To fear, he said, and to know the reason for it, constitutes the greatest single stride up from the primal ooze.
"Nedra!" his first cry was. And then, "Oh, Father, Father, help me! Help me—"
And the voice came to him gently:
"You see, O'Hara? Are you so measurably superior to that dawn child who worshiped the fire that burnt him? You call upon me now as if indeed I were a god, and solely because I seem to injure you."
"Father, you mock me."
"Yes, O'Hara, I mock you—but only to help you regain your reason. There is something you should know, O'Hara—you must understand that a man who has lived in authority as long as I have has seen all the pitifully few reactions of men under duress. As you were walking away from me, I knew that you were considering how you would plot against me. I cannot read your mind, but given the man you are, trained as you are, it was inevitable that you would react in that manner. I could, I believe, reduce all this to an understandable equation, just as I can shuffle about the components of this city into the pattern I desire without thinking in detail of the various phases of it. The integrocalculators do that detail thinking for me. That should be comprehensible to you, for all these little mechanical marvels were rooted in the world as it existed here before the Curtain, and exist now beyond it. Equations of the brain—we had the fundamentals of them in the years before the Third World War; and the origins of spatial architecture lay in those experimental buildings in which the walls were movable, of course only horizontally, but not remote in mathematical technique from the vertical and spherical construction of this city. A matter of imagination only, isn't it?
"And memory, O'Hara. My memory for the keys upon this board, and the integrocalculators' automatic memory of the meaning of successive stabs of power.
"And so I think I can write the equation of your being, O'Hara—an equation in terms of the years you have existed and the times you have faced death and love—I must include love, however ephemerally your poets think of it. Yes, love, O'Hara, for there as you undoubtedly have suspected is a complex thing, mystical beyond the caress of a woman's arms or a baby's breath, intellectual beyond the tables of multiplication that you studied as a youth—the soul of man in fact. Surely you've recognized it as that. Your woman of the mountains, Nedra, lacks your capacity for love, which after all is tenderness, and so you do not understand her always, do you, O'Hara? The soul—you would dispute this with me? Then take the next gradation below Nedra that we have within this hemisphere, the people of the masses. What essentially have they lost? Yes, you do know that! Their souls, the capacity for love, decreasing in direct proportion to their retrogression. If they possessed it there might be some hope for them—but they do not. Oh, yes, O'Hara, I can write that equation—physical and mental strength, and the capacity for love—or soul—these are the algebraic terms of man. I bore you?"
"My wife and my baby, Father?"
"Safe with me. You see, I even ape the attributes of a god—the things you love forever are attainable by keeping faith with me. Hostages, shall I say? As the pledge of immortality keeps your kind in hostage. Yes, they will be here with me, awaiting you, when you have finished the task I set for you."