"Oh, no."
"You realize what caused the Deluge?"
"Yes. The Father caused it."
"And if I told you that the Father too was swallowed by the Deluge?"
"That could not happen."
"But if I say I saw it happen?"
"No," said the Son. "For even now the Father speaks to us. And even now the Tube brings new food from the photosynthetrons. And soon the Tube will bring more females to repopulate Emporia."
"Do you not know what has occurred in Washington?"
"None of us ever knows what has occurred in Washington. It is not necessary that we know, for the Father speaks, and the food continues coming, and the water from the oceans of the west, and we the Sons need nothing more than that. No," said the Son, neither obstinately nor shaken, "we need nothing more, and we need to know nothing more, not while the Voice still comes to give us tasks."
O'Hara himself, certain of what he knew, certain of what he understood must yet be done, could not feel in this moment of such faith that all of this, the whole vast system of existence and regeneration stemming from the fixed impulses of the integrocalculators, must in time run down. For one brief instant he forgot the Father's constant warning that he must not put his trust in miracles, and it seemed possible that these lost continents could go on as they were, unguided, automatically, until their retrogressive doom in time left these glistening corridors only the moist warm droplets of the primal ooze.