Darkness engulfed him. A great wind shrieked through his last
consciousness. Long after that, it seemed, he was wrapped in a silence
that was endless and sublime, as death might be, yet he felt certain
that it was not death. And after that, long after that, he sensed that
he was in the cylinder within the Tube. He struggled up. Nedra was
lying at his feet, her baby locked tight in her shielding arms.
And so the Father had disclosed in death this final truth to him,
and they had escaped through it--the actual power of thought. It
was destructive thought, intensified with Anstruther's mind and
focused through the keyboard, that had freed the impulse that caused
the integrocalculators to disarrange the spatial structure of the
subterranean capital, then loosing in the great hall of the Father and
indeed all Washington the devouring torrents of the Deluge. And it was
his own thought, O'Hara's thought, attuned to these integrocalculators
which once more had moved his body through these walls of stone and
seamless magnesium--his body and Nedra's and the child's--streaming
as Stephen Bryce had sent him from the library downward, unchained
energy, and now into the cylinder of the Tube that at this moment
hurtled them toward the west.
Deceleration flung him forward in the cylinder. When its momentum died
he crawled to Nedra, lying motionless.
"Nedra," he called to her.
Her lips moved silently, as if the trick of speech were lost to her.
Her sluggish breathing seemed a part of that subhuman torpor he had
seen before, when they were in the Tube arriving at its terminus in
Washington. And as before, her apathy enraged him. It was the fury of
a man who cannot dodge his guilt. He recognized it now. He stayed his
hand.
"Nedra," he said, "however wrong I may have been before, this
time--this time at least, I have been right. We are returning, Nedra,
rising from these depths, and you must help me rise this time. Do you
hear me, Nedra?"