"For I could deal with Anstruther. Insane or not, Anstruther could not seem too dangerous, the way that I remembered him. His rather womanish blue eyes and fair hair and his romantic boyishness--weakness, I told myself--could never be formidable. Yes, I could deal with Anstruther. And as I left the Father and went toward the distant wall where Nedra was waiting with my infant son, I meant to do it. "Let me make the situation clear. I had been without hope. It had seemed incredible that I could escape with Nedra and my son from the labyrinth of Washington, retracing my way along the glittering and utterly deserted corridors through panels that slid open without detectable human motivation, back to the Tube and through it back into Emporia, now a dead metropolis, and up again by its only shaft to the surface of the earth and through the patrols of the Degraded in western Kansas once again into those mountains where Nedra's kinsmen were. No one--I had had the clansmen's word for this--had ever escaped once he had sunk into the cities of the lowlands. It was that absolute hopelessness that had driven me unresisting forward to the Father, and yet now-- "Now I believed there was a way to do it. I had only to learn from the Father the mechanism of the integrocalculators, the key-studded board he kept beneath his blue-veined hands, and to make my peace with Anstruther who surely understood this maze of a city and who, as the Father himself had said, controlled a dissident faction of the Sons, and the way would be clear for Nedra and my child and me. "That's hope for you. The impossible at once becomes a very simple thing. I had only to do this, and only to arrange that. I wonder now how I supposed the Father, so readily to be outwitted, had been able to endure for two hundred and seventy years behind the Atomic Curtain. The truth is of course that I was not thinking--I was engaging in the opposite of thought, which is hope. And hope blinded me. Or rather, purpose blinded me. I had been so long without either." He had been, he said, quite certain of his direction when he started walking away from the dais. He had seen Nedra going toward the apartment built into the distant wall, and he had thought that he had only to go that way himself to join her. Yet in the absorption of his speculations he walked for some fifteen minutes without the distance once occurring clearly to him, and it was only the sensation of walls closing in upon him that finally halted him. He was in a corridor. Somehow he had passed from the vast hall of the Father.