Everyone knew what they were there for: to reassure one another that they were all together, and to discuss what was to be done next. The spirit of the gathering was festive and a little excited. People stood up on the porch and spoke, all saying in one way or another, “We’re not going to give in, we’re not going to let our hostages down!” When Lev spoke he was cheered: grandson of the great Shults who led the Long March, explorer of the wilderness, and a general favorite anyhow. The cheering was interrupted, there was a commotion in the crowd, which now numbered over a thousand. Night had come on, and the electric lights on the Meeting House porch, powered by the town generator, were feeble, so it was hard to see what was going on at the edge of the crowd. A squat, massive, black object seemed to be pushing through the people. When it got nearer the porch it could be seen as a mass of men, a troop of guards from the City, moving as a solid block. The block had a voice: “Meetings … order … pain,” was all anyone could hear, because everyone was asking indignant questions. Lev, standing under the light, called for quiet, and as the crowd fell silent the loud voice could be heard:
“Mass meetings are forbidden, the crowd is to disperse. Public meetings are forbidden by order of the Supreme Council upon pain of imprisonment and punishment. Disperse at once and go to your homes!”
“No,” people said, “why should we?”—“What right have they got?”—“Go to your own homes!”
“Come on, quiet!” Andre roared, in a voice nobody knew he possessed. As they grew quiet again he said to Lev in his usual mumble, “Go on, talk.”
“This delegation from the City has a right to speak,” Lev said, loud and clear. “And to be heard. And when we’ve heard what they say, we may disregard it, but remember that we are resolved not to threaten by act or word. We do not offer anger or injury to these men who come amongst us. What we offer them is friendship and the love of truth!”
He looked at the guards, and the officer at once repeated the order to disperse the meeting in a flat, hurried voice. When he was through, there was silence. The silence continued. Nobody said anything. Nobody moved.
“All right now,” the officer shouted, forcing his voice, “get moving, disperse, go to your homes!”
Lev and Andre looked at each other, folded their arms, and sat down. Holdfast, who was also up on the porch, sat down too; then Southwind, Elia, Sam, Jewel, and the others. The people on the meeting ground began to sit down. It was a queer sight in the shadows and the yellowish, shadow-streaked light: the many, many dark forms all seeming to shrink to half their height, with a faint rustling sound, a few murmurs. Some children giggled. Within half a minute they were all sitting down. No one remained afoot but the troop of guards, twenty men standing close together.
“You’ve been warned,” the officer shouted, and his voice was both vindictive and embarrassed. He was evidently not sure what to do with these people who now sat silently on the ground, looking at him with expressions of peaceable curiosity, as if they were children at a puppet show and he was the puppet. “Get up and disperse, or I’ll begin the arrests!”
Nobody said anything.
“All right, arrest the thir—the twenty nearest. Get up. You, get up!”
The people spoken to or laid hands on by the guardsmen got up, and stood quietly. “Can my wife come too?” a man asked the guard in a low voice, not wanting to break the great, deep stillness of the crowd.
“There will be no further mass meetings of any kind. By order of the Council!” the officer bawled, and led his troop off, herding a group of about twenty-five townsfolk. They disappeared into the darkness outside the reach of the electric lights.
Behind them the crowd was silent.
A voice rose from it, singing. Other voices joined in, softly at first. It was an old song, from the days of the Long March on Earth.
As the group of guards and prisoners went on into the darkness the singing did not sound fainter behind them but stronger and clearer, as all the hundreds of voices joined and sent the music ringing over the dark quiet lands between Shantih and the City of Victoria.
The twenty-four people who had been arrested by the guards, or had voluntarily gone off with them, returned to Shantih late the following day. They had been put into a warehouse for the night, perhaps because the City Jail had no room for so many, and sixteen of them women and children. There had been a trial in the afternoon, they said, and when it was done they were told to go home. “But we’re supposed to pay a fine,” old Pamplona said importantly.
Pamplona’s brother Lyons was a thriving orcharder, but Pamplona, slow and sickly, had never amounted to much. This was his moment of glory. He had gone to prison, just like Gandhi, just like Shults, just like on Earth. He was a hero, and delighted.
“A fine?” Andre asked, incredulous. “Money? They know we don’t use their coins—”
“A fine,” Pamplona explained, tolerant of Andre’s ignorance, “is that we have to work for twenty days on the new farm.”
“What new farm?”
“Some kind of new farm the Bosses are going to make.”
“The Bosses are going in for farming?” Everybody laughed.
“They’d better, if they want to eat,” a woman said.
“What if you don’t go work on this new farm?”
“I don’t know,” Pamplona said, getting confused. “Nobody said. We weren’t supposed to talk. It was a court, with a judge. The judge talked.”
“Who was the judge?”
“Macmilan.”
“Young Macmilan?”
“No, the old one, the Councillor. The young one was there, though. A big fellow he is! Like a tree! And he smiles all the time. A fine young man.”
Lev came, at a run, having just got news of the prisoners’ return. He hugged the first ones he came to, in the excited group that had gathered in the street to welcome them. “You’re back, you’re back—All of you?”
“Yes, yes, they’re all back, you can go eat supper now!”
“The others, Hari and Vera—”
“No, not them. They didn’t see them.”
“But all of you—They didn’t hurt you?”
“Lev said he couldn’t eat anything till you got back, he’s been fasting.”
“We’re all right, go eat some dinner, what a stupid thing to do!”
“They treated you well?”
“Like guests, like guests,” old Pamplona asserted. “We’re all brothers. Isn’t that so? A good big breakfast they gave us, too!”
“Our own rice we grew, that’s what they gave us. Fine hosts! to lock their guests up in a barn as black as night and as cold as last night’s porridge, I have an ache in every bone and I want a bath, every one of those guard people was crawling with lice, I saw one right on his neck, the one that arrested me, a louse the size of your fingernail, ugh, I want a bath!” This was Kira, a buxom woman who lisped because she had lost her two front teeth; she said she didn’t miss the teeth, they got in the way of her talking anyhow. “Who’ll put me up for the night? I’m not going to walk home to East Village with every bone aching and a dozen lice creeping up and down my backbone!” Five or six people at once offered her a bath, a bed, hot food. All the freed prisoners were looked after and made much of. Lev and Andre went off down the little side street that led to Lev’s home. They walked in silence for a while.