Anstruther was indeed approaching, but O'Hara was not prepared for the manner of his entrance. As the voice died away, the metal sheathing of the corridor immediately beyond the circular room bulged suddenly and then became molten, flowing down from the living rock it shielded in a silver stream, and a great yellow mass of fire erupted out into the corridor, becoming instantly a mottled red and magenta that in turn, and as instantly, was a fuming cloud, gray and black and flecked with ocherous matter and roiling constantly within itself, until in a fraction of time it was sucked up through recessed ventilators in the flame-seared ceiling, the fumes and the fire and their resultant heat gone simultaneously, so that O'Hara who was crouching only twenty feet away felt only that first scorching blast, as if the fire door of a furnace had swung open, and the next moment smelled the sweat of it drying on his skin and the sharp odor of burnt hair--his beard and eyebrows crumbling at his touch. The flash left him blinded. Then he heard a cry: "O'Hara! O'Hara! Thank God I am in time." It was Anstruther's voice. And the joy of that cry, the jubilating ring of overwhelming relief in it, brought tears involuntarily into O'Hara's sightless eyes. He stood there weeping as if suddenly he had come blundering against his only friend. Nor did he question that Anstruther was his friend. All the warnings of the Father moments earlier were lost in this excruciating feeling of reunion and deliverance. He was saved, he was freed at last of the exhausting nerve-drag of these long months in the Western Hemisphere, behind the Curtain, never daring once in all that time to trust even the woman he loved, never completely, and menaced, even while he slept, by an omniscient and omnipresent living fable--the Father. Now, at last, he felt, here was a man from his own time and world, and with his own sense of what a man should be--Anstruther. He stretched out his hands. "Anstruther, I--can't see--" "The blast," Anstruther explained briskly, and immediately strong arms were lifting O'Hara's helpless body. "We have a remedy for that. Don't be afraid, O'Hara. You're safe now, you're free. We who have had to live with Stephen Bryce know what that means. All slaves are blind." O'Hara asked, "But wasn't my blindness your doing?" "Yes. But there are blindnesses that don't involve the eyes." "Mine does."