O'Hara turned and descended the steps and passed through the door behind the dais. It slid down behind him. He was standing in a tremendous tiered hall, stacked from floor to ceiling upon each wall with books, while occupying the center of the hall were countless exhibits of machinery and clothing, weapons and utensils, all the implements of the civilizations that had been piled one upon the other here in this subterranean capital of the Western Hemisphere. Against the farthest wall was an immense bright screen, like those that he had seen in the corridors and public buildings everywhere upon the continent, and on this screen, at the moment that he entered, Nedra was visible. Nedra was nursing the child. At the sound of O'Hara's cry, she looked up slowly, as if she was expecting to find him in the room with her, wherever that might be, until finally her eyes were raised, and O'Hara knew that she was peering into the screen in that lost, small room of hers. "Nedra," he called to her, "does my voice come through to you?" "Oh, yes," she said calmly, "and I see you on the screen above me. It is as though you were standing here beside me." "Do you know where you are?" "But surely you recognize this little room, O'Hara." It was the exquisite room in which they had spent so many months together, the perfect little room, hexagonal and thickly carpeted, its ceiling vaulted and displaying shades of blue that darkened toward the apex. "Yes, I know that room," O'Hara whispered bitterly. "And do you know your son?" she asked, and pushed the child gently from her breast. She was as he had last seen her in that translucent water-filled room, lying upon the floor--completely nude, her majestic body serenely recumbent, her deep breasts forward as she rested on her elbow, watching the child, which now rolled from his back upon the floor, and smiling up into the screen began to crawl toward it. O'Hara pressed his face into his palms. "How long have I been gone?" "I do not know, O'Hara--perhaps two days, perhaps two months. There is no way of telling time in the cities of the Degraded. There is no sun and no moon, and no need for time, for time is a measure of accomplishment and nothing is accomplished here. We exist, and that is all." The child sat up. He yawned. "He must sleep now," said Nedra, and moved quickly to pick him up. "We must not talk, we would disturb him--" "Nedra, this is not possible. We're speaking as if we were together in that exquisite little room, yet only hours ago--or days ago--I saw you drowning, and I unable to break through the yielding wall to save you from it. And only hours after that--or was it days or months?--you suddenly were back with me in that exquisite room, bringing the child, after those endless days and nights of solitude in which I did not know--" "What troubles you?"