The Tube beneath the river took O'Hara and his new escort to the island where a shaft ascended. O'Hara emerged again for the first time since he had descended into the earth at Emporia. His eyes involuntarily swept in every direction, seeing the swift, free-flowing waters of the mighty river, the strangely wonderful irregular contours of the earth, and above all the sky—the limitless pale sky that seemed, as it had never seemed before, celestial—the heavens, freedom, not of man. His lungs were gulping deeply of an air he had forgotten.
"This sight amazes you?" the Son beside him said.
"It awakens me."
"You have been sleeping?"
"Dreaming."
"I understand dreams," the Son said sympathetically. "In Washington they taught us what they meant. They are a memory of things we should forget—and do forget when we awake."
"You dream?" O'Hara asked.
"Oh, yes—all of us dream sometimes. Even the masses. We dream of cities such as this before us, great heaps of rubble, and fire is raining down upon us and we die in heaps untidily, or live untidily, and our bellies are empty, and we must fight with one another. These things were actuality before the early days, before the destruction of this city that you see ruined before us. Here," said the Son, "a tower once stood. Now, as you see, it is only some bits of metal and crumbled stone. Our ancestors lived in whole corridors of such towers."
"I know," O'Hara said. "I have seen photographs of it within the library at Washington."
"But there was no resemblance to the photographs, only miles and miles of heaped-up earth and flame-seared rubble with rusting beams and steel protruding from the surface. Small stunted shrubs had sprouted in the ruins, and a strange yellow leafless vine that matted itself thickly close against the ground. A jagged fragment of stone blocks was thrust far up.