"So you believe, O'Hara. Emotion is contagious, and you have caught the fever of it--but few men ever catch the fire of thought. You will, you will! But until I have rid you of this delusion you are useless to me. When you are here with Anstruther we shall then see how altruistic tyranny can be, when it is based on thought. And how completely senseless and destructive pure emotion is." "I will not betray Anstruther to you." "Do you forget your wife and child?" "I will not betray him." "You saw her agony when she was struggling to keep the child afloat?" "I see that agony now, Father. It is my agony. But I will not betray Anstruther. Do as you will, but quickly, Father--in this final cruelty be merciful." "My hand is on the key, O'Hara. Must I?" "Quick!" "I commend your resolution," said the Father quietly. "Now I promise you that I will not destroy Anstruther, or will I detain him from the fate he wishes for himself. Is this enough?" "You promise this?" "You can enforce it. I cannot work through you unless you wish." The Father's voice sank to a whisper now. "Open your eyes. For you are in that small point in infinity--the room that seemed forever unattainable, the end of these long corridors of Washington. Anstruther and the Sons are sleeping there with you. Awaken them and do as I have said." O'Hara was now conscious of opening his eyes. The illusion that the Father's voice was audible only to himself was overpowering at this time, for had he not been violently in argument with the Father in this room, where Anstruther and the Sons still were sleeping? Anstruther had not moved from the bunk across the room, or had the Sons stirred from the grotesque line upon the floor where they had fallen. Or, it seemed, had O'Hara himself moved since he first had sat there on the bunk, discussing with Anstruther the Father's tyranny. And all that seemed to have intervened since then--his return to the Father, his weeks of study in the library behind the dais, his strangely visual life with Nedra by means of the screen, his descent down to the unattainable integrocalculators, his journey through the Tube to the three cities of New York, and his surprising colloquy with the Son who first had guarded him there, the Son who had remembered that a female once had fought to keep her child and who had thought that it was somehow beautiful, and who had died for thinking that--none of these events that had transpired since he first left this little point that was infinity now seemed a portion of his conscious life. They were only dreams, he told himself. "Yes, they were dreams, only the product of disordered sleep," he told himself. Then his hand touched something sharp within his jacket. It was the metal book--the way out that as yet he did not need.