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<title>III</title>
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<section id="chapter-3" epub:type="chapter">
<h2 epub:type="title ordinal z3998:roman">III</h2>
<p>The pain was still burning when Chandler awoke the next day. He wished he had a bandage, but he didn’t, and that was that.</p>
<p>He was in a freight car—had hopped it on the run at the yards, daring to sneak back into town long enough for that. He could not hope to hitchhike, with that mark on him. Anyway, hitchhiking was an invitation to trouble.</p>
<p>The railroads were safer—far safer than either cars or air transport, notoriously a lightning-rod attracting possession. Chandler was surprised when the train came crashing to a stop, each freight car smashing against the couplings of the one ahead, the engine jolting forward and stopping again.</p>
<p>Then there was silence. It endured.</p>
<p>Chandler, who had been slowly waking after a night of very little sleep, sat up against the wall of the boxcar and wondered what was wrong.</p>
<p>It seemed remiss to start a day without signing the Cross or hearing a few exorcismal verses. It seemed to be mid-morning, time for work to be beginning at the plant. The lab men would be streaming in, their amulets examined at the door. The chaplains would be wandering about, ready to pray a possessing spirit out. Chandler, who kept an open mind, had considerable doubt of the effectiveness of all the amulets and spells—certainly they had not kept him from a brutal rape—but he felt uneasy without them. … The train still was not moving. In the silence he could hear the distant huffing of the engine.</p>
<p>He went to the door, supporting himself with one hand on the wooden wall, and looked out.</p>
<p>The tracks followed the roll of a river, their bed a few feet higher than an empty three-lane highway, which in turn was a dozen feet above the water. As he looked out the engine brayed twice. The train jolted uncertainly, then stopped again.</p>
<p>Then there was a very long time when nothing happened at all.</p>
<p>From Chandler’s car he could not see the engine. He was on the convex of the curve, and the other door of the car was sealed. He did not need to see it to know that something was wrong. There should have been a brakeman running with a flare to ward off other trains; but there was not. There should have been a station, or at least a water tank, to account for the stop in the first place. There was not. Something had gone wrong, and Chandler knew what it was. Not the details, but the central fact that lay behind this and behind almost everything that went wrong these days.</p>
<p>The engineer was possessed. It had to be that.</p>
<p>Yet it was odd, he thought, as odd as his own trouble. He had chosen this car with care. It contained eight refrigerator cars full of pharmaceuticals, and if anything was known about the laws governing possession, as his lawyer had told him, it was that such things were almost never interfered with.</p>
<p>Chandler jumped down to the roadbed, slipped on the crushed rock and almost fell. He had forgotten the wound on his forehead. He clutched the sill of the car door, where an ankh and fleur-de-lis had been chalked to ward off demons, until the sudden rush of blood subsided and the pain began to relent. After a moment he walked gingerly to the end of the car, slipped between the cars, dodged the couplers and climbed the ladder to its roof.</p>
<p>It was a warm, bright, silent day. Nothing moved. From his height he could see the Diesel at the front of the train and the caboose at its rear. No people. The train was halted a quarter-mile from where the tracks swooped across the river on a suspension bridge. Away from the river, the side of the tracks that had been hidden from him before, was an uneven rock cut and, above it, the slope of a mountain.</p>
<p>By looking carefully he could spot the signs of a number of homes within half a mile or so—the corner of a roof, a glassed-in porch built to command a river view, a twenty-foot television antenna poking through the trees. There was also the curve of a higher road along which the homes were strung.</p>
<p>Chandler took thought. He was alive and free, two gifts more gracious than he had had any right to expect. However, he would need food and he would need at least some sort of bandage for his forehead. He had a wool cap, stolen from the high school, which would hide the mark, though what it would do to the burn on his skin was something else again.</p>
<p>Chandler climbed down the ladder. With considerable pain he gentled the cap over the great raw H on his forehead and began to climb the mountain.</p>
<hr/>
<p>He knocked on the first door he came to, a great old three-story house with well tended gardens.</p>
<p>There was a wait. The air smelled warmly of honeysuckle and mown grass, with wild onions chopped down by the blades of the mower. It was pleasant, or would have been in happier times. He knocked again, peremptorily, and the door was opened at once. Evidently someone had been right inside, listening.</p>
<p>A man stared at him. “Stranger, what do you want?” He was short, plump, with an extremely thick and unkempt beard. It did not appear to have been grown for its own sake, for where the facial hair could not be coaxed to grow his skin had the gross pits of old acne.</p>
<p>Chandler said glibly: “Good morning. I’m working my way east. I need something to eat and I’m willing to work for it.”</p>
<p>The man withdrew, leaving the upper half of the Dutch door open. As it looked in on only a vestibule it did not tell Chandler much. There was one curious thing—a lath and cardboard sign, shaped like an arc of a rainbow, lettered:</p>
<b>Welcome to Orphalese</b>
<p>He puzzled over it and dismissed it. The entrance room, apart from the sign, had a knickknack shelf of Japanese carved ivory and an old-fashioned umbrella rack, but that added nothing to his knowledge. He had already guessed that the owners of this home were well off. Also it had been recently painted; so they were not demoralized, as so much of the world had been demoralized, by the coming of the possessors. Even the elaborate sculpturing of its hedges had been maintained.</p>
<p>The man came back and with him was a girl of fifteen or so. She was tall, slim and rather homely, with a large jaw and an oval face. “Guy, he’s not much to look at,” she said to the pockmarked man. “Meggie, shall I let him in?” he asked. “Guy, you might as well,” she shrugged, staring at Chandler with interest but not sympathy.</p>
<p>“Stranger, come along,” said the man named Guy, and led him through a short hall into an enormous living room, a room two stories high with a ten-foot fireplace.</p>
<p>Chandler’s first thought was that he had stumbled in upon a wake. The room was neatly laid out in rows of folding chairs, more than half of them occupied. He entered from the side, but all the occupants of the chairs were looking toward him. He returned their stares; he had had a good deal of practice lately in looking back at staring faces, he reflected. “Stranger, go on,” said the man who had let him in, nudging him, “and meet the people of Orphalese.”</p>
<p>Chandler hardly heard him. He had not expected anything like this. It was a meeting, a Daumier caricature of a Thursday Afternoon Literary Circle, old men with faces like moons, young women with faces like hags. They were strained, haggard and fearful, and a surprising number of them showed some sort of physical defect, a bandaged leg, an arm in a sling or merely the marks of pain on the features. “Stranger, go in,” repeated the man, and it was only then that Chandler noticed the man was holding a pistol, pointed at his head.</p>
<hr/>
<p>Chandler sat in the rear of the room, watching. There must be thousands of little colonies like this, he reflected; with the breakdown of long-distance communication the world had been atomized. There was a real fear, well justified, of living in large groups, for they too were lightning rods for possession. The world was stumbling along, but it was lame in all its members; a planetary lobotomy had stolen from it its wisdom and plan. If, he reflected dryly, it had ever had any.</p>
<p>But of course things were better in the old days. The world had seemed on the brink of blowing itself up, but at least it was by its own hand. Then came Christmas.</p>
<p>It had happened at Christmas, and the first sign was on nationwide television. The old President, balding, grave and plump, was making a special address to the nation, urging good will to men and, please, artificial trees because of the fire danger in the event of H-bomb raids; in the middle of a sentence twenty million viewers had seen him stop, look dazedly around and say, in a breathless mumble, what sounded like: “<i xml:lang="uk-Latn">Disht dvornyet ilgt.</i>” He had then picked up the Bible on the desk before him and thrown it at the television camera.</p>
<p>The last the televiewers had seen was the fluttering pages of the Book, growing larger as it crashed against the lens, then a flicker and a blinding shot of the studio lights as the cameraman jumped away and the instrument swiveled to stare mindlessly upward. Twenty minutes later the President was dead, as his Secretary of Health and Welfare, hurrying with him back to the White House, calmly took a hand grenade from a Marine guard at the gate and blew the President’s party to fragments.</p>
<p>For the President’s seizure was only the first and most conspicuous. “<i xml:lang="uk-Latn">Disht dvornyet ilgt.</i>” <abbr epub:type="z3998:initialism">C.I.A.</abbr> specialists were playing the tapes of the broadcast feverishly, electronically cleaning the mumble and stir from the studio away from the words to try to learn, first, the language and second what the devil it meant; but the President who ordered it was dead before the first reel spun, and his successor was not quite sworn in when it became his time to die. The ceremony was interrupted for an emergency call from the War Room, where a very nearly hysterical four-star general was trying to explain why he had ordered the immediate firing of every live missile in his command against Washington, <abbr epub:type="z3998:place">DC</abbr>.</p>
<p>Over five hundred missiles were involved. In most of the sites the order was disobeyed, but in six of them, unfortunately, unquestioning discipline won out, thus ending not only the swearing in, the general’s weeping explanation, the spinning of tapes, but also some two million lives in the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia and (through malfunctioning relays on two missiles) Pennsylvania and Vermont. But it was only the beginning.</p>
<hr/>
<p>These were the first cases of possession seen by the world in some five hundred years, since the great casting out of devils of the Middle Ages. A thousand more occurred in the next few days, a hundred in the next hours. The timetable was made up out of scattered reports in the wire-service newsrooms, while they still had facilities for spot coverage in any part of the world. (That lasted almost a week.) They identified 237 cases of possession by noon of the next day. Disregarding the dubious items—the Yankee pitcher who leaped from the Manhattan bridge (he had Bright’s disease), the warden of San Quentin who seated himself in the gas chamber and, literally, kicked the bucket (did he know the Grand Jury was subpoenaing his books?)—disregarding these, the chronology of major cases that evening was:</p>
<p>8:27 <abbr class="eoc">p.m.</abbr> EST: President has attack on television.</p>
<p>8:28 <abbr class="eoc">p.m.</abbr> EST: Prime Minister of England orders bombing raid against Israel, alleging secret plot (order not carried out).</p>
<p>8:28 <abbr class="eoc">p.m.</abbr> EST: Captain of <abbr epub:type="z3998:initialism">S.S.N.</abbr> <i epub:type="se:name.vessel.ship">Ethan Allen</i>, surfaced near Montauk Point, orders crash dive and course change, proceeding submerged at flank speed to New York Harbor.</p>
<p>9:10 <abbr class="eoc">p.m.</abbr> EST: Eastern Airlines six-engine jet makes wheels-up landing on roof of Pentagon, breaking some 1500 windows but causing no other major damage (except to the people aboard the jet); record of this incident fragmentary because entire site charred black in fusion attack two hours later.</p>
<p>9:23 <abbr class="eoc">p.m.</abbr> EST: Rosalie Pan, musical-comedy star, jumps off stage, runs up center aisle and vanishes in cab, wearing beaded bra, G-string and $2500 headdress. Her movements are traced to Newark airport where she boards <abbr epub:type="z3998:initialism">T.W.A.</abbr> jetliner, which is never seen again.</p>
<p>9:50 <abbr class="eoc">p.m.</abbr> EST: Entire <abbr epub:type="z3998:acronym">SAC</abbr> fleet of 1200 jet bombers takes off for rendezvous over Newfoundland, where 72% are compelled to ditch as tankers fail to keep refueling rendezvous. (Orders committing the aircraft originate with <abbr epub:type="z3998:acronym">SAC</abbr> commander, found to be a suicide.)</p>
<p>10.14 <abbr class="eoc">p.m.</abbr> EST: Submarine fusion explosion destroys 40% of New York City. Analysis of fallout indicates U.S. Navy Polaris missiles were detonated underwater in bay; by elimination it is deduced that the submarine was the <i epub:type="se:name.vessel.ship">Ethan Allen</i>.</p>
<p>10:50 <abbr class="eoc">p.m.</abbr> EST: President’s party assassinated by Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare; Secretary then dies on bayonet of Marine guard who furnished the grenade.</p>
<p>10:55 <abbr class="eoc">p.m.</abbr> EST: Satellite stations observe great nuclear explosions in China and Tibet.</p>
<p>11:03 <abbr class="eoc">p.m.</abbr> EST: Heavily loaded munitions barges exploded near North Sea dikes of Holland; dikes breached, 1800 square miles of reclaimed land flooded out. …</p>
<p>And so on. The incidents were countless. But before long, before even the <abbr epub:type="z3998:initialism">C.I.A.</abbr> had finished the first playthrough of the tapes, before their successors in the task identified <i xml:lang="uk-Latn">Disht dvornyet ilgt</i> as a Ukrainian dialect rendering of, My God, it works!—before all this, one fact was already apparent. There were many incidents scattered around the world, but not one of them took place in Russia itself.</p>
<hr/>
<p>Warsaw was ablaze, China pockmarked with blasts, East Berlin demolished along with its western sector, in eight rounds fired from a <abbr epub:type="z3998:initialism">U.S.</abbr> Army nuclear cannon. But the <abbr epub:type="z3998:initialism">U.S.S.R.</abbr> had not suffered at all, as far as could be told by the prying eyes in orbit; and that fact was reason enough for it to suffer very greatly very soon.</p>
<p>Within minutes of this discovery what remained of the military strength of the Western world was roaring through airless space toward the most likely targets of the East.</p>
<p>One unscathed missile base in Alaska completed a full shoot, seven missiles with fusion warheads. The three American bases that survived at all in the Mediterranean fired what they had. Even Britain, which had already watched the fire-tails of the American missiles departing on suicide missions, managed to resurrect its own two prototype Blue Streaks from their racks, where they had moldered since the cancellation of the British missile program. One of these museum-pieces destroyed itself in launching, but the other chugged painfully across the sky, the tortoise following the flight of the hares. It arrived a full half-hour after the newer, hotter missiles. It might as well not have bothered. There was not much left to destroy.</p>
<p>It was fortunate for the Communists that most of the Western arsenal had already spent itself in suicide. What was left wiped out Moscow, Leningrad and nine other cities. It was even fortunate for the whole world, for this was the Apocalypse they had dreaded, every possible nuclear weapon committed. But the circumstances were such—hasty orders, often at once recalled; confusion; panic—that most were unfused, many others merely tore great craters in the quickly healing surface of the sea. The fallout was locally murderous but quite spotty.</p>
<p>And the conventional forces invading Russia found nothing to fight. The Russians were as confused as they. There were not many survivors of the very top brass, and no one seemed to know just what had happened.</p>
<p>Was the Secretary of the <abbr epub:type="z3998:initialism">C.P.</abbr>, <abbr epub:type="z3998:initialism">U.S.S.R.</abbr> behind that terrible brief agony? As he was dead before it was over, there was no way to tell. More than a quarter of a billion lives went into mushroom-shaped clouds, and nearly half of them were Russian, Latvian, Tatar and Kalmuck. The Peace Commission squabbled for a month, until the breakdown of communications cut them off from their governments and each other; and in that way, for a time, there was peace.</p>
<hr/>
<p>This was the sort of peace that was left, thought Chandler looking around at the queer faces and queerer surroundings, the peace of medieval baronies, cut off from the world, untouched where the rain of fallout had passed by but hardly civilized any more. Even his own home town, trying to take his life in a form of law, reduced at last to torture and exile to cast him out, was not the civilization he had grown up in but something new and ugly.</p>
<p>There was a great deal of talk he did not understand because he could not quite hear it, though they looked at him. Then Guy, with the gun, led him up to the front of the room. They had constructed an improvised platform out of plywood panels resting on squat, heavy boxes that looked like empty ammunition crates. On the dais was a dentist’s chair, bolted to the plywood; and in the chair, strapped in, baby spotlights on steel-tube frames glaring on her, was a girl. She looked at Chandler with regretting eyes but did not speak.</p>
<p>“Stranger, get up there,” said Guy, prodding him from behind, and Chandler took a plain wooden chair next to the girl.</p>
<p>“People of Orphalese,” cried the teenage cutie named Meggie, “we have two more brands to save from the imps!”</p>
<p>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 around 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“People of Orphalese,” chanted Guy, standing behind Chandler with the muzzle of the gun against his neck, “the <em>meeting</em> of the Orphalese Self-Preservation <em>Society</em> will now come to <em>order</em>.” There was an approving, hungry murmur from the audience.</p>
<p>“Well, people of <em>Orphalese</em>,” Guy went on in his singsong, “the agenda for the day is first the salvation of we <em>Orphalese</em> on McGuire’s <em>Mountain</em>.”</p>
<p>(“All saved, all of us saved,” rolled a murmur from the congregation.) A lean, redheaded man bounded to the platform and fussed with the stand of spotlights, turning one of them full on Chandler.</p>
<p>“People of Orphalese, as we are <em>saved</em>, do I have your consent to <em>pass on</em> and proceed to the next order of <em>business</em>?”</p>
<p>(“Consent, consent, consent,” rolled the echo.)</p>
<p>“And then the <em>second</em> item of business is to <em>welcome</em> and bring to grace these two newly <em>found</em> and adopted <em>souls</em>.”</p>
<p>The congregation shouted variously: “Bring them to grace! Save them from the imps! Keep Orphalese from the taint of the beast!”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>The teenaged 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.”</p>
<p>“The imps!” cried a woman of forty with a face like a catfish.</p>
<p>The girl nodded. “Most prob’ly. Well, I—I mean, people of Orph’lese, well, I was by the switchback where we keep the chevvy-freeze hid, so I just waited till I saw it slowing down for the curve—me out of sight, you know—and I rolled the chevvy-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 burn. 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.</p>
<p>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 guess—no, wait!” He held up his hand as a murmur began. “First thing is, we ought to read a verse or two.”</p>
<p>He opened a purple-bound volume at random, stared at a page for a moment, moving his lips, and then read:</p>
<p>“Some of you say, ‘It is the north wind who has woven the clothes we wear.’</p>
<p>“And I say, Ay, it was the north wind, but shame was his loom, and the softening of the sinews was his thread.</p>
<p>“And when his work was done he laughed in the forest.”</p>
<p>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, O people of Orphalese?”</p>
<p>The audience muttered to itself and then began to call out: “Accept! Oh, bring in the brand! Accept and drive out the imp!”</p>
<p>“Fine,” said the teenager, 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?”</p>
<p>The girl said faintly, “Ellen Braisted.”</p>
<p>“ ‘<em>Meggie</em>, my name is Ellen Braisted,’ ” corrected the teenager. “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.”</p>
<p>Guy stroked his beard and assessed Chandler, looking him over carefully. “Okay,” he said. “People of Orphalese, the <em>third</em> order of business is to <em>welcome</em> or reject this <em>other</em> brand saved from the imps, as may be your <em>pleasure</em>.” 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.</p>
<hr/>
<p>The room erupted into confusion, the audience leaping from their seats, running to the broad windows, Guy and the teenage girl seizing rifles, everyone in motion at once.</p>
<p>Chandler straightened, then sat down again. The redheaded 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>And at once he found himself leaping for the gun.</p>
<p>No. Chandler didn’t find himself attacking the redheaded man. He found his <em>body</em> 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 redheaded 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!</p>
<p>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 him was surprised, another alien part was not. He started to shoot the teenaged girl in the back of the head, silently shouting <em>No!</em></p>
<p>His fingers never pulled the trigger.</p>
<p>He caught a second’s glimpse of someone just beside him, whirled and saw the girl, Ellen Braisted, limping swiftly toward him with her barbed-wire amulet loose and catching at her feet. In her hands was an axe-handle club caught up from somewhere. She struck at Chandler’s head, with a face like an eagle’s, impersonal and determined. The blow caught him and dazed him, and from behind someone else struck him with something else. He went down.</p>
<p>He heard shouts and firing, but he was stunned. He felt himself dragged and dropped. He saw a cloudy, misty girl’s face hanging over him; it receded and returned. Then a frightful blistering pain in his hand startled him back into full consciousness.</p>
<p>It was the girl, Ellen, still there, leaning over him and, oddly, weeping. And the pain in his hand was the burning flame of a kitchen match. Ellen was doing it, his wrist in one hand, a burning match held to it with the other.</p>
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