"No," he said, and filled our glasses, "I haven't finished, have I?" He drank, his eyes intently watching me. "You want the full picture, don't you? Well, you shall have it. Let your mind step back into that plane I mentioned, and take that two hours' flight across to the Rockies, to southern Colorado, beyond the Atomic Curtain. We're in a mountain valley, remember—? Nedra, and I, facing a gentleman who speaks that strangely bastardized English I've described for you—and speaks it with a certain dignity, as if used to command. And in his ugly hand he holds that shining tubelike object that creates those hideous explosions that destroy—and without trace—his enemies. The atomic gun.
"I have described him. Apelike yet hairless, stooped and hulking, his skin as gray as the granite of that mountain, a revolting thing, though I've seen men in London's streets quite as revolting. What perplexed me—amazed me—was the paradox of his speech, for as I say, it had a certain dignity that could come only from a mind that had been schooled. But the others of his patrol who now were coming around the rocks toward us, moving quite slowly as their weak eyes constantly kept watching for the scattered mountain clansmen, were, I was to learn, by far his inferiors. They were the horde, the masses if you please, while he—and by sheer accident of birth, for in that society of which he was a member, to be born with intelligence is indeed an accident—belonged to that most tyrannic of all aristocracies, the oligarchy of brains. They called him the Son."
Nedra, O'Hara said, was pressing tremblingly against the muzzle of the .38 he was holding at her side, watching the Son with an expression of absolute loathing, nor did she then or ever see the Son as any different from the members of the horde—the difference in intellect being meaningless to her. "A blow," said O'Hara, "to the bright boys of this earth, had they seen her face as I was seeing it. But I do not think it was a blow to the Son. He expected only loathing from Nedra, and if he could have had her, physically, her loathing would not have mattered to him. He knew—that is, he had been taught—that women of her kind were desirable for breeding purposes, as a means of retarding the reverse process of evolution, desirable from the standpoint of the race, but he was utterly lacking in aesthetics—a lovely woman or an ugly one, the flower or the weed, he did not and could not differentiate. And not through lack of intelligence, for he had something resembling that—but because, I think, the essence of romance and the appreciation of beauty is escape. And from what was he escaping, he and his kind? They had everything—everything, including the sickness. That alone perhaps they wished to escape, and that was a simple matter of biology.
"The real truth is," said O'Hara, "they wished to escape the sickness only because the thought of escaping it had been thumped into their brains from the moment when it was first realized that they had brains—so few of them had. It was no inherent wish. Actually the masses were quite content to go along as they were going, back toward the ape, the lizard, the fish, the primal scum. The masses of North America—both the Americas—are quite content. It is that thought that must be terrifying at this instant the Twelve Old Men of Geneva. For the masses anywhere always are striving toward contentment, and now—well, they can achieve it! Our masses, too. The Twelve Old Men know that now. And yet they also know—as Nedra knew instinctively—the price of it."
The Son, said O'Hara, now indicated the route they were to follow, pointing down the valley. "We must go at once," he announced, "for the cold of night will come swiftly. You-who-fly," he said, his eyes meeting O'Hara's, "are responsible for the woman's life. Remember, if she dies by the metal rod that you are holding against her, you will die instantly. Now, march."
For two hours they proceeded, but with nothing of the cautious and skillful precision that the mountain clansmen had effected before the attack, for although the Son remained just behind them, constantly ready to prevent their escape, the rest of the horde, three hundred when assembled, shambled aimlessly along in groups of two or ten or fifty, pausing now and then to explore an unusual rock formation or to feel the bark of trees, to tear an insect's tiny body to pieces, or simply to stop, having for the moment apparently forgotten where they were going, or why. Only a sharp command from the Son made them resume the march, always apathetically, neither resentful nor willingly, as a troop of small rhesus monkeys might proceed through a particularly interesting part of the forest.
"You called me 'you-who-fly,'" said O'Hara, speaking to the Son. "How did you know?"
"You were watched," said the Son. "When you came through the Curtain, The Father knew of it at once. The Father knows everything that happens."
"And you are taking us to him?"
"Yes. In Washington."