"We must go down into Emporia at once," he warned. "The Deluge is coming soon, and you should be safely in the Tube before it happens. The Father does not wish you to be drowned."
O'Hara tightened his arm around Nedra's waist, to avoid any surprise, and keeping his .38 beneath her ribs began to follow the horde further into the maze of pipes.
Six hundred yards deeper, between two pipes of an intense vermilion color, a square of some forty feet of opaque glass or metal or plastic now began to tilt upward as they approached, revealing beneath it a platform of what apparently was magnesium, and onto this platform the Son led O'Hara and Nedra and as many of the Degraded as it would accommodate. The platform now began to sink rapidly, without sound, down a shaft immaculately tooled from a similar glistening metal, descending for what O'Hara estimated to be two hundred feet before it reached bottom. A wall of the enclosing shaft now slid up, and they left the platform, which as instantly began to rise again toward the surface, while the panel closed automatically behind them. They were in the underground city of Emporia.
O'Hara, describing this, could not conceal, even in prosaic Bloomsbury, the intense excitement that he'd felt upon first seeing this fantastic culmination of an epoch. "The atomic epoch," he continued, "the world that Europe might have become except for that Third World War. If you were standing now, as I stood then, in the exact center of that strange and yet contemporary subterranean metropolis, I doubt you'd ever write another bit of pseudoscientific nonsense for those Youth League fans of yours. Because you are an amateur, old man—what your picked old brains consider rather weird, and hence commendable from the standpoint of a fiction writer, is in truth nearer facts—though there was more of weirdness in Emporia than you ever dreamed of. More astonishing probably than the Curtain itself, weirder than the Degraded, and vastly further into the domain of the inconceivable than a clan of Cro-Magnon people walking magnificently through the caverns of the Rockies, not two hours' flying time from where we're sitting now. I should have known—I am mildly psychic, a throwback possibly to some wild Boston Irishman of the twentieth century or a gandy dancer for the Santa Fe. These names confuse you, gandy dancer, Boston Irishman? I read them, later, in the incalculably tremendous library that the Father keeps in Washington, the archives of a dead democracy. Yes, there's Celtic blood in me, thinned out but quite sufficient to be psychic in such matters, and I should have known, when I heard Anstruther scream the day he vanished off the coast of Patagonia, that there were stranger things on earth than an impenetrable wall.
"You've seen the Roman catacombs? Marveled at them, that men can burrow into the earth like that? Then faintly, though very faintly, you understand how I felt standing there, with Nedra pressed close against me, shuddering—the glistening magnesium walls and avenues of subterranean Emporia extending in all directions from the shaft that pierced the city's roof, the lone communication with the surface of the earth.
"The shaft rose from a sort of plaza, a wide space, rectangular, with avenues dug through the living stone and lined with metal, top and bottom as well as both sides, and with the various compartments that would correspond to our buildings honeycombed out from each avenue, so that there really was no feeling of a city as we know it—only of immense tunnels, intersecting, none of the relief of roofs and chimney pots and varying architectural façades—a triumph of cubism, a nightmare of magnesium that reflected a pale green light from opalescent tubing recessed everywhere into the city's roof. And through these vast avenues the masses of the Degraded swarmed in aimless and quite effortless contentment.
"Literally," said O'Hara, "tens of thousands. The avenues were choked. It was worse than Trafalgar Square on a holiday, worse than the crush of devotees at the Grand National. Continuously they pressed through swinging doors into the food and slumber chambers of Emporia—vast rooms without the variance of so much as a welded seam, where, in great cauldronlike contrivances, the substance that was manufactured by the sun's rays in the photosynthetrons was constantly available, different foods, colored differently, tasting differently, all piped in from the reservoirs into which the photosynthetrons were drained—all automatic, not a hand raised to achieve the feeding of the populace except that which would guide the ladle to the mouth. The populace was fed—not quite like pigs, but with as little ceremony or appreciation.
"The slumber rooms were uniform. Around the walls were tiers of bunks, each six feet wide and eight feet long, each cushioned with a yielding dry material much like foam rubber but incredibly enduring. It was impossible to tear it, impossible to wear it out from the small friction it received. As a matter of record, it had been in those bunks, unchanged, for nearly two centuries.
"Sanitation? That was one of the major purposes of the Deluge, as they called it—a purging of the city, ridding it of both surplus population and uncleanliness, an alkaline solution that—but wait, I've got ahead of how I learned these things.
"The city of Emporia was impressive. Believe me, engineering reached its peak in those first years behind the Atomic Curtain, when fear and want had been abolished and all the genius of man was channeled into the creation of the perfect civilization—perfect, it seemed! And Emporia was sealed completely, locked in magnesium in its cavern blasted into the rock, its air a manufactured substance like its food, its drink pumped in along the Tube that terminated at Los Angeles, where the enormous purifying plant distilled sea water for half of the continent. But great as were these utterly nonmanual works, the most astonishing phase of life was life itself—the horde, the shambling tens of thousands eating there and sleeping there and breeding—