For the horde was separated at last, and those who were to go into the mountain valleys were already clambering back across the endless colored coiling of the photosynthetron, while the second of the Sons, his atom gun held cautiously, was now approaching them. "We must go down into Emporia at once," he warned. "The Deluge is coming soon, and you should be safely in the Tube before it happens. The Father does not wish you to be drowned." O'Hara tightened his arm around Nedra's waist, to avoid any surprise, and keeping his .38 beneath her ribs began to follow the horde further into the maze of pipes. Six hundred yards deeper, between two pipes of an intense vermilion color, a square of some forty feet of opaque glass or metal or plastic now began to tilt upward as they approached, revealing beneath it a platform of what apparently was magnesium, and onto this platform the Son led O'Hara and Nedra and as many of the Degraded as it would accommodate. The platform now began to sink rapidly, without sound, down a shaft immaculately tooled from a similar glistening metal, descending for what O'Hara estimated to be two hundred feet before it reached bottom. A wall of the enclosing shaft now slid up, and they left the platform, which as instantly began to rise again toward the surface, while the panel closed automatically behind them. They were in the underground city of Emporia. O'Hara, describing this, could not conceal, even in prosaic Bloomsbury, the intense excitement that he'd felt upon first seeing this fantastic culmination of an epoch. "The atomic epoch," he continued, "the world that Europe might have become except for that Third World War. If you were standing now, as I stood then, in the exact center of that strange and yet contemporary subterranean metropolis, I doubt you'd ever write another bit of pseudoscientific nonsense for those Youth League fans of yours. Because you are an amateur, old man--what your picked old brains consider rather weird, and hence commendable from the standpoint of a fiction writer, is in truth nearer facts--though there was more of weirdness in Emporia than you ever dreamed of. More astonishing probably than the Curtain itself, weirder than the Degraded, and vastly further into the domain of the inconceivable than a clan of Cro-Magnon people walking magnificently through the caverns of the Rockies, not two hours' flying time from where we're sitting now. I should have known--I am mildly psychic, a throwback possibly to some wild Boston Irishman of the twentieth century or a gandy dancer for the Santa Fe. These names confuse you, gandy dancer, Boston Irishman? I read them, later, in the incalculably tremendous library that the Father keeps in Washington, the archives of a dead democracy. Yes, there's Celtic blood in me, thinned out but quite sufficient to be psychic in such matters, and I should have known, when I heard Anstruther scream the day he