"I have regretted doing this, O'Hara. But if all the regrets of my life were to come back upon me suddenly, I should as surely drown in them as Nedra and your baby were drowning a moment ago. Now I promise their lives to you, if you are faithful. The walls again are receding, as you see—"
The walls were receding and the floor upon which O'Hara stood was rising and Nedra and the baby in her arms had vanished once more into that chaos of shifting walls and floors and ceilings, and again O'Hara was conscious of the rapidly increasing velocity with which he was moving through the space of Washington—conscious of it only momentarily, and then the black pall of vertigo smothered him.
But the voice that pervaded the spatial geometry of the underground metropolis never stopped speaking to him, counseling him even as he lay in a coma, as if it were a dream voice, the voice of a god that was dimly remembered from a childhood revelation, and very slowly, as his senses returned to him and once more he could see the tangibles of metal and stone and his own flesh, he began to feel as if the voice spoke only to himself, O'Hara—as if those about him, later, could not hear it. This became an obsession that he never clearly recognized for what it was, the Messiah complex in its early stages, the conviction, never really questioned by himself, that the omnipotent being of the Western Hemisphere spoke only to him and listened only to him, an absurdity that ten months before—when he was beyond the Curtain—he would have derided. In the end, when he was done with delusions, he was to understand how well the Father realized the magic of the Voice from Space, a psychological device that was implemented by physical control over those whom O'Hara loved.
"You must get up now, O'Hara," the voice was telling him. "For even at this moment Anstruther is approaching you—Anstruther does not yet know where you are, nor is he actually searching for you. He is in fact going about the futile business of trying to find his way into this hall where I exist—he and his dissident Sons, relying upon the juvenile techniques of your mythical Monte Cristo, digging or boring or cutting, completely unaware that within an instant's time I can transfer him twenty miles away. Anstruther does not know the secret of the integrocalculator and will never know it, even should I be forced to use him if you fail me. But do not fail—and you shall know that secret, O'Hara. Some vessels will contain water and some will contain hydrogen, some will contain molten magnesium and some will contain only eiderdown, but few will contain them all. You will, O'Hara—you will contain what you must, I think—so long as I keep my fingers on the fibers of your heart. Arise."
O'Hara got up. He was standing in a small circular room at the end of one of those glaring corridors, as if in running he had come at last upon that point in infinity which the corridors always seemed to promise, a room with a diameter of forty feet, its sheer walls rising to a dome that opened on a tiny patch of brilliant blue, much like the blue of O'Hara's now shapeless uniform. Was it the sky he saw, the heavens that he'd known before descending into the subsurface warrens of this lost atomic world? He did not know—illusion had become so routine that the fact seemed always suspect now. Yet it could be the sky, a pledge of things to be, as Nedra and the baby had become in memory.
"Are you listening, Stephen Bryce?"
"What is it now, O'Hara?"
"The ceiling—?"
"A symbol. And only you in this hemisphere can understand it."
"I don't."