"Yes. Unless I die."
O'Hara knew now that Anstruther could not be stopped. He had set for himself this course toward inevitable death; he had been constantly seeking it; he meant to give the Sons whom he had taught and the masses that he had not yet been able to teach, and might never have been able to teach, a martyr.
Still, O'Hara refused to lead Anstruther to the Father. It was Anstruther himself who pushed O'Hara aside and strode upward at last through the darkness until his groping hand touched metal above him and he thrust against it and it yielded to him. He climbed slowly out of the dark into the brilliance of the sun above him and disappeared into it. And when the Sons too had passed and vanished, O'Hara followed.
Anstruther was standing rigid and defiant halfway up the dais toward the enormous bed from which, as O'Hara emerged among the cowed and kneeling Sons, the fragile hand of Stephen Bryce was beckoning to them all. And beyond the pitifully small mound that Stephen Bryce's wasted body made beneath its coverlet, Nedra was standing with her baby in her arms—Nedra magnificently tall, robed in the thick, rich tresses of her auburn hair.
And of those gathered there, herself, Stephen Bryce, Anstruther and the Sons, and O'Hara, only Nedra seemed tranquil. Only Nedra seemed waiting for what must now happen with serene indifference—the total serenity of woman everywhere who knows that after blood is shed, she conquers.
It was Nedra's indifference that inflamed O'Hara. At the foot of the dais in that incalculably vast hall, with the hairless nude bodies of the Sons now hulking between him and the bed upon which Stephen Bryce was very slowly dying, and below Anstruther who had frozen halfway to the bed, O'Hara reckoned his chances.
He might just reach Nedra before the atom guns of Anstruther's Sons obliterated him. He might get there, but it would only be to die with her in his arms. He had had that chance before, to die with her, and he repeatedly had rejected it—he rejected it now, for it was to live with her that he wanted. Yet with the fever of death about that enormous bed O'Hara could feel surging within himself the mad and heroic drive toward immolation, to die with Nedra, as she had wished before.
The Father spoke sharply. "Stay where you are, O'Hara!"
A Son's hand touched him. He whirled and drove his fist into the hairless face, exulting in the splattered flesh and bone.
"O'Hara, stop! Nedra will not die and does not wish to die, and you yourself will not die unless you wish it. You have a mind—you must use it."