"Time troubles me. Time and the vagueness of what has happened in it. And you trouble me, Nedra! This is not the way you were, content to have a semblance of me showing on a screen." "Ah, you see, O'Hara?" She smiled. "This is that dying process that I warned you of, this is what happens in the cities of the Degraded. Your mind is steeped in clouds. You are frantic now, but soon enough you will not care. You will not know it. And that will be much worse than that death which could have come easily for us upon the mountain. Remember now? Remember that you told me we could always die?" "Yes, Nedra, I remember." "We cannot do it now." "I can die now, I can climb these tiers of books and leap--" "But I cannot. And you would never leave me." O'Hara bowed his head. At last he asked, "Where were you all that time I was alone in that exquisite room? Where was the baby born?" "I was with the Father. A woman of the masses was with me." "I have seen no masses here in Washington." "Nonetheless they are here. Millions, millions--like those we saw jammed together in the corridors of Emporia, jamming the corridors below the upper levels of the capital. They exist, down there, as we exist up here--as worms exist within concentric rings in a decaying log. The baby is sleepy, O'Hara. And I am sleepy too." She stretched herself upon a couch that he remembered, holding the baby closely in her arms, and she was smiling drowsily up toward the screen when the light upon it ebbed. "Nedra! Don't leave." "But I am not leaving. As long as the Father wishes it, I shall be here, as close to you as if we were upon two couches in this same exquisite room, able always to see each other and to speak." "Which is worse than death!" The light was gone upon the screen. Her voice, sleepy, came to him once more. "Are you sure of that? Are you so certain that death will not be this way?" And he was not certain. Nothing now seemed certain. Nothing had reality. But soon, re-echoing Nedra's words, he would not care. He would not care! Days passed. At least the glow would come again upon the screen and Nedra would be there, talking to him as though they were together in that exquisite room, smiling or laughing at the child upon the floor, angry when O'Hara's frustrated calls awakened it, scolding. Or whispering through the darkness on the screen. "Nedra, Nedra--" "What is it, O'Hara?" "Where are you in that darkness? Let me hear your voice. Speak to me, Nedra!" "But I am here." "Yes, you are there, wherever that may be, and I am here, in this enormous room of books, entombed in centuries of written facts while you--you cannot see, but now I touch this screen, my hands are feeling for you in that dark, toward the whisper of your voice. And touch cold metal! Nedra--" "Yes, O'Hara." "It does not matter to you that we are apart like this?" "But you sent me away from you, O'Hara." "And you will never forgive me."