O'Hara got up. He was standing in a small circular room at the end of one of those glaring corridors, as if in running he had come at last upon that point in infinity which the corridors always seemed to promise, a room with a diameter of forty feet, its sheer walls rising to a dome that opened on a tiny patch of brilliant blue, much like the blue of O'Hara's now shapeless uniform. Was it the sky he saw, the heavens that he'd known before descending into the subsurface warrens of this lost atomic world? He did not know--illusion had become so routine that the fact seemed always suspect now. Yet it could be the sky, a pledge of things to be, as Nedra and the baby had become in memory. "Are you listening, Stephen Bryce?" "What is it now, O'Hara?" "The ceiling--?" "A symbol. And only you in this hemisphere can understand it." "I don't." "It is inevitable, O'Hara, that the mechanics of this hemisphere as we have been forced to organize it would tend to create in your mind the impression that I am divine. Is that not true?" "It is stronger than an impression, Father. If you have lived, as you say, nearly three centuries, if you control this spatial city and the Curtain and the Tube--and I know you do--it becomes extremely difficult to think of you as mortal." "You see? In spite of your reason, in spite of the scoffing tone you force into your voice, you are beginning to believe. The genesis of faith is most often the misinterpretation of truths. And so I have made that tiny patch of celestial heaven visible to you. For you--and you alone--must understand that I am not God, that I am not immortal, that I am subject to the laws of nature and eternity regardless of how long I manage to evade them. "That patch of sky is there to bolster your sanity, O'Hara. For you must be sane. No matter how deeply involved you may become in the game of playing the Chosen Son, you must retain your sanity, or the purpose of the game will be defeated by the zest of it. Remember this, you have few realities to cling to--that patch of sky is one of them, and the senile tremor of my fingertips, and the receptive loins of your wife, and your baby's cry, and the inerasable memory of the world beyond the Curtain. Cling to these, O'Hara, for you will need them. Anstruther is approaching."