As he staggered back, her long nails slashed his cheeks and she came after him, not sluggish now but lithe and murderously quick, and leaped upon him, locking her strong legs around him, and thus driving him down hard upon the cushioned surface of the cylinder while her tensed fingers stabbed toward his eyes.
O'Hara rolled from beneath her. The apathy had vanished from her eyes. What he saw in them was that wild, tigrish mating lust of the Nedra he had loved, and loved now, and must conquer or as surely die. Again she pinioned him, again tearing at his face, and with a final desperate thrust he broke away from her and staggered up. She leaped for him at once. Through the blood in his eyes, he saw her chin and swung for it. And this time it was she who dropped.
She lay at his feet. Her fingers moved unguided and found his ankles. She dragged herself toward him, painfully, and when he saw the fierce and untamed admiration in her eyes, he flung himself down blind with desire.
Yes, there were limits to the possibilities of thought. There were some things that called for more than the will to endure and to dare, as he had meant it, and it was arguable, he now confessed, that these might be the most important things of all.
In that little flat in Bloomsbury, the floor of which he had been pacing all this time so constantly, O'Hara now paused, shrugged his great shoulders and reached toward the glass that had remained untouched for better than an hour while he had told me this. He was back with me once more, back in mind as well as body, from those lost continents beyond the Atomic Curtain. He was back to the dirt and the poverty and the insecurity of the world as he had known it as a boy, and as if he felt the change was too abrupt he lifted his glass to the level of his eyes, and staring moodily into it, whispered:
"To Stephen Bryce, the Father."
"To Stephen Bryce," I echoed.
O'Hara smashed the glass against the wall. Then he turned again to me and the smile came once more to his wide, strong mouth. "Well, he's gone, has Stephen Bryce, for nothing human could have cheated the Deluge pouring into that vast hall in Washington—Stephen Bryce and his adoring Sons who turned at last against their self-appointed Messiah, Anstruther. But don't think that I would discredit Anstruther. He was more than a man. He was a force, a spirit—the little, stupid things Messiahs do die with them, but their message, the cause for their being, lives on and grows. And so it will with Anstruther. He gave them a word they had forgotten—men. And some will remember and spread it. Yes, Anstruther in death can triumph over all those masterworks that trammeled him in life. And I—"
A low cry came to us from the room beyond. O'Hara whirled, his dark eyes seeming to flash fire. His great fists tightened quickly, then he forced them open, very carefully, as if it hurt him. He stared a moment longer, and then he said:
"There's a little more and I must finish it. I left you with us in that cylinder of the Tube, its momentum gone, and Nedra and myself completely one again, but not free yet, still trapped. I must get us out of that. It is too much like the ending of a chapter in those serials you used to write—you're hanging from a cliff, and the pond below you swarms with hungry crocodiles. You're slipping, you're certain to fall—but we mustn't worry too much. With a quick flourish of your pen—I suppose you actually use a typewriter—you'll whisk away the crocodiles and place a haymow in the pond to receive you gently when at last you fall.