CHAPTER 12

There was something so infinitely sad in the man's words that Pat was emotionally moved. Not knowing what a philosopher might be did not prevent her from feeling sorry that the bound man had been the last of whatever it was that he had been.

Comstock never knew about the conversation that the quondam Picaroon had with Pat, for all the while that the girl and the bound man talked, Comstock was in a little world of his own trying to chase down the reality of his own existence.

Sitting on the ground next to the man who called himself the Picaroon and the last philosopher, Pat found herself involved in a discussion of what the man spoke of as the eternal verities.

The sun rose higher and higher in the sky, noon came and went while Comstock went deeper and deeper into himself searching for the answer that does not exist.

When he had not moved for many hours, Pat tore herself away from what she was being told and asked, "What can I do for him?"

For the first time in many hours the philosopher gave place to the Picaroon and the madman, laughing gleefully as he said, "All you need do is find the answer for which he is questing. That will bring him out of the grey world into which the question has driven him."

Looking at Comstock, Pat felt fear like a live thing. There was no intelligence on his soft face. None at all. His eyes were unfocussed, his breathing very slow. His arms were hooked around his knees which were drawn up towards his chest. He had fallen over on his side.

Luckily Pat had no idea of what the foetal position looks like or she would have been even more frightened than she was.

Pat asked hesitantly, "Will you tell me the answer so that I can help him come back?"

Then the madman threw his lean face back and howled.

Wringing her hands, Pat wondered what had come over the man who such a short time before had told her wonderful things of which she had never dreamed.

When he was strangling with his own mirth, the man gasped, "My dear, I would gladly give the answer ... that's what I devoted all my life to searching for ... but the humor of it all is that there is no answer."

Then another paroxysm of laughter swept through him.

Deep down inside Comstock's brain in the never-never land to which the last philosopher's question had driven him, Comstock was dully aware that his body was being stroked. It felt nice and he made an animal sound deep in his throat. But the action did not serve to revive him any more than Pat's anxious voice which was shouting in his unhearing ears.

He never heard her say, "Darling, you _must_ come back! The R.A.'s are coming."

Comstock never knew when a squad of R.A.'s surrounded the car, and by means of a frightening array of stun-guns forced Pat to help them carry first the tied-up lunatic and then the unresisting body of the man she loved into the car in which they had driven onto the scene.

* * * * *

Inside Bowdler's house Grundy, Helen and the owner of the robot house sighed as midnight came and went. Bowdler voiced all their feelings when he said, "I am afraid we must give them up for lost. We have waited through three periods. There has been no sign of them. None at all."

While he was saying this, the R.A.'s were driving away with Comstock, Pat and the Picaroon.

"Then we can wait no longer?" Helen asked.

Shaking his head, Bowdler said, "No."

Grundy rose to his feet as he murmured, "I'm glad. This waiting has been worse than anything that the Board of Fathers can mete out to us."

Helen and Grundy paused at the door of the house and looked back regretfully, Grundy spoke, "It's been a wonderful month we had, we can remember that, darling."

She kissed him and they walked out into the darkness with Bowdler close behind them.

He said, "I shall be with you, and you can depend on my helping in any way that I can."

"To face the Board of Fathers!" Grundy's face was set. "I'll tell them a few home truths no matter what they finally decide to do to us."

"You're so brave, sweetheart," Helen said. And looked at him admiringly.

"But it's still The Grandfather whom I fear the most." Grundy was honest enough to add.

Bowdler laid his heavy hands on each of them and said, "Courage."

Then they started on the way to their fates.

* * * * *

In the R.A.'s car, Pat sat between the lump of unresisting flesh that Comstock had become and the cocoonlike figure of the philosopher.

The man who was a criminal in spite of himself observed the way Pat looked down at Comstock and his harshly handsome face softened.

"My dear, perhaps it is better that he be the way he is, if what you have told me is true and you are both rebels against the bonds that chain all of us on this sorry world of ours. I fear what the Board of Fathers or The Grandfather may decide may be much worse than this condition that my question has caused."

"To die is hard, but to die without knowing that you are dying, is horrible," Pat said through clenched teeth.

"It is unmanly, I will not gainsay that." Then the man was silent.

Ahead of them the odd buildings that housed the Board and The Grandfather rose up in their way. The globular buildings inside of which were both the Elders and the Fathers were dwarfed by the height of the shaft of The Grandfather's residence.

The R.A.'s were as silent and seemingly unthinking as machines. Their first visible emotion had been one of jubilance at having caught Pat and Comstock but that had faded under the fear of punishment for not having caught them sooner.

They sat statue still, their hands on their guns as the car drove up to the entrance of the buildings.

One of the R.A.'s left the machine to go for further orders from his superior officer.

In the car the last philosopher said softly, "Perhaps whatever little nobility there is in man is best served by dying with one's eyes open. I shall not again retreat into the lie of the Picaroon." He smiled gently at Pat, and said, "I think I will like dying as one of you, as a rebel."

But all Pat's attention was on her beloved who had never stirred from the curled up position into which his thoughts had forced him.

Seeing this, the last philosopher said, "There is one chance, and only one that I can think of that may revive him. Perhaps love, an emotion of which I know very little, may be strong enough to pull him out of that place to which he has run for safety."

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"To me," the man said, "as a philosopher, the charms of love and sex were never very strong. But I should imagine, just as pure speculation, that the two must be very tightly entwined."

Deep, deep down inside the thing that Comstock had become he felt a stirring of some kind of interest. He did not yet know what was causing the sensation, he could not hear the love words that Pat was whispering in his ear, he was not really conscious of her soft hands caressing him, but something was taking place, something that seemed to have reality in a place where there was no such thing.

* * * * *

So it was that the guards of the R.A. were as shocked by her behavior as earlier the waiting crowd had been when Comstock and Pat had broken the deepest, strongest held taboo of their culture.

At their side, the last philosopher chuckled as he saw the guards blanch, then turn their eyes away.

Their livid faces were turned from the scene as Pat literally drew Comstock back from the bourne to which he had retreated.

Gasping, astounded, Comstock came back to reality. He was terribly shocked when he saw what Pat had done, but this shock gave place to an even bigger one when he realized that they had been captured, that they were in front of The Grandfather's Retreat, and that there was no longer any chance for escape.

None at all.

Gasping, he asked, "What happened? Where have I been? How did we get here? Why don't I remember coming here?"

"Don't repeat my question," the last philosopher said, "or he may be trapped by it again."

Slurring over the crux of the matter, Pat gently tried to bring Comstock up to date.

The guards recovered some of their equanimity and brutally shoved all three of them out of the car. The last philosopher, still bound, crashed to his face as they evicted him. Pat hurried to untie him, and help him to his feet.

Then, inside a living square formed by the R.A.'s they were ushered back into the ante-room which Comstock, Grundy and Helen had escaped from a month earlier.

Surprise was piled on surprise for Comstock. When the R.A.'s shoved him into the room he saw, waiting, sitting in chairs, Helen and Grundy. Standing, pacing back and forth was Bowdler, his heavy face set with thought.

Helen cried, "We thought you were dead!"

Then there were introductions, and explanations, and it was only when Bowdler finally interrupted and said, "Hold everything. You realize it is late at night, and it is only because of the uniqueness of the situation that the Board of Fathers is sitting in extraordinary session, in order to decide what to do with you all, that I am here."

This sufficed to let Comstock and Pat know that Bowdler was still playing his double game.

Helen whispered in Comstock's ear. "Bowdler pretended that he had captured us and brought us here and then invoked the special session of the Fathers."

Just as the door that led into the Board of Fathers began to open, Bowdler said, his voice harsh with urgency, "I want you to go in there, not as prisoners come to judgment, but as stalwarts who demand a fitting place in the government of our world.

"Audacity, my little ones, audacity is the order of the day!" Bowdler smiled as he saw the puzzlement spread over Comstock's and Pat's faces. "Follow the lead of Grundy and Helen. I've had time to tell them a little more than I have told you two!"

The door was open wide now, and as Comstock girded his loins preparatory to what he was sure would be a battle to the death against impossible odds, the R.A. who had entered, bowed to Bowdler and said, "The Fathers request your presence, Father Bowdler."

Then their last prop was gone, and they just sat and waited, staring at the door which had closed behind Bowdler.

* * * * *

The three who had endured so much sat and waited. The three plus Pat and the last philosopher. When you have fought for as long as they had against forces strong almost beyond imagining, when you have struggled in despair, lived without daring to think, hope, when it finally comes is almost anti-climactic. At least Comstock found it so. Despite the traps, the violence, the hurts, the fear, they were now where they wanted to be.

They sat quietly, their hands folded, and if any feeling of triumph was in them, it was so muted as not to be observable. At that precise moment, when they sat in the ante-room, waiting for their reward, if reward it were to be, the only common emotion they shared was that they had fought a good fight. Fought as hard as it is in a person to fight for what they consider right.

Then the door opened and instead of the summons to come before the Board of Fathers which they had expected, The Grandfather entered the room. The Grandfather, with his high hooked nose, his broad forehead, deep set harsh old blue eyes, focussed on the middle distance, his strong old hands crossed on his stomach just below his patriarchal beard, his tremendous height forcing him to look down at them.

It was hard to believe.

Hard to believe that they, or anyone below the rank of Father would ever actually behold Him in the flesh.

When He spoke His voice was all the things they had known it would be... Deep as an organ base, calm, full of authority, stern, yet with a leavening of those other things that make up the whole man, his voice was almost gentle as he said, "Follow me, please."

They rose, and feeling like little children, followed his preposterously tall, spare back, out of the ante-room, into that other room where the Board awaited them.

There was no fear in them now as there would have been earlier. For they were not coming before the Board for judgement, but to be rewarded. At least that's what Grundy and Helen had been told by Bowdler.

The Grandfather pointed out Comstock, Helen and Grundy, and said, "These three are the original ones. The other two," his gesture pointed out the last philosopher and Pat, "are the newer recruits."

There was silence.

"They have come to join us," The Grandfather said.

The silence expanded.

"Gentlemen, Fathers all, these are three new Fathers." The Grandfather's voice faded away and there was no other sound. Some of the men who made up the Board of Fathers said a word.

But the ones who had fought their way up to this eminence stood in silence and looking about them, examined the men with whom they would now share the control of their whole world.

This was the moment of their triumph.