"We have escaped," he cried. "We've gotten out of Washington despite
your fears. And you yourself, this time at least, refused the chance to
die."
"No one escapes, O'Hara."
"But that is the worst of all delusions, for we have done it. We've
gotten out of Washington at last, and if we can do that, we can go on."
"Where would we go."
"To your people in the mountains. And after that--"
"It has never happened."
Grimly he answered, "They have always told you this--that it could
not happen. Perhaps that is why it has never happened before. Perhaps
it is part of your people's philosophy of death, your hankering after
death--perhaps they were afraid to have it happen, Nedra! For nothing
is impossible when men are willing to endure, and to dare, and most of
all to think."
"It cannot happen, O'Hara."
"It's going to happen now," he warned. "And since I must, I shall make
it happen in the one way that you really understand. Give me your hand."
"I can't--"
Deliberately, he swung his open palm sharply against her face. Nor this
time did he loathe himself for striking her. He struck again, and as
her chin came slowly up, he said, "Yes, Nedra, yes, it's happening,"
knowing that if he could dislodge her one obsessive thought--and he was
doing it--she would become again the Nedra he had met and conquered in
that mountain amphitheater months before.
He was being very calm, a paradox of gentle brutality and masculinity,
when her own hand shot out and seized his throat.
As he staggered back, her long nails slashed his cheeks and she came
after him, not sluggish now but lithe and murderously quick, and leaped
upon him, locking her strong legs around him, and thus driving him
down hard upon the cushioned surface of the cylinder while her tensed
fingers stabbed toward his eyes.
O'Hara rolled from beneath her. The apathy had vanished from her eyes.
What he saw in them was that wild, tigrish mating lust of the Nedra he
had loved, and loved now, and must conquer or as surely die. Again she
pinioned him, again tearing at his face, and with a final desperate
thrust he broke away from her and staggered up. She leaped for him at
once. Through the blood in his eyes, he saw her chin and swung for it.
And this time it was she who dropped.
She lay at his feet. Her fingers moved unguided and found his ankles.
She dragged herself toward him, painfully, and when he saw the fierce
and untamed admiration in her eyes, he flung himself down blind with
desire.
Yes, there were limits to the possibilities of thought. There were some
things that called for more than the will to endure and to dare, as he
had meant it, and it was arguable, he now confessed, that these might
be the most important things of all.
In that little flat in Bloomsbury, the floor of which he had been
pacing all this time so constantly, O'Hara now paused, shrugged
his great shoulders and reached toward the glass that had remained
untouched for better than an hour while he had told me this. He was
back with me once more, back in mind as well as body, from those lost
continents beyond the Atomic Curtain. He was back to the dirt and the
poverty and the insecurity of the world as he had known it as a boy,
and as if he felt the change was too abrupt he lifted his glass to the
level of his eyes, and staring moodily into it, whispered:
"To Stephen Bryce, the Father."
"To Stephen Bryce," I echoed.
O'Hara smashed the glass against the wall. Then he turned again to me
and the smile came once more to his wide, strong mouth. "Well, he's
gone, has Stephen Bryce, for nothing human could have cheated the
Deluge pouring into that vast hall in Washington--Stephen Bryce and his
adoring Sons who turned at last against their self-appointed Messiah,
Anstruther. But don't think that I would discredit Anstruther. He was
more than a man. He was a force, a spirit--the little, stupid things
Messiahs do die with them, but their message, the cause for their
being, lives on and grows. And so it will with Anstruther. He gave them
a word they had forgotten--_men_. And some will remember and spread it.
Yes, Anstruther in death can triumph over all those masterworks that
trammeled him in life. And I--"
A low cry came to us from the room beyond. O'Hara whirled, his dark
eyes seeming to flash fire. His great fists tightened quickly, then he
forced them open, very carefully, as if it hurt him. He stared a moment
longer, and then he said:
"There's a little more and I must finish it. I left you with us in
that cylinder of the Tube, its momentum gone, and Nedra and myself
completely one again, but not free yet, still trapped. I must get us
out of that. It is too much like the ending of a chapter in those
serials you used to write--you're hanging from a cliff, and the pond
below you swarms with hungry crocodiles. You're slipping, you're
certain to fall--but we mustn't worry too much. With a quick flourish
of your pen--I suppose you actually use a typewriter--you'll whisk away
the crocodiles and place a haymow in the pond to receive you gently
when at last you fall.
"With myself and Nedra and our baby it was not quite that easy. We were
sealed inside the cylinder. And no Son now appeared above us at the
hatch. We were sealed in there as completely as we had been sealed,
months before, in that exquisite hexagonal room in Washington. But now
there was no omnipresent voice to lull us, and we meant to try.
"The hatch was kept rigidly in place by a thick metal spring,
protecting us from the vacuum of the Tube during our passage. I glanced
around that empty cylinder for some sort of lever to pry against the
spring, and then absurdly--for the first time in months--I remembered
the pistol strapped inside my jacket. Now I drew it out and fired twice
against the coiled metal before it snapped. The hatch sprang open.
"We climbed out warily. Once more we stood in a deserted corridor of
glittering magnesium, its endless distances reaching toward infinity.
But this time no one opened panels in the walls for us. We marched, a
long, long march to nowhere, prisoners still, yet knowing this time
in our hearts that space alone could never vanquish us. Nor were we
wrong, for finally we made an oblique turn and there before us lay the
Guild. And as we entered it, the Sons rose from their knees before a
blindingly bright screen. And a god's voice was droning:
"'Now they will come to you--this darkly bearded man and this
red-haired woman with a boy child in her arms. Take them to the surface
of Emporia, and there deliver them unto the Son who guards the valleys
toward the mountains. He must see that they reach the mountainside and
leave them there. This is your task. This is your task--'
"The voice droned on repetitively in that same pitch of godliness that
I had first heard in the subterranean city of Emporia, beating the
order endlessly into their brains until it was--as so much of their
guidance was--hypnotic. A voice from the grave--rather, a voice out
of the depthless Pits of Yellowstone. Yes, Stephen Bryce's voice,
recorded sometime in the hours before his death while he lay waiting
for Anstruther and myself to come to him. Knowing that he was to die,
and planning to achieve in death the goal he sought for me. And I had
thought he would not open panels in the walls!
"Now the Sons were rising from their knees, and they came at once to
us--they never doubted that we would be waiting there--and motioned
that we were to follow."
The ensuing march, led by the Son whose duty was to take them to the
surface, had nothing of the horror of their first descent into Emporia,
for it had been the swarming masses of the Degraded that had made it
horrible, the shambling tens of thousands, naked and vilely apathetic,
aimless. Now there were no masses. And the Son now marching with them
knew what he was doing.
"Are you not lonely here without the masses?" asked O'Hara.
"Lonely?"
"Do you not miss those who were swallowed by the Deluge here?"
"Oh, no."
"You realize what caused the Deluge?"
"Yes. The Father caused it."
"And if I told you that the Father too was swallowed by the Deluge?"
"That could not happen."
"But if I say I saw it happen?"
"No," said the Son. "For even now the Father speaks to us. And even now
the Tube brings new food from the photosynthetrons. And soon the Tube
will bring more females to repopulate Emporia."
"Do you not know what has occurred in Washington?"
"None of us ever knows what has occurred in Washington. It is not
necessary that we know, for the Father speaks, and the food continues
coming, and the water from the oceans of the west, and we the Sons need
nothing more than that. No," said the Son, neither obstinately nor
shaken, "we need nothing more, and we need to know nothing more, not
while the Voice still comes to give us tasks."
O'Hara himself, certain of what he knew, certain of what he understood
must yet be done, could not feel in this moment of such faith that
all of this, the whole vast system of existence and regeneration
stemming from the fixed impulses of the integrocalculators, must in
time run down. For one brief instant he forgot the Father's constant
warning that he must not put his trust in miracles, and it seemed
possible that these lost continents could go on as they were, unguided,
automatically, until their retrogressive doom in time left these
glistening corridors only the moist warm droplets of the primal ooze.
And was that actually so terrible? Might as well feel pity for bacteria
as for these mindless creatures. But then, in New York, there had been
that Son who had recalled a female of the masses who had fought to keep
her child. And that Son had remembered it as beautiful.
However dim, perhaps not sharper than the anguish of a wobbly tooth,
the anguish of the soul was not yet gone from them. And on that anguish
he could build.
"This is the shaft," the Son beside him said.
So O'Hara and Nedra and their child ascended once more to the
surface above Emporia and went across the multi-hued coiling of the
photosynthetrons and again upon that long march into the upland
valleys. And there the Son turned back.
"Good-by," O'Hara called to him.
The Son stood silently. His weak eyes focused for a moment, then he
shook his head. "But you will be returning," he said. "The Father frees
you for a purpose that is known to him. When you have achieved it, he
will send us again to take you back to him."
"You do believe that, don't you?" said O'Hara. "You do believe--"
But the Son was gone.
For the next five days O'Hara and Nedra and the child wandered higher
into the mountains. And the beauty of growing things, the trees that
soared toward the intense blue skies, and the soft thick mosses and
grass beneath their feet, and the birds that fluttered suddenly off
when they approached, and the frogs and insects that hopped away or
crawled from under rocks, the bite of the wind that came whining down
the far white slopes ahead, the gaggle of water searching its path
through pebbles, the heat of a true sun in the heavens, all these--and
freedom from oppressive walls and more oppressive destiny--awakened
them slowly from the long timeless stupor of the lowlands. Nor did they
know how deeply, if how troubled they had slept.
"I am hungry," said Nedra.
"I shall hunt for food."
"You have forgotten how to do it."
"An empty belly is a rapid teacher."
"But what will teach you to become a man again?"
"That too I shall learn," O'Hara laughed. He had not laughed for months.
The third night of their wandering it snowed, and they took refuge
underneath a ledge of granite, and Nedra toiled for hours with dry bark
and some twigs until she had a fire. But a very small fire.
"I am cold now," she said accusingly.
"I shouldn't wonder," said O'Hara. "The fact is, Nedra, you've got to
put on some clothes. Which means, I'm sure, that I shall have to get to
providing them. I had forgotten what a chore it is to be a husband in
this world."
The snow did not stop. On the fourth day of it O'Hara shot a giant
timber wolf. Its flesh was coarse and its hide, when they had baked
it out, had an amazing stench, but Nedra fashioned it into a sort of
kirtle, not so expertly made as that which had concealed her sex the
first time that O'Hara saw her, but serviceable.
"Beyond the Curtain," he said, "men buy perfumes for their women, but I
doubt, Nedra, that any ever bought a perfume such as this."
"You do not think that I am beautiful in this?"
But it had been a long day's climb and O'Hara was weary. He did
not feel that he was in the best of shape for battle. "Yes, Nedra,
beautiful," he sighed, and for this night at least she let him lie a
coward.
On the sixth day, as they were trudging slowly upward along a
snow-drifted trail, the brush ahead of them parted suddenly and from it
stepped the gaunt, commanding figure of the clansmen's Elder, his Colt
aimed menacingly at O'Hara's breast.
But Nedra said, "Is this the way you welcome us? Where are the others
of the clan?"
And they came out of hiding along the trail behind the Elder.
It was not a time for conversation. The Elder now turned his back upon
them and began to lead the way, and the clansmen closed in quickly
around them, and together at a trot they proceeded along the trail
toward the sandy chasm.
In the days that followed, with Nedra reigning placidly once more
within the deep gloom of the cavern, O'Hara prepared himself for what
he knew must follow. Now that he was free, now that he felt himself
again a factor in his destiny, he was reluctant. It was the Elder who
at last convinced him, after hearing one night the strange abominations
of the lowlands.
"It is a time of strange things," said the Elder cautiously. "I too
have heard and seen strange things since you were with us. Do you
recall the day you vanished in the valley? Those of us who escaped the
Degraded continued on until we reached the lake that had the black
water. In time we returned here with it, and made the long copper pots
that you designed upon the walls of the cavern--"
"Oh, yes, the still for refracting petroleum."
"--and then we prepared the water that you wished, the colorless water,
to give to the flying thing. We wished despite your absence to send
it into the air. We took the colorless water in jars and we placed
the jars before the flying thing and waited. And presently we heard a
voice that spoke the way you spoke when you first came to us. Again
and again, as a wolf calls for its missing whelp, it called for you:
'O'Hara--O'Hara--come in, O'Hara! This is Tournant calling, this is
Wrangell calling--can you come in, O'Hara?'"
"Tournant!"
"The voice kept saying that. Yet there was no one in the flying thing,
no man to speak these words to you."
"Of course! Of course! A voice--the wireless--speaking through three
thousand miles of space. And through the Curtain."
"Is this not strange, O'Hara?"
But O'Hara seized his arm. "The voice! The craft! And you took the fuel
there? Then I--I can fly again!"
It was that overwhelming yearning to be taking off again that sent him
rushing to the cavern.
"Nedra!" And when she turned. "I'm going to fly again."
She wiped the baby's mouth. She rubbed her hands together slowly,
with sand between them, to rid them of the fat of a wild fowl she was
roasting. She placed a log upon the smoldering fire.
"Where will you fly?" she asked.
"Does it matter, Nedra?"
"Yes."
"All right, I shall go straight up as long as the motors will push me,
and then I shall circle around as a condor might do it, and I'll feel
like a condor, too, a king of the skies--"
"I am going with you."
That sobered him up. And he took her hands: "There is a chance, always
a chance, that the flying thing will fall. And the baby, Nedra, your
child--our child?"
"The baby is the clan's. But I, O'Hara, am yours."
"But Nedra, if I--well, if I don't come back to these mountains--?"
"Ah." She smiled. "I knew!" And clenched the ceremonial warclub and
advanced.
It was the Elder who managed things. At dawn they departed, the men and
the younger women of the clan going swiftly upward through the heavy
snowdrifts and O'Hara with Nedra trotting grimly among them until at
last they reached that upland meadow where he had first set his craft
down on the continent. The craft--and the jars of fuel--waited there.
Nedra got into the cockpit. Then O'Hara directed the task of clearing
a runway through the snow. When they had finished, O'Hara climbed in,
touched his instruments very carefully, then touched them in earnest
and felt the living throb of motors. They coughed and then died.
"Once more," he whispered to himself.
This time they roared.
The Elder flung himself face down into the snow. The younger clansmen
scattered. O'Hara shook his fist at them. The craft shot forward.
Before it reached the wall of trees it knifed into the sky.
For some minutes O'Hara was too busy with the glory of his wings,
driving higher, soaring, to observe that Nedra had now shut her eyes.
The ticking of his scintillometer broke in upon his absorption finally,
its milliroentgen count a steady .285. Then he heard a more staccato
clicking, and it was Nedra.
"Here, your teeth are chipping. Take this jacket, Nedra."
He pulled it off. And the metal book that he had taken from the library
in Washington dropped onto his knees. He closed his eyes, and when
he opened them, he flicked wide the covers. Upon the single sheet of
bright magnesium was this:
"December 20, 12:35:01 P.M. Save for these ten seconds, only you can do
it."
Nedra called his name but he did not hear her. His mind was working
like an exquisitely refined machine. He was counting, squeezing the
fractional lost months and weeks and days and hours, the minutes and
seconds of the past twelve months into a pattern, calculating time,
estimating his position by the daytime pinpoints of the stars.
"O'Hara, O'Hara! Our mountains have vanished--"
December 20--and precisely at 12:35:01 P.M.--and for the ensuing ten
seconds.
Sweat poured from his body. Infinitesimal memories arranged themselves.
He could not be certain. But then he could never be certain again on
this side of the Curtain. To the day, yes! And to the hour and possibly
quite close to the minute--but never to the second! He would have to
feel his way into it, watching his milliroentgen count, and if the
Curtain was there, he would have to turn back. Yet this fuel would not
last him back from the Curtain to Nedra's mountains. It would be a
chance--a frightful chance.
"O'Hara, tell me--"
"We're going through the Curtain, Nedra."
And she nodded somberly.
At fifty thousand feet O'Hara leveled off. As he accelerated past two
thousand miles an hour he checked and re-checked his calculations of
the day and hour. His problem, as he analyzed it, was to reach the
Curtain before 12:35:01 P.M., and to continue swinging into it and away
from it until--at the miraculous proper moment--his scintillometer
reading dropped below the danger point, and then, upon the inward arc
of his ellipse of flying, to smash through.
It would be best to approach first in a dive from his maximum altitude,
at his maximum speed. It was true that he might thus smash into the
Curtain before the ten-second interval in which it did not exist,
during the changing of the reactors, but at least this time he would
know what he was about to do--he would not be senseless from a bolt of
lightning.
This was his plan. And it worked.
It shot him back across the Arctic, deep into Asia, deep into the
hemisphere of Delhi, Rome and Paris and the Twelve Old Men of Geneva.
"You've got to have luck for anything like that," O'Hara admitted. "The
luck of a Columbus. Would you have bet on us?"
He laughed, then he corked the bottle. There would be no more tippling
in that little flat in Bloomsbury.
"I would not bet against your luck, O'Hara."
"But there was more than luck to it," he answered. "For I was beginning
to learn the most difficult of the arts--to think. The Father had
taught me how to start learning. Ninety-nine hundredths of the best
motor you and I have got is never used--ninety-nine hundredths of each
of our brains lies idle. Perhaps in Washington I learned to use another
hundredth. At least I had begun to learn how to learn, and once that
has begun no problem can remain insoluble."
"Almost the words of the Father," I pointed out.
"Yes, almost the words of the Father. And if you link them with the
words I found in that magnesium book--the words I forgot in my extreme
concentration upon the matter of the ten seconds in which the Curtain
would not be before me--if you recall those words--"
"Only you can do it," I quoted.
"--then you know why I am here tonight," he said. "Do you think I'd
desert them?"
"Desert whom, O'Hara? Your son?"
"Yes," he said, "my son--and the Son who remembered a woman of the
masses who had fought to keep her child, that Son who had died for
thinking it was beautiful and the tens of thousands of others now
shambling dully through those subterranean corridors, their bellies
full, without anxiety as we know it, yet haunted--dimly haunted by the
memory of love. For Stephen Bryce told me that tyranny is in essence
not the existence of a tyrant, but the debased minds of the people, and
it is their lost faculty of love that most debases them. Of course I'm
going back to them. Do you know a comparable challenge?"
"We have a challenge here," I insisted. "The deserts of China and
Africa, the hunger of our billions. What you have learned--and what you
know of guiding us--can end all that."
"Are you trying to convince me?" he smiled, and took my hand. "Listen
carefully, Arthur Blair--tonight I am returning through the Curtain.
Don't ask me how, for I have told you, the words in that magnesium
book, the moment when the Father died in Washington--I am going back!
I know I am going back despite all that the Twelve Old Men and their
Security Bureau may attempt. I shall be there in Washington tomorrow. I
will have much to do, and for the next three months you will not hear
from me. But when those three months end my voice will come to you, not
on a screen that blinds you with its incandescence--by wireless, Arthur
Blair. I shall be speaking for the Western Hemisphere to you and all
these billions. For you need us. And we so desperately need you. My
voice will come through the Curtain, and when I am finished speaking
there will be no Curtain. I will have lifted it forever.
"We can save our two worlds, Arthur, but it won't be easy. The Twelve
Old Men, those timid guardians of the past, are going to fight you. You
must fight back, and fast--inform the peoples. Give them the facts,
the dangers most of all. Don't raise false dreams, for nothing is
accomplished without sweating. Yes, you have got your work cut out for
you, Arthur--and only you can do it!"
He freed my hand. He stooped, and when he rose again, he held the
ceremonial club tight in his hand.
"I'm going to open that door," he said, "and for just one instant
you'll see the most magnificent woman on this earth. Then out you go,
old boy! Stand back--stand back!"