"The city of Emporia was impressive. Believe me, engineering reached its peak in those first years behind the Atomic Curtain, when fear and want had been abolished and all the genius of man was channeled into the creation of the perfect civilization--perfect, it seemed! And Emporia was sealed completely, locked in magnesium in its cavern blasted into the rock, its air a manufactured substance like its food, its drink pumped in along the Tube that terminated at Los Angeles, where the enormous purifying plant distilled sea water for half of the continent. But great as were these utterly nonmanual works, the most astonishing phase of life was life itself--the horde, the shambling tens of thousands eating there and sleeping there and breeding-- "You've always been libidinous. And I suppose you'd think there'd be a furor if a hundred thousand women, nude, came through the streets. But there was none--no furor, not so much as a wolf call, not a whistle in those choked streets of Emporia. One hundred thousand naked women, mind you, their bodies delicately green in that reflected light, frailer than the men, their breasts like pockets turned inside out, their hair as short as the men's and as bristling and their long arms clasping more often than not their strange little babies with the fierce protectiveness of all biological things--the rat fights for its young, and the hare, and the wren--but without real affection. One hundred thousand nude and speechless women, apathetically shambling among one hundred thousand naked men--" A scene, said O'Hara, from Dante's hell. Men and women without emotion and without souls, or if souls cannot be bred out of the race, then without the intelligence to express them. The particular band of the Degraded with which he and Nedra had descended into Emporia now had dispersed among these swarming thousands, but the Son who was guarding them remained, and O'Hara, as they proceeded along a glittering, nameless avenue, passing through several of the slumber and feeding chambers where the masses were eating or lying in their bunks, both together and separately, without shame, no longer could believe that there was any purpose or direction in their movement. "Where are you taking us?" he asked the Son. "Toward the Guild," replied the Son. "The Tube from Washington comes there. Also, all the Sons allotted to Emporia are bound there now, to escape the Deluge." "The Sons escape the Deluge." "The Sons and all those babies who have the prerequisites of Sons. We collect them from the women after we have tested their intelligence. That is done at birth, their brain waves proving those who will be eligible." "Tested by a machine?" "How else?" "Their mothers don't object?" "Why should the mothers object? When they have borne them, their task is done. It is we, the Sons, who have the tasks of collecting them and sending them to Washington for training there. It is we, the Sons, who have the task of fertilizing--"