Never an answer. Never the slightest whisper coming from the disks concealed in that room. For the Father understood too well that while there still remained the faintest hope that Nedra was alive, and might return, O'Hara was not going to end his life. Yet possibly this was not altogether intended as torture, said O'Hara. There was torture in it, and surely the Father was indifferent to that, but that was not the sole purpose of this ninth and most terrible month of solitude. The Father himself had been injured. And a god could not permit that to be known. The Father, too, O'Hara was to learn, had also sealed himself away, using the fraudulent blazing mirrors of his electronic network to direct the hemisphere. He knew--he heard it hour by hour--O'Hara's raging, but his own acute problem and his grasp of O'Hara's mind made any other action seem to him unwise. And the wisdom of rulers is not always gentle. Think! And wait! Ten months of that, and the last two months of it at a plane of tension that made thinking seem like the flash of electricity through a vacuum. Thought and contemplation can achieve humility or they can achieve an equally super-normal arrogance of frozen wrath. Yet within a moment it was ended. For O'Hara awoke one morning with a small cry singing in his ears. He turned upon his bed--and there was Nedra beside him, and at her breast was the child. In every man's life there is a moment that he cannot perfectly remember afterward, for the moment is too emotional to be lived through twice. He has at last approached the reason for his being, and for O'Hara it had come with Nedra. And the child. He wept. When he could bring himself to touch them, the child was beautiful, the magic of slumber still doelike in its wide blue eyes, vigor in the clasp of its small fingers. "He knows you, O'Hara." Yes. Why shouldn't he? My child, my son, my own son--yes, he knows me. "Nedra--" "Not now." Her fingers touched his lips. "A little while--" Then the voice from nowhere, absent all these months, came back. "Good evening, O'Hara. You forgive me now, don't you?" Softly, very softly: "It has been difficult for you, but there was no other way. Without my guidance, you would have destroyed yourself, your woman and the child--and not with your gun. You must come to me at once." "With Nedra and my son." "They will be safer there." "It is your word against my thinking, Father. Either they come--" "Bring them, O'Hara. But keep your weapon ready." The panel through which they had entered months before now was sliding up, revealing the empty corridor beyond. "You will come into the corridor and turn toward your left," the Father was saying. "Only my voice will guide you. That is correct--now proceed until you hear me. And keep your weapon ready!"