"Go quickly, O'Hara!"
"But Father, if you die while I am absent?"
"Then instantly you will be with your wife and son, free to make your way back to the mountains, if you can. I am giving the integrocalculators the impulse to accomplish that. Do as I tell you and you have this pledge. But—I shall not die! Now, go."
O'Hara turned and descended the steps and passed through the door behind the dais. It slid down behind him. He was standing in a tremendous tiered hall, stacked from floor to ceiling upon each wall with books, while occupying the center of the hall were countless exhibits of machinery and clothing, weapons and utensils, all the implements of the civilizations that had been piled one upon the other here in this subterranean capital of the Western Hemisphere. Against the farthest wall was an immense bright screen, like those that he had seen in the corridors and public buildings everywhere upon the continent, and on this screen, at the moment that he entered, Nedra was visible.
Nedra was nursing the child. At the sound of O'Hara's cry, she looked up slowly, as if she was expecting to find him in the room with her, wherever that might be, until finally her eyes were raised, and O'Hara knew that she was peering into the screen in that lost, small room of hers.
"Nedra," he called to her, "does my voice come through to you?"
"Oh, yes," she said calmly, "and I see you on the screen above me. It is as though you were standing here beside me."
"Do you know where you are?"
"But surely you recognize this little room, O'Hara."
It was the exquisite room in which they had spent so many months together, the perfect little room, hexagonal and thickly carpeted, its ceiling vaulted and displaying shades of blue that darkened toward the apex. "Yes, I know that room," O'Hara whispered bitterly.