Grimly he answered, "They have always told you this--that it could not happen. Perhaps that is why it has never happened before. Perhaps it is part of your people's philosophy of death, your hankering after death--perhaps they were afraid to have it happen, Nedra! For nothing is impossible when men are willing to endure, and to dare, and most of all to think." "It cannot happen, O'Hara." "It's going to happen now," he warned. "And since I must, I shall make it happen in the one way that you really understand. Give me your hand." "I can't--" Deliberately, he swung his open palm sharply against her face. Nor this time did he loathe himself for striking her. He struck again, and as her chin came slowly up, he said, "Yes, Nedra, yes, it's happening," knowing that if he could dislodge her one obsessive thought--and he was doing it--she would become again the Nedra he had met and conquered in that mountain amphitheater months before. He was being very calm, a paradox of gentle brutality and masculinity, when her own hand shot out and seized his throat. As he staggered back, her long nails slashed his cheeks and she came after him, not sluggish now but lithe and murderously quick, and leaped upon him, locking her strong legs around him, and thus driving him down hard upon the cushioned surface of the cylinder while her tensed fingers stabbed toward his eyes. O'Hara rolled from beneath her. The apathy had vanished from her eyes. What he saw in them was that wild, tigrish mating lust of the Nedra he had loved, and loved now, and must conquer or as surely die. Again she pinioned him, again tearing at his face, and with a final desperate thrust he broke away from her and staggered up. She leaped for him at once. Through the blood in his eyes, he saw her chin and swung for it. And this time it was she who dropped. She lay at his feet. Her fingers moved unguided and found his ankles. She dragged herself toward him, painfully, and when he saw the fierce and untamed admiration in her eyes, he flung himself down blind with desire. Yes, there were limits to the possibilities of thought. There were some things that called for more than the will to endure and to dare, as he had meant it, and it was arguable, he now confessed, that these might be the most important things of all. In that little flat in Bloomsbury, the floor of which he had been pacing all this time so constantly, O'Hara now paused, shrugged his great shoulders and reached toward the glass that had remained untouched for better than an hour while he had told me this. He was back with me once more, back in mind as well as body, from those lost continents beyond the Atomic Curtain. He was back to the dirt and the poverty and the insecurity of the world as he had known it as a boy, and as if he felt the change was too abrupt he lifted his glass to the level of his eyes, and staring moodily into it, whispered: "To Stephen Bryce, the Father." "To Stephen Bryce," I echoed.