O'Hara leaped up. "You are taking me away from Anstruther?"
"Yes," said the Father patiently, "I must take you away for a while, for there is much that you must learn. Go into the corridor at once, for I am sending an anesthetic into that little room, as I once sent it mercifully to you when Nedra bore her child. Keep walking, O'Hara—further—and further—and you must close your eyes, for this will be very swift—"
O'Hara clenched his fists against a sudden rush of pressure. His knees were buckling and his mouth stretched wide and in the blackness that swirled over him his senses reeled.
"You may approach my bed," the Father whispered.
And it had been done. O'Hara was again inside the great hall of the Father, just below the dais. The Father's feeble hand was beckoning.
"Just so far, O'Hara, and watch my hand upon this board—don't think that if I relax my touch upon this key you could save Nedra and the child. I do not like to threaten you, but you have permitted Anstruther to convert you, O'Hara. The absurdity of defying death for a mistaken altruism does impress a man your age. But do you really believe, O'Hara, that I am as wicked as he thinks?"
"I saw the masses dying in Emporia. I saw my wife and baby sinking in that translucent room."
"Cruelty is comparative, O'Hara. And not all of it, anywhere, is personal. Do you suppose that I alone shaped this hemisphere and am alone responsible for the evils in it? You must go now into the library behind this dais, O'Hara—you must read how these things really happened. I did not alone erect the Curtain. I did not build the atomic reactors that made the Curtain possible. I did not make the initial choice. All these things were done, after the Third World War, by men who were mature when I was still a child. I inherited the conduct of these continents as you have found them. I have built nothing, achieved nothing, save to stay alive for two hundred and seventy years while all my peers were perishing.
"Two hundred and seventy years," he whispered. "Surely that would amaze the doctors of your world—surely one at least of them would wish to return with you through the Curtain solely to learn how I have lived this long. And it is so simple—I prolong my life the way your doctors empty bowels. I take little pills, O'Hara, that any chemist of your world can easily compound. Yet were your doctor to come through the Curtain for this secret, I would not talk with him of how to prolong life, but of euthanasia. I am tired, O'Hara.
"And now you too think I am a tyrant. Let me tell you this, O'Hara—were I to cast aside this keyboard and forget the masses that you think I tyrannize, what has happened at Emporia would be multiplied in deadliness a thousand times. No, not by the Deluge but by the scourges it prevents, pestilence and hunger.