"It is your word against my thinking, Father. Either they come—"
"Bring them, O'Hara. But keep your weapon ready."
The panel through which they had entered months before now was sliding up, revealing the empty corridor beyond.
"You will come into the corridor and turn toward your left," the Father was saying. "Only my voice will guide you. That is correct—now proceed until you hear me. And keep your weapon ready!"
Nedra walked slowly at O'Hara's side, the child asleep within her arms. The panel closed behind them. They were within a seemingly endless metal-lined tunnel that receded in each direction toward infinity, the glaringly reflected light obscuring the convergence of its geometric lines, and for a long while they walked as if each second might bring sudden death, completely tense, O'Hara with the .38 in his hand.
"Now you must turn again, this time toward your right," the Father commanded, and simultaneously a second panel opened in the wall. "You must come inside—and put away your weapon now, O'Hara. Only in the corridor was there any danger."
"What was the danger, Father?"
The second panel closed. They were within a vast rectangular hall, its ceiling far above them, azure pale, its walls a fretwork of marvelously carved stone, polished like glass. And deep back into it, against the farthest wall, upon a four-tiered dais of translucent stone was an enormous bed.
"This is where I exist, O'Hara—where I sleep and work, and where you and your woman and the child will live. There is privacy in space and space enough for us. Danger, you ask? A disturbance among some of the younger Sons, Anstruther's group, but I can settle it in time. Approach me closely—here, upon this dais."
The voice was everywhere around them, from every corner of the enormously spacious room, as the voice of a divinity would be, yet O'Hara understood that it was coming from the bed upon the dais, and toward that, with Nedra beside him—Nedra with the sleeping infant held against her breast—he was now moving, as the first man with the first woman must have moved from the Garden, scourged by the voice of wrath. It was like that. It was no less than that—awe and humility and perhaps terror, although he knew it was the voice of Stephen Bryce, a wasted man with eyes that burned more brightly than the sun itself.