Chapter IV: Part THREE (2)

"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.

"This is where I exist, O'Hara--where I sleep and work, and where you and your woman and the child will live. There is privacy in space and space enough for us. Danger, you ask? A disturbance among some of the younger Sons, Anstruther's group, but I can settle it in time. Approach me closely--here, upon this dais."

The voice was everywhere around them, from every corner of the enormously spacious room, as the voice of a divinity would be, yet O'Hara understood that it was coming from the bed upon the dais, and toward that, with Nedra beside him--Nedra with the sleeping infant held against her breast--he was now moving, as the first man with the first woman must have moved from the Garden, scourged by the voice of wrath. It was like that. It was no less than that--awe and humility and perhaps terror, although he knew it was the voice of Stephen Bryce, a wasted man with eyes that burned more brightly than the sun itself.

Sublime, O'Hara insisted.

"Come near to me, O'Hara. For I--cannot get up."

And the spell was shattered. It was the pathos of the words that did it. The Father was helpless, the Father whose mind was the germ of life for these two continents, the only real intelligence within the hemisphere, was lying now upon a vast bed in a vaster hall, a cripple, a brain no longer able to effect for itself the simplest functions of the grossest of the masses.

Yes, the spell was shattered. But a man of O'Hara's stature would finally have rebelled against mere sublime authority, had it attempted to drive him to do the things he normally abhorred. But the authority of a cripple was infinitely more terrible--a cripple's power lay in the innate will of all men to be kind. And had Stephen Bryce so planned it, he could not have planned better. From the moment that O'Hara discovered how completely helpless Stephen Bryce had now become, and how dependent upon him, his own will was faltering.

"You see, O'Hara?" the voice was saying from all corners of the immense hall, although O'Hara now was standing close beside the bed. "At this moment it is you who have the privilege to do what could not be accomplished by the Muscovite--you can destroy these continents. For if I die, these people die."

The lids were closed above the blazing youthful eyes and Stephen Bryce had thus become a wasted, ancient skull, alive but only that. His blue-veined hand lay fragilely upon the coverlet, close to a metal panel that was studded countlessly with unmarked keys.

"You pass the privilege?" the Father said ironically, his voice a whisper within inches of his lips, yet booming from the corners of the hall, an acoustical arrangement that O'Hara did not notice for the first few seconds, so intent was he upon the substance of his words.

"I have delayed for your arrival," the Father was saying, "the Deluge at Emporia. But these ten additional months of life have not surprised them, or are they grateful. My people," he said, and his eyes seemed to burst open, "are incapable of either surprise or gratitude, which limits the satisfaction that I get from playing God. As you observe, I'm not a god--not quite, I suppose, any longer a creature of flesh and blood, but certainly not a god. Few here, behind the Atomic Curtain, are aware of that. Yourself, and Anstruther--and it was also Anstruther who restored to me the realization that neither am I quite immortal. I'd almost forgotten that. You heard, perhaps--a matter of two broken arms and the debilitation that resulted from the shock of it. That is why I am here, upon this grandiose bed, the old lion bearded, O'Hara--the old stag at bay at last. Done for, O'Hara."

The hand rose slowly, fluttering. "And now, the decencies of life. I have things to show you that a woman might not wish to see. And things to tell you that no child should hear, whether it comprehends or not. Send them away--send them toward the wall upon your left, it is prepared for them. At any time you can recall them if you wish, for the slightest whisper on this dais is magnified to thunder--oh, you've noticed that? Send them--at once--the decencies; I have not forgotten."

The eyes were closing. The hand had dropped upon the coverlet. It was as if the Father were already dead. For a moment O'Hara remained beside the bed, then he turned and descended the steps of the dais to Nedra, and after explaining what the Father had requested--Nedra left at once, without a glance at him--he returned again to the bedside of Stephen Bryce.

"Thank you, O'Hara. You are more gracious than the circumstances," said the Father, now opening his eyes again, while weariness dragged at the corners of his pallid mouth. "A new race, O'Hara," he whispered. "We need it here. You will remember that I mentioned it to you? Come, now, don't glare at me so sanctimoniously--I am mathematician enough to know that a new race cannot be bred from a single woman, your woman, nor the handful of women I might have the Sons take from the mountains. Are you a student of husbandry? There are books here--behind this dais a doorway leads into the library where I once used to study. Among these books are many from the days before the Curtain, and in that section, if you wish, you may learn all we've ever learned of genetics. We have no cattle now. Our only animals"--the pale lips twisted--"but you know them--men! Your brothers, O'Hara, the masses of Washington and Emporia, New York and Chicago, all our cities. In husbandry, O'Hara, the soundest concept was that rundown stock was easiest improved by crossing the prevailing females with a superior male. The get of any single male is almost limitless, provided--"

"This was explained to me," O'Hara interrupted, "by one of the Sons at Emporia. Artificial insemination."

"I heard his explanation, O'Hara. Yes, the males of the masses are sterile, although not impotent. And actually the tests which we make at birth do not determine intelligence as such, but fertility. The relation of those two factors is no coincidence. The stupid-fertile, once a predominant strain, have bred themselves out with the vanishing of the reason for their existence, which was hunger--the substitution of one physical satisfaction for another. The intelligent-sterile, toward which the ruling classes tended in the days before the Curtain, likewise have passed, and for the same cause--with the necessities of life available to all without effort, intelligence, in itself, lost its survival virtues.

"What now remain are the two breeds that our way of life brought to the front--the stupid-sterile and the intelligent-fertile, a geneticist's dream come true, the fruit of our atomic civilization. We should be reaching the millennium, O'Hara.

"But while we have got the two best strains predominating now, the unforeseeable reversal of the laws of evolution has shoved both strains ever backward, although comparably for each. The keel is on the bottom still, the mast upon the deck, but the ship is sinking. And nature has confounded man once more.

"And so, O'Hara--so through these endless years alone I have been forced to tinker--selective breeding, elimination of the weak, artificial insemination--tricks, all tricks, all little stratagems to stall off the immutable. Each generation slides back further than its sires. Your son--forgive me--will be not quite you, and his son will be neither you nor his mother. And your son's son will see his newborn son with horror. It is exact. But if a new race suddenly were spawned into the hemisphere, recapturing the ground lost in these generations since the Curtain--"

"Father, you'd still be tinkering."

"But the possibilities of this tinkering are extensive. Beyond the Curtain, fortunately, exists an inexhaustible source of uncontaminated sires."

"How would you get them here?"

"That is your task."

"My task? I could not count upon a providential thunderstorm to get me through the Curtain again."

"Providence we cannot reckon in planning the future of a hemisphere, and never have. It is true that chance--pure chance--enabled you, and Anstruther before you, and others now dead before both of you, to pass through the Curtain. But it was not Providence. Any man flying in the correct direction at the exact second that you were flying--and at any point in the Curtain--would have got through."

"I'm not sure I understand you. At any point in the Curtain at that exact second?"

"Within those exact ten seconds, O'Hara, hundreds of pilots in your International Patrol must ram into the Curtain every decade, yet if all of them were to hit it at the correct speed, flying the correct course, at the correct time, they would all get through. Chance enters into it only in that you happened to be doing all of these. Once each year, and for an interval of ten seconds, our Carolina reactor shuts off automatically and the Hanford or West Coast reactor takes over supplying the power for the Curtain. That has been happening now for the two hundred and seventy years since the establishment of the Curtain--the reactors were so arranged in the beginning. Completely automatic, you understand, as are the Tubes, the photosynthetrons, the East and West Coast distillation plants, the Deluges--as everything must be within this hemisphere. And there is this interval of ten seconds between the shutting off of the Carolina reactor and the generation of the Hanford reactor--ten seconds in which the Curtain does not exist!"

O'Hara closed his eyes. The taste of blood, saline and hot, was in his mouth--his heart now pounding with trip-hammer force. For here, within a sentence, was the determining great secret of the two halves of the earth--"There is an interval of ten seconds in which the Curtain does not exist!"

"It cannot vary by even a fractional concept of time," the Father was continuing. "And there, O'Hara, is how your task can be accomplished. You have your known factor of time, and in the lower Rockies, you have your plane. When it is brought to Washington, it can be duplicated on a more adequate scale, for the Sons, under guidance, are not bad workmen. Time and method are problems we can master, and there is only the issue of your willingness to obtain from beyond the Curtain--"

"My willingness? Do you believe, Father, that men--men as I've always known them, not your masses and Sons--would voluntarily enter into this proposition?"

"Do you believe that they would not? For a full belly, for a life without exertion, without the strain of thought--really, O'Hara, I have not forgotten what your world was like."

"Remove the strains they know, and they will discover other strains. In time, for instance, they will rebel against becoming your automatons."

"I am aware of that--I am now dealing with Anstruther. But that at least is a problem I can solve. Let me show you how I deal with human problems, O'Hara--let me show you the city of Emporia, where you first saw my people. Observe upon the wall behind this dais a metal screen, such as you saw in every hall and every corridor of Emporia, and as exist in every city of this hemisphere, even our dead cities--remember Spokane? The giant tower with its solarium? Remember you were curious and flew down close to it? Remember Denver? Those cities we abandoned soon after the establishment of the Curtain, as soon as our subterranean metropolises were built--for in those days we were not certain just how quickly the nations beyond the Curtain might construct atomic plants. True, we had our scintillometers, we were constantly on our guard, we had our rockets ready, but the physical plant could be built, prepared for instant operation, and we had by then no accurate reports of what your scientists might be thinking--we had learned that thinking was more vital than the last incidents of construction. We had no surety except our rocket barrages that you would not get these suppositional plants into production before we could destroy you, which meant of course that we too might be destroyed. We had with us the frightful memory of that Third World War, and how very close the outcome seemed at first. So we took no risks. We went beneath the earth, leaving dead cities where once we had lived. We built new cities up into the Arctic, outpost cities, as far as the northern coast of Canada, leaving only that chain of mountains, where the engineering problems were prohibitive, beyond the network of our automatic civilization. Now, this metal panel--" The Father's fragile fingers poised above the unmarked keys. "I touch, as you observe, and instantly you are seeing what is happening across the continent in Emporia."

The screen above the dais now glowed. And when the brilliant light adjusted into patterns, O'Hara saw the glittering corridor outside the Guild, the hall of the Sons at Emporia. The shambling naked tens of thousands of the masses passed before his eyes, as aimless as he'd seen them when he had been there, the women with their babies in their arms, the nude and hairless apelike men, feeding by thousands at the photosynthetron troughs, sleeping by thousands in the wide-bunked slumber halls--a mass of life as purposeless as maggots, living and devouring.

"The Sons again have gone within the Guild," the Father said. "And now I touch this key--"

Above the corridors of Emporia, slots opened in the ceilings and from them poured a tidelike wave of palely amber liquid, cascading down upon the swarming masses, engulfing them, yet as O'Hara watched, those caught up in the tide were vanishing--not sinking down, but actually vanishing, while those who fled in screaming panic, milling as a scalded colony of ants might do, leaping above the fallen bodies of those trampled in the crush, when once touched by the amber tide jerked back from it, but where an arm had been, a leg, a head, was nothing.

"Dissolved," the Father said. "The Deluge is a caustic solution that will cleanse Emporia of all filth, all population except those in the Guild--all that should not endure. Observe--this key--the solution now is pouring down through slots beneath the corridor, draining into that pipe within the Tube which carries it--and them, for they are only liquid now--into the Pits of Yellowstone, the continental sewerage plant, where the caustic is decanted and restored to tanks for future use. You see approximately three hundred thousand of these--call them men!--disappearing now, all except the Sons. Observe the screen--it flashes now inside the Guild, and this is even more adroit."

The pattern changed, and when it reshaped, O'Hara recognized the vast hall of the Sons, and saw them staring as they knelt, obeisant as they watched the metal screen within their own hall. That screen, inside the Guild, was glowing now, the brilliance of the sun upon its surface and a booming voice exhorting them--the Father's voice as O'Hara had first heard it in Emporia.

"That voice," the Father said, "my own, also is automatic, the electronic impulse which released the Deluge also starting the voice. All these details were co-ordinated in the beginning and are now effected through batteries of integrocalculators here in Washington. The single touch of a key sets in motion the chain of events, another key modifies it or ends it--although at all times I can shift these operations to manual and direct them step by step. Suppose now we go to one of the slumber chambers, distant from the heart of Emporia, where the Deluge has only now begun. You will see them asleep or in their more intimate existence, and you will realize how really painless all this is."

"No, Father," said O'Hara. "No, Stephen Bryce. No more."

"Compassion, O'Hara?"

"Disgust. Loathing."

"For me. I can understand that. When I was younger there were times when I felt it too. But how else can the problem of overpopulation be solved, O'Hara?"

"You have the means. There are no births except at your direction."

"You would have me deprive the women of the masses of their sole amusement, which is the bearing of children? And further, you forget the declining ratio of potential Sons among the newborn--to keep constant the total of Sons, the birth rate of the women of the masses constantly must be stepped up--we must have more babies, more population to select from, but our supply of food material is constant, adequate for a constant population, which through these periodic Deluges I achieve. An instant's agony--no worse than that experienced in that painless institution of your hemisphere, the electric chair--avoids the months and years of slow starvation which your own estimable system, O'Hara--the system of your hemisphere--enforces. Which do you actually believe to be less cruel?"

"But in our hemisphere there is no volition--"

"The truth is, isn't it, that no one will accept the responsibility for managing society?"

"We have had such men. We called them monsters."

"You are not yet quite adults. But I have lived now for almost three hundred years. I was born before the establishment of the Curtain, while a people of your hemisphere were loosing upon our cities a murderous rain of warheads, destroying among others the city of my birth, killing my father and my mother and my small brother--I have lived, O'Hara, long enough to remember the monsters of your hemisphere, and remember them acutely, not as vague names in history. And also I have lived long enough to recognize the immutable facts of a mechanical world, and to lose, I suppose, my childish scruples. And yet, had I any choice at all in these matters, had I less responsibility, had I someone to lean upon, someone with the physical abilities that I no longer have--yourself, O'Hara."

"I reject you, Stephen Bryce. For after all of your excuses you remain a monster who has lived too long to value life."

"And will live long enough to fit you into my purposes."

"If I don't destroy you now."

"Destroy a cripple? You haven't the capacities for it. And destroy all of my people in this hemisphere? You call me a monster, O'Hara? Come now, tell me--is that the ethics of the world beyond the Curtain nowadays? To shrink from necessary cruelties to perform those that would be incalculably more terrible?"

"It is a matter--a matter of intentions--"

"Bosh! Kill millions to spare thousands--that isn't even good economy. Spare the inhabitants of Emporia, but not spare me--and not the tens of millions of these continents who depend upon my knowledge? And not yourself? And not your woman, O'Hara? And not your child? Let's try to avoid these absurdities--you are going to do as I wish you to do, at least until I have taught you how this panel operates the integrocalculators. Is that not true?"

O'Hara met those blazing eyes a moment. Then his own eyes closed. "Yes, Father. It's true."

The Father smiled wanly. "I welcome you again. You may join your woman and your child now, for I must sleep. I am exhausted by the rare experience of argument. Later on, we must work together on the problem of Anstruther and the younger Sons. I shall need, I think, more than my brain for that. For at this moment, just beyond the door through which you entered this hall, they are coming now, the danger that I warned you of. And he, whom once I welcomed as I welcome you--he who is screaming that he means to save his comrade of the International Patrol, yourself--is motivated chiefly by another vision that he saw upon this screen, a vision that has cracked his fragile brain--it was the woman, Nedra. Another complex from your world that I'd forgotten."