"It is a matter—a matter of intentions—"
"Bosh! Kill millions to spare thousands—that isn't even good economy. Spare the inhabitants of Emporia, but not spare me—and not the tens of millions of these continents who depend upon my knowledge? And not yourself? And not your woman, O'Hara? And not your child? Let's try to avoid these absurdities—you are going to do as I wish you to do, at least until I have taught you how this panel operates the integrocalculators. Is that not true?"
O'Hara met those blazing eyes a moment. Then his own eyes closed. "Yes, Father. It's true."
The Father smiled wanly. "I welcome you again. You may join your woman and your child now, for I must sleep. I am exhausted by the rare experience of argument. Later on, we must work together on the problem of Anstruther and the younger Sons. I shall need, I think, more than my brain for that. For at this moment, just beyond the door through which you entered this hall, they are coming now, the danger that I warned you of. And he, whom once I welcomed as I welcome you—he who is screaming that he means to save his comrade of the International Patrol, yourself—is motivated chiefly by another vision that he saw upon this screen, a vision that has cracked his fragile brain—it was the woman, Nedra. Another complex from your world that I'd forgotten."
PART FOUR
O'Hara put down his empty glass.
"I have had enough of this," he said, and got up, as an angered lion might get up—that kind of throttled wrath, restrained only by the dignity of his huge and thickly muscled body, for the pent-up loathing that he had felt for Stephen Bryce—the Father, the only brain guiding the destinies of the hundreds of millions swarming through the subterranean cities of the Western Hemisphere—was burning through him, even here in London, in this flat of his in Bloomsbury, much as if he had gotten into his veins a dose of that caustic solution that he had seen dissolving the masses of overpopulated Emporia.
"You see?" he asked, and whirled abruptly toward me, his darkly tanned face twisting sardonically beneath his tousled dark hair, his blue flight jacket of the International Patrol now completely unbuttoned, for the drinks we had had and his rapid pacing of the floor of that little flat and the pace of his report, and above all his tension, had dappled him with sweat. "You see, do you—I'm utilized! I've lost whatever grip I had. Or perhaps I never had it. When there's no stress, we can all of us think ourselves cucumbers. But when I was walking at last away from that immense bed upon the dais in Stephen Bryce's unthinkably vast hall in Washington, my pity for the Father was drowned in disgust for any man who could do what I had just seen him do, and I dreaded him more than I feared the dangers now loosed in the endless corridor outside the hall.
"For I could deal with Anstruther. Insane or not, Anstruther could not seem too dangerous, the way that I remembered him. His rather womanish blue eyes and fair hair and his romantic boyishness—weakness, I told myself—could never be formidable. Yes, I could deal with Anstruther. And as I left the Father and went toward the distant wall where Nedra was waiting with my infant son, I meant to do it.