The Sons, now milling on the dais, seemed lost and leaderless, a shambling herd again, until from their slack apelike mouths issued a low, despairing wail, as animals in panic raise their senseless cry, then all at once, as panicked animals will swerve, they turned toward Anstruther, their long arms lashing out toward him. "No," cried Anstruther, reeling back. "No, don't--this was for you!" But a wild horror was upon them, a blood-lust born of their shocked sense of guilt, and their immense hands tore at him, gouging at his eyes, ripping his face to shreds. He rushed beyond the enormous bed upon which the Father lay inert, and reaching Nedra, flung himself prostrate at her feet, then raising eyes that welled with sudden tears he sobbed, "We might--have led them! You and I--" The Sons went swarming after him. Nedra was standing motionless, serene--dazed or serene, O'Hara could not tell. Anstruther's hand slid down along her thigh, and then, defiantly, he smashed his fist into the myriad of keys upon the board. Then the tide of leaping hairless bodies swept down on him, and as O'Hara snatched Nedra away from them, Anstruther screamed again, a scream of agony that rose half muffled from the writhing mass. They tore him apart, dismembered him, lay wallowing in bestial fury in his flesh and blood. "O'Hara! O'Hara!" It was the Father's voice. The hall's vast walls were now receding toward infinity, and from above, sped by the impulse that Anstruther's blow upon the keys had loosed, the intricately embellished ceiling now was plunging toward them and a great roaring from a greater distance drowned the babbling of the Sons. The Father's hand rose up. And fell. O'Hara bent down to the bed. "This was--the solution of the problem. Death for both extremes, O'Hara--death just a little earlier than it should have come. Now both of us, Anstruther and myself, commit into your hands the redemption of these continents. You understand, you hear?" "Yes, Father--yes, I hear." "You must go back through the Atomic Curtain. You must convince them that our skill can save their continents from their real enemies, hunger and disease. You must convince them, O'Hara, for this is their last chance, I think, as it is ours. Convince them that we want their colonists to build again, as they once built, a new and stronger race within this hemisphere--new blood to strengthen ours. And then return quickly, for it will be your task to carry on my work, to avoid my mistakes, to practice the restraint I should have shown, ridding this hemisphere at last of its pollution--" "But the Atomic Curtain, Father?" "You--will--pass through. The keyboard--quick! It is a means of concentration, of translating thought into fact. Think and the integrocalculators will respond. Think quickly--take your woman and your baby in your arms and concentrate--the Tube--" "You, Father?" "--to the Pits of Yellowstone. You see--?"