstruther's
upraised hand and O'Hara's half-crouched body and aware--constantly
and fearfully aware--of the silent small form prostrate on the enormous
bed above them. And the miracle of the vast hall, that the Father's
voice was a senile whisper when heard upon the dais but an overwhelming
and godlike roar a few feet from it, gave those Sons further from
the bed the strange obsession of listening to a deity's words come
thundering from dying lips.
"It is indeed Anstruther's hour," said Stephen Bryce, and the Sons
pressed forward to the steps of the dais.
Anstruther lowered his hand. "You have brought me here at last, Stephen
Bryce," he said, "into this hall which is the symbol and the origin of
your power. It was for this meeting that my craft was guided by a power
more sublime than yours through the Atomic Curtain into Patagonia, and
that the Sons then sent me northward through the Tube, that I might
meet you here and take from you those keys and their control of the
integrocalculators I might once again restore these people to the
dignity of men--"
"You hear, O'Hara?" said the Father. "None of this springs from
Anstruther's will. This is the classic attitude of the Messiah. Avoid
this attitude, never believe that what you do is not the fruit of your
own thinking and your volition."
Anstruther's own voice now again was audible, but he was looking past
the Father and the keyboard now, toward Nedra.
"--and to restore the dignity of woman's motherhood, the peopling of
the earth, the sacred adoration of their sons--"
"Worship comes from within," the Father said. "It does not need
Messiahs to restore it. This is emotion speaking, blind emotion."
"--deliver to me now the keyboard of the integrocalculators. The
weapons of the Sons whom you debased are turned upon you now--"
"You see, O'Hara, this violence will not be his. He has aroused the
Sons, he led them in revolt, yet when the climax of it comes he shrinks
from recognizing that the act is his. He blames the Sons, or pins it
on a power beyond us all, and in this way he sheds responsibility for
what he surely knows must end in death for all of us if I so will. This
is the way of emotion, this is the weakling's way, O'Hara, this is the
maddened posturing of a fool insensible to all except how he must seem
just now in Nedra's eyes--the Chosen Male, the Dedicated Man. And she
is seeing him that way! Don't you foresee how all of this must end,
O'Hara? One moment more--"
"Answer, Stephen Bryce," Anstruther cried. "Answer, or die. Give me the
key!"
The Father's voice broke coldly now into the sudden hush. "No, my son,
I am sorry--the key is not for you, and I cannot now save you from
yourself, as I had wished to do. For the worst of all human diseases
is upon you, the one disease for which we never yet have found a
palliative--your own vanity."
"Give me the key!" Anstruther screamed out in hysteria. "Or by my own
hand, I--"
"Anstruther, stop!" O'Hara cried.
The kneeling Sons rose up in sudden frenzy, leaping for the steps.
And in that moment of confusion Anstruther struck wildly downward at
the Father's skull. The sound of it was like the bursting of an egg,
Anstruther rocked, as if it were himself that had received the blow,
and then, his arms extending cataleptically, he gripped the keyboard
and drew back with it.
The Sons, now milling on the dais, seemed lost and leaderless, a
shambling herd again, until from their slack apelike mouths issued a
low, despairing wail, as animals in panic raise their senseless cry,
then all at once, as panicked animals will swerve, they turned toward
Anstruther, their long arms lashing out toward him.
"No," cried Anstruther, reeling back. "No, don't--this was for you!"
But a wild horror was upon them, a blood-lust born of their shocked
sense of guilt, and their immense hands tore at him, gouging at his
eyes, ripping his face to shreds. He rushed beyond the enormous bed
upon which the Father lay inert, and reaching Nedra, flung himself
prostrate at her feet, then raising eyes that welled with sudden tears
he sobbed, "We might--have led them! You and I--"
The Sons went swarming after him. Nedra was standing motionless,
serene--dazed or serene, O'Hara could not tell. Anstruther's hand slid
down along her thigh, and then, defiantly, he smashed his fist into
the myriad of keys upon the board. Then the tide of leaping hairless
bodies swept down on him, and as O'Hara snatched Nedra away from them,
Anstruther screamed again, a scream of agony that rose half muffled
from the writhing mass. They tore him apart, dismembered him, lay
wallowing in bestial fury in his flesh and blood.
"O'Hara! O'Hara!"
It was the Father's voice. The hall's vast walls were now receding
toward infinity, and from above, sped by the impulse that Anstruther's
blow upon the keys had loosed, the intricately embellished ceiling now
was plunging toward them and a great roaring from a greater distance
drowned the babbling of the Sons. The Father's hand rose up. And fell.
O'Hara bent down to the bed.
"This was--the solution of the problem. Death for both extremes,
O'Hara--death just a little earlier than it should have come. Now both
of us, Anstruther and myself, commit into your hands the redemption of
these continents. You understand, you hear?"
"Yes, Father--yes, I hear."
"You must go back through the Atomic Curtain. You must convince them
that our skill can save their continents from their real enemies,
hunger and disease. You must convince them, O'Hara, for this is their
last chance, I think, as it is ours. Convince them that we want their
colonists to build again, as they once built, a new and stronger race
within this hemisphere--new blood to strengthen ours. And then return
quickly, for it will be your task to carry on my work, to avoid my
mistakes, to practice the restraint I should have shown, ridding this
hemisphere at last of its pollution--"
"But the Atomic Curtain, Father?"
"You--will--pass through. The keyboard--quick! It is a means of
concentration, of translating thought into fact. Think and the
integrocalculators will respond. Think quickly--take your woman and
your baby in your arms and concentrate--the Tube--"
"You, Father?"
"--to the Pits of Yellowstone. You see--?"
The roaring from the space around them now drowned out the Father's
voice, and his eyelids shriveled shut. And while the Sons at last
turned from Anstruther's mangled body and knelt down in worship at
the bed, slots opened in the rapidly descending ceiling and the amber
torrents of the Deluge came cascading down.