"Nothing."
"What did you think of it?"
O'Hara said, "I thought this, Father: that kind of city could not possibly have grown up behind your Curtain. There is too much of the greatness and the cheapness of the human soul in it. There is too much of free and human aspiration, unsafe for you perhaps, maudlin I feel certain, yet almost by the fact of these defects fare more glorious in its total achievement than all the glittering corridors and vast chambers of your geometrical metropolises."
The Father's voice seemed melancholy. "That is true, O'Hara. What you say is true. Yet only my Curtain could have saved that city. Such is the paradox that I have faced alone through all these years, until this hour. You must return to me now. I have solved my dilemma. And possibly I can solve yours."
PART FIVE
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."