“Whatever for?” I exclaimed. “That’s not sunlight outside, it’s elflight. It won’t inhibit transformation.”
“It’s changed character since that priest set upshot. I used a spectroscope to make certain. The glow’s acquired enough ultraviolet-X500 angstroms to be exact that you d have trouble. By-product of a guard against any that we might try to use offensively.
“But we won’t!”
“Of course not, It’s pure ostentation on his part. Clever, though. When they saw a shieldfield established around them, the fanatics and naive children in the mob leaped to the conclusion that it was necessary; and thus Nornwell gets reconfirmed as the Enemy.” He shook his head. “Believe me, Steve, these demonstrators are being operated like gloves, by some mighty shrewd characters.”
“You sure the priest himself raised the field?”
“Yeah. They’re all Maguses in that clergy, remember—part of their training—and I wonder what else they learn in those lonesome seminaries. Let’s try talking with him.”
“Is he in charge?” I wondered. “The Johannine hierarchy does claim that when its members mix in politics, they do it strictly as private citizens.”
“I know, Barney” said. “And I am the Emperor Norton.”
“No, really,” I persisted. “These conspiracy theories; are too bloody simple to be true. What you’ve got is a—uh, a general movement, something in the air, people, disaffected—”
But then, walking, we’d reached one of the ornamental glass panels that flanked the main entrance. It was smashed like the windows, but no one had thought to barricade it, and our protective spell forestalled entry. Of course, it did not affect us. We step through, onto the landing, right alongside the line bodies that was supposed to keep us in.
We couldn’t go farther. The stairs down to ground were paced solid. For a moment we weren’t noticed. Barney tapped one straggle-bearded adolescent on the shoulder. “Excuse me,” he said from his towering height. “May I?” He plucked a sign out of the unwashed hand, hung the blanket over the placard, and waved his improvised flag of truce aloft. The color was bilious green.
A kind of gasp like the puff of wind before a storm, went through the crowd. I saw faces and faces and faces next to me, below me, dwindling off into the dusk beyond the flickering elflight. I don’t think it was only my haste and my prejudice that made them look eerily alike.
You hear a lot about long-haired men and shorthaired women, bathless bodies and raggedy clothes. Those were certainly present in force. Likewise I identified the usual graybeard radicals and campus hangers-on, hoodlums, unemployables, vandals, True Believers, and the rest. But there were plenty of clean, well-dressed, terribly earnest boys and girls. There were the merely curious, too, who had somehow suddenly found themselves involved. And everyone was tall, short, or medium, fat, thin, or average, rich, poor, or middleclass, bright, dull, or normal, heterosexual, homosexual, or I know not what, able in some fields, inept in others, interested in some things, bored by others, each with an infinite set of memories, dreams, hopes, terrors, loves-each with a soul.
No, the sameness appeared first in the signs they carried. I didn’t count how many displayed ST. JOHN 13:34 or I JOHN 2:9-11 or another of those passages; how many more carried the texts, or some variation like LOVE THY NEIGHBOR or plain LOVE: quite a few, anyway, repeating and repeating. Others were less amiable:
DEMATERIALIZE THE MATERIALISTS!
WEAPONMAKERS, WEEP!
STOP GIVING POLICE DEVILS HORNS
KILL THE KILLERS, HATE THE HATERS, DESTROY THE DESTROYERS!
SHUT DOWN THIS SHOP
And so it was as if the faces-worse, the brains behind them had become nothing but placards with slogans written across.
Don’t misunderstand me. I wouldn’t think much of a youngster who never felt an urge to kick the God of Things As They Are in his fat belly. It’s too bad that most people lose it as they get old and fat themselves. The Establishment is often unendurably smug and stupid; the hands it folds so piously are often bloodstained.
And yet . . . and yet . . . it’s the only thing between us and the Dark Ages that’d have to intervene before another and probably worse Establishment could arise to restore order. And don’t kid yourself that none would. Freedom is a fine thing until it becomes somebody else’s freedom to enter your house, kill, rob, rape, and enslave the people you care about. Then you’ll accept any man on horseback who promises you’ll have some predictability back into life, and you yourself will give him his saber and knout.
Therefore isn’t our best bet to preserve this we’ve got? However imperfectly, it does function; it’s ours, it shaped us, we may not understand it too well but surely we understand it better than something untried and alien. With a lot of hard work, h thinking, hard-nosed good will, we can improve it.
You will not, repeat not, get improvement if wild-blue-yonder theorists who’d take us in one leap outside the whole realm of our painfully acquired experience; or from dogmatists mouthing the pat words of reform movements that accomplished something two generations or two centuries ago; or college sophomores convinced they have the answer to every social problem over which men like Hammurabi, Moses, Confucius, Aristotle, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Thomas Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Voltaire, Jefferson, Burke, Lincoln, a thousand others broke their heads and their hearts.
But enough of that. I’m no intellectual; I try to think for myself. It depressed me to see these mostly well-meaning people made tools of the few whose aim was to bring the whole shebang down around their ears.
XXII
The indrawn breath returned as a guttural sigh that edged toward a growl. The nearest males took a step or two in our direction. Barney waved his flag. “Wait!” he called, a thunderous basso overriding any other sound. “Truce! Let’s talk this over! Take your leader to me!”
“Nothing to talk about, you murderers!” screamed a pimply girl. She swung her sign at me. I glimpsed upon it PEACE AND BROTHERHOOD before I had to get busy protecting my scalp. Someone began a chant that was quickly taken up by more and more: “Down with Diotrephes, down with Diotrephes, down with Diotrephes—”
Alarm stabbed through me. Though Diotrephes is barely mentioned in John’s third epistle, the Johannines of today made him a symbol of the churches that opposed their movement. (No doubt he also meant other things to their initiates and adepts.) The unbelieving majority of the purely rebellious hadn’t bothered to understand this. To them, Diotrephes became a name for the hated secular authority, or anyone else that got in their way. Those words had hypnotized more than one crowd into destructive frenzy.
I took her sign away from the girl, defended my eyes from her fingernails, and reached for my flash. But abruptly everything changed. A bell sounded. A voice cried. Both were low, both somehow penetrated the rising racket.
“Peace. Hold love in your hearts, children. Be still in the presence of the Holy Spirit.”
My attacker retreated. The others who hemmed us in withdrew. Individuals started falling on their knees. A moan went through the mob, growing almost orgasmic before it died away into silence. Looking up, I saw the priest approach.
He traveled with bell in one hand, holding onto the upright of his tau crucifix while standing on its pedestal. Thus Christ nailed to the Cross of Mystery went before him. Nothing strange about that, I thought wildly, except that other churches would call it sacrilegious to give the central sign of their faith yonder shape, put an antigrav spell on it and use it like any broomstick. Yet the spectacle was weirdly impressive. It was like an embodiment of that Something Else on which Gnosticism is focused.
I’d regarded the Johnnies’ “ineffable secrets” as unspeakable twaddle. Tonight I knew better. More was here than the ordinary paranatural emanations. Every nerve of my werewolf heritage sensed it. I didn’t think the Power was of the Highest. But whence, then?