Front matter (continued 2)

The blow crashed into the muscles of his shoulder. He rolled beneath it, got onto his knees just as a second blow splashed blood into his eyes, then plunged again. His groping fingers found the club and wrenched it loose and this time he forgot it was a game—in close, he struck. His opponent toppled backward and lay still.

"I felt," said O'Hara, "rather like reciting a few lines from Horatio at the bridge. Or Spartacus. For my head was splitting. But the flambeaux were moving closer. I could see who carried them now—big fellows, perching up there in the box seats as if they might start throwing pennies to me. I waved the club to them. At the moment I think I would have fought the pack of them, for I was boiling—I'd been roughed up and I never had liked that. And then something touched my foot."

His adversary had crawled across the snow and was reaching out, hand supplicant. The parka had fallen back. It was a woman.

"She held on to my knees and looked up at my face, a mass of waist-long auburn hair now loose upon her back. And she was beautiful—her hair reflecting firelight from flambeaux, deeply auburn, her eyes the blue of glacier ice—a classic face, exquisite, but no tenderness as we know it. Only passion.

"Quickly she got to her feet, her arms locking me close against her splendid breasts, an Amazon who worshiped only strength, which I was glad I had, for those above us now were coming down the sheer walls of the amphitheater like so many chamois, bringing their flambeaux with them. Let me repeat—big fellows! Six-six on the average, and running upward of two-thirty, chests like bulls. And so damned agile! To see them scamper down that precipice toward me, depending on the quickness of their feet where I would certainly have found my hands not adequate, depressed me. I had the warclub and of course my .38, but if they meant to take me, neither was enough."

Instead, they lined up on both sides of him, then waiting while the woman motioned him to follow her, and began to lead the way. So at last they moved off in that strange procession, guided by flambeaux through the night, much as a bridal couple might move underneath an arch of swords.

"The simple act of splitting her noggin seemed to have inflamed—be damned if I'll tell it. Most natural thing in the world, I suppose, when it's the local custom. Yet it was embarrassing. And the studied indifference of our escort made it worse. How does one make love on the march, surrounded by a hundred men? For hours!"

Gradually they were descending the mountain, coming finally beneath an overhanging cliff into a narrow chasm, and there, around immense bonfires, a swarm of women and children waited—had waited, O'Hara now felt certain, throughout the long absence of their men, for all at once, silent but busier than ants, they began dragging great haunches of meat from a series of caves which were eroded deep into the stone face of the cliff, arranging them upon the fires to roast. O'Hara's woman indicated that they were to sit, and the men now ground out in the sand their smoking flambeaux and squatted beside them, silent, impassive, waiting.

Primeval, said O'Hara. There could have been nothing like it since—what were those ancient caves in France? Cro-Magnon man? The old boys who drew perfect little sketches of buffalo on the stone walls of caves? These silent giants, these women with their thick, abundant hair, the cliff and the caverns, the smell of roasting flesh, the constant scampering of fur-swaddled babies in the sand—primeval, certainly. The tribe—the clan!

Someone was chanting. It was the oldest of the men, using words that were no language that O'Hara knew, yet vaguely familiar. And as others joined in, the men's voices rich in a monotonous refrain, the women's working out a hymnlike counterpoint, O'Hara's woman arose and took him by the hands.

The chant changed now, a lament in it, a grieving for lost things, the women's voices dominating, keening, almost crystalline in iciness, like music locked within the chill stone of cathedral towers. O'Hara's woman led him toward one of the caverns, moving slowly, somberly erect. Within, deep in the gloom, a log fire smoldered. Smoke made fantastic shadows leaping on the living rock. She turned at last and stood there rigid, facing him.

Outside, the chant was changing now, a jubilating chorus of men's voices, gaining tempo until suddenly they ceased, and from the breathless silence finally a voice incredibly high, seeming incredibly remote, sang adoration.

O'Hara's woman freed his hand, then loosening a thong across her shoulders, shook herself, and stood there in the firelight nude. And the next instant she leaped at him, her hands like claws, tearing at his face and throat, driving him backward toward the entrance of the cave, back toward the clan. It was repetition of the struggle in the natural amphitheater, savage, passionate, and with O'Hara understanding now that he must master her or die. He swung his wooden club.

"She fell," he said. "I was getting expert at it—she fell, and that was it. Brutal, you think? Perhaps. I will not argue that. What mattered was that Nedra did not think of it that way. That was her name, Nedra—I learned that, as I was to learn so many things within the next few days."

But that learning came swiftly only after he understood their language. It was a decadent English, elided and bastardized and purified of abstracts, a working language for mountain people, verbs and nouns, only the simplest adjectives. The trick of understanding it was not to attempt to get it word for word—the words themselves no longer had their English identity—but by complete sentences, for three syllables might express an idea which in the original of his school days would have required ten or more words. Much of it depended of course on inflections, whether a question or a command or a statement of fact. And yet, slurred in his mind's ear, repeated rapidly, it suggested the more complex English structure, always excepting the abstract. Or ideas born since the establishment of the Atomic Curtain. It was not difficult, once O'Hara had grasped the basic sounds.

His key to it, his teacher, was Nedra. For two days and nights, by custom of the clan, O'Hara was not permitted to leave the nuptial cave, Nedra herself going only to procure what was necessary in food and water, returning then at once and always with that mating ferocity of her people.

"Violence," said O'Hara, "but not the implied violence of our corrupted European customs, not the ring and the finger, not the bridal veil—actual violence, the club and the ripping hands, and finally submission to the master sex, was implicit in their rituals as it was in their lives constantly. The original combat in that snow-packed amphitheater actually was our marriage by their custom, later consecrated in the chants outside the cavern. Neither a ceremony taken lightly—and not one forgotten readily. Not a blurred memory of dress uniforms and flowers but as sacred, I think. And vastly more impressive. As for courtship, as we know it, what is it but a rather futile attempt at premarital adjustment? Nedra had watched me kill the saber-tooth, and while I claim no valiance in it she had thought it admirable. She'd wanted me. I'd proved myself sufficiently before her people in the amphitheater. It was that simple.

"But with passion and loyalty and respect—which she demanded that I earn—did not come tenderness. Not then or ever. I had to learn that lesson. Nedra was not for the meek. And weakness would have sickened her. It was, I confess, disturbing to learn that I must always be on guard, that between us there could be no gentleness, that the carved wooden club, the symbol of marriage, must ever be ready to strike, but once I had got over my namby-pamby notions, I found myself—well, smug about it. I too could rule my cave."

Yes, a cave-dwelling people, said O'Hara, but not quite so primitive as he had supposed. It was on his third day with the clan, after he and Nedra had at last emerged from the nuptial cavern—O'Hara could follow the language by now, usually getting it the second or third time that something was said to him—that he discovered a facet of their culture that amazed him. He had gone with the gray-haired leader of the ceremonial chant, called simply the Elder—men's names, he was to learn, were functional, last names inconsequential—just beyond the chasm of the caves along a mountain trail with a group of children who were hauling fallen timber, when from a bank of dense ferns a giant bear reared up, a bear resembling the Kodiak that O'Hara had known in Siberia, beyond the Atomic Curtain, but vastly larger, an immense shaggy beast, awing, the rumble of the thunder in its throat.

The children froze. And before O'Hara could get out the .38 strapped inside his jacket, the Elder stepped forward, leveled his fist and fired—the spurt of smoke and flame and the sharp clack of firearms—then continuing boldly to advance, pouring shot after shot into the massive animal until it toppled.

O'Hara's surprise was intense. "I did not know you had these weapons," he said, and the Elder smiled. It was a .45 revolver, the butt of it worn smooth through countless decades of use, a type of gun that O'Hara had never seen.

"Weapon?" said the Elder. "It is called Colt, not weapon. We have always had them. Our people brought them when they came into these mountains."

"Then you were not always here?"

It was the Elder's turn to be amazed. "Always? No—it was not the best place to be always. We came here only to escape the sickness, in the time of my fathers' fathers. Long ago."

"The sickness?"

"You are one of us, you are of our people," said the Elder. "We know that because you use gunpowder, for we saw you kill the saber-tooth. If you had used an atomic gun we would have fled, for they are stronger than Colt—Colt cannot fight the atomic gun. But you are one of us, you must know these things."

"I don't know them," said O'Hara. The children were by now busily cutting up the giant bear, preparing it to take back to the caves. "I came from beyond the Curtain—"

"What does this mean, beyond the Curtain?"

"Beyond the Atomic Curtain, which shields this continent from that other world, my world, the Eastern Hemisphere. Beyond the oceans. Europe, Asia, Africa."

"These sounds mean nothing to us—Europe, Asia, Africa. Are they other mountains, perhaps along the Coast? We have not been there—it is too far and the risk of death is too great."

"You never go down from these mountains?"

"None of us. It would be death from the sickness—or worse than death, were we caught. Below the mountains is tabu for us. Were I to go, one of my people would fire Colt at me. It is our law."

"But you permit others of your people to come here?"

"That is permitted, yet it has never happened until you came. We saw you far above us, in that great flying thing you rode. We had never seen that thing before, but there are stories—myths the older people told when I was young—of the flying thing that men could ride across the skies in, as the condor does. Did you come in it from another mountain, beyond the regions of the Degraded?"

"From the north," said O'Hara. "Beyond the ice and the Curtain. But what are the Degraded?"

"The atomic people, if you can call them people. Those who live in the lowlands below the mountains."

"A different people?"

The Elder looked incredulous. "You must know these things. It is impossible not to know these things."

"But I do not know them," said O'Hara. "Beyond the Curtain we know nothing. Who are these atomic people and how are they different from you? And the sickness you mention. Tell me—"

But it could not come all at once, not while there remained the chore of cutting up the giant bear and gathering wood for the clan's fires burning on the floor of the chasm. The Elder talked as he worked, instructing the children—they were, O'Hara learned, considered the clan's children, not the children of individual couples, for the idea of the family had been expanded to include the entire clan. One family, with the Elder heading it, two hundred of them living communally, owning nothing. Even their weapons—Colts—were property of the clan, handed down from generation to generation. They worked as a unit, directed by the Elder, with strange little islands of technology in their otherwise crude culture. For instance, they knew about ores—they smelted metals and were expert in fashioning them, making the utensils of their working lives, the bowls and pots and knives they used, and the cartridges for Colt. Their mountains were rich in both copper and iron, and when later O'Hara saw their diggings, the evidence was there of long usage and a more advanced technology, much of which the clansmen no longer understood. Among the Elder's most treasured possessions was a large glass retort, once part of a rather extensive chemical laboratory that now lay in ruins, its purpose no longer known to the clansmen, who did not know the manufacture of glass. The Elder considered his retort a sacred vessel—sacred through antiquity alone, however.

"Our fathers who came here from the lowlands understood these things," he explained. "It was a magic, perhaps, that they needed there—perhaps it saved them from the sickness. But we have not needed them and their use is forgotten. We no longer know the ceremonies for them."

"This clan is the only one to escape the sickness of the lowlands?"

"No, there are others. Many of us came together from the lowlands, fleeing together—some of us came here, others went to other ranges there, and beyond there," said the Elder, pointing. "And beyond there—many clans, but not so many as those who stayed in the lowlands and were lost."

"You see these clans?"

They never saw them. They were related peoples, but without any political or blood ties, for the constant incursion of the atomic peoples—the Degraded—made any close association of these mountain clans impossible. Always, the Elder said, the thousands of the Degraded swarmed up through the valleys, searching for the mountain people, hunting them.

"For them, the Degraded, there is never any work—they do not need wood for fires or animals for food or copper for their utensils," said the Elder. "There is no risk in their lives, other than the risk of hunting us. They do not want to destroy us—they want only to take us to replenish their blood, to halt the sickness. But we wish death to mating with them. They are animals. Surely you know?"

"I do not know."

"They were like us once," said the Elder. "That is the story of my fathers' fathers—they were like us once, when all of us lived in the lowlands, the great plains toward the rivers. But that was in the first years."

"What do you mean by the first years?"

The Elder tried to answer. "It was a time of great things and great triumphs. No one was hungry and no one needed to hunt for food. Have you seen from the flying thing the vast glistening colored objects lying in the valleys? That is a part of it—that was left from the first years. People lived in piles of stones and the sun provided them with everything they needed. But it was long ago. It has no meaning now, no real meaning that I understand. For something happened that had to do with the sickness and our people fled from it. I had heard the old men of the clan, when I was a child, thirty years ago, attempt to explain what they remember their fathers telling them and they could not make it clear to me."

"Thirty years ago. You were a child then?"

"Yes, thirty years ago. That is an old age, older than most."

"These children—?"

"Two and three—with us they mature slowly. Among the Degraded they are old at twenty, older at twenty than I am at thirty."

"Tell me," asked O'Hara, "what is Nedra's age?"

"She has lived nine winters. This is the tenth of them."

O'Hara felt as if the earth had shuddered under his feet. Nedra was ten—for a moment he thought that possibly they reckoned time differently, but the Elder's own words refuted that reasoning—nine winters! She was in her tenth year, mature—in many ways much more mature than women of his own world at the mating age, certainly without the protective claptrap of sentimentality and romantic misconceptions. Was it, then, strange that the degenerated emotions of old age were absent from these people? Passion and ferocity, which were the attributes of youth, but not malice and tenderness. When the life span was cut so short there was not time for these. Returning later to his cavern, he entered with a sense of active guilt, of shame, but the intricately carved wooden club was lying on the floor, significantly, and Nedra was waiting with that look of adoration that he now recognized as the adoration of a child's mind, but she was not a child—she was magnificently dangerous, splendidly strong and quick, knowing what she wanted, and without absurd squeamishness about it.

"I am waiting for you, O'Hara."

"Yes—I see you are. But never mind that club. We'll get along without it—"

"How?" She asked it simply. She could not conceive of placid submission, nor, after that, could O'Hara. It was another turning point.

What the Elder had meant by the first years was never made clearer, but O'Hara, remembering the long-forgotten books of those musty Oxford cellars—the books that had so fascinated him in school—concluded that the first years meant the decades immediately after the establishment of the Atomic Curtain, an historic milestone that these mountain clansmen no longer understood, now lost to them after the rapid succession of many generations, one each ten years. But concerning the sickness of the lowlands, the Elder was better informed. For it was a continuing thing, present among the atomic peoples even now, and the constant dread and loathing of the clansmen.

"What they eat," said the Elder, "is abomination. It grows in the lowlands in those immense systems of colored objects that are like pipes—if you did not see them from your flying thing I will take you to a peak from which you can see them. And these pipes are contaminated, making their food a poisonous stuff—yet they no longer have any other way to feed. Nor do they wish to feed in any other way. For everything is done for them by atomic power—"

"Who does these things by this power for them?"

"These things are fixed. No one needs to do them."

"They are automatic?"

"We do not know your word, but no one needs to do things for the atomic peoples. Everything is done. They have contrivances to work for them—the colored pipes to grow their food, and the water that they drink and that flows in these pipes they draw from the ocean that is said to be beyond the mountains toward the west, but the water also is contaminated. The earth itself—the soil of the lowlands—is contaminated, soaked with atomic wastes. Their cities—"

"What about their cities?"

"None of us has seen them, but we have heard that they exist. Our fathers' fathers told these things—once they built places out of stones and metals, like mountains with many caves, but they fled from them in the first years. That was before our people left. They were driven by the sickness—"

"How does the sickness injure them?"

"It is in their get."

"Only in their get?"

"Only in their get—it does not injure those already born, but their get become different. Each generation they become more and more like animals. Undeniably animals, though once they were like us. Now their arms are much longer than ours and their feet are different, their jaws are thrust out, their heads are shaped oddly, sloping back above the brows of their eyes—"

"Like apes?"

"Apes?" asked the Elder, puzzled.

"Never mind. You say this sickness comes from what they eat and drink and the cities that they live in?"

"From everything that is about their lives. The Tubes, the Sun Beneath the Earth—"

"What are these?"

"We do not know. We have never seen them. They were devised after the first years, when our fathers' fathers fled. But the legends are that the Tubes run everywhere beneath the crust of the earth, as the trails lie across the mountains, and that somewhere among these Tubes there is a Sun that glows, giving heat and light and power—and something else that we do not understand, a strange protection, not against us, but against a great evil—"

"The Curtain!"

"You know what this evil is?"

"Perhaps. And I'll learn more. But tell me one thing now—why did your people flee this sickness?"

The Elder's dignity was impressive. "I've told you that—what happens to their get. It is better to fight and to struggle for your life. Man was not meant to exist, as a worm does, pallid and content beneath a log."

And that was as close to an expression of religious belief as O'Hara was to hear among these mountain clansmen. Security was evil in itself.

Considering this, O'Hara decided that in those first years these clansmen who had fled the fat and effortless life of the atomic regions had discovered that security had an inevitable price, and it had been a price that they would not pay. They had turned their backs upon it, fleeing from it, escaping the greatest of all scientific wonders because of the greatest of all scientific mistakes—an unforeseeable error that they grasped only by seeing its result, without understanding of the cause. Yet they must have known it once.

O'Hara knew it.

Atomic contamination, never quite deadly, low enough to be tolerated, nonetheless had wrought its havoc in the genes of the race.

It had reversed the process of evolution.

The people of the lowlands, the atomic peoples, were reverting, returning toward the ape, and at a pace incredibly speeded up by some mutation within the reproductive genes that forced maturity at ten years of age, a generation every decade, ten to a century—twenty-seven since the establishment of the Atomic Curtain! But the rate of retrogression was immeasurably swifter than had been the slow climb upward since the dawn of time. For with the reversal of the process of evolution, an atomic disaster within the genes, had also come the reversal of the law that only the fittest could survive—the perfect atomic state, with security for all, was preserving and multiplying the predominant strain, those who were unfit!

Even these mountain clans who had fled, they too had taken that first short stride back toward the dawn. They had got back to the simplicity of life and the magnificent stature of Cro-Magnon times. For even here, remote from the pipe farms and the reservoirs of distilled and contaminated sea water, the radioactive food and drink of the lowlands, the dangerously hot power plants—even here there was always a degree of radiation. O'Hara's scintillometer had shown .285 milliroentgens an hour just before his craft had crashed—not dangerous, as veterans of the International Patrol reckoned danger, but over a period of time a factor never fully evaluated.

Adults at ten! Old men at thirty! And, as the Elder said, even sooner in the lowlands.

The Elder had described the atomic peoples as animals—as apes—but O'Hara was puzzled by these accounts of scientific achievement, the atomic weapons, the vast pipe farms which were the sources of food, the distillation of oceans, and the Curtain itself. Surely these were not the product of inferior minds, and as surely there must be somewhere in the lowlands another people, a superior people who had conceived and who directed the operation of these superb contrivances. But if there was such a people, the Elder did not know of them.

"The people of the mountains and the Degraded—there are no others," he insisted. "There cannot possibly be others, for if they lived there, they too would have the sickness."

O'Hara could not believe this. Yet he confessed it did not seem to be a greater contradiction of the possible than that a cave-dwelling race should employ gunpowder and understand the lightning properties of petroleum.

The petroleum remained for him a goal to be attained. The Elder was evasive, and Nedra, who would have told him anything she knew, considered it a mystery she neither comprehended nor cared about.

"Why talk of their torches?" she demanded. "If we need them, they will give them to us. Am I not enough to amuse you?"

"Yes, Nedra, but I want to know—"

"Are you really one of us, O'Hara? You ask questions that could interest only an old man of thirty, yet you cannot be more than twelve. You are restless, you are unhappy with me. I am not beautiful to you."

"No woman anywhere is quite as beautiful."

"There is something that you want. Is it babies, O'Hara? Soon we will have them."

"For the clan, I suppose?"

"For the clan, of course. Would you like to take them with us and leave the clan, go to another mountain? Is that what you want? But the Degraded would catch us. Would you want your sons and daughter to breed with the Degraded? No, we must stay with the clan and our babies must be for the clan."

"Our babies," he said, for he had forgotten that. There would be babies. And before he was an old man they would be older men. And Nedra—Nedra would be gone.

"In the place that you came from in the flying thing, O'Hara," Nedra was saying, "are the people there like me?"

"Not like you, Nedra. But they would admire you."

"As you admire me?"

"Yes."

Then, peremptorily, "Admire me, O'Hara, and let us begin to have our babies."

The eternal antidote! Wherever women were, they had this cure for restlessness. And there was something to it. He was not going to find, on either side of the Curtain, a life more idyllic than this. They had drawn a screen of skins across the mouth of the cavern and their log fire gave sufficient light and warmth; they had eaten together and now they were lying together on a heavy pad of furs, Nedra luxuriating in the tigrish grace of her naked body. Was there more than this?

"Nedra," he said at last, "I've got to know about the torches."

"The Elder knows these things. Ask him."

"Where does he get the petroleum?"

"That is a secret word. I do not know it."

"The oil—the stuff that burns in them. The black water."

"Why do you need to know about the black water?"

"For my—for the flying thing."

"That makes it fly?"

"Yes, Nedra."

"You want to fly away again?"

"I want to fly, though perhaps not far away. Perhaps that can't be done—not far."

"You wish to fly above the lands of the Degraded?"

"Perhaps."

"Then I will kill you."

"No," he said, "you won't. You must understand this, Nedra. As it is your nature to love, it is my nature to fly."

"Then I have not been a strong mate for you. I have been too weak, but I—"

"Leave the club where it is," O'Hara laughed. "And I'll talk no more to you of torches."

But with the Elder he was finally more successful. It came about through the Elder's reverence for the weapon he called Colt. The mechanics of it had an almost ecstatic fascination for him. He would take hours to explain the workings of each part, diagraming it in the sand before the caves, stopping from time to time to recite some victory he had won with it, a giant bear, a saber-tooth, a monster ground sloth that had come wandering from the lowlands.

"And do you know what makes it eternal?" he asked O'Hara. "It is the black water of our torches."

"I understand about the black water," said O'Hara instantly, determined now to trade on the Elder's reverence. "For that is what takes my flying thing into the air, like a bird."

"The black water does that?"

"When certain things have first been done to the black water. Would you like to see it?"

The Elder drew himself erect, a gaunt six feet eight, his face turned upward to the sky. "I would like to see the flying thing go up."

"Then I must have the black water."

"We will go to the place tomorrow."

"And we must boil it. We must build a machine, something like the machines you use for smelting copper. Come into the cavern, I will draw the parts for it in secret for you. I will show you on the walls of the cavern how it must be done."

"We can make this machine?"

"It will take time. But if you can make the cartridges for Colt, you can make this machine. We will do it together."

Using a pointed splinter of obsidian, O'Hara tediously worked out the design for a rudimentary still, sufficient, he was certain, for refracting kerosene. "This part must be copper," he explained to the Elder. "A retort to contain the black water."

"I see it, O'Hara."

"And here we must have pipes. Like a hollow reed, like the barrel of Colt. Can you do this?"

"It can be done. We will make a rod of clay and dip it into molten copper. When it cools we will wash out the clay."

"That will do it. You must have a very hot fire here—I think that if we spray black water on a bed of coals—with perhaps a bellows here—"

"You must draw that."

"Here it is. And we will need these coils—we will bend the copper pipes for this—"

O'Hara rapidly continued drawing. The sketches were making some kind of sense to the Elder.

"They are like the bright clear metal that I showed you in the old place," he suggested, and O'Hara nodded—like the glass retorts in the abandoned laboratory.

"This is the machine," he said. "The black water will become colorless, and with it, then, the flying thing will soar into the sky. But first we must have black water."

"We will go for it in the morning," said the Elder. "It will take two days to reach the lake that has it. I must go now—your woman is angry. Women do not like these secret things."

When the Elder left, Nedra seized O'Hara's arm. "It was evil of you to make these drawings," she burst out, angry. "They are like the drawings of women who design new pots. They are unmanly."

"You think I am unmanly, Nedra?"

"When you draw these things, yes."

"You think so, Nedra?" He moved backward quickly, seizing the carved club and then walking very slowly toward her.

When at last it was over, and she turned sleepily on the bearskin at his side, her voice, for once, seemed almost gentle. "We have begun our babies, O'Hara. And I will never leave you now."

With dawn, the Elder marshaled his caravan for the journey to the lake that had the black water—a natural pool of petroleum, O'Hara felt certain. And Nedra, alone of all the women, was going. The Elder had his say upon that issue—a scornful speech, addressed to O'Hara, concerning the proper management of women. But Nedra ignored it. Her arms were taut around O'Hara's neck, her face obstinately buried against the brilliant blue of his jacket.

"She will delay us," the Elder insisted. "And we must travel swiftly a great distance. We must cross the valley below us, and if there is trouble we cannot wait for a woman to keep pace."

O'Hara smoothed Nedra's hair. "Nonetheless, she is going."

"Then she is your burden."

"Yes, my burden. I understand."

The Elder lashed out the order of the march, and the youngest clansmen fanned out in front as scouts, a hundred yards apart, with those who followed moving now in groups of two at intervals of five minutes, dispersal against a fire-power far more deadly than the guns O'Hara knew. The Elder stationed O'Hara and Nedra as the second of these groups, so that their pace would be determined by the scouts out front. In this order, and proceeding at a dog-trot, the party swiftly descended the flank of the mountain toward the small valley intervening before the next range.

They were soon down upon the valley's floor, moving steadily through head-high grass broken now and then by densely wooded groves of aspen, and by noon they were crossing the ice of a narrow stream, heading toward a thicket. The Elder, pressing up from behind, now urged O'Hara to increase his speed—the scouts, he warned, having crossed the stream, were running for the lower slopes of the mountain across the valley.

"They are almost beyond danger," he explained, "and you cannot blame them. This is the point of risk, when they are not scouting carefully."

But Nedra needed no urging. They were climbing now, the grade curving sharply upward, exhausting, the icy wind of December cutting into the tissue of their lungs as if they were breathing acid. They reached the first shaggy line of snow-clad conifers and were pausing there, trying to determine where the route now led, when far ahead of them up the slope, a great burst of sound came roaring and a thin column of ocherish fuming matter shot up toward the sky, flattened at the top, changed coloration rapidly toward mottled red, then seemed to sag, drifting down toward the earth again.

Nedra seized O'Hara's hand.

Then down below them, just beyond the stream they'd crossed, another blast of sound came simultaneously with that tortured, soaring column of dark yellow matter, pustulant, and like a pustule bursting at the top, fuming into a blackish red, the color of dried blood. Obscene, O'Hara thought—it was obscene. A fire of filth.

Nedra was pulling at his arm. "Get down," she whispered. "Crawl—they do not see well and if we stay down, going from rock to rock, it may be that they'll miss us—"

"They?"

"It is the Degraded. Down below us in the valley."

O'Hara took out his .38, kneeling by Nedra and watching for movement on the slope below. "Nedra," he whispered, "is that it, that fuming matter—the atomic weapon?"

She did not answer. He reached out, touching her, and slowly turned. She was staring straight ahead.

And standing there beside a mass of crumbled granite, gray like the stone itself, his hulking body naked, neither clad nor furred, incredibly long arms now swinging as his weak eyes focused under bone-ridged brows, a man—though not a man—was raising in his ugly hand a shining tubelike object.

"Fire now, O'Hara," Nedra was saying. "Make them destroy us. They are around us now. They want to take us, not to kill. You see, that one—and that—"

"Nedra, I want you to run. When I fire—"

"It is too late. Kill me, O'Hara."

"No, Nedra," he said, but he pressed the .38 against her side. "We can always die, and if they try to separate us, I will do it. But it's you they want—if they see I'll kill you, they'll spare both of us. Can you tell him that?"

"She does not need to tell me that," said the Degraded. "You live while she lives. Now, come—the Father waits for you in Washington."

PART THREE

"Suppose," O'Hara said to me, leaning forward suddenly, his empty glass in his hand, "you were to fly tomorrow to the Prefecture of Switzerland—leave London, say, at noon, and arrive there twenty minutes later and alight at the Bern airstrip and then start walking, away from the town into the countryside—into the mountains. You'd have the feeling of London clinging to you. At any moment, you'd think, you could return to the airstrip and be again in London—in Bloomsbury, here—within twenty minutes, if you wished.

"Now, suppose further, that while you're walking through those Swiss mountains, you come upon a magnificent woman, larger than most women of Europe and more beautiful by far, auburn-haired, blue-eyed, dressed strangely in furs in a costume very like a Highlander's. And within a half hour's time she has attempted to knock out your brains and you, in defending yourself, have instead been forced to flatten her, and then have found that this was exactly what she'd hoped you would be able to do, and that henceforward she is your woman—not your slave but your mate—the mother of children who will be yours but who will not call you their father.

"And still further, suppose that suddenly from these same Swiss Alps, not twenty minutes from where we're sitting this moment, drinking ourselves into a mild sort of bender, a horde of manlike creatures, uglier than apes because they are men and not apes, surrounds you and destroys the illusion of an ancient time—destroys it with atomic weapons and the evidences of atomic-powered industry—ah, you see?

"We have not telescoped only the time involved since the establishment of the Atomic Curtain around the two Lost Continents of the Western Hemisphere. We have also telescoped time as far back as one hundred thousand years ago—we have got back to the Java Man, and yet we're also far ahead of where Europe and Asia are today, all within the present moment. For you're only twenty minutes from London!"

"It would take more than twenty minutes to get from here to the Rockies of North America," I pointed out.

O'Hara laughed. "It would take," he said, "two hours of straight flying time. And the Twelve Old Men of Geneva are now aware of that. Two hours—imagine it—from where we sweat and scrabble for our daily bread, and we could live forever without so much as wiggling our smallest toes. The abundant life, old man—food for the taking, shelter and absolute peace and freedom, and only those who are bored with that engage in anything resembling human struggle as we know it. And we can have that. All of us. Have it there in North America—or here, if we wish—for by now the Twelve Old Men must be reading my report, sent on from Croydon after I landed just a while ago. What do you think they'll do about it?"

"I don't know, O'Hara. You have not finished."

"No," he said, and filled our glasses, "I haven't finished, have I?" He drank, his eyes intently watching me. "You want the full picture, don't you? Well, you shall have it. Let your mind step back into that plane I mentioned, and take that two hours' flight across to the Rockies, to southern Colorado, beyond the Atomic Curtain. We're in a mountain valley, remember—? Nedra, and I, facing a gentleman who speaks that strangely bastardized English I've described for you—and speaks it with a certain dignity, as if used to command. And in his ugly hand he holds that shining tubelike object that creates those hideous explosions that destroy—and without trace—his enemies. The atomic gun.

"I have described him. Apelike yet hairless, stooped and hulking, his skin as gray as the granite of that mountain, a revolting thing, though I've seen men in London's streets quite as revolting. What perplexed me—amazed me—was the paradox of his speech, for as I say, it had a certain dignity that could come only from a mind that had been schooled. But the others of his patrol who now were coming around the rocks toward us, moving quite slowly as their weak eyes constantly kept watching for the scattered mountain clansmen, were, I was to learn, by far his inferiors. They were the horde, the masses if you please, while he—and by sheer accident of birth, for in that society of which he was a member, to be born with intelligence is indeed an accident—belonged to that most tyrannic of all aristocracies, the oligarchy of brains. They called him the Son."

Nedra, O'Hara said, was pressing tremblingly against the muzzle of the .38 he was holding at her side, watching the Son with an expression of absolute loathing, nor did she then or ever see the Son as any different from the members of the horde—the difference in intellect being meaningless to her. "A blow," said O'Hara, "to the bright boys of this earth, had they seen her face as I was seeing it. But I do not think it was a blow to the Son. He expected only loathing from Nedra, and if he could have had her, physically, her loathing would not have mattered to him. He knew—that is, he had been taught—that women of her kind were desirable for breeding purposes, as a means of retarding the reverse process of evolution, desirable from the standpoint of the race, but he was utterly lacking in aesthetics—a lovely woman or an ugly one, the flower or the weed, he did not and could not differentiate. And not through lack of intelligence, for he had something resembling that—but because, I think, the essence of romance and the appreciation of beauty is escape. And from what was he escaping, he and his kind? They had everything—everything, including the sickness. That alone perhaps they wished to escape, and that was a simple matter of biology.

"The real truth is," said O'Hara, "they wished to escape the sickness only because the thought of escaping it had been thumped into their brains from the moment when it was first realized that they had brains—so few of them had. It was no inherent wish. Actually the masses were quite content to go along as they were going, back toward the ape, the lizard, the fish, the primal scum. The masses of North America—both the Americas—are quite content. It is that thought that must be terrifying at this instant the Twelve Old Men of Geneva. For the masses anywhere always are striving toward contentment, and now—well, they can achieve it! Our masses, too. The Twelve Old Men know that now. And yet they also know—as Nedra knew instinctively—the price of it."

The Son, said O'Hara, now indicated the route they were to follow, pointing down the valley. "We must go at once," he announced, "for the cold of night will come swiftly. You-who-fly," he said, his eyes meeting O'Hara's, "are responsible for the woman's life. Remember, if she dies by the metal rod that you are holding against her, you will die instantly. Now, march."

For two hours they proceeded, but with nothing of the cautious and skillful precision that the mountain clansmen had effected before the attack, for although the Son remained just behind them, constantly ready to prevent their escape, the rest of the horde, three hundred when assembled, shambled aimlessly along in groups of two or ten or fifty, pausing now and then to explore an unusual rock formation or to feel the bark of trees, to tear an insect's tiny body to pieces, or simply to stop, having for the moment apparently forgotten where they were going, or why. Only a sharp command from the Son made them resume the march, always apathetically, neither resentful nor willingly, as a troop of small rhesus monkeys might proceed through a particularly interesting part of the forest.

"You called me 'you-who-fly,'" said O'Hara, speaking to the Son. "How did you know?"

"You were watched," said the Son. "When you came through the Curtain, The Father knew of it at once. The Father knows everything that happens."

"And you are taking us to him?"

"Yes. In Washington."

"Does he know you've captured us?"

The Son looked puzzled, the skin above his bony eye sockets wrinkling up. He seemed uncertain of his answer for a moment, but then his scowl relaxed. "The Father knows everything," he said, as if that bit of catechism demolished any doubts. "He thinks of everything. He sent us here into the mountains to return with you."

There was some interest in this game, watching the Son's mind struggling with unscheduled questions. "Suppose," O'Hara asked, "we had not come down into this valley today? How would you have captured us?"

"It would have been done."

"I see—the Father would have thought of something else?"

"Yes."

"But what?"

"Whatever would have been the best thing possible. If he wished, the Father could have destroyed these mountains. All of them."

"Why doesn't he? The mountain people are your enemies."

"Oh, no, we have no enemies." The Son was speaking now with greater surety, for these were obviously lessons he'd been taught. "The mountain people are instead a medicine. As the Father cultivates some medicines in test tubes, so he cultivates the mountain people in the medium in which they thrive."

"He permits them to exist?"

"He encourages them to exist," the Son replied. "He stimulates them."

"How?"

"By sending us to fight with them."

"But that destroys them."

"Only some of them. And that stimulates those who survive. Also, it rids their stock of those unfit to multiply."

"An admirable arrangement," said O'Hara. "As you say, the Father thinks of everything. I am beginning to want to meet him."

"You will," the Son said. "You will meet him soon."

They were coming out now into the thickly forested valley that opened eastward toward a rolling plain, then abruptly, sheered off, either by blast or fire, the forest ceased, and before them lay one of those vast and multi-hued farms of pipes which O'Hara had seen earlier from the air. Each section of pipe was roughly four feet in diameter, its surface slick and with a temperature that O'Hara by touch estimated at eighty degrees, the ends joined as he had observed so that it was in fact an endless coil, extending for miles.

"You must climb over these," the Son explained.

"What are they?"

"Photosynthetrons for western Kansas, although not all of their produce is used here—the solar rays in this region are more favorable for this particular food, much of which is needed in the cities of the Atlantic East. We send it there in the Tube."

"The Tube?"

"We are nearing its local terminal." The Son was pointing toward the approximate center of the pipe farm, from which now a sudden new eruption of these hairless manlike animals—despite their speech, O'Hara could not think of them as men—came clambering, their faces stamped with that unthinking emptiness of the masses, herded along toward the approaching party by another of their kind, who, like the Son, bore in his hand the shining tubelike weapon that O'Hara was to learn was both the symbol and enforcer of authority. "These are," the Son explained, "Emporians—their city is a very ancient one, although its site was often transferred in the old times, before the deluges began. The Son you see among them tells me that they expect another deluge soon to remedy their serious overpopulation. You will go with him."

"Another Son?"

"Oh, yes. The Father does not lack for Sons. I leave you now—my assignment is the valleys of this mountain range."

And while he turned, the two masses were commingling, so that the task of separating them was like the task of shepherd dogs with sheep—a division of the herd, not by specific individuals, but numerically, the two Sons shouting as they cleaved the shambling and always apathetic horde apart. To O'Hara it seemed an astonishing performance, the docility of the masses, for surely behind their dim eyes must be some semblance of a brain—surely they must know that those who went toward the mountains were to be used for combat purposes, exposed at least to the minor risk from the Colts of the mountain clansmen, yet apparently it did not matter to them, whether war or the placid test-tube existence of a city like Emporia, the sole difficulty that the Sons encountered arising from the inability of the masses to grasp the fact that they must be separated, that before the tumult could cease some of them must direct themselves toward the mountains and some return to the city. It was like the insensate division of an amoeba—a division directed perhaps by a sublime intelligence but without either the acquiescence or comprehension of the masses.

More and more, observing the Degraded—the only less than bestial stupidity of the horde and the derived intelligence or trained reflexes of the Sons—O'Hara was conscious of feeling that it was indeed a sublime intelligence that guided them, something they accepted without challenge as infallible, which in the inevitable pattern of such conceptions that spoke of as the Father but which more probably was a cabal of the more superior of the Sons, a ruling organism probably not unlike the Twelve Old Men of Geneva.

But to Nedra such reflections were not only senseless, they were silly. The masses of the Degraded, the Sons and even the Father were only varying terms for describing a loathsome people—worms, the clansmen called them. And only his curiosity kept O'Hara from tending to agree with that.

"You see?" said Nedra. "You should have killed me earlier, in the mountains, for this is the way it goes when you deal with the Degraded—you are passed from band to band, always deeper into the contamination in which they live, always with less and less chance of escaping them. They will be taking us now down into this city of theirs, Emporia, and how then, O'Hara, do you propose that we shall ever get away?"

There was truth in this. But O'Hara could not see that they were really worse off than before. "Let me coin a phrase or two," he said ironically. "While there's life, there's hope, and we can only die once."

"Those are the worst of lies," Nedra answered, her chin set stubbornly. "You can die a thousand times, each time more horribly than the times before, and while there is life it sometimes happens that it's only life to die again. Are you afraid to die, O'Hara?"

"Not afraid, but reluctant."

"Why? Are better nights coming in our lives than those we passed together in our cavern?"

"Not better, Nedra—but as interesting, perhaps, and certainly I would not wish to cancel out that possibility. A man who is dying of thirst in the middle of the desert does not seek death because the water that he may reach will not be sweeter than the water that he once had drunk. But it's more than that—more than the carrot dangled always just beyond the donkey's nose. In my world, beyond the Curtain, we cling to the belief that life itself is sacred and that always, finally, we may achieve redemption."

"What is redemption?"

"Life after death—a finer life than we have lived."

"You think only of yourselves," said Nedra, "and thinking only of yourselves, that notion may be true. But what of the clan? Have you forgotten, O'Hara, what the sickness does? We have got it now, you and I, as the Degraded have always had it—and what it has made of them it will make of the child that I am carrying."

"That you—?" he said, and gave it up, for there was no answer. None at all in logic, and Nedra had no concept of religion. Instead, he touched his lips against her face, a quick caress before she spoke again.

For the horde was separated at last, and those who were to go into the mountain valleys were already clambering back across the endless colored coiling of the photosynthetron, while the second of the Sons, his atom gun held cautiously, was now approaching them.

"We must go down into Emporia at once," he warned. "The Deluge is coming soon, and you should be safely in the Tube before it happens. The Father does not wish you to be drowned."

O'Hara tightened his arm around Nedra's waist, to avoid any surprise, and keeping his .38 beneath her ribs began to follow the horde further into the maze of pipes.

Six hundred yards deeper, between two pipes of an intense vermilion color, a square of some forty feet of opaque glass or metal or plastic now began to tilt upward as they approached, revealing beneath it a platform of what apparently was magnesium, and onto this platform the Son led O'Hara and Nedra and as many of the Degraded as it would accommodate. The platform now began to sink rapidly, without sound, down a shaft immaculately tooled from a similar glistening metal, descending for what O'Hara estimated to be two hundred feet before it reached bottom. A wall of the enclosing shaft now slid up, and they left the platform, which as instantly began to rise again toward the surface, while the panel closed automatically behind them. They were in the underground city of Emporia.

O'Hara, describing this, could not conceal, even in prosaic Bloomsbury, the intense excitement that he'd felt upon first seeing this fantastic culmination of an epoch. "The atomic epoch," he continued, "the world that Europe might have become except for that Third World War. If you were standing now, as I stood then, in the exact center of that strange and yet contemporary subterranean metropolis, I doubt you'd ever write another bit of pseudoscientific nonsense for those Youth League fans of yours. Because you are an amateur, old man—what your picked old brains consider rather weird, and hence commendable from the standpoint of a fiction writer, is in truth nearer facts—though there was more of weirdness in Emporia than you ever dreamed of. More astonishing probably than the Curtain itself, weirder than the Degraded, and vastly further into the domain of the inconceivable than a clan of Cro-Magnon people walking magnificently through the caverns of the Rockies, not two hours' flying time from where we're sitting now. I should have known—I am mildly psychic, a throwback possibly to some wild Boston Irishman of the twentieth century or a gandy dancer for the Santa Fe. These names confuse you, gandy dancer, Boston Irishman? I read them, later, in the incalculably tremendous library that the Father keeps in Washington, the archives of a dead democracy. Yes, there's Celtic blood in me, thinned out but quite sufficient to be psychic in such matters, and I should have known, when I heard Anstruther scream the day he vanished off the coast of Patagonia, that there were stranger things on earth than an impenetrable wall.

"You've seen the Roman catacombs? Marveled at them, that men can burrow into the earth like that? Then faintly, though very faintly, you understand how I felt standing there, with Nedra pressed close against me, shuddering—the glistening magnesium walls and avenues of subterranean Emporia extending in all directions from the shaft that pierced the city's roof, the lone communication with the surface of the earth.

"The shaft rose from a sort of plaza, a wide space, rectangular, with avenues dug through the living stone and lined with metal, top and bottom as well as both sides, and with the various compartments that would correspond to our buildings honeycombed out from each avenue, so that there really was no feeling of a city as we know it—only of immense tunnels, intersecting, none of the relief of roofs and chimney pots and varying architectural façades—a triumph of cubism, a nightmare of magnesium that reflected a pale green light from opalescent tubing recessed everywhere into the city's roof. And through these vast avenues the masses of the Degraded swarmed in aimless and quite effortless contentment.

"Literally," said O'Hara, "tens of thousands. The avenues were choked. It was worse than Trafalgar Square on a holiday, worse than the crush of devotees at the Grand National. Continuously they pressed through swinging doors into the food and slumber chambers of Emporia—vast rooms without the variance of so much as a welded seam, where, in great cauldronlike contrivances, the substance that was manufactured by the sun's rays in the photosynthetrons was constantly available, different foods, colored differently, tasting differently, all piped in from the reservoirs into which the photosynthetrons were drained—all automatic, not a hand raised to achieve the feeding of the populace except that which would guide the ladle to the mouth. The populace was fed—not quite like pigs, but with as little ceremony or appreciation.

"The slumber rooms were uniform. Around the walls were tiers of bunks, each six feet wide and eight feet long, each cushioned with a yielding dry material much like foam rubber but incredibly enduring. It was impossible to tear it, impossible to wear it out from the small friction it received. As a matter of record, it had been in those bunks, unchanged, for nearly two centuries.

"Sanitation? That was one of the major purposes of the Deluge, as they called it—a purging of the city, ridding it of both surplus population and uncleanliness, an alkaline solution that—but wait, I've got ahead of how I learned these things.

"The city of Emporia was impressive. Believe me, engineering reached its peak in those first years behind the Atomic Curtain, when fear and want had been abolished and all the genius of man was channeled into the creation of the perfect civilization—perfect, it seemed! And Emporia was sealed completely, locked in magnesium in its cavern blasted into the rock, its air a manufactured substance like its food, its drink pumped in along the Tube that terminated at Los Angeles, where the enormous purifying plant distilled sea water for half of the continent. But great as were these utterly nonmanual works, the most astonishing phase of life was life itself—the horde, the shambling tens of thousands eating there and sleeping there and breeding—

"You've always been libidinous. And I suppose you'd think there'd be a furor if a hundred thousand women, nude, came through the streets. But there was none—no furor, not so much as a wolf call, not a whistle in those choked streets of Emporia. One hundred thousand naked women, mind you, their bodies delicately green in that reflected light, frailer than the men, their breasts like pockets turned inside out, their hair as short as the men's and as bristling and their long arms clasping more often than not their strange little babies with the fierce protectiveness of all biological things—the rat fights for its young, and the hare, and the wren—but without real affection. One hundred thousand nude and speechless women, apathetically shambling among one hundred thousand naked men—"

A scene, said O'Hara, from Dante's hell. Men and women without emotion and without souls, or if souls cannot be bred out of the race, then without the intelligence to express them.

The particular band of the Degraded with which he and Nedra had descended into Emporia now had dispersed among these swarming thousands, but the Son who was guarding them remained, and O'Hara, as they proceeded along a glittering, nameless avenue, passing through several of the slumber and feeding chambers where the masses were eating or lying in their bunks, both together and separately, without shame, no longer could believe that there was any purpose or direction in their movement.

"Where are you taking us?" he asked the Son.

"Toward the Guild," replied the Son. "The Tube from Washington comes there. Also, all the Sons allotted to Emporia are bound there now, to escape the Deluge."

"The Sons escape the Deluge."

"The Sons and all those babies who have the prerequisites of Sons. We collect them from the women after we have tested their intelligence. That is done at birth, their brain waves proving those who will be eligible."

"Tested by a machine?"

"How else?"

"Their mothers don't object?"

"Why should the mothers object? When they have borne them, their task is done. It is we, the Sons, who have the tasks of collecting them and sending them to Washington for training there. It is we, the Sons, who have the task of fertilizing—"

"Only the Sons?"

"The males of the masses are sterile. That task is ours."

"There must be many Sons," said O'Hara.

"No, unfortunately. The ratio of Sons to masses constantly grows smaller and nowadays it is only by artificial insemination that the task can be accomplished. You will go this way," the Son said, indicating a door. "This is the Guild."

The chamber which they were now entering differed from the other immense halls of Emporia only in two particulars—the entrance through which they were passing consisted of double doors, like waterlocks, and in the center of the hall the metallic floor was cut away, with steps descending toward a series of still lower and smaller tunnels, the top halves of which had been removed. In one of these semi-exposed tunnels was resting at the moment a huge metal cylinder, some sixty feet long, with a hatch at its top into which various of the Sons were now descending, each bearing in his arms an infant, returning moments later empty-handed. After ten minutes of this, the last of the Sons emerged, the hatch was snapped shut and bolted, and the cylinder began moving, disappearing within a second past a valve into its tunnel.

A booming voice now filled the hall. The Sons turned from all sides toward a giant metal mirror, upon which, without apparent source, a brilliant light seemed reflected.

"The infants have departed?" asked the voice, and a chorus of the Sons answered in the stylized manner of a chant, "They have departed, Father."

"The man who flies has departed?"

"He has just arrived, Father."

"Send him to me. The hour of the Deluge is at hand."

The Son with O'Hara and Nedra motioned them toward a second cylinder now sliding in from its tunnel. "You must go at once," he commanded. "But you alone, not the red-haired woman of the mountains."

And Nedra turned. "You promised me, O'Hara."

"I promised you," he said, watching the Son's atomic gun. He remembered then the sudden, vile extrusion of the belching fire upon the mountain's side. It would happen easily. And now that it was here at last, his reluctance was gone—there was no fear, only an exaltation that was blinding to him, the first quick phase of death. "Are you ready, Nedra?"

"Yes," she said, and turning, drew her arms around him. "Now—"

The voice came booming through the hall. "O'Hara! Wait!"

And in that instant those among the Sons close to them crouched.

"Send both of them to me," the voice commanded, and the light upon the mirror gained intensity, becoming pure incandescence. "Send both of them," the voice repeated. "Will you put away your weapon now, O'Hara?"

He faced the light. "Only when we go together."

"You must go together into the Tube at once. The Sons will not hinder you."

"You are watching, Father? You understand about the gun?"

"Yes, I understand—I watch, as I watch everything. As I know everything. That uniform of yours—the International Patrol. You were based on Wrangell Island north of the Siberian Coast. Before that, you were based in the Falklands, flying southward to Antarctica. Born an Englishman of émigré descent—of American descent. Your ancestors were from this continent, before the establishment of the Curtain. You see, O'Hara? I know!" The reflected light now glowed as would the sun itself, and O'Hara was remembering the clansman's myth—the Sun Beneath the Earth. "You are afraid of me now, O'Hara?" asked the voice. "Afraid of knowledge?"

"I am not afraid of knowledge."

"Then you will come, you and your woman—now. I need you here."

The power of that voice, matched by the sunlike intensity upon the surface of the giant mirror, lent a sublimity to these words that kept the Sons in postures of obeisance, yet to O'Hara the tone seemed instead beseeching, as if the Father were himself afraid—as if dreading lest O'Hara might destroy himself. What else could possibly be the purpose of that display of knowledge of events beyond the Curtain? And that last phrase—"I need you here."

The Father needed him. He knew, as he considered it, that he was going. And Nedra knew it.

"O'Hara—no!"

Thrusting the .38 inside his jacket, he whirled, and seizing Nedra's hands, he lifted her, then going quickly down the steps and through the hatch into the cylinder. The Sons were leaping toward it all at once, and then the hatch snapped shut.

With a tremendous thrust, the cylinder shot forward, hurling O'Hara backward through the space inside. Both he and Nedra fell, landing upon the soft resilience of the foamlike rubber material that had lined the wide bunks of the slumber chambers of Emporia. The interior of the cylinder was barren of all else—a long, completely cushioned projectile that now glided smoothly with the sensation of motion eliminated by the lack of any way of reckoning it, no openings, no vibration, until within seconds as O'Hara managed to regain his balance and got up, seeing Nedra lying motionless six feet away, the cylinder began to lose acceleration rapidly. O'Hara again was jerked off his feet.

And as immediately, the hatch above them opened. The face of a Son appeared.

"You are in Washington," he said. "The Father awaits you."

Seconds, said O'Hara. Not more than twenty seconds since the hatch had shut, yet in those twenty seconds they had traveled in the Tube from western Kansas to Washington, a speed unthinkable if Washington were where it once had been.

Nedra was getting up.

He had been prepared for Nedra to fly into her tigrish rage and come dangerously toward him, compelling him once again to meet her in the endless struggle of a mountain clansman with his mate—a struggle that had begun to be exhilarating—she did not now so much as look at him. She stood with her eyes averted, her shoulders drooped, her bosom motionless, completely apathetic.

"Nedra?" he called. And she did not answer. She did not move. Her arms were hanging slackly, the palms of her hands limp against her thighs. O'Hara spun her around, looking into her eyes. If she saw him at all, she perfectly concealed it. Her eyes were glazed, her lips seeming loose. "Nedra," he cried, and shaking her, "Nedra, what is it? Do you hear me, Nedra?"

"Yes," she said. "I hear you."

Above them again, at the hatch of the cylinder, the Son was saying, "The Father waits for you. You must come now."

And for an instant, O'Hara heard in the Son's toneless voice an echo of Nedra's—the same flatness, a mindless monotone. Now, in confused panic, he was remembering the relative degrees of contamination he had discovered earlier, low when above the mountains, extremely high both toward the east and west of them and presumably even higher in these atomic-powered cities—remembering too that the people of the mountains had already taken that first stride back toward the dawn of man. And had this sudden intensification of atomic pollution struck Nedra, changing her, since daybreak, into another of these apelike people?

The thought of it revolted him. His reaction was violent. Unforgivable, he called it—forever unforgivable, for in the next moment he was guilty of that crime of crimes, unthinking passion, the closest that man ever comes to bestiality—these words were his own, the opinion that he voiced in Bloomsbury. He slashed his open hand across her face.

The blow did not stagger her. When he could see again, she had not moved—she was standing there before him, staring at him blankly, a thin smear of blood coming from her mouth.

"Nothing I can say, nothing I've done since, can possibly atone for that," said O'Hara. "For that was the ugly revulsion of a man who strikes his misshapen son, loathing the tortured image of himself. All men are capable of it, as I was capable of it. And even as it was done, while the palm of my hand was aching from the blow I'd struck, the abysmal shame of doing it was squeezing chilling fingers on my heart. And something was changed, something was dead—passion perhaps was dead. She was more to me than passion could possibly encompass after that. A man must get down from the high horse of his masculinity to know what I knew then, at last—I loved her. She was my bride at last. My wife."

He stooped, placing one arm gently beneath her knees and then lifting her unresisting body, and with his head bowed above her, he climbed the steps that led out of the cylinder.

The Son who had been waiting now turned his back upon them, saying, "You must follow me." He began at once, moving with the clumsy gait of the Degraded along the vast magnesium-walled corridor. And O'Hara with Nedra in his arms went after him.

The corridor was deserted. The Son, going in front, was without the tubelike atomic weapon that the Sons had carried in Emporia, the only quick way of distinguishing them from the masses. Yet here, in Washington, the city of the Father, there seemed to be no masses, nor in this long corridor were there any of the bunks or feeding cauldrons of Emporia. The endless procession with the bare feet of the Son soundless upon the metal flooring while O'Hara's heels echoed and re-echoed made it seem as if he were walking alone in the most horrible of nightmares—empty space. It continued undeviating, past the point of bearing, with O'Hara's arms losing any sense of feeling from the dead weight of Nedra's body, until abruptly, without explanation, the Son wheeled toward the wall and waited until O'Hara reached his shoulder. The wall was suddenly slid up before them, revealing a narrow flight of countless small metal steps, disappearing in distance infinitely far above the level of O'Hara's vision.

These steps they now continued to ascend, going very slowly, for O'Hara's iron strength was ebbing, until at last they reached a second level of the city, an immense hall, circular in design and with its walls fashioned of the same glaring magnesium that reflected the green lights recessed into the ceiling—a light that magnified the sensation of astronomical space and emptiness, as if this were an edifice beyond the earth, and not beneath it. Exhausted as he was, O'Hara still was able to conclude that this vastness was calculated, its purpose to awe, for it could not have had another use. Even the masses of Emporia, the teeming naked hundred thousands swirling in that satellite city's halls, would have been lost in this tremendous glittering void.

At the center of this enormous hall was a cylindrical shaft, and upon reaching this the Son again halted. A second panel shot open and the Son silently indicated that O'Hara was to enter.

"With you," O'Hara insisted.

"I cannot go further," said the Son. "It is forbidden."

"The Father forbids you to go further?"

"Yes."

"What would happen if you did?"

"I do not know."

"You are afraid?"

"I am not afraid. The Father watches me."

"He is watching you now?"

"The Father always watches. You must go now."

"You'll wait for my return?"

"But you are not returning. None who enters does."

O'Hara hesitated. But he knew already that there was no way of returning through the Tube to Emporia and through subterranean city to the plains and beyond the photosynthetron to the mountains. There were no odds at all. It was impossible. His only path was forward to the Father. He turned, and passed through the panel which closed instantly behind him, shutting off the sight of the kneeling Son.

The floor of the shaft now began rising swiftly. When at last it stopped, another panel opened, and O'Hara with Nedra in his arms walked out into the radiance of the sun itself.

He was uncertain how long he stood there, his sightless eyes aching. And if this brilliance also had the purpose of humbling him, it failed, for anger became defiance, the crazy courage of all trapped animals.

"If I could see," he cried aloud. "If only I could see—"

"You shall see, O'Hara," said the voice. "And I rejoice that you have chosen me above death."

As the sentence was done, the volume of the voice was dropping so swiftly that the final words seemed no more than a whisper, close. The brilliancy too was diminishing, and light was taking form and shape.

"When you have seen," the voice was whispering, "you will no longer be angry, O'Hara. You too will rejoice. Consider this, all your adult life you have constantly wondered what would lie beyond the Atomic Curtain, what had transpired in these two hundred and seventy years within the two Lost Continents, and here particularly, within the United States—within its Capital of Washington. Now you are going to know. I am going to show you. To teach you, O'Hara. I have wished so often in these years that it could be told to someone who could understand it. I have thought at times that the man had come, a real Son, O'Hara, for you are not the first to cross the Curtain. But the others were inadequate. They failed me, and I—perhaps I too was not quite adequate. Now you are here. Can you see, O'Hara?"

The glare was gone, but utter darkness had succeeded it.

"I can see nothing. These tricks of light and dark are stupid, Father. If you intend by them to frighten me—"

"It is only the contraction of the pupils of your eyes," the Father said. "They will adjust. Surely I have not brought you here to frighten you. Do you see yet?"

"I cannot—wait!—a wall—"

"You are now at the bottom of a pit. I cannot always trust those who come to me."

"—above me, twenty feet, and on the parapets of it—a bearded man, as fragile as the Twelve Old Men—"

"Yes, I am old. You see me now?"

"I see you now," O'Hara answered. "Very dimly, I see you. They call you the Father?"

"It was wise to have them call me that. But you need not. My name is Bryce—Stephen Bryce—Stephen Bryce, how very odd that sounds! I have not heard my name for better than a century. Let me hear it now—"

"Stephen Bryce."

"You humor me, O'Hara. I thank you for it. But you must come up to me. No, please don't move—you must learn that of all the great machines, only man's body cannot be replaced. Conserve it always. You see, you are rising now. This is that glorious age when the pressing of a button can achieve all things, except the things that matter."

The bottom of the pit was indeed rising, lifting O'Hara and Nedra toward the level upon which stood the reed-thin figure of an aged man, a wisp of a man in robes of shimmering and overlaid transparent cloth, a man with scattered hair no longer white but yellowish as parchment is, the beaked and collapsed face of a prophet, toothless, the pallid mouth moving slowly in the sparse, blanched beard, but the eyes young and large and blazingly bright, their blue made darker by the darkness of their sockets, amazing eyes in a body that was skin-sheathed bone.

"I welcome you, O'Hara," said the Father. "You and the woman from the mountains, welcome. But you are weary."

"Yes, Father," said O'Hara, and then instantly amended it: "Yes, Stephen Bryce, and if it is permitted, if we may rest—"

"This," said the Father, with an indicative gesture, "is called the Dome, a hall useful in that time when many came to me as you have come to me today. The great height of this arched ceiling was designed as you have suspected to be impressive, as if a visitor were standing at the core of the earth—a thousand feet to that ceiling, yet only fifty from wall to wall. A masterpiece of illusion. But through that arch upon your left—that way, O'Hara—you will discover that our architects were not altogether inhuman. Go through into the room beyond. You see? Beds, food and drink, the necessities. You must rest now. You must sleep. In this room you must shed the apprehensions you have felt. Remember, if I had not needed you, you would not have come here to Washington. Yet I trust," he said, "you will forgive a last precaution. Move back—the door!"

A panel clanged down from above. O'Hara and Nedra were alone.

It was an exquisite room. Hexagonal in shape, its floors were deeply cushioned with a carpeting of woven plastic threads. Its walls were carved intricately in stone so that the semblance of an open window centered each facet and yet there were actually no windows, no exits visible now that the panel had clanged shut. The ceiling was vaulted, fashioned of a glasslike material that shaded from the palest blue toward blue black at its apex. Against the far wall were two immense beds, or divans, side by side, and a refectory table wrought from polished and dark metal, with various bowls and beakers containing the multi-hued liquid foods of the photosynthetrons.

O'Hara strode with Nedra to the beds. And as he slid her burden from his numbing arms, a strange low music filled the room, the sweetness and ethereal thinness of flutes but with a sustained tone, yet without the throatiness of an organ—close, he thought, to the human voice, in octaves incredibly high and with a quality incredibly lyric. The music of sirens, the music of desire, a music that a man might hear in dreams. But Nedra was at last awakening.

She was lying there motionless, her long rich hair disheveled on the bed, her eyes now wide, her full lips whispering, and as he knelt beside her quickly she was saying, "—not even they could have done this to me. I could have made them destroy me, O'Hara. But you refused, you were too weak, you will be the father of my child—"

He threw himself upon the bed beside her. "No, Nedra, you are wrong, it is not weakness but violence that I hold against myself. We have lost nothing that we had. We retain the privilege of death."

"You believe that, O'Hara?"

"I am certain of it. I have the means here," he said, tapping his jacket.

"But you haven't the will. That is the trouble now, O'Hara. This thirst of yours to know what happens next is like a disease. Your hand becomes more reluctant each time you stay it, and now that you have seen the Father, what else is there? There are no more wonders. Why do you wait? Let me tell you, O'Hara—"

"Nedra, you are obsessed with dying. Is there no strength in learning to endure?"

"Endure for what purpose? Yes, if there is a purpose, but we cannot escape, we can only sink deeper and deeper into these slick abominations."

"You're learning to think, Nedra, and I'm not sure that it's desirable. Yet less than half an hour ago the fear that you might never think again was terrifying me. What does a man really want?"

"I know what you want. To talk."

"Why, yes," he said. "To talk—"

The opalescent light was dying out. The music now faint.

"To talk," O'Hara said, "and sleep, and wake again. Yes, Nedra, if we can be sure to wake again. Eternal life! Remind me to explain to you—though later on—"

But it was the Father who reminded him, and much later. For when O'Hara awoke the room was filled once more with that opalescent light that symbolized day, for actually, in this city of the Father, this capital of the Lost Continents behind the Atomic Curtain, there was neither day nor night. It was true that there were fourteen hours of synthetic light, radiating from the ever-present tubing recessed into the ceilings of the great halls and subterranean avenues, and these fourteen hours were succeeded by ten hours of darkness in the chambers used for sleep. But there was no real night.

O'Hara, then, awakening into this synthetic day, and finding Nedra still asleep beside him, was in no hurry to arise, but lay there staring toward the vaulted ceiling, remembering Nedra's bitter accusation, "We can only sink deeper and deeper into these slick abominations."

But even if they were forever to remain here, prisoners, would it be unendurable? If their cavern in the mountains had been pleasant, why was it less so here? Suppose that door were never to be unlocked?

Never?

The thought of it was smothering. It was in that instant as if he were strapped down upon the bed, and a cold sweat burst out on his body and he clenched his fists, crying aloud, "Father, Father—"

And the room was filled with a quiet voice: "You are unhappy here, O'Hara?"

The door was locked. The voice of the Father came again:

"I shan't insult you, O'Hara—these are not miracles. It is a simple contrivance. Doubtless you have it beyond the Curtain—electronic disks in the ceiling above you. I can hear you and see you, although I am some distance away in my own quarters. I was preparing to come to you when I heard you calling me. Are you unhappy?"

O'Hara said, "I am not unhappy, Father. I am—shall I call it restless? Caged!"

"I understand—you miss the illusion of choice. You are vastly more comfortable in that room than you were in your aircraft in the Arctic, and within those walls at least you have your liberty. An illusion, I insist—a matter of degree. Yet it is irritating to you, isn't it? I have a remedy for that—the stimulation of your mind. And in time you will achieve patience. There is work for you. While you were sleeping with your woman, I have considered a new concept for the Americas—interesting! The first development in a hundred years, O'Hara, and so delightfully simple that I cannot understand why I did not discover it before. You've seen what has happened to my people?"

"The Degraded?" O'Hara answered. "And the Sons?"

The Father's voice was silken. "Are there none beyond the Curtain who would change places with those you describe as the Degraded? Are there none in your world, O'Hara, as deserving of that ungracious term?"

"I am sorry, Father. I used a clansmen's word."

"And there is truth in it. The physiological facts are obvious. That is why I am vain about my Sons—the same stock, yet so perfectly trained that even you, I suppose, believe they have an intelligence superior to that of the masses."

"I have heard how they were selected as babies."

"And trained! That is the fact of it. Are there still dogs in your world beyond the Curtain?"

"Yes, Father. Our world has not changed."

"Once we had dogs. And it was possible to train them so that they made amazing use of their inherent faculties. They could never be taught to speak, for dogs never had that ability, but they made expert use of their paws and their noses in the way that was inherent to them. Now, the Sons, who are the children of women of the masses, are descended, as are the Degraded themselves, from speaking and thinking men. Like yourself, O'Hara. And I have trained them to recover their lost faculties. Without that training you could not distinguish them from the masses. But no amount of patience will instill in them—recover from their lineal past—the power to think beyond instinctive things. We need a new pattern, a thinking pattern. I have wasted too much of my allotted time in trying to salvage. I must create now. That is, you must create, O'Hara—a new caste, a new race."

"That will soon go the way of the Degraded, Father?"

"Yes, in time. The law of retrogression is exact, and for two generations—"

The Father's voice broke off abruptly. Then, in a moment, it came back with amazing sharpness. And O'Hara knew that the Father was speaking now to someone else, and in anger. "Why are you here? You will return at once to your work with the Sons!"

The voice that answered was hysterical. "No, Father—oh, no! I won't return to the Sons. I've seen him on the screen, I know he's here, and I'm going to warn him, Father. He won't surrender to your bloody, murderous—"

"I am calling the Sons," the Father cried.

"Call them and be damned. These arms of yours are so much cheese, Father, I can snap them in my fingers. You see? You feel? Pain—pain—you had forgotten what it was, hadn't you? Make the Sons return!"

"The Sons are coming now," the Father said. "You have your choice. Return at once to your work, and the promise that I've made to you—"

"A promise I no longer trust."

"You have your choice," the Father said again. "If I do not keep my promise, you know what lies ahead for you. You do prefer to trust me, don't you, Anstruther?"

The shrill voice rose. "I want to believe! I've got to believe you, Father—"

"Then return at once."

O'Hara heard a sob.

When the Father spoke again, his words came very slowly. "I have been injured, O'Hara. I cannot talk to you today. That imbecile who crossed the Curtain—Anstruther, who knew you when he flew for the Patrol—I'm sorry. You must be patient. Contemplate. Time need mean nothing to you, as it means nothing to me. Nothing, O'Hara! Think. And wait—"

Time need mean nothing. Think—and wait!

These, said O'Hara, were slogans that the Twelve Old Men of Geneva might well have used. "The old," he said, "have this at least in common on both sides of the Atomic Curtain—delay, for change is dangerous. And if they base their thinking on the greatest political fact of both our worlds, the Curtain, the slogan is sound. For we of Europe and Asia and Africa have become completely static, our minds paralyzed by the aftermath of that Third World War, while they—the people of the Western Hemisphere—have reaped the whirlwind of spectacular advance, and both because of that one change—the Curtain. And both of us have lost the future we once had."

In Bloomsbury, with the decadent smell of London in our noses and that strange insight that sometimes precedes intoxication stealing over him, O'Hara's voice now seemed to reach a pitch close to evangelical.

"Which is better?" he was saying. "To starve in Bengal or to shamble naked and unreasoning through the subterranean avenues of Emporia? A hard choice, isn't it? No choice at all, I'd say, if that were all we had to choose between. If that were all, there'd be no hope for men. I wish I could tell you that even then the Father, Stephen Bryce, was less fear-ridden than our Twelve Old Men. But it was not true at that moment. It was to come later, with adversity. The greatest of our teachers.

"Philosophy, old man, but cheap stuff. I am no Socrates, no Kant. At best I am—or was—a pilot for the International Patrol, an observer and no more. It is absurd that I should speculate upon the fate of man when I, in that exquisite room in Washington, could not with accuracy foresee what that strange conversation would portend for me within the next few months. But the fact that Anstruther was alive—and the absolute hysteria of his voice—the realization that he was not far from me within this terra incognita shook me, left my throat constricted and parched. I can feel it yet, that parched constriction. And you must yourself, don't you, Arthur? May I fill your glass?"

He was pacing the floor, his pounding tread a counterpoint for ideas that he felt instinctively were much too vast for discussion in that ordinary little flat. And while I helped myself once more from his liquor cabinet he continued speaking, or rather resumed speaking, after suddenly halting nervously and picking up that hand-worn ceremonial club.

"Anstruther, too! And in such mental anguish that the city which I had thought deserted now became at once a sinister catacomb where voices came from nowhere and a man who was everywhere, yet nowhere, was constantly watching me—Nedra and I! The goldfish bowl! Spied on by that old skeleton with the living mind, Stephen Bryce, the Father.

"And yet I thought it bearable.

"But bearable for months? Think! And wait! I did not then know that with those words the Father was sealing us in that room for eight months. Or perhaps sealed is the wrong word, it only seemed sealed—for the door was opened or some undiscoverable panel in the walls rolled up, but only when that synthetic day had passed, only when we were asleep, anesthetized!

"The architects of Washington had indeed thought of everything. This can only be my guess—for neither Nedra nor I actually saw the seal upon that exquisite room broken for the next eight months—but somehow, as sound and air could be piped in, so could an anesthetic that made robots of us each night, dead robots, out of service. And with the coming of each synthetic day there was always fresh food, the gruelly stuff from the photosynthetrons, palatable enough, and the necessary sanitation had been effected by means less final than the Deluge, but other than that we might as well have been within our tomb.

"Dead robots—that was the key to it. The Father was conditioning us. We were locked in a paradise of effortless well-being, the most subtle way of stamping out man's soul, but as with a fever that wastes away the body, so our minds were approaching frenzy through those damned eight months—the frenzy that would break, as a fever breaks, and leave us acceptably pliable.

"Eight months of endless days, each identical with the day before, except that Nedra now was growing big with our child. And I think it was the fact of the small life in her womb that saved us. Our fears were concentrated upon it. Our child, prenatally exposed to ceaseless radiation—was it to be another of those soulless ape men? I believed and still believe that Nedra throughout those months was toughening her resolve, she who forever found the answer to all evil things in death, to destroy the infant if—

"Do you understand now? It saved us. The contemplation of a greater tragedy was restorative, the established principle of medicine, the counterirritant. It also works with minds. It kept me sane—Nedra and the child!

"Then one morning Nedra was gone."

That was the morning of hell. That was the bottom of the pit, the breaking of the frenzy, said O'Hara. For hours, alone, within that hideously exquisite room, he beat his fists against the unyielding stone, or screamed the name of the Father toward the disks concealed in the vaulted ceiling.

"Send her back to me! Send her back, Stephen Bryce! Whatever you wish, ask it of me, but send her back!"

Or, when entreaties failed:

"I have the gun! Had you forgotten, Father? Do you suppose that when at last the door is opened, I shall stand here broken? Or that I shall permit myself to sleep beneath your anesthesia? I have the gun!"

Never an answer. Never the slightest whisper coming from the disks concealed in that room. For the Father understood too well that while there still remained the faintest hope that Nedra was alive, and might return, O'Hara was not going to end his life.

Yet possibly this was not altogether intended as torture, said O'Hara. There was torture in it, and surely the Father was indifferent to that, but that was not the sole purpose of this ninth and most terrible month of solitude. The Father himself had been injured. And a god could not permit that to be known. The Father, too, O'Hara was to learn, had also sealed himself away, using the fraudulent blazing mirrors of his electronic network to direct the hemisphere. He knew—he heard it hour by hour—O'Hara's raging, but his own acute problem and his grasp of O'Hara's mind made any other action seem to him unwise. And the wisdom of rulers is not always gentle.

Think! And wait!

Ten months of that, and the last two months of it at a plane of tension that made thinking seem like the flash of electricity through a vacuum. Thought and contemplation can achieve humility or they can achieve an equally super-normal arrogance of frozen wrath. Yet within a moment it was ended.

For O'Hara awoke one morning with a small cry singing in his ears. He turned upon his bed—and there was Nedra beside him, and at her breast was the child.

In every man's life there is a moment that he cannot perfectly remember afterward, for the moment is too emotional to be lived through twice. He has at last approached the reason for his being, and for O'Hara it had come with Nedra. And the child.

He wept.

When he could bring himself to touch them, the child was beautiful, the magic of slumber still doelike in its wide blue eyes, vigor in the clasp of its small fingers.

"He knows you, O'Hara."

Yes. Why shouldn't he? My child, my son, my own son—yes, he knows me.

"Nedra—"

"Not now." Her fingers touched his lips. "A little while—"

Then the voice from nowhere, absent all these months, came back.

"Good evening, O'Hara. You forgive me now, don't you?" Softly, very softly: "It has been difficult for you, but there was no other way. Without my guidance, you would have destroyed yourself, your woman and the child—and not with your gun. You must come to me at once."

"With Nedra and my son."

"They will be safer there."

"It is your word against my thinking, Father. Either they come—"

"Bring them, O'Hara. But keep your weapon ready."

The panel through which they had entered months before now was sliding up, revealing the empty corridor beyond.

"You will come into the corridor and turn toward your left," the Father was saying. "Only my voice will guide you. That is correct—now proceed until you hear me. And keep your weapon ready!"

Nedra walked slowly at O'Hara's side, the child asleep within her arms. The panel closed behind them. They were within a seemingly endless metal-lined tunnel that receded in each direction toward infinity, the glaringly reflected light obscuring the convergence of its geometric lines, and for a long while they walked as if each second might bring sudden death, completely tense, O'Hara with the .38 in his hand.

"Now you must turn again, this time toward your right," the Father commanded, and simultaneously a second panel opened in the wall. "You must come inside—and put away your weapon now, O'Hara. Only in the corridor was there any danger."

"What was the danger, Father?"

The second panel closed. They were within a vast rectangular hall, its ceiling far above them, azure pale, its walls a fretwork of marvelously carved stone, polished like glass. And deep back into it, against the farthest wall, upon a four-tiered dais of translucent stone was an enormous bed.