Chapter VII

The lights behind the windows of the schoolhouse made vague islands in the dark pennons of mist. Kazetzky got out and tied the horse to the hitching-rail as Heidekopfer dismounted. "Go in, little father," he said. "I will stay outside as long as I can." He was breathing hard, as though trying with all his strength to resist some kind of compulsion.

Heidekopfer checked the sets of his radio, walked to the door and flung it open. The fifteen or twenty men and women of the Supreme Soviet were seated in chairs scattered in no particular order around the classroom, with Samsonov at the teacher's desk, his back to Heidekopfer as the latter entered. But the thing that made the reporter catch his breath as the faces turned toward him like flowers toward the sun was the sight of Ann Starnes, sitting just to the right of the Patriarch. Her glance was coldly unfriendly.

For a second or two the tableau held. Then Samsonov turned round and rose majestically to his feet. "The session of the Supreme Soviet is secret," he said, and glared.

Heidekopfer once more felt the headache sensation at the back of his neck, accompanied by an almost overwhelming impulse to get out of there, to escape from that place before something dreadful happened, a strange malaise, which he could not name possessed him. He staggered back a step, then caught Ann's eye fixed on him with the same quality as the rest, and was abruptly seized by another impulse, even more overwhelming.

The second one struck him as a better idea, anyway, so he yielded to it. He took three rapid steps toward the Patriarch Samsonov and let him have one fetched up from the region of the belt-line.

It took the big man flush on the button, and down he went, thrashing and kicking, as the room burst into a turmoil of shouts and chairs knocked to the floor. Ann screamed. Heidekopfer grabbed her by the arm. "You're coming with me whether you like it or not," he said in English, and turned to face the group menacingly. But nobody seemed inclined to offer him any opposition, and the thought flashed through his head that they probably had a law against physical violence, too.

Samsonov had hauled himself to his feet with the aid of the desk. There was a little trickle of blood from his mouth and his eyes were deadly. The last thing Heidekopfer heard him say as he pulled the girl through the door was, "There will be a law--"

Kazetzky had disappeared. Ann was limp as he bundled her into the droshky, and didn't say anything until he had unhitched the horse, climbed to the driver's seat, and with a combination of yells and jerking on the reins, urged it into plodding motion. Then she said, "Oh, Bob!"

He didn't turn around. "Yeah. What is it?"

"I was hating you. I knew they were going to pass a law that you should commit suicide, and I was going to help them."

"Nice of you."

"When you hit him, something happened. It was like coming out of a dark room into the sunlight.... Bob!"

"What is it?"

"I think I need a keeper. I'll marry you when we get back--if we ever do." She began to cry.

This time he swung round on the seat. "Listen, angel," he said, "I want you just enough to take you up on that, whether it's on a rebound or not. But are you sure you're out from under the control that big lug seemed to have snapped on you?"

"I--I--think so. But I don't know how long it will last. Get me out of here, quick!"

* * * * *

Overhead, a beam of light stabbed down through the crowding mist, just picking out the corner of Samsonov's house a few hundred yards beyond them, and there was a sound of ghostly wings. The beam shifted, ran along a line of trees, and then satisfied itself with an open field.

"The helio," said Heidekopfer. "I radioed for one on the chance I could get you away." He tried to urge the horse to greater speed as lights came on in the building and the aircraft swung in for a landing in a pool of its own illumination. Abruptly, the headache sensation took him in the back of the neck again, stronger than ever, accompanied by an intolerable sense of depression, and the night was suddenly full of horrors ahead. It was not worth the trouble. He felt the reins loosening in his hands. "Ann!" he cried, "Ann ..." and blacked out.

He came to to the sound of purring motors and struggled to sit up. Someone said, "Give him this," and a cup of coffee was held against his lips. He looked up into Ann's face.

"Still feel the same way you did in the droshky?" was the first thing he said as he drank.

"Sssh. Yes," she said, and he looked round to see the Lanzerottis smiling at him across the cabin of the helio. He struggled upright on the transom. "That was a narrow one," he said. "I think they must have passed the law of suicide against me. But I can't figure out how it would affect me so. They said I was a resistant."

Lanzerotti said, "Thought can operate without physical presence. The Christian Scientists and Theosophists on earth knew that years ago. And this was a rather massive impact."

Heidekopfer shook his head. "Give me a little more of that stuff, will you? I'm still a little groggy. What I can't figure out is how you two got away and came along."

"We were talking about that," said Lanzerotti. "Rosa and I were just getting ready for bed, when it suddenly struck us that everything you had said was true, and the Tolstoians had us under control and were showing us, in effect, a Potemkin village. When you knocked Samsonov out, even for only a moment, the control snapped on us as it did on Ann. Then he got so interested in passing the law of suicide against you that he didn't have time to rebuild his fences. So we got away, but we had to leave most of the records."

Heidekopfer drank again. "I don't suppose it makes much difference, though," he said. "Our verbal report ought to be enough to keep the Council from giving them the Wrightley Islands. My God, if that thing got loose! With what they've developed they'd be able to take over every inch of the three worlds, little by little, and turn them into more Tolstoias."

"No," said Lanzerotti emphatically.

"No what?"

"My recommendation will be that we grant them the Wrightley Islands and any other bits of uninhabited territory they happen to want--but only for so long as Samsonov remains Patriarch."

Heidekopfer's mouth fell open. "What!" he exclaimed aghast, "Has he still got you under?"

Lanzerotti's smile was bland. "Not at all. They've attained the goal of the totalitarian state. They've got everybody thinking alike. Remember, Dubrassov couldn't warn us, even when he wanted to, although he couldn't bring himself to go along with Samsonov's expansionist policy. Samsonov showed us Potemkin villages, all right. But don't you see what all this crazy set-up adds up to? These people can't change. They've lost their adaptability.

"The system has to be rigid, because the first time anyone expresses an individual idea, the whole totalitarian structure will collapse. They're inbred and interlocked, and Samsonov has complete control of their thinking and their behavior--for the time being, at least. But as soon as the Tolstoians expand to the Wrightley Islands, or anywhere else, they'll be facing conditions they've never before encountered. They'll have to learn to think for themselves again--"

"--And as soon as they start to think new thoughts, Samsonov's power will evaporate. He'll lose his grip, just like he did on me!" finished Heidekopfer, reaching for Ann's hand.

"You see," concluded Lanzerotti, "Dubrassov was the really dangerous one. He didn't have new ideas, and whether they were castaways or not, more people would have been drawn in on him."

The little group was quiet, contemplative, then they smiled knowingly at one another.

"Let's get home," said Ann, "and make our--my last picture."