But much as he learned in the library during the ensuing weeks, it was his journey through the Tube to New York that taught him most of what America had been before the Third World War. The subterranean city, built since the establishment of the Curtain and glutted with its multi-millions of naked and hairless masses shambling along from feeding hall to feeding hall, sleeping together indiscriminately in those wide cushioned bunks everywhere along the city's corridors and herded always by the Sons with their atomic guns, was another and larger Emporia, and from the density of its population must itself be approaching a similar Deluge. It would be coming any day, the Son attached to O'Hara anticipated. "Only the Father knows the hour," the Son explained. "He counts the masses as they multiply, and when there are too many for the Tube to feed, the Deluge mercifully will come." "You call it mercy?" asked O'Hara. "Yes, that is the word that we were taught." "It does not hurt you to know what happens to the masses?" "Hurt me? I do not understand. I am in the Guild when it occurs." "But one of these women who will be dissolved may have been your mother. That one--she who carries her baby against her breast--she may indeed be your mother. And these--your sisters, and if they had received the training at the Father's schools in Washington that you received, they would have been as you are, articulate, able to comprehend--" "Are you referring to these females?" the Son asked, puzzled. "Don't you know the word _mother_?" "It was not taught to us. It must be nonessential." "But you do know about the birth of babies." "Oh, yes, an entirely artificial process." "The female who bears the baby in her womb nonetheless is its mother. It is her flesh and her blood that sustains it before its birth, and there is nothing artificial in that phase of it. Her blood has fed you. She has felt the pain and I think she must have felt some joy at your birth. Yes, despite your customs, despite the soulless processes the Father has enforced, or been driven to enforce, the word should mean something, it is not nonessential, and you can never aspire--" "One moment, please!" "--you can never aspire to emulate the men your fathers were, decades ago, unless--" "One moment, please," the Son repeated courteously. "For I remember something that happened once, which has sometimes disturbed me. I had been sent to collect the babies for the measurement of their brain waves, to determine those who should be sent to Washington to become Sons. There was a female who resisted--" The Son fell silent. He was staring at O'Hara, but his eyes were vacant, unseeing, or seeing very dimly back into the past. Then his voice resumed in a whispered hush: "And I though that was--beautiful." O'Hara paused a moment. Then he asked, "What did you do?"