"We wanted too much. And we have got too much for us. Along the way somewhere we let our aspirations push us past the point of prudence, yet it was not wrong for us to aspire. Perhaps even now, if I were to lift the Atomic Curtain—but I don't dare! I cannot trust Eurasia even now. I must work this out alone."
And at the bottom of the page, as if it were an afterthought:
"One way out is the volume on the first shelf of the left front wall."
O'Hara found it. The covers of it were stamped cleanly from magnesium, and as he picked it up, seeing only that it must contain a single metal page, the hushed voice of the Father filled the Library.
"You have it now, O'Hara. Place it inside your jacket, for you do not yet need it. Remember my pledge, that if I die, you will be instantly with Nedra and your son. I am sending you down now to the integrocalculators. As before, hold your breath, open your mouth—this will be very swift and terrible for you."
There was a great rush of chilling air and the library went black, and in that blackness O'Hara felt himself exploding, dying, passing through death into magnetic space, becoming part of space, losing identity. Then out of this serenity he felt himself congeal again.
He was standing before a vast oblong machine, inside the glass casing that enclosed it. There was no entrance to the casing. And beyond the glass, upon all sides, a pale gray depthless liquid kept the casing perpetually suspended.
"Observe it quickly, O'Hara," came the Father's whispered voice. "For soon your nuclear heat will disturb it. Already its counteractors have begun to hum a warning to me. You are the first to have passed into it since it was suspended there, insusceptible to shock, beyond all foreseeable change. And you must be the last. You have streamed into it in the mesons and neutrons that compose you, and what you think is flesh and blood, your body, clings together only through the wave lengths of your brain. You have no real finite shape or substance now, you are only what you think. And you must think! Absorb it all, and quickly—this is the key, O'Hara! The board I hold is only to assist your focusing your brain. It is recorded, isn't it? Now, you must return—"
The chill air and the overwhelming blackness smothered him.
When he revived he was upon the library floor, kneeling as if in prayer. He raised his eyes. "It could not be," he whispered. "It did not happen—"