“Stranger, get up there,” said Guy, prodding him from behind, and Chandler took a plain wooden chair next to the girl.
“People of Orphalese,” cried the teen-age cutie named Meggie, “we have two more brands to save from the imps!”
The men and women in the audience cackled or shrilled, “Save them. Save them!” They all had a look of invisible uniforms. Chandler saw, like baseball players in the lobby of a hotel or soldiers in a diner outside the gate of their post; they were all of a type. Their type was something strange. Some were tall, some short; there were old, fat, lean and young among them; but they all wore about them a look of glowing excitement, muted by an aura of suffering and pain. They wore, in a word, the look of bigots.
The bound girl was not one of them. She might have been twenty years old or as much as thirty. She might have been pretty. It was hard to tell; she wore no makeup, her hair strung raggedly to her neck, and her face was drawn into a tight, lean line. It was her eyes that were alive. She saw Chandler and she was sorry for him. And he saw, as he turned to look at her, that she was manacled to the dentist’s chair.
“People of Orphalese,” chanted Guy, standing behind Chandler with the muzzle of the gun against his neck, “the meeting of the Orphalese Self-Preservation Society will now come to order.” There was an approving, hungry murmur from the audience.
“Well, people of Orphalese,” Guy went on in his sing-song, “the agenda for the day is first the salvation of we Orphalese on McGuire’s Mountain.”
(“AU saved, all of us saved,” rolled a murmur from the congregation.) A lean, red-headed man bounded to the platform and fussed with the stand of spotlights, turning one of them full on Chandler.
“People of Orphalese, as we are saved, do I have your consent to pass on and proceed to the next order of business?”
(“Consent, consent, consent,” rolled the echo.) “And then the second item of business is to welcome and bring to grace these two newly found and adopted souls.”
The congregation shouted variously: “Bring them to grace! Save them from the imps! Keep Orphalese from the taint of the beast!”
Evidently Guy was satisfied. He nodded and became more chatty. “Okay, people of Orphalese, let’s get down to it. We got two new ones, like I say. Their spirits have gone wandering on the wind, or anyway one of them has, and you all know the et cetera. They have committed a wrong unto others and therefore unto themselves. Herself, I mean.
Course, the other one could have a flame spirit in him too.” He stared severely at Chandler. “Boys, keep an eye on him, why don’t you?” he said to two men in the front row, surrendering his gun. “Meggie, you tell about the female one.”
The teen-aged girl stepped forward and said, in a conversational tone but with modest pride, “People of Orph’lese, well, I was walking down the cut and I heard this car coming. Well, I was pretty surprised, you know. I had to figure what to do. You all know what the trouble is with cars.”
“The imps!” cried a woman of forty with a face like a catfish.
The girl nodded. “Most prob’ly. Well, I1 mean, people of OrpMese, well, I was by the switchback where we keep the chewy-freeze hid, so I just waited till I saw it slowing down for the curveme out of sight, you know and I rolled the chewy-freeze out nice and it caught the wheels. Right over!” she cried gleefully. “Off the shoulder, people of Orph’lese, and into the ditch and over, and I didn’t give it a chance to bum. I cut the switch and I had her! I put a knife into her back, just a little, about a quarter of an inch, maybe. Her pain was the breakin’ of the shell that enclosed her understanding, like it says. I figured she was all right then because she yelled but I brought her along that way. Then Guy took care of her until we got the synod. Oh,” she remembered, “and her tongue staggered a little without purpose while he was putting it on, didn’t it, Guy?” The bearded man nodded, grinning, and lifted up the girl’s foot. Incredulously, Chandler saw that it was bound tight with a three-foot length of barbed wire, wound and twisted like a tourniquet, the blood black and congealed around it. He lifted his shocked eyes to meet the girl’s. She only looked at him, with pity and understanding.
Guy patted the foot and let it go. “I didn’t have any more C-clamps, people of Orphalese,” he apologized, “but it looks all right at that. Well, let’s see. We got to make up our minds about these two, I guessno, wait!” He held up his hand as a murmur began. “First thing is, we ought to read a verse or two.”
He opened a purple-bound volume at random, stared at a page for a moment, moving his lips, and then read: “Some of you say. It is the north wind who has woven the clothes we wear.’
“And I say. Ay, it was the north wind, but shame was his loom, and the softening of the sinews was his thread.
“And when his work was done he laughed in the forest.”
Gently he closed the book, looking thoughtfully at the wall at the back of the room. He scratched his head. “Well, people of Orphalese,” he said slowly, “they’re laughing in the forest all right, I guarantee, but we’ve got one here that may be honest in the flesh, probably is, though she was a thief in the spirit. Right? Well, do we take her in or reject her, 0 people of Orphalese?”
The audience muttered to itself and then began to call out:
“Accept! Oh, bring in the brand! Accept and drive out the imp!”
“Fine,” said the teen-ager, rubbing her hands and looking at the bearded man. “Guy, let her go.” He began to release her from the chair. “You, girl stranger, what’s your name?”
The girl said faintly, “Ellen Braisted.”
” ‘Meggie, my name is Ellen Braisted,’ ” corrected the teen-ager. “Always say the name of the person you’re talkin’ to in Orph’lese, that way we know it’s you talkin’, not a flame spirit or wanderer. Okay, go sit down.” Ellen limped wordlessly down into the audience. “Oh, and people of Orph’lese,’ said Meggie, “the car’s still there if we need it for anything. It didn’t burn. Guy, you go on with this other fellow.”
Guy stroked his beard and assessed Chandler, looking him over carefully. “Okay,” he said. “People of Orphalese, the third order of business is to welcome or reject this other brand saved from the imps, as may be your pleasure.”
Chandler sat up straighter now that all of them were looking at him again; but it wasn’t quite his turn, at that, because there was an interruption. Guy never finished.
From the valley, far below, there was a sudden mighty thunder, rolling among the mountains. The windows blew in with a crystalline crash.
The room erupted into confusion, the audience leaping from their seats, running to the broad windows, Guy and the teen-age girl seizing rifles, everyone in motion at once.
Chandler straightened, then sat down again. The red-headed man guarding him was looking away. It would be quite possible to grab his gun, run, get away from these maniacs. Yet he had nowhere to go. They might be crazy, but they seemed to have organization.
They seemed, in fact, to have worked out, on whatever crazed foundation of philosophy, some practical methods for coping with possession. He decided to stay, wait and see.
And at once he found himself leaping for the gun.
No. Chandler didn’t find himself attacking the red-headed man. He found his body doing it; Chandler had nothing to do with it. It was the helpless compulsion he had felt before, that had nearly cost him his life; his body active and urgent and his mind completely cut off from it.
He felt his own muscles move in ways he had not planned, observed himself leap forward, felt his own fist strike at the back of the red-headed man’s ear. “The man went spinning, the gun went flying, Chandler’s body leaped after it, with Chandler a prisoner in his own brain, watching, horrified and helpless. And he had the gun!
He caught it in the hand that was his own hand, though someone else was moving it; he raised it and half-turned. He was suddenly conscious of a fusillade of gunfire from the roof, and a scattered echo of guns all round the outside of the house. Part of Um was surprised, another alien part was not. He started to shoot the teen-aged girl in the back of the head, silently shouting. No!