Nedra walked slowly at O'Hara's side, the child asleep within her arms. The panel closed behind them. They were within a seemingly endless metal-lined tunnel that receded in each direction toward infinity, the glaringly reflected light obscuring the convergence of its geometric lines, and for a long while they walked as if each second might bring sudden death, completely tense, O'Hara with the .38 in his hand. "Now you must turn again, this time toward your right," the Father commanded, and simultaneously a second panel opened in the wall. "You must come inside--and put away your weapon now, O'Hara. Only in the corridor was there any danger." "What was the danger, Father?" The second panel closed. They were within a vast rectangular hall, its ceiling far above them, azure pale, its walls a fretwork of marvelously carved stone, polished like glass. And deep back into it, against the farthest wall, upon a four-tiered dais of translucent stone was an enormous bed. "This is where I exist, O'Hara--where I sleep and work, and where you and your woman and the child will live. There is privacy in space and space enough for us. Danger, you ask? A disturbance among some of the younger Sons, Anstruther's group, but I can settle it in time. Approach me closely--here, upon this dais." The voice was everywhere around them, from every corner of the enormously spacious room, as the voice of a divinity would be, yet O'Hara understood that it was coming from the bed upon the dais, and toward that, with Nedra beside him--Nedra with the sleeping infant held against her breast--he was now moving, as the first man with the first woman must have moved from the Garden, scourged by the voice of wrath. It was like that. It was no less than that--awe and humility and perhaps terror, although he knew it was the voice of Stephen Bryce, a wasted man with eyes that burned more brightly than the sun itself. Sublime, O'Hara insisted. "Come near to me, O'Hara. For I--cannot get up." And the spell was shattered. It was the pathos of the words that did it. The Father was helpless, the Father whose mind was the germ of life for these two continents, the only real intelligence within the hemisphere, was lying now upon a vast bed in a vaster hall, a cripple, a brain no longer able to effect for itself the simplest functions of the grossest of the masses. Yes, the spell was shattered. But a man of O'Hara's stature would finally have rebelled against mere sublime authority, had it attempted to drive him to do the things he normally abhorred. But the authority of a cripple was infinitely more terrible--a cripple's power lay in the innate will of all men to be kind. And had Stephen Bryce so planned it, he could not have planned better. From the moment that O'Hara discovered how completely helpless Stephen Bryce had now become, and how dependent upon him, his own will was faltering.