"It cannot vary by even a fractional concept of time," the Father was continuing. "And there, O'Hara, is how your task can be accomplished. You have your known factor of time, and in the lower Rockies, you have your plane. When it is brought to Washington, it can be duplicated on a more adequate scale, for the Sons, under guidance, are not bad workmen. Time and method are problems we can master, and there is only the issue of your willingness to obtain from beyond the Curtain--" "My willingness? Do you believe, Father, that men--men as I've always known them, not your masses and Sons--would voluntarily enter into this proposition?" "Do you believe that they would not? For a full belly, for a life without exertion, without the strain of thought--really, O'Hara, I have not forgotten what your world was like." "Remove the strains they know, and they will discover other strains. In time, for instance, they will rebel against becoming your automatons." "I am aware of that--I am now dealing with Anstruther. But that at least is a problem I can solve. Let me show you how I deal with human problems, O'Hara--let me show you the city of Emporia, where you first saw my people. Observe upon the wall behind this dais a metal screen, such as you saw in every hall and every corridor of Emporia, and as exist in every city of this hemisphere, even our dead cities--remember Spokane? The giant tower with its solarium? Remember you were curious and flew down close to it? Remember Denver? Those cities we abandoned soon after the establishment of the Curtain, as soon as our subterranean metropolises were built--for in those days we were not certain just how quickly the nations beyond the Curtain might construct atomic plants. True, we had our scintillometers, we were constantly on our guard, we had our rockets ready, but the physical plant could be built, prepared for instant operation, and we had by then no accurate reports of what your scientists might be thinking--we had learned that thinking was more vital than the last incidents of construction. We had no surety except our rocket barrages that you would not get these suppositional plants into production before we could destroy you, which meant of course that we too might be destroyed. We had with us the frightful memory of that Third World War, and how very close the outcome seemed at first. So we took no risks. We went beneath the earth, leaving dead cities where once we had lived. We built new cities up into the Arctic, outpost cities, as far as the northern coast of Canada, leaving only that chain of mountains, where the engineering problems were prohibitive, beyond the network of our automatic civilization. Now, this metal panel--" The Father's fragile fingers poised above the unmarked keys. "I touch, as you observe, and instantly you are seeing what is happening across the continent in Emporia."