The middle ground, he told himself—the middle ground, always seeming to both extremes contemptible, weak and confused. And perhaps confusion really was the virtue of it, veering this way for a while, then that, but persevering devious and without dogma toward the goal, toward saving Nedra and his child. Was that contemptible? He could not think that it was. In the first phase of mankind, before codes and ideologies, there had been only the preservation of the family and a dim concept of God—and so, O'Hara felt, would be the final phase.
"I was unconscious," he repeated.
"Then we are lost again," said Anstruther gloomily. But instantly his eyes were light again. "It does not matter. However long it takes, we will find our way to him. We have come in a straight line this far, and we will continue it until we reach the outer shell of Washington, which must be close to this room. Then we shall cut back again through the heart of the city, never leaving between the lines we cut the space that Stephen Bryce's vast throne room occupies. Somewhere, someday, we'll find the heart of this."
O'Hara asked, "You too, Anstruther, were unconscious when you left the Father's hall?"
"I have never been there. After I crashed in Patagonia, the Sons brought me to Washington through the North-South Tube, which plunges underneath the Gulf of Mexico from Yucatan—the second of the two great Tubes that are the arteries of these continents. As you know, there are smaller, lateral Tubes—"
"I know very little, Anstruther. And I ought to know."
"The two great Tubes," said Anstruther, "converge at Washington, the Transcontinental and the North-South Tube. The lesser Tubes branch off to all key points, to the Pits of Yellowstone and to the vast plutonium plant in southern Colorado—"
"I flew into its radiation zone," O'Hara said, remembering.
"—to the Arctic outposts in Alaska and Labrador, to the plants in South Carolina and at Hanford that generate the Atomic Curtain, to the major population centers. You, whose family was once American, would know the names of most of them, but they are no longer cities as you and I remember cities—they had no purpose now, except as warrens for the masses. No trade, no growth, no manufactures. A few repair shops at strategic points, with almost nothing to repair, though they have the skill for it. Everything has been done here, everything is finished, and only man—or what is left of man—is subject now to change. That has been true almost from the day they established the Atomic Curtain. At once, behind its absolute security, the moral fiber of the masses started to decay. Only the elite, the scientists, were able to preserve a kind of integrity, for all too soon they were confronted with the challenge of the retrogression of the masses of the continents, the reversal of evolution, resulting from the gradual pollution of the continents by their atomic-powered plants in every phase of life. But after those first scientists, there were no more—no minds that came out of the masses had the capacity for exploratory thought. And gradually these scientists died off through these three centuries, until there was only the last of them, the Father, Stephen Bryce. No, I have never seen the Father's vast hall—he did not raise me from the pit when I arrived."
"I recall the pit," O'Hara said.