"You see, O'Hara, this violence will not be his. He has aroused the Sons, he led them in revolt, yet when the climax of it comes he shrinks from recognizing that the act is his. He blames the Sons, or pins it on a power beyond us all, and in this way he sheds responsibility for what he surely knows must end in death for all of us if I so will. This is the way of emotion, this is the weakling's way, O'Hara, this is the maddened posturing of a fool insensible to all except how he must seem just now in Nedra's eyes—the Chosen Male, the Dedicated Man. And she is seeing him that way! Don't you foresee how all of this must end, O'Hara? One moment more—"
"Answer, Stephen Bryce," Anstruther cried. "Answer, or die. Give me the key!"
The Father's voice broke coldly now into the sudden hush. "No, my son, I am sorry—the key is not for you, and I cannot now save you from yourself, as I had wished to do. For the worst of all human diseases is upon you, the one disease for which we never yet have found a palliative—your own vanity."
"Give me the key!" Anstruther screamed out in hysteria. "Or by my own hand, I—"
"Anstruther, stop!" O'Hara cried.
The kneeling Sons rose up in sudden frenzy, leaping for the steps. And in that moment of confusion Anstruther struck wildly downward at the Father's skull. The sound of it was like the bursting of an egg, Anstruther rocked, as if it were himself that had received the blow, and then, his arms extending cataleptically, he gripped the keyboard and drew back with it.
The Sons, now milling on the dais, seemed lost and leaderless, a shambling herd again, until from their slack apelike mouths issued a low, despairing wail, as animals in panic raise their senseless cry, then all at once, as panicked animals will swerve, they turned toward Anstruther, their long arms lashing out toward him.
"No," cried Anstruther, reeling back. "No, don't—this was for you!"
But a wild horror was upon them, a blood-lust born of their shocked sense of guilt, and their immense hands tore at him, gouging at his eyes, ripping his face to shreds. He rushed beyond the enormous bed upon which the Father lay inert, and reaching Nedra, flung himself prostrate at her feet, then raising eyes that welled with sudden tears he sobbed, "We might—have led them! You and I—"
The Sons went swarming after him. Nedra was standing motionless, serene—dazed or serene, O'Hara could not tell. Anstruther's hand slid down along her thigh, and then, defiantly, he smashed his fist into the myriad of keys upon the board. Then the tide of leaping hairless bodies swept down on him, and as O'Hara snatched Nedra away from them, Anstruther screamed again, a scream of agony that rose half muffled from the writhing mass. They tore him apart, dismembered him, lay wallowing in bestial fury in his flesh and blood.