The roaring from the space around them now drowned out the Father's voice, and his eyelids shriveled shut. And while the Sons at last turned from Anstruther's mangled body and knelt down in worship at the bed, slots opened in the rapidly descending ceiling and the amber torrents of the Deluge came cascading down. O'Hara cried, "The Tube! The Tube! The Tube!" Darkness engulfed him. A great wind shrieked through his last consciousness. Long after that, it seemed, he was wrapped in a silence that was endless and sublime, as death might be, yet he felt certain that it was not death. And after that, long after that, he sensed that he was in the cylinder within the Tube. He struggled up. Nedra was lying at his feet, her baby locked tight in her shielding arms. And so the Father had disclosed in death this final truth to him, and they had escaped through it--the actual power of thought. It was destructive thought, intensified with Anstruther's mind and focused through the keyboard, that had freed the impulse that caused the integrocalculators to disarrange the spatial structure of the subterranean capital, then loosing in the great hall of the Father and indeed all Washington the devouring torrents of the Deluge. And it was his own thought, O'Hara's thought, attuned to these integrocalculators which once more had moved his body through these walls of stone and seamless magnesium--his body and Nedra's and the child's--streaming as Stephen Bryce had sent him from the library downward, unchained energy, and now into the cylinder of the Tube that at this moment hurtled them toward the west. Deceleration flung him forward in the cylinder. When its momentum died he crawled to Nedra, lying motionless. "Nedra," he called to her. Her lips moved silently, as if the trick of speech were lost to her. Her sluggish breathing seemed a part of that subhuman torpor he had seen before, when they were in the Tube arriving at its terminus in Washington. And as before, her apathy enraged him. It was the fury of a man who cannot dodge his guilt. He recognized it now. He stayed his hand. "Nedra," he said, "however wrong I may have been before, this time--this time at least, I have been right. We are returning, Nedra, rising from these depths, and you must help me rise this time. Do you hear me, Nedra?" Her lips moved painfully. "I do hear you, O'Hara." "We have escaped," he cried. "We've gotten out of Washington despite your fears. And you yourself, this time at least, refused the chance to die." "No one escapes, O'Hara." "But that is the worst of all delusions, for we have done it. We've gotten out of Washington at last, and if we can do that, we can go on." "Where would we go." "To your people in the mountains. And after that--" "It has never happened."