"Philosophy, old man, but cheap stuff. I am no Socrates, no Kant. At best I am—or was—a pilot for the International Patrol, an observer and no more. It is absurd that I should speculate upon the fate of man when I, in that exquisite room in Washington, could not with accuracy foresee what that strange conversation would portend for me within the next few months. But the fact that Anstruther was alive—and the absolute hysteria of his voice—the realization that he was not far from me within this terra incognita shook me, left my throat constricted and parched. I can feel it yet, that parched constriction. And you must yourself, don't you, Arthur? May I fill your glass?"
He was pacing the floor, his pounding tread a counterpoint for ideas that he felt instinctively were much too vast for discussion in that ordinary little flat. And while I helped myself once more from his liquor cabinet he continued speaking, or rather resumed speaking, after suddenly halting nervously and picking up that hand-worn ceremonial club.
"Anstruther, too! And in such mental anguish that the city which I had thought deserted now became at once a sinister catacomb where voices came from nowhere and a man who was everywhere, yet nowhere, was constantly watching me—Nedra and I! The goldfish bowl! Spied on by that old skeleton with the living mind, Stephen Bryce, the Father.
"And yet I thought it bearable.
"But bearable for months? Think! And wait! I did not then know that with those words the Father was sealing us in that room for eight months. Or perhaps sealed is the wrong word, it only seemed sealed—for the door was opened or some undiscoverable panel in the walls rolled up, but only when that synthetic day had passed, only when we were asleep, anesthetized!
"The architects of Washington had indeed thought of everything. This can only be my guess—for neither Nedra nor I actually saw the seal upon that exquisite room broken for the next eight months—but somehow, as sound and air could be piped in, so could an anesthetic that made robots of us each night, dead robots, out of service. And with the coming of each synthetic day there was always fresh food, the gruelly stuff from the photosynthetrons, palatable enough, and the necessary sanitation had been effected by means less final than the Deluge, but other than that we might as well have been within our tomb.
"Dead robots—that was the key to it. The Father was conditioning us. We were locked in a paradise of effortless well-being, the most subtle way of stamping out man's soul, but as with a fever that wastes away the body, so our minds were approaching frenzy through those damned eight months—the frenzy that would break, as a fever breaks, and leave us acceptably pliable.
"Eight months of endless days, each identical with the day before, except that Nedra now was growing big with our child. And I think it was the fact of the small life in her womb that saved us. Our fears were concentrated upon it. Our child, prenatally exposed to ceaseless radiation—was it to be another of those soulless ape men? I believed and still believe that Nedra throughout those months was toughening her resolve, she who forever found the answer to all evil things in death, to destroy the infant if—
"Do you understand now? It saved us. The contemplation of a greater tragedy was restorative, the established principle of medicine, the counterirritant. It also works with minds. It kept me sane—Nedra and the child!
"Then one morning Nedra was gone."