"A promise I no longer trust."
"You have your choice," the Father said again. "If I do not keep my promise, you know what lies ahead for you. You do prefer to trust me, don't you, Anstruther?"
The shrill voice rose. "I want to believe! I've got to believe you, Father—"
"Then return at once."
O'Hara heard a sob.
When the Father spoke again, his words came very slowly. "I have been injured, O'Hara. I cannot talk to you today. That imbecile who crossed the Curtain—Anstruther, who knew you when he flew for the Patrol—I'm sorry. You must be patient. Contemplate. Time need mean nothing to you, as it means nothing to me. Nothing, O'Hara! Think. And wait—"
Time need mean nothing. Think—and wait!
These, said O'Hara, were slogans that the Twelve Old Men of Geneva might well have used. "The old," he said, "have this at least in common on both sides of the Atomic Curtain—delay, for change is dangerous. And if they base their thinking on the greatest political fact of both our worlds, the Curtain, the slogan is sound. For we of Europe and Asia and Africa have become completely static, our minds paralyzed by the aftermath of that Third World War, while they—the people of the Western Hemisphere—have reaped the whirlwind of spectacular advance, and both because of that one change—the Curtain. And both of us have lost the future we once had."
In Bloomsbury, with the decadent smell of London in our noses and that strange insight that sometimes precedes intoxication stealing over him, O'Hara's voice now seemed to reach a pitch close to evangelical.
"Which is better?" he was saying. "To starve in Bengal or to shamble naked and unreasoning through the subterranean avenues of Emporia? A hard choice, isn't it? No choice at all, I'd say, if that were all we had to choose between. If that were all, there'd be no hope for men. I wish I could tell you that even then the Father, Stephen Bryce, was less fear-ridden than our Twelve Old Men. But it was not true at that moment. It was to come later, with adversity. The greatest of our teachers.