"Yet even if you had such excellently trained scientists, and could set up your reactors and place your warheads in your rockets and launch them before my rockets or my Curtain were to reach you, your rockets would thunder down only upon the wastelands that compose the surface of these western continents. You would destroy our photosynthetrons, the source of our food, but that is all. You would not reach our subterranean cities, or the vast reservoirs of food and water beneath the surface or the intricate tunnels of the Tube. You would hurt us, yes—but you would not destroy us, O'Hara. And within minutes, then, we would as surely wipe your continents clean of life as with this shaking hand I wipe the perspiration from my forehead.
"Such is the actual power this keyboard—or what it stands for—gives me. Anstruther thinks I am the tyrant of a degraded race, and the degrader of it. I could as easily become the master of the entire earth, were I to wish it. But I don't, O'Hara. My burdens here are sufficient. Is this the thinking of an evil tyrant?"
O'Hara said, "Tyranny is only a word, Father. But Emporia was a fact."
The frail hand collapsed upon the Father's breast. His eyelids flickered jerkily above his blazing eyes and for a moment the rise and sinking of his bosom ceased. The pale lips parted, the fingers seemed about to slide from the keyboard beneath them.
It was the fingers that O'Hara leaped to seize, for he remembered what the Father had warned him, that if the pressure ceased, Nedra would drown inside that translucent room. But the Father's sinews stiffened. His lips again were moving:
"Not yet! Not yet! I am not dead."
O'Hara recoiled. And as he stood there the horror of Emporia seemed vague beside this new horror, that all life of this hidden hemisphere depended in these instants upon a brain that was hovering so very near the line between the living and the dead. The Father's life was life for millions now.
"I did not die!"
It was a cry of triumph. The voice was hoarsely jubilant. "I did not die!" the Father cried again. "But do you know how close it was? So near that I could see beyond. And I am ready!" his eyes opened very wide. "This problem must be resolved, and now. While I consider it, go behind the dais into the library. You will find more than books to amuse you there."
O'Hara moved backward slowly. In his mind was the apprehension that those fingers might in death relax their pressure on the key. But the Father whispered: