"You will see the Father?" he whispered. "Yes, I will see the Father," said O'Hara. "If he wishes it." "I have always heard his voice come from the screen. I have never seen him. A brilliantly unbearable radiation comes upon the screen and that is all." "You wish to know what he is like?" The Son drew his brutish body up to its great height, his long arms swinging loose, his weak eyes focusing intently upon O'Hara's face. He was in that moment at least something more than subhuman, for a beseeching huskiness came quickly into his voice, not the piteous whine of an animal but the humility of a man. "I wish to know what he is like," he whispered. "He is like yourself." The Son's jaw muscles flexed. His nostrils flared. "He is not as large as you, or as strong as you, or as content as you," O'Hara said, "but he is more cunning, and more consciously merciless--" "Stop that! He listens." "--and he would destroy the one man who would lead you back into the glory of your kind, the lost glory of the fact of being man and not a soulless animal. One man alone would help you, Anstruther--" "Stop it! Don't speak again!" "Then you have heard of him? The word is traveling. And once the word again is on the lips of those who would be men, no power as yet conceived--" "Liar and renegade! Beast of the upper earth--" The Father's voice came wearily, "Enough, O'Hara--do not preach to him. Our problem has been solved. Descend." The hatch clanged shut. O'Hara felt the shock of the cylinder's sudden acceleration and sprawled helplessly upon its foamlike cushioning, and as before, when he regained his feet, the quick deceleration flung him down again. And the hatch was opening. "The Father awaits," a Son above him said. But this time there was to be no long ascent by corridors and stairs and shafts to reach the awe-inspiring architecture of the Dome. When he left the cylinder, a panel opened in the wall beyond the terminus of the Tube, and after O'Hara had passed through, the Son stepped quickly back, the panel slid down instantly, and in the rushing dark O'Hara heard the Father's silken voice, now faint, now roaring through his brain, now very faint and weak again: "I am returning you at once to Anstruther. When you have regained your senses, awaken him. You have only to tell him that you have at last remembered the way to reach me. He and his Sons will follow willingly enough. "But this time I shall not guide you by my voice. A panel will open in the corridor beyond the point at which Anstruther blasted through. Lead them through that panel. Ascend the stairs you will then find. At the top of them, push up the metal covering. And you will find yourselves before this dais." O'Hara gasped, "Anstruther was that close to you?" "Anstruther always has been that close to me, but men who live by their emotions never quite achieve their goals. He feels. I think. That is our difference." "Ah, Father, there is more than that."