"You are in Washington," he said. "The Father awaits you."
Seconds, said O'Hara. Not more than twenty seconds since the hatch had shut, yet in those twenty seconds they had traveled in the Tube from western Kansas to Washington, a speed unthinkable if Washington were where it once had been.
Nedra was getting up.
He had been prepared for Nedra to fly into her tigrish rage and come dangerously toward him, compelling him once again to meet her in the endless struggle of a mountain clansman with his mate—a struggle that had begun to be exhilarating—she did not now so much as look at him. She stood with her eyes averted, her shoulders drooped, her bosom motionless, completely apathetic.
"Nedra?" he called. And she did not answer. She did not move. Her arms were hanging slackly, the palms of her hands limp against her thighs. O'Hara spun her around, looking into her eyes. If she saw him at all, she perfectly concealed it. Her eyes were glazed, her lips seeming loose. "Nedra," he cried, and shaking her, "Nedra, what is it? Do you hear me, Nedra?"
"Yes," she said. "I hear you."
Above them again, at the hatch of the cylinder, the Son was saying, "The Father waits for you. You must come now."
And for an instant, O'Hara heard in the Son's toneless voice an echo of Nedra's—the same flatness, a mindless monotone. Now, in confused panic, he was remembering the relative degrees of contamination he had discovered earlier, low when above the mountains, extremely high both toward the east and west of them and presumably even higher in these atomic-powered cities—remembering too that the people of the mountains had already taken that first stride back toward the dawn of man. And had this sudden intensification of atomic pollution struck Nedra, changing her, since daybreak, into another of these apelike people?
The thought of it revolted him. His reaction was violent. Unforgivable, he called it—forever unforgivable, for in the next moment he was guilty of that crime of crimes, unthinking passion, the closest that man ever comes to bestiality—these words were his own, the opinion that he voiced in Bloomsbury. He slashed his open hand across her face.
The blow did not stagger her. When he could see again, she had not moved—she was standing there before him, staring at him blankly, a thin smear of blood coming from her mouth.