The lights behind the windows of the schoolhouse made vague islands in
the dark pennons of mist. Kazetzky got out and tied the horse to the
hitching-rail as Heidekopfer dismounted. "Go in, little father," he
said. "I will stay outside as long as I can." He was breathing hard, as
though trying with all his strength to resist some kind of compulsion.
Heidekopfer checked the sets of his radio, walked to the door and flung
it open. The fifteen or twenty men and women of the Supreme Soviet were
seated in chairs scattered in no particular order around the classroom,
with Samsonov at the teacher's desk, his back to Heidekopfer as the
latter entered. But the thing that made the reporter catch his breath
as the faces turned toward him like flowers toward the sun was the
sight of Ann Starnes, sitting just to the right of the Patriarch. Her
glance was coldly unfriendly.
For a second or two the tableau held. Then Samsonov turned round and
rose majestically to his feet. "The session of the Supreme Soviet is
secret," he said, and glared.
Heidekopfer once more felt the headache sensation at the back of his
neck, accompanied by an almost overwhelming impulse to get out of
there, to escape from that place before something dreadful happened, a
strange malaise, which he could not name possessed him. He staggered
back a step, then caught Ann's eye fixed on him with the same quality
as the rest, and was abruptly seized by another impulse, even more
overwhelming.
The second one struck him as a better idea, anyway, so he yielded to
it. He took three rapid steps toward the Patriarch Samsonov and let him
have one fetched up from the region of the belt-line.
It took the big man flush on the button, and down he went, thrashing
and kicking, as the room burst into a turmoil of shouts and chairs
knocked to the floor. Ann screamed. Heidekopfer grabbed her by the arm.
"You're coming with me whether you like it or not," he said in English,
and turned to face the group menacingly. But nobody seemed inclined to
offer him any opposition, and the thought flashed through his head that
they probably had a law against physical violence, too.
Samsonov had hauled himself to his feet with the aid of the desk. There
was a little trickle of blood from his mouth and his eyes were deadly.
The last thing Heidekopfer heard him say as he pulled the girl through
the door was, "There will be a law--"
Kazetzky had disappeared. Ann was limp as he bundled her into the
droshky, and didn't say anything until he had unhitched the horse,
climbed to the driver's seat, and with a combination of yells and
jerking on the reins, urged it into plodding motion. Then she said,
"Oh, Bob!"