A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller [136]
“What are you doing out of bed, child?” he breathed. “You’re not supposed to be up, not with that hip. Just where did you think you were going?”
She shifted her weight, and her face twisted with pain.
“To town,” she said. “I’ve got to go. It’s urgent.”
“Not so urgent that somebody couldn’t go do it for you. I’ll get Brother-”
“No, Father, no! Nobody else can do it for me. I’ve got to go to town.”
She was lying. He felt certain she was lying. “All right, then,” he said. “I’ll take you to town. I’m driving in anyway.
“No! I’ll walk! I’m-” She took a step and gasped. He caught her before she fell.
“Not even with Saint Christopher holding your crutches could you walk to town, child. Come on, now, let’s get you back to bed.”
“I’ve got to get to town, I tell you!” she shrieked angrily.
The child, frightenend by its mother’s anger, began crying monotonously. She tried to calm its fright, but then wilted: “All right, Father. Will you drive me to town?”
“You shouldn’t be going at all.”
“I tell you, I’ve got to go!”
“All right, then. Let’s help you in…the baby… now you.”
The child screamed hysterically when the priest lifted it into the car beside the mother. It clung to her tightly and resumed the monotonous sobbing. Because of the loose moist dressings and the singed hair, the child’s sex was difficult to determine at a glance, but Abbot Zerchi guessed it to be a girl.
He dialed again. The car waited for a break in the traffic, then swerved onto the highway and into the mid-speed lane. Two minutes later, as they approached the Green Star encampment, he dialed for the slowest lane.
Five monks paraded in front of the tent area, in a solemn hooded picket line. They walked to and fro in procession beneath the Mercy Camp sign, but they were careful to stay on the public right-of-way. Their freshly painted signs read:
ABANDON EVERY HOPE
YE
WHO ENTER HERE
Zerchi had intended to stop to talk to them, but with the girl in the car be contented himself with watching as they drifted past. With their habits and their hoods and their slow funereal procession, the novices were indeed creating the desired effect. Whether the Green Star would be sufficiently embarrassed to move the camp away from the monastery was doubtful, especially since a small crowd of hecklers, as it had been reported to the abbey, had appeared earlier in the day to shout insults and throw pebbles at the signs carried by the pickets. There were two police cars parked at the side of the highway, and several officers stood nearby to watch with expressionless faces. Since the crowd of hecklers had appeared quite suddenly, and since the police cars had appeared immediately afterwards, and just in time to witness a heckler trying to seize a picket’s sign, and since a Green Star official had thereupon gone huffing off to get a court order, the abbot suspected that the heckling had been as carefully staged as the picketing, to enable the Green Star officer to get his writ. It would probably be granted, but until it was served, Abbot Zerchi meant to leave the novices where they were.
He glanced at the statue which the camp workers had erected near the gate. It caused a wince. He recognized it as one of the composite human images derived from mass psychological testing in which subjects were given sketches and photographs of unknown people and asked such questions as: “Which would you most like to meet?” and “Which do you think would make the best parent?” or “Which would yon want to avoid?” Or “Which do you think is the criminal?” From the photographs selected as the “most” or the “least” in terms of the questions, a series of “average faces,” each to evoke a first-glance personality judgment had been constructed by computer from the mass test results.
This statue, Zerchi was dismayed to notice, bore a marked similarity to some of the most effeminate images by which mediocre, or worse than mediocre, artists had traditionally misrepresented the personality of Christ.