O'Hara laughed. "It would take," he said, "two hours of straight flying time. And the Twelve Old Men of Geneva are now aware of that. Two hours--imagine it--from where we sweat and scrabble for our daily bread, and we could live forever without so much as wiggling our smallest toes. The abundant life, old man--food for the taking, shelter and absolute peace and freedom, and only those who are bored with that engage in anything resembling human struggle as we know it. And we can have that. All of us. Have it there in North America--or here, if we wish--for by now the Twelve Old Men must be reading my report, sent on from Croydon after I landed just a while ago. What do you think they'll do about it?" "I don't know, O'Hara. You have not finished." "No," he said, and filled our glasses, "I haven't finished, have I?" He drank, his eyes intently watching me. "You want the full picture, don't you? Well, you shall have it. Let your mind step back into that plane I mentioned, and take that two hours' flight across to the Rockies, to southern Colorado, beyond the Atomic Curtain. We're in a mountain valley, remember--? Nedra, and I, facing a gentleman who speaks that strangely bastardized English I've described for you--and speaks it with a certain dignity, as if used to command. And in his ugly hand he holds that shining tubelike object that creates those hideous explosions that destroy--and without trace--his enemies. The atomic gun. "I have described him. Apelike yet hairless, stooped and hulking, his skin as gray as the granite of that mountain, a revolting thing, though I've seen men in London's streets quite as revolting. What perplexed me--amazed me--was the paradox of his speech, for as I say, it had a certain dignity that could come only from a mind that had been schooled. But the others of his patrol who now were coming around the rocks toward us, moving quite slowly as their weak eyes constantly kept watching for the scattered mountain clansmen, were, I was to learn, by far his inferiors. They were the horde, the masses if you please, while he--and by sheer accident of birth, for in that society of which he was a member, to be born with intelligence is indeed an accident--belonged to that most tyrannic of all aristocracies, the oligarchy of brains. They called him the Son."