“…within this room,” George was saying, “we have the undirected power of ustiliath. We have the makings of a mob, of a group mind. Shout Fire! and we might see this power. Shout Vote Labour, or Heil Hitler, or Black is Beautiful. In fact, I wouldn’t be up here talking to you if I had listened to my advisors, for they are afraid of this power. They are afraid of the combined power of your minds. They are afraid of ustiliath.”

  Gordon felt an awkward stillness in the room. He understood it; people always stiffened up at any mention of things of the spirit. A few years ago they had done the same thing over sex. It was an affliction to be grown out of.

  “Christ was afraid of it. “When two or three are gathered together in my name,’ he said, ’there am I in the midst of them’. Two or three. Not fifty or sixty, not a hundred or a thousand—for then a group mind might form, and a group mind has power. To be one in many and many in one was God’s privilege. Therefore a nice safe number. Therefore ’two or three…’”

  Sylvia would have killed him at that moment for his wickedness, had she not been trembling so that she could hardly breathe. She prayed for strength, personal strength, asking her angel for a strong hand and a steady eye. Below her George was looking from face to face in the crowd around him. Gordon felt the uneasiness lift, the pillared spaces fill with more than words. He prayed for strength also, but—as George had taught him—for the strength of others.

  “The Church,” George went on, “needed to survive. So it ignored its founder s advice and built big. Big churches and bigger cathedrals. It used ustiliath in this way to get people in, to help them to feel bigger than separately they were. Then, quickly, before they could discover ustiliath’s real power, it preached the inadequacy of self, the obviously hopeless confrontation of each man’s solitary soul with God. It gave with one hand and took away with the other. By doing so it admitted both the reality of ustiliath and its fear of ustiliath’s potency.”

  Still George scanned the crowd, as if looking for the one person, the one soul, he needed. Even Gordon, who knew him so well, felt a second’s incomprehensible hope—of what?—as George’s gaze passed over him.

  “We four,” George said, “Have come across the depths of space to show you this. To show you ustiliath, and to teach you not to be afraid. Its power is that of the continuing processes of the universe. It is hope. It is the promise of glory. It is the future.”

  She could see he was working himself up. Her hand was steadying. Boney, her hair scragged back in a wispy bun, the revolver enormous, needing all her strength, she knew she was not ridiculous. She intended death.

  “Directed to petty ends, it becomes itself petty. Directed to vastness, it becomes itself vast. In the minds of men of good intent ustiliath can move mountains.” He raised his arms above his head. “When ten thousand are gathered together in ustiliath’s name the waters part and the army goes across dryshod. It’s as simple as that.”

  He ended abruptly and stooped to get down from the table. Then he hesitated, and stood again. If only he would be still for a moment, then she would kill him. She braced her hand against the balustrade. She would kill his wickedness, his sin.

  “I’ve been talking about practical things,” he said. “About this life, and this universe, and what can be done in it. That’s because this life is the only life I can be certain of. Eternal life is something other. But I promise you this: true service to ustiliath will teach you to live as though the best and most intimate parts of yourselves were indeed going to endure for ever. You can do no more. You and I, caught up in a life we love, we can do no more.”

  He stood now, still and silent. Although he had stopped speaking, Gordon heard his words, his thought, continue. The room, for all its collonades and porticos, its fountains, its reproduction statuary and sham marble couches, for all its falsity, was filled with huge determination. It was filled, Gordon knew, with the power of ustiliath.

  And Sylvia on her balcony, George’s head motionless below her, heard only the words of her angel: Be watchful, and strengthen the things that remain, that are ready to die.

  And over them a memory of her husband…her husband ranting on at Dacre, a little boy, a little boy with an air rifle, ranting on in the garden of their house in Aldershot: The tip of the blade of the foresight in line with and in the centre of the shoulders of the V of the backsight.

  She tilted the gun, steadied it with both hands on the stone balustrade, and squeezed (Not pull, boy, squeeze…Good God, will the boy never learn?) the trigger.

  If Gordon had known what she was up to he could have told her she was wasting her time. The hammer rose and fell, its tiny click lost in the rustling of the fountains. Good heavens, woman, did you honestly think “I’d leave a weapon like that about if it wasn’t disarmed? Too bloody dangerous—and look how right I was. Got the armourer to file down the firing pin the day I left the service. Kept it as a memento…and something to scare any burglars. She squeezed again, her aim wandering. And again. The barrel of the gun began to droop and she raised it with trembling, aching muscles. She shot George, then turned the gun on the other missionaries and killed them too, one by one. The moment had been imagined so often. Every sound, every sensation, had been pictured so precisely. The gun had jarred her whole body, the noise had battered her ears, the smoke had caught at her lungs, the missionaries one by one had fallen. This was her reality. The rest, the idiotic little clicks, the rustling fountains, the people unmoved and unmoving below her, were nothing.

  But her dream faded. Waking slowly from it, she found her new reality oddly unsurprising. Below her nothing had changed. The silence ended gradually, naturally, in a murmur of shifting feet. It was hardly surprising, she thought, remembering the fate of the poor policeman, that the devil should look after his own.

  She stepped back from the balustrade, and replaced the gun carefully in her handbag. There would be other days and other ways. Meanwhile, and the thought did not worry her, the wicked would flourish even as the green bay tree. Wishing to see no more, she turned away and went slowly back down the staircase.

  She walked in a peace that transcended pearls and twinset. Her faith was affirmed, her purpose strengthened, and her patience infinite. She firmly recognised her adversary now, and knew that hers would be no easy victory. But there would be other days and other ways, and victory in the end was certain.

  No one saw her, no one heard her sharp footsteps on the marble tiles, no one watched her solitary, straight-backed progress across the foyer and out, her own universe, into the street. Bullets could be tamed, a gun could be bewitched, but the Angel of the Lord could not be denied for ever.

  The wise, unrufflable servants of the London Forum Club were crowded into the back of the dining hall, observing with mild distaste the unsuitable uproar as ninety of the best people proclaimed for ustiliath. Having missed what led up to it, they could afford to feel superior. That is, until one of them—a respectably elderly bellhop-started shouting too, and pushed into the crowd, and was followed by three and then four others.

  The conversion—traxinodal?—might turn out to be fleeting, but its headline potential, following on the previous week’s campaign, was enormous. It gave a good start to a movement that was soon to number a conservative three million as its members. And Sylvia, biding her time in North Molton, saw with perverse satisfaction how the leaves of the bay tree multiplied. There would, she knew, be other days and other ways.

  PART IV

  .…When the teachers were taken on shore to be introduced to this most inviting sphere, the joy of the people seemed to know no bounds. Some of the principal chiefs took their hands and led them through the village, while the crowd manifested their joy in ways the most unmistakable.

  The above reception was accorded to the teachers on the 1st November, 1853, and—will it be credited?—the whole party was murdered by these same people only nineteen days after that date! Superstitious fears may have had something to do with the horrid tragedy…

  Rev. A. W. Murray. 1885.

  Item from the Missionaries’ I.G. Handbook.

  Missionaries must be prepared, once their work can be seen to have had serious impact, for opposition—both political and from in situ religious organisation—to intensity. This is probably the Mission’s most vulnerable period. Based still on the personalities of the missionaries and posing a viable threat to established cultural patterns, it will come under attack from many quarters.

  After four weeks in London, television appearances, mass meetings, a fund-raising campaign and the founding of a Mission Centre in Russell Square, three of the missionaries went on an evangelical tour of the northern industrial cities, taking Mr. Wilcox with them and leaving Gordon and Cora to run the Centre in their absence. Ustiliath was booming. With its emphasis on life, on the unity and beauty of the physical world, it had quickly found support among a powerful group of young scientists, conservationists, and antipollution experts. Older people were impressed by the standards it preached, thrashed out by the missionaries during several long sessions with Gordon and Mr. Wilcox. Socialists appreciated its egalitarianism, and Tories its apparent worldliness. The various churches came the nearest they ever had to being united in turning their heads discreetly away, as if from a nasty smell—all of them fearing the dignity they would bestow on the cult if they appeared to take it seriously. Pronouncements filtered out, however, largely from ancient, eager vicars, carefully forgotten in their distant rural parishes.

  In practical terms, a spontaneous London movement against the motor car was bom. Heterogeneous groups of ustiliaths barred thoroughfares and let down tyres and actually—on an occasion quickly world-famous—succeeded in stopping an entire three-lane commuter scramble solely by the force of their thousand-strong ustiliath: helped, it must be admitted, by Cora who happened to be passing at the time. The police were considerably outnumbered, and people working in London took to leaving their cars at home. Discovering this, the police immediately became more outnumbered than ever. To the inestimable benefit of both themselves and the urban environment.

  Other movements were less successful of course, for often the power of ustiliath was misunderstood and invoked in a holiday spirit—and vainly—to a variety of dubious ends. For example, fifty or so Arsenal supporters tried to set up an ustiliath shield across the home goalmouth. Their team lost 7—0. More seriously, some simple-minded ustiliaths, wanting to prove that ustiliath was an exclusively Caucasian quality, drove out to Heathrow and tried to stop a planeload of Pakistani immigrants from landing. When the force of their minds alone proved inadequate, they broke through onto the tarmac and four were killed.

  Such incidents demanded action—or at least comment—from the Mission Centre on Russell Square. Gordon and Cora spent eighteen hours a day speaking, explaining, exhorting, and organising others to do the same. They filled the brown marbled respectability of the Wigmore Hall every lunch hour, holding demonstrations of the central power of ustiliath to bring individual peace. Ritual’s grew up, and forms of prayer, and glimmers of understanding of the concept of worthiness, of good intent.

  If Cora sometimes returned from meetings almost in tears at the simplifications forced on her, then the consolations of Gordon’s moleskin shoulder were at least a partial comfort to her. Or to the Janey part of her. And the other parts of her would never have cried anyway.

  They planned a rally in the Albert Hall for the day after the other three missionaries’ return from the north, and Willoughby-Parkes booked several speakers—the chairman of the Race Relations Board, an sf novelist, the artistic director of the National Theatre, a spokesman from ICI—to appear. Ustiliath was moving in from the fringe, making a bid for respectability. Gordon, for one, welcomed the move. He was tired, and his brisk flamboyance was wearing thin. The symbol-bedecked young exhausted him. And he had no liking—as Mr. Wilcox in his sort of areas undoubtedly did have—for rotten fruit and gefilte fish. The nearer the movement was to the Centre, the better Gordon was pleased.

  It would be unfair to say that he had completely forgotten his family; after all, he’d taken the trouble to ask his wife to that very first celebration party. But she’d been quite right not to come. Never any good at parties, no real help with a man’s career at all. But he thought about her and his son a lot. Ustiliath forbid that it should ever be otherwise. Soon he’d be able to take a short holiday. Go down and buck them all up a bit.

  So it was that he instantly denied the feeling of guilt that twinged sharply when his secretary rang through one afternoon to say that his son was asking for him down at reception. He had nothing to feel guilty about. He finished the memo he was writing to Willoughby-Parkes on poster space donated by a large tobacco firm (Eager for public favour, WP. See what you can do for them.), glanced at his watch, and had Dacre sent up.

  The sight of the boy was a shock. It took him back to the old life, to the old death in life, and he rejected it. He was new, and his life was new. But the guilt twinged again, and suddenly he was very tired. And wary.

  “Dacre…good to see you, boy. Sit yourself down. You haven’t written. What’ve you been up to?”

  Dacre sat. “I’ve been doing what you told me to.” Then, when Gordon didn’t understand, “I’ve been looking after my mother.”

  Gordon refused the reproach. The boy needn’t sound so pious; it was the first time he’d done a thing for another soul in his whole bloody life. “Good. Good…and how is she, then? Surviving her ordeal, I hope?” But the bitterness was unworthy, and he corrected it. “It must be hard for her. I’m glad you’re there, boy, to do what you can for her.”

  Dacre stared across the desk at him, also seeing a man he hardly recognised. All that the old and the new seemed to share was bitterness. And he wanted his father to be happy. More than anything, he wanted him to be happy. But he also wanted someone to blame for the past five weeks. So he fed him flattery, needing him to smirk and simper so that he could, although loved, be despised.

  “I’ve watched your progress,” he said. “In the papers and on the telly. You’ve come a long way.”

  “Not me, Dacre. The cause, perhaps, but not me. I’ve come nowhere at all.” No smirk, no simper. “Frankly, I’m worn out. It’s like pushing a snowball up a hill. You never reach the top, and the snowball gets bigger and bigger.” “You mean you’re disillusioned?”

  “Not with ustiliath. Not even with human nature. But you see so many people in it for the wrong things. For the glory, mainly. As I suppose I was myself, once.”

  He said the once as if he was looking far back. Like a child who says when I was little… Perhaps his father had indeed been little, and in six short weeks had grown out of it. Perhaps the bitterness had had other reasons.

  “I still fall for the glory, of course, now and then. When I don’t watch myself. I’m no speaker, and I sometimes need it to get me through. But it’s not mine, and I don’t enjoy it. I hope you believe me.”

  Dacre hadn’t expected this. He had expected what his father at first had given him: a blustering old fool, an army officer. He hadn’t expected this, a man trying to be truthful.

  “Have you told anybody else you feel like this?”

  “Cora knows, of course. But it’s not for long. After the Albert Hall I shall be able to step down. You remember I told your mother that. I told her it wouldn’t be for very long.”

  Dacre remembered why he was there—ostensibly why he was there. “She’s not well,” he said. “That’s what I’ve come to London to talk to you about.”

  “If your mother’s not well you shouldn’t have left her. You could quite well have telephoned. What does Smiley have to say about it?”

  “She won’t see him. She won’t see anybody, only Mr. Dunbarton. She wouldn’t see him at first, till he insisted. Now he’s up at the farm almost every day. And a friend from his London days. The two of them worry me.”

  “You shouldn’t have left her.”

  “I had to see you. Besides, she’ll be alright. She eats well and sleeps well. She’ll be alright.”

  “But you said she wasn’t well.”

  Dacre gathered his thoughts. He tried to explain. To anyone else he would simply have said his mother’d gone stark, staring mad. But his father needed protecting, needed a different truth. So he told him about Sylvia’s loneliness instead, and how it made her do lonely things.

  He didn’t tell him about her noises, about the scene in the study that had started the whole thing off.

  He explained instead that on one occasion she had gone to the library in Barnstaple and stayed away until late in the evening, giving no explanation at all on her return.

  She must, in her loneliness, have been walking around Barnstaple all day. He explained that she talked to herself in the kitchen far more often, suggesting that this too was caused by her loneliness.

  He didn’t mention the exact nature of her mutterings, or that she sometimes shouted, or that she sometimes boiled the potatoes without peeling them and served meat raw on the plate, or that she then linked the butcher to some unexplained conspiracy when the meat was uneatable.

  He explained that he couldn’t reach her, couldn’t talk to her at all: her loneliness again, her need for Gordon. He explained that she had returned to Christianity, again, no doubt, turning to Mr. Dunbarton in her loneliness.

  He didn’t describe his painfully sharp memories of the face she hid behind, the superior little smiles she gave him, the wide, frightened eyes. Neither did he describe the chair from the sitting room chopped up and burned in the stable yard because George had sat in it.

  Now that he was there, sitting opposite his father, he was afraid. To have told a stranger that his mother was mad would have been easy, meaningless. To tell Gordon that she was mad would make it true. It was he himself who needed the protection.