Unlike Korsakov, Chester was not a man of action, but he believed he could manage this little uprising. He'd need help: Fence and John Whreg seemed likely recruits, maybe he could even co-opt Brother Emil. If he couldn't win Bet Wiley over, they'd just take her hostage. All they really needed was her story, not her cooperation. Hole up in some barn with the bomb and invite the cameras to his very own media circus. He would be a colossus astride the communications net; the world would echo once again with the power of his voice.
On arriving at the lounge, he saw Brother Emil Sanger already seated at the far end of the circle of chairs. He assumed the prophet was there for the same reason he was — to get closer to Elizabeth Wiley.
Roberta opened the session by focussing immediately on the new arrivals. "Let's start with you, Brother Emil," she said. "You were saying this morning that you wanted to be cured."
"Cured, yes," said Brother Emil. "Of the coercion of the state. Of the tyranny of reason."
Roberta raised her eyebrows expectantly.
Allan Fence, the writer, quickly rose to the occasion. "What coercion?" he said. "You checked yourself in here voluntarily, Brother Emil. Of your own free will."
"When we were neanderthals," replied Brother Emil, "we developed a taste for mastodon. You know how we hunted them, my friend? We'd form a hunting line and drive the herd toward the edge of a cliff. Within the bounds of that line each mastodon exercised free will, yet today" — he waved at the window, which looked out over the fields — "one very rarely sees a mastodon."
"No, no, that's terribly wrong." Linda Bartly was upset. "We're not all
mastodons, we're not all the same. They're like a hunting line, but what they've crowded together is a flock of creatures: sloths, butterflies, leopards, loons, platypuses-"
Loons indeed, thought Chester.
"— they want us all to be the same, but we're not — "
"Linda," said Roberta, "would you like to tell the group what you see in Brother Emil and Chester's auras?" She turned and explained to Chester: "Linda sees auras. But not around those of us who've undergone Carcopino. We've lost ours."
Brother Emil held up his hand. "It will avail us nothing to become mastodons, certainly. But if we all grew wings together, the onrushing cliff would become an opportunity."
"Or arm the mastodons with machine guns," said Allan Fence thoughtfully.
"Suitably adapted for physiological differences, of course. Trunk triggered, air-cooled fifty calibers with cermet stocks."
"Mr. Drummond's aura is huge," Linda Bartly stage-whispered. "Big enough for all of us. But it's gray — "
"I'm interested in what the group thinks of Brother Emil's image of the wings," said Roberta. "Implicitly, he's proposing to lead you, to turn you into his followers. He's not a man who gives up easily — only last year he was preaching the end of the world to his cult on Mt. Shasta."
"It was postponed," said Sanger.
"Your following has evaporated since then. Is that the reason you're here?"
"I'm here because the answers are here. I always seek the answers. Others are welcome to join me in that seeking."
"It was postponed," said Bet Wiley. She was knitting, leaning back in her chair, unhurriedly clacking the brass needles, between which hung a tiny scrap of finished work.
There was a silence. It was more than Brother Emil shutting up and staring. Everyone seemed to hang on Bet's words.
"It was postponed," she said again, and shook her head a little. "But now it'll come. She has come back for the stragglers, the lost sheep."
"I'm sorry, Bet," said Roberta, "can you explain?"
Bet Wiley tilted her head. "She says I'm to be the very last. Just look at the way the chairs are arranged in this room, and you'll see it's so. Who's sitting where." Then she turned to Chester. "She tells me you're my test."
"The Virgin sent you a message about Chester Drummond?" asked Allan Fence. "You know, I wrote that story once, only it was Joan of Arc and Hitler."
"What brings you to us, Chester?" said Gall Wood, the Red Sox fan. Chester glared at her.
"You should share with the group," said Roberta. "You agreed to cooperate."
"I did not," said Chester. "Just because I've been forced to seek shelter from your sterile C-K society doesn't mean I have to answer questions. This isn't a prison, it's an accommodation farm. Wasn't that what you said earlier?"
"You think today's society is sterile? I find it closer to utopia than the world your generation left us."
"If it were anyone else besides these condescending, all-forgiving Carcopino clones that had taken away your power," said Allan Fence, "you'd probably have been executed as a war criminal."
"Fair enough," Chester said. "At least it would have been a man's death, a leader's death."
"When you accept Carcopino-Koster treatment," said Roberta, "you'll understand how little difference there is between the leader of a movement and one of that movement's followers. We've no more to hold against you than we would against someone you'd led around by the nose — you're both victims of a delusive belief system."
"In a parade going nowhere," said Allan Fence, "it doesn't matter if you're standing in the front."
"I was a Valutarian," said Gail Wood. "I voted for you. Sent you money. 'Chester Drummond, he remembers the values of America.'"
Chester was jolted by the slogan. He had heard it through amplifiers in crowded convention halls, seen it scroll across window shirts across the land. Now hearing it spoken here at a roundtable of idiots, Chester realized just how far he was from the ideal America.
"Read your newsletter right up to the end," she continued reflectively.
"Lifetime subscriber. Never thought I'd meet you, though."
"At the end," said Bet Wiley, "the universe shrinks to one point, and all that is scattered is collected together."
"Yes," said Brother Emil. "The All is here with us in this room." He leaned forward, excessively pleased.
"Your aura," said Linda Bartly, staring at Brother Emil. "It's flaring yellow, like a beacon of hope in the night."
"It's not night," Allan Fence pointed out. "It's one-twenty in the afternoon."
"The gray one," said Linda Bartly, indicating Chester. "He's enclosing us in his world."
"The melancholic temperament has an allure," said Roberta. "Until Carcopino, it was widely seen as a prerequisite for the deepest sort of insight. But quite the contrary is actually true."
"Tell that to Lincoln," said Chester.
"Or Beethoven, or Malzberg," said Allan Fence, with a vinegar laugh. "The C-K society is hardly lacking for philosophers or artists," said Roberta. "You know that as well as I do. They're simply free of the psychological turbulence, the displaced intensities, that distort your intellect."
"Turbulence," said Brother Emil. "That's one word for what's missing from your utopia. Others are passion, genius, that unpredictable spark that furthers the All. Your churches are empty, your familial bonds have been reduced to economic contracts. The graveyards go unvisited because the dead are forgotten. This is aworld fit only to end."
"Everything I said about the depressive tendency applies equally to the manic," said Roberta.
"Let them dance," said Bet Wiley, and again the room fell silent around her, and there was only the click of her knitting.