"What did not happen?" Nedra asked him, and was visible upon the screen. "And where have you been these weeks, O'Hara? Where were you all these nights I tried to call you to the screen?" Her voice was petulant. "I am beginning to wonder now, O'Hara—you told me that you came from beyond the Curtain but you seem to be marvelously at home here among the Degraded. And except for your ages, you and the Father are becoming much alike. Did you really come from Washington when you approached my mountains in your flying thing?"
O'Hara shrugged. Was this so different from the tirades of the housewives of London, Cairo or of Stockholm? Were women anywhere, once they were mated to their satisfaction, different? Except for the ceremonial warclub that she'd left behind in her cave in the Rocky Mountains, Nedra was as women were everywhere.
"Did you really miss me, Nedra?"
"Yes. Of course I did."
"Of course," he sighed, and started walking toward the tiers of books.
But much as he learned in the library during the ensuing weeks, it was his journey through the Tube to New York that taught him most of what America had been before the Third World War. The subterranean city, built since the establishment of the Curtain and glutted with its multi-millions of naked and hairless masses shambling along from feeding hall to feeding hall, sleeping together indiscriminately in those wide cushioned bunks everywhere along the city's corridors and herded always by the Sons with their atomic guns, was another and larger Emporia, and from the density of its population must itself be approaching a similar Deluge. It would be coming any day, the Son attached to O'Hara anticipated.
"Only the Father knows the hour," the Son explained. "He counts the masses as they multiply, and when there are too many for the Tube to feed, the Deluge mercifully will come."
"You call it mercy?" asked O'Hara.
"Yes, that is the word that we were taught."
"It does not hurt you to know what happens to the masses?"