"With myself and Nedra and our baby it was not quite that easy. We were sealed inside the cylinder. And no Son now appeared above us at the hatch. We were sealed in there as completely as we had been sealed, months before, in that exquisite hexagonal room in Washington. But now there was no omnipresent voice to lull us, and we meant to try.
"The hatch was kept rigidly in place by a thick metal spring, protecting us from the vacuum of the Tube during our passage. I glanced around that empty cylinder for some sort of lever to pry against the spring, and then absurdly—for the first time in months—I remembered the pistol strapped inside my jacket. Now I drew it out and fired twice against the coiled metal before it snapped. The hatch sprang open.
"We climbed out warily. Once more we stood in a deserted corridor of glittering magnesium, its endless distances reaching toward infinity. But this time no one opened panels in the walls for us. We marched, a long, long march to nowhere, prisoners still, yet knowing this time in our hearts that space alone could never vanquish us. Nor were we wrong, for finally we made an oblique turn and there before us lay the Guild. And as we entered it, the Sons rose from their knees before a blindingly bright screen. And a god's voice was droning:
"'Now they will come to you—this darkly bearded man and this red-haired woman with a boy child in her arms. Take them to the surface of Emporia, and there deliver them unto the Son who guards the valleys toward the mountains. He must see that they reach the mountainside and leave them there. This is your task. This is your task—'
"The voice droned on repetitively in that same pitch of godliness that I had first heard in the subterranean city of Emporia, beating the order endlessly into their brains until it was—as so much of their guidance was—hypnotic. A voice from the grave—rather, a voice out of the depthless Pits of Yellowstone. Yes, Stephen Bryce's voice, recorded sometime in the hours before his death while he lay waiting for Anstruther and myself to come to him. Knowing that he was to die, and planning to achieve in death the goal he sought for me. And I had thought he would not open panels in the walls!
"Now the Sons were rising from their knees, and they came at once to us—they never doubted that we would be waiting there—and motioned that we were to follow."
The ensuing march, led by the Son whose duty was to take them to the surface, had nothing of the horror of their first descent into Emporia, for it had been the swarming masses of the Degraded that had made it horrible, the shambling tens of thousands, naked and vilely apathetic, aimless. Now there were no masses. And the Son now marching with them knew what he was doing.
"Are you not lonely here without the masses?" asked O'Hara.
"Lonely?"
"Do you not miss those who were swallowed by the Deluge here?"