That was the morning of hell. That was the bottom of the pit, the breaking of the frenzy, said O'Hara. For hours, alone, within that hideously exquisite room, he beat his fists against the unyielding stone, or screamed the name of the Father toward the disks concealed in the vaulted ceiling.
"Send her back to me! Send her back, Stephen Bryce! Whatever you wish, ask it of me, but send her back!"
Or, when entreaties failed:
"I have the gun! Had you forgotten, Father? Do you suppose that when at last the door is opened, I shall stand here broken? Or that I shall permit myself to sleep beneath your anesthesia? I have the gun!"
Never an answer. Never the slightest whisper coming from the disks concealed in that room. For the Father understood too well that while there still remained the faintest hope that Nedra was alive, and might return, O'Hara was not going to end his life.
Yet possibly this was not altogether intended as torture, said O'Hara. There was torture in it, and surely the Father was indifferent to that, but that was not the sole purpose of this ninth and most terrible month of solitude. The Father himself had been injured. And a god could not permit that to be known. The Father, too, O'Hara was to learn, had also sealed himself away, using the fraudulent blazing mirrors of his electronic network to direct the hemisphere. He knew—he heard it hour by hour—O'Hara's raging, but his own acute problem and his grasp of O'Hara's mind made any other action seem to him unwise. And the wisdom of rulers is not always gentle.
Think! And wait!
Ten months of that, and the last two months of it at a plane of tension that made thinking seem like the flash of electricity through a vacuum. Thought and contemplation can achieve humility or they can achieve an equally super-normal arrogance of frozen wrath. Yet within a moment it was ended.
For O'Hara awoke one morning with a small cry singing in his ears. He turned upon his bed—and there was Nedra beside him, and at her breast was the child.
In every man's life there is a moment that he cannot perfectly remember afterward, for the moment is too emotional to be lived through twice. He has at last approached the reason for his being, and for O'Hara it had come with Nedra. And the child.