"What are they?"
"Photosynthetrons for western Kansas, although not all of their produce is used here—the solar rays in this region are more favorable for this particular food, much of which is needed in the cities of the Atlantic East. We send it there in the Tube."
"The Tube?"
"We are nearing its local terminal." The Son was pointing toward the approximate center of the pipe farm, from which now a sudden new eruption of these hairless manlike animals—despite their speech, O'Hara could not think of them as men—came clambering, their faces stamped with that unthinking emptiness of the masses, herded along toward the approaching party by another of their kind, who, like the Son, bore in his hand the shining tubelike weapon that O'Hara was to learn was both the symbol and enforcer of authority. "These are," the Son explained, "Emporians—their city is a very ancient one, although its site was often transferred in the old times, before the deluges began. The Son you see among them tells me that they expect another deluge soon to remedy their serious overpopulation. You will go with him."
"Another Son?"
"Oh, yes. The Father does not lack for Sons. I leave you now—my assignment is the valleys of this mountain range."
And while he turned, the two masses were commingling, so that the task of separating them was like the task of shepherd dogs with sheep—a division of the herd, not by specific individuals, but numerically, the two Sons shouting as they cleaved the shambling and always apathetic horde apart. To O'Hara it seemed an astonishing performance, the docility of the masses, for surely behind their dim eyes must be some semblance of a brain—surely they must know that those who went toward the mountains were to be used for combat purposes, exposed at least to the minor risk from the Colts of the mountain clansmen, yet apparently it did not matter to them, whether war or the placid test-tube existence of a city like Emporia, the sole difficulty that the Sons encountered arising from the inability of the masses to grasp the fact that they must be separated, that before the tumult could cease some of them must direct themselves toward the mountains and some return to the city. It was like the insensate division of an amoeba—a division directed perhaps by a sublime intelligence but without either the acquiescence or comprehension of the masses.
More and more, observing the Degraded—the only less than bestial stupidity of the horde and the derived intelligence or trained reflexes of the Sons—O'Hara was conscious of feeling that it was indeed a sublime intelligence that guided them, something they accepted without challenge as infallible, which in the inevitable pattern of such conceptions that spoke of as the Father but which more probably was a cabal of the more superior of the Sons, a ruling organism probably not unlike the Twelve Old Men of Geneva.
But to Nedra such reflections were not only senseless, they were silly. The masses of the Degraded, the Sons and even the Father were only varying terms for describing a loathsome people—worms, the clansmen called them. And only his curiosity kept O'Hara from tending to agree with that.
"You see?" said Nedra. "You should have killed me earlier, in the mountains, for this is the way it goes when you deal with the Degraded—you are passed from band to band, always deeper into the contamination in which they live, always with less and less chance of escaping them. They will be taking us now down into this city of theirs, Emporia, and how then, O'Hara, do you propose that we shall ever get away?"