"'Now they will come to you--this darkly bearded man and this red-haired woman with a boy child in her arms. Take them to the surface of Emporia, and there deliver them unto the Son who guards the valleys toward the mountains. He must see that they reach the mountainside and leave them there. This is your task. This is your task--' "The voice droned on repetitively in that same pitch of godliness that I had first heard in the subterranean city of Emporia, beating the order endlessly into their brains until it was--as so much of their guidance was--hypnotic. A voice from the grave--rather, a voice out of the depthless Pits of Yellowstone. Yes, Stephen Bryce's voice, recorded sometime in the hours before his death while he lay waiting for Anstruther and myself to come to him. Knowing that he was to die, and planning to achieve in death the goal he sought for me. And I had thought he would not open panels in the walls! "Now the Sons were rising from their knees, and they came at once to us--they never doubted that we would be waiting there--and motioned that we were to follow." The ensuing march, led by the Son whose duty was to take them to the surface, had nothing of the horror of their first descent into Emporia, for it had been the swarming masses of the Degraded that had made it horrible, the shambling tens of thousands, naked and vilely apathetic, aimless. Now there were no masses. And the Son now marching with them knew what he was doing. "Are you not lonely here without the masses?" asked O'Hara. "Lonely?" "Do you not miss those who were swallowed by the Deluge here?" "Oh, no." "You realize what caused the Deluge?" "Yes. The Father caused it." "And if I told you that the Father too was swallowed by the Deluge?" "That could not happen." "But if I say I saw it happen?" "No," said the Son. "For even now the Father speaks to us. And even now the Tube brings new food from the photosynthetrons. And soon the Tube will bring more females to repopulate Emporia." "Do you not know what has occurred in Washington?" "None of us ever knows what has occurred in Washington. It is not necessary that we know, for the Father speaks, and the food continues coming, and the water from the oceans of the west, and we the Sons need nothing more than that. No," said the Son, neither obstinately nor shaken, "we need nothing more, and we need to know nothing more, not while the Voice still comes to give us tasks."