Something had caused Chance and Fairweather, these two members of levelheaded disciplines, to throw down their lab coats and turn to esoteric doctrines. They quit their jobs—Fairweather not even bothering to resign formally, simply walking away from his desk and his ongoing projects, to the confusion and indignation of his former employers—and sold their cars and furniture, and left.
In India, they met a young Canadian named Samantha Dooley, who had dropped out of her sophomore year at Harvard at the age of seventeen and a half and gone to live responsibly on the earth on a commune near Pune, where she was quietly starving when she met the three travelers. The four Westerners joined up, moved on to Bombay for a while, and eventually worked their way back to Fairweather's native England, where they used Fairweather's considerable inheritance to buy a run-down estate. There they established a doctrine and a community called Change, which attracted a growing number of followers over the years. Steven and Jonas changed their names, Fairweather becoming Jonas Seraph, although Mallory and Samantha Dooley retained theirs.
Eight years after returning from India, the original four divided: Steven and Mallory to concentrate on their new site in Arizona, which drew heavily from the San Francisco and Los Angeles branches, while Jonas and Samantha Dooley continued their efforts in rural England. Both enterprises flourished, and although the San Francisco branch was being shut down, there were still smaller branches in Boston, Los Angeles, southern France, Germany, and two in Japan. There were now nearly eight hundred members.
On the surface, there seemed little to draw the attention of Glen McCarthy's project to Change. One of the things working against a possible diagnosis of coming disaster was the far-flung nature of this particular group. Most problematic communal entities—the kinds of groups that were dubbed 'cults' by the media and which tended to flash into an orgy of violence, either self-directed or against a perceived enemy—were close-knit, close-mouthed little communities obsessively focused on one individual, a person whose irrationality and fears were in turn nourished by the attentions of his (or occasionally her) followers. In this case, although each branch had its leader, they were scattered. Members of the different groups were constantly in and out—Steven to England, the Japanese leaders to Arizona, families and kids moving from one house to another—not characteristic behavior from threatened communities.
Another interesting oddity was the Arizona branch. Within months of its founding it had begun a school, a large portion of its students being kids who had been thrown out of other schools, were on parole, or had been remanded from one of the state's youth facilities. 'Troubled youth', formerly called delinquents, were an odd choice for a religious community, but well established within Change: all three men of the original leaders had brushed up against the law in some way, Steven as part of a high school drunken spree with several friends (so much for sealed juvenile records, Anne noted disapprovingly) and Jonas Fairweather in England for a series of nuisance crimes that boiled down to ignoring rules rather than deliberately flouting them. Thomas Mallory had the most serious history, having spent six months in jail at the age of nineteen for threatening a neighbor with a gun and blowing holes in the man's television set. This was during university finals week, and although it marked the end of Mallory's university career, Anne could feel a twinge of sympathy for the man's desperate action. Mallory had also been fingered as instrumental in an investigation into illegal arms possession and sales in the Los Angeles branch of Change three years before, where he had gone to assume an apparently temporary leadership for a couple of months, but charges against him were dropped for lack of evidence. Beyond the three of them, the Change leader in Boston had a record as well, for drunk driving and drunk-and-disorderly, and one of the Japanese leaders had a history of 'political crimes', whatever that might be. Passing out leaflets at an antigovernment demonstration, no doubt.
It was the presence of the 'troubled youth' in Arizona that had first sparked Glen's interest, even though there were no official complaints, no firm evidence from the periodic medical checkups or the social workers' visits aside from one report that some of the older boys had seemed 'unnaturally subdued'.
Looking through the material the second time, Anne decided that it was probably Steven Chance's background in chemistry that had originally pressed an alarm button somewhere in the FBI's corporate mind. A small religious group led by a man who could construct a bomb was a group the government wanted to keep under observation.
The material she'd been given was detailed but hardly complete—another indication that Glen wasn't absolutely convinced that there was a problem, or if he himself was, he hadn't managed to bring his superiors around to his point of view. There was an elaborate chart comparing purchases of the various groups, but no conclusions had been drawn concerning the relatively high consumption of rice and fish by the Japanese compared to the Germans, the high demand for concrete mix and heavy lifting equipment in Arizona, currently under construction; or the large orders for chemical fertilizer, garden equipment, and chain saws by the English branch, which was busy restoring a large garden.
She put the purchase records to one side and returned to Glen's personal analysis, which was based largely on a visit he had made to Steven Change's compound in the Arizona desert. What it boiled down to was that a) the children were too well behaved, b) Steven's speech was heavily laced with references to the Book of Revelations and the cleansing nature of fire, and c) Thomas Mallory's history of guns.
Anne thought it all sounded very thin, although she had to admit that Glen's judgment in these matters had in the past been extraordinarily good.
And in the Arizona community alone, there were one hundred and three children.
At eight-thirty she reached behind her and took the kitchen phone down from the wall. The departmental secretary answered.
"Morning, Tazzie," Anne said. "I'm going to need half an hour with Antony today. Any chance?"
"He's really busy. Is it important?"
"Yes," Anne said flatly. There was a pause while Tazzie thought about this, and then Anne could hear the rustling of papers and a strange humming noise, Tazzie's habit while she was thinking. In a minute the secretary came back on the line.
"I can cancel a couple of things. Two-thirty do you?"
'I have a two o'clock lecture,' Anne said apologetically.
"Of course you do, stupid me. Four-thirty, then. I'll cancel Himself."
"Don't do that," Anne said in alarm. 'Himself' was the royal reference to the pompous academic vice-chancellor. "I could wait until tomorrow."
"Himself has cancelled on us twice, it would be a pleasure to return the honor. Are you okay? You don't sound yourself."
"I'm a bit tired."
"All those babies keeping you awake? don't get too run down. There's a nasty bug going around, and you wouldn't want it just before finals."
Anne's laughter was more hysterical than the remark called for: With all the things on her mind, a viral infection might prove a welcome distraction. Perhaps a nice bout of pneumonia would stick her in the hospital and give her an excuse to step aside.
When she had hung up, she hesitated over the phone. She ought to make this next contact in person, but perhaps for the preliminary stages, she could be a coward. She picked up the phone and dialed another number.
"Hello, Alice, could I speak with Eliot, please? Sure, I can wait." An interminable five minutes later, Alice Featherstone's flat-voiced monologue on the problems of raising chickens faded suddenly in mid-sentence, to be replaced by the taciturn young voice of her son Eliot, grunting a query into Anne's harassed eardrum. "Eliot," she said in relief. "Look, I just found out that I'm going to have to go away for a while. Are you available?" She knew that he would be, and that he would be overjoyed, in his completely undemonstrative way, at the chance to be away from his mother and the rest of the world. It was, nonetheless, only polite to make a question out of it.