"Fire now, O'Hara," Nedra was saying. "Make them destroy us. They are around us now. They want to take us, not to kill. You see, that one--and that--" "Nedra, I want you to run. When I fire--" "It is too late. Kill me, O'Hara." "No, Nedra," he said, but he pressed the .38 against her side. "We can always die, and if they try to separate us, I will do it. But it's you they want--if they see I'll kill you, they'll spare both of us. Can you tell him that?" "She does not need to tell me that," said the Degraded. "You live while she lives. Now, come--the Father waits for you in Washington." PART THREE "Suppose," O'Hara said to me, leaning forward suddenly, his empty glass in his hand, "you were to fly tomorrow to the Prefecture of Switzerland--leave London, say, at noon, and arrive there twenty minutes later and alight at the Bern airstrip and then start walking, away from the town into the countryside--into the mountains. You'd have the feeling of London clinging to you. At any moment, you'd think, you could return to the airstrip and be again in London--in Bloomsbury, here--within twenty minutes, if you wished. "Now, suppose further, that while you're walking through those Swiss mountains, you come upon a magnificent woman, larger than most women of Europe and more beautiful by far, auburn-haired, blue-eyed, dressed strangely in furs in a costume very like a Highlander's. And within a half hour's time she has attempted to knock out your brains and you, in defending yourself, have instead been forced to flatten her, and then have found that this was exactly what she'd hoped you would be able to do, and that henceforward she is your woman--not your slave but your mate--the mother of children who will be yours but who will not call you their father. "And still further, suppose that suddenly from these same Swiss Alps, not twenty minutes from where we're sitting this moment, drinking ourselves into a mild sort of bender, a horde of manlike creatures, uglier than apes because they are men and not apes, surrounds you and destroys the illusion of an ancient time--destroys it with atomic weapons and the evidences of atomic-powered industry--ah, you see? "We have not telescoped only the time involved since the establishment of the Atomic Curtain around the two Lost Continents of the Western Hemisphere. We have also telescoped time as far back as one hundred thousand years ago--we have got back to the Java Man, and yet we're also far ahead of where Europe and Asia are today, all within the present moment. For you're only twenty minutes from London!" "It would take more than twenty minutes to get from here to the Rockies of North America," I pointed out.