Nick B. Williams

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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?" ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ But I've seen more of Northern Europe and Siberia in the last twelve months than all the expeditions of the czars and Muscovite Bolsheviks explored in their thousand years. The debris of their two cultures lies scattered across the top of this vast Eurasian land mass, with immense glassy pockets where their cities once stood, the scars of the Third World War. And through the air that we are flying that first cloud of rockets came from the continent of North America, leveling all Russia down to the latitude of Moscow before the ultimatum and the surrender. ”

“ They could not hear him.
"It closed my record in the logs of the Patrol. Like Anstruther, I'd vanished, leaving nothing but hysterical last words, as valueless to science and my people as the twitterings of starlings on a summer evening."
Night deepened his gloom. He shut himself inside his craft, placing his automatic on the seat beside him, a loneliness that was like coma sapping him.
"Old Hendrik Hudson—drifting in an open boat among the floes. I think I really understood at last. For time had ceased to telescope for me. Time, too, had frozen. As it must in death." ”

“ 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. ”

“ You see, O'Hara, this violence will not be his. He has aroused the Sons, he led them in revolt, yet when the climax of it comes he shrinks from recognizing that the act is his. He blames the Sons, or pins it on a power beyond us all, and in this way he sheds responsibility for what he surely knows must end in death for all of us if I so will. This is the way of emotion, this is the weakling's way, O'Hara, this is the maddened posturing of a fool insensible to all except how he must seem just now in Nedra's eyes—the Chosen Male, the Dedicated Man. ”

“ You must go back through the Atomic Curtain. You must convince them that our skill can save their continents from their real enemies, hunger and disease. You must convince them, O'Hara, for this is their last chance, I think, as it is ours. Convince them that we want their colonists to build again, as they once built, a new and stronger race within this hemisphere—new blood to strengthen ours. ”

“ So you believe, O'Hara. Emotion is contagious, and you have caught the fever of it—but few men ever catch the fire of thought. You will, you will! But until I have rid you of this delusion you are useless to me. When you are here with Anstruther we shall then see how altruistic tyranny can be, when it is based on thought. And how completely senseless and destructive pure emotion is. ”

“ 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! ”

“ Dull work? I remember O'Hara's first letter: "The black sky meets the blacker water upon a horizon even more intensely black, a horizon that is a ribbon of mourning constantly below the level of my eyesight, as if these were dead seas and dead heavens. But the coloration is deceptive, for they are not dead. The howling violence that must have been the planet's birthing wail still echoes here, the raging winds that must have screeched throughout infinity when Earth ripped loose from the Sun—and beyond, ten miles ahead of me, perhaps, the Wall of Death invisibly stands shimmering. ”

“ 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." ”

“ It is they who decree by their conspiracy of silence that the deserts of Australia and Arabia and China are as parched today, and the tundras of Siberia as utterly fruitless, as they were in the years before the miracle of Los Alamos. It is they, these dread-chilled Twelve Old Men, who are insisting that the Western Hemisphere, which at one time seemed destined to redeem us all from want, must remain for further centuries a whispered mystery behind its impenetrable Atomic Curtain. ”

“ O'Hara went alone into the cylinder that rested at the terminus of the Tube within the Guild of the Sons in subterranean New York. The Son who had attended him, standing by to bolt down the hatch, glanced covertly toward the great screen in the center of the hall.
"You will see the Father?" he whispered.
"Yes, I will see the Father," said O'Hara. "If he wishes it."
"I have always heard his voice come from the screen. I have never seen him. A brilliantly unbearable radiation comes upon the screen and that is all." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ I can live for two years only with the amazing medications that Stephen Bryce and his fellow scientists of the early days developed, and then my illness, a cancer of the brain, will destroy me as surely as the tyranny of Stephen Bryce has destroyed these men. Do you think that a man with a destiny of death could think only of ambition?"
"All men have a destiny of death."
"That is true enough. All men have it, but with most men the time is not fixed. How long have you been in Washington, O'Hara?" ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”