CHAPTER 9

A wave of revulsion turned Comstock's stomach making him forget, for a moment, the girl for whom he was seeking. All around him in eddying mobs were elderly, grey and white-haired women, their long dresses dragging on the ground. The idea that he had ever found them exciting was hard for him to bear. And the way the young men held the women's arms, talked to them, guided and protected them, made Comstock feel even queazier.

It was a Grandfather's Meeting night and all the couples were on their way to the meeting house. Above them all, the crazily careening green moon sent down harsh high lights that made the old women seem even more decrepit than they really were.

But search as Comstock would, of the red-haired girl he found no sign.

It was getting later and he saw an R.A.'s carriage come down the street, its astrobats dancing as the R.A. driver lashed them. He called out, "Nine o'clock, time for meeting!"

Knowing that he would be arrested if he stayed out on the street while everyone else went into the meeting house, Comstock decided he had better try to look like a normal citizen. Even so, however, he was the recipient of an icy stare from the R.A. For he was the last person to enter the meeting place.

Comstock's flesh crawled when he found the last empty hard seat, and sat listening to the only too familiar smooth patter of the Elder who stood in the front of the hall, on a little podium and mouthed the old, only too familiar platitudes, about The Grandfather.

Closing his eyes, Comstock tried unavailingly to close his ears to the now meaningless words that flooded him and all the others in the crowded smelly meeting place.

The Elder was speaking, his seamed face hanging in lank folds, his jowls wobbling as they barked out the words, "And so, we know now that only in the lap of The Grandfather is there to be found the peace that passes all understanding...."

Comstock's eyes blinked open in shock when a clear, sweet voice interrupted the maunderings of the Elder by saying, "Poppycock!"

The Elder's face froze in ludicrous astonishment as he repeated after his heckler, "Poppycock?"

And then he saw her, Comstock did, and he was glad he hadn't murdered Grundy, and he was even gladder that his frozen tongue had not been able to utter words of love he had wanted to say to Helen. For he saw the girl for whom he had been searching and she was all his maddest dreams come true.

* * * * *

She stood up on her chair at one side of the hall and her eyes were as clear as Bowdler had said, and now they were flashing in anger. Her chest was heaving with indignation and Comstock found himself admiring the way her chest lent itself to this sort of treatment.

Waving one hand in the air for attention, she said, "You fools! How much longer are you going to be duped by the maunderings of these old fools? Don't you know that it's all a lie?"

The audience rose in its wrath and with one voice roared loudly enough to drown out all sounds that might have come from the girl.

The Elder, pointing a shaking arthritic forefinger at the girl, said in a feeble voice that didn't reach through the tumult. "She is insane. Call the R.A.'s."

But the crowd was too upset for any such normal proceedings. None of Comstock's reading had covered lynchings but that was the feeling that emanated from the furious people. This was a many-headed mob that wanted blood.

She was grabbed by so many hands that Comstock wondered if anything would be left of her. One man, bigger and stronger than the rest of the crowd roared out, "To the stocks with her!"

There was no way that Comstock could fight his way to her side, and even if he could have there was little he could have done but be attacked in his turn.

"The stocks," he kept thinking. They were outside in the square, just to one side of a statue of The Grandfather, where the graven image could look down in its infinite wisdom and be soothed and assuaged by the sight of its recalcitrant grandchildren being punished in the stocks.

If he waited, Comstock thought, till she was in them, there would be little he could do, for few ever lived through more than an hour of that treatment. The rocks and stones thrown by the good, lawful citizens of the community made sure of that.

No he could not wait, and yet what could he do as of that moment? What had possessed her to make her speak out in the meeting? The little fool. He'd shake some of the nonsense out of her, if he ever got her away from those menacing hands.

The crowd surged out of the meeting house, down the stairs and toward the statue. There was still no sign of any R.A. But then, why should there have been? Once everyone was at meeting, the R.A.'s could relax, having done their duty for the evening.

But how long could the rumble, the frightening mutter of an outraged mob continue before some R.A. heard it?

Comstock came to a sudden decision, as a ferocious and even more elderly woman than most reached forward and ripped the girl's dress from her neck to her navel, screeching, "The hussy! Put her in the stocks! I've got a stone for her! A big one ... perhaps one of you young sirs would help me throw it?" She looked about her coquettishly and her plea did not fall on empty air.

Running around the outer perimeter of the mob, Comstock made his way to the statue of the kindly-faced Grandfather. Skirting the stocks which were ugly and dull with the blood that had so many times defaced them, Comstock reached up and pulled himself into the lap of the stone Grandfather.

From that point of vantage he yelled, "Stop!"

His voice squeaked a little of course and did not come out with quite the roar that he had wanted it to, but it was enough, it served to halt the mob in its tracks.

Down below him, the girl, naked to the waist, her torn gown hanging from the belt that was all that retained the shreds of cloth that remained from the old woman's tearing hands, looked up at him.

The sight of her bare b.....s was almost too much for Comstock. It unmanned him momentarily, but raising his eyes to her face, and seeing the courage that shone from her eyes, he recovered his lost voice and this time it came out with a roar, as he yelled, "Sanctuary! I claim the right of sanctuary for this girl and myself!"

* * * * *

It had been over four hundred years since last a human voice had claimed that right. But in an ancestor-directed culture like his, Comstock was sure that since old things were automatically the best things, his plea would _have_ to be honored. Once having claimed sanctuary and while in the lap of the Grandfather, no one, not even the R.A., would tear you from that sacred place.

The mob was not at all happy, but it surrendered as he had been sure it would. The girl was passed up to him. His hands reaching down for her, were gladdened by the soft silkiness of her skin as he pulled her to him. Once she too was seated next to him in that broad capacious lap, the first thing she did, and he was sorry to see it happen, was to pull the shreds of her garment close around her.

Down below them the crowd was not silent. It looked up, and after a while its many faces merged into one, a fearful, frightening visage with one big voice that chanted, "You have sanctuary. We cannot deny you that. But sooner or later you must leave for you must eat and drink ... and when you do...."

And when they did, Comstock knew, they'd be torn to shreds. For the anger which formerly had been noisy and quarrelsome, was now quiet and, if anything, even more menacing than the noise had been.

But it would be a long time before he and the girl were forced to leave their sanctuary, and looking at her face, he decided that if he had to die, there were worse ways to go.

Shyly he put his hand out and stroked her flaming hair. Then he asked, "What's your name?"

"Patience and Fortitude Mather." She was still busy trying to arrange her torn clothing.

He gulped.

Noticing his surprise, she said, "But just call me Pat. What's your name?" But before he could answer she said, "Don't tell me you're a friend of...."

Nodding, he said, "Yes, I'm one of Bowdler's rebels." Then he identified himself.

"I should have known."

"Why," he asked with some asperity, "didn't you join us at Bowdler's house?"

"I couldn't shake off the R.A. who was following me and I wouldn't jeopardize the sanctum."

"Of course. But what made you decide to get up and carry on the way you did at the meeting?"

"When I finally did get away from the R.A. it was too late. It was past the time that Bowdler said I would be able to get through the force field. I knew I was lost and I decided I might just as well go down to defeat saying the things I'd always wanted to say."

"In case," Comstock said, "just in case, there is any chance of an escape from our present situation, and we should become separated," and he told her about the two times of the day when it would be possible to get to Bowdler's house.

* * * * *

The temperature went down as they sat on the cold stone and became acquainted. S.x was the farthest thing from Comstock's mind when he moved closer to the girl and held her in his arms to try and preserve their mutual body heat. At least s.x was far from his mind in the beginning of the long night. But as the evening hours wore away and the insane moon moved higher and higher in the sky, he found that hunger and thirst, cold and fear were not enough to keep certain thoughts from his now over-heated brain. Just sitting so close to her was the most exciting experience he had ever had.

Below them the Hydra-head of the angry multitude began to murmur as he disregarded some of the conventions on which he had been raised. "Shameful," "Disgusting," "Perverted," "Horrible," were some of the milder epithets that were thrown through the air.

Her skin he found on investigation put any flower he had ever beheld to shame. Her breath was sweet on his nostrils. The feel of her was unlike any thing he had ever dreamt of.

He said, his voice as low as his intentions, "Pat, do you think what I feel for you is love?"

Snuggling closer to him, she answered, "If it isn't, it's as good an imitation as we're likely to find." Then her inquisitive lips met his.

It was, he thought, even as he was experiencing it, a highly unlikely place in which to enjoy a honeymoon.

The shamelessness of their conduct was not lost on the waiting throng. At one point even the R.A. who had joined the mob and whose hand had never left the butt of his stun-gun, found it necessary to walk away. None of the onlookers, as a matter of fact, could bear to watch.

So it was, that when Comstock accomplished his desire, and leaning back against The Grandfather's stony beard expressed some of his satisfaction by wishing he could fight the Board of Fathers, en masse, with one hand tied behind his back, he and Pat found that of the whole mob there was not a remnant.

Their conduct had shamed and frightened away the crowd.

Slipping down from the statue's lap, unable to believe their eyes, they skittered away in the now all-encompassing darkness, expecting at any moment to be halted by an R.A. or grabbed by some die-hards from the waiting crowd.

Jogging along at his beloved's side at a half-run, half-walk, Comstock wondered if even death could eradicate the exultation which he felt. But feeling as he did was not conducive, he found, to gloomy, dismal thoughts.

Not even when they ducked down a long alleyway, which he thought led in the general direction of Bowdler's house, did he really, deeply feel concerned about capture. Life could not be so unfair, he decided, as to raise him up to such heights as he had just surmounted, and then drop him into a gloomy pit.

But of course life could, and did, do just that.