They were taken out of the enclosure and the room they had been in, down another short corridor to an underground garage and a waiting bus. The bus hissed up on its fans and they slid out through the garage, emerging into the nighttime streets of Citadel. It was raining, and the rain streaked the windows of the bus, blurring the gray shapes of the building fronts they passed under the sparse yellow glow of the street lighting. They drove for a little under half an hour, then entered another interior garage, down below the street level.
From the bus in the garage, they were taken upstairs into what seemed at first sight to be an office building. Their papers were taken from them; and there was another long wait on straight chairs in an outer office, with trips to the water tap in one wall and to the rest room, under the eye of their police guard, as the only distractions. Then, one by one, they were called into interior offices that had only a single desk and a single interviewer behind it. Once more, Hal saw the dark-skinned young man called before him.
When Hal's turn came, he found himself sitting down at the side of a desk, facing a small, balding man with an egg-shaped face, unblinking eyes and an almost lipless mouth. The gray man picked up papers that Hal recognized as his from the desk, and read through them with a speed that made Hal suspect the other of being already familiar with their contents. He laid the papers back down and looked at Hal from a bureaucratic distance.
"Your name?"
"Howard Beloved Immanuelson
"You're a communicant of the Revealed Church Reborn, born into that Church twenty-three point four standard years ago, in the hamlet of Enterprise?"
"Yes," said Hal.
"Your father and mother were both communicants of that Church?"
"Yes."
"You remain a communicant in good standing of that Church?"
"I am," said Hal, "by the grace of the Lord."
"You have just returned from four years of work off-planet as a semantic interpreter, having been employed by various of the unchurched…"
The questioning continued, covering the facts of Howard Immanuelson's life as set forth in the papers Hal had been carrying. Once these had been exhausted, the interviewer pushed the papers from him and stared at Hal with his unchanging eyes.
"Do you keep regular times of prayer?" he asked.
Hal had been expecting this sort of question.
"As far as I can," he said. "Travelling about as I do among those who do lack the Word, it isn't always easy to keep regular hours of prayer."
"Ease," said the interviewer, "is not the way of the Lord."
"I know," said Hal. "I know as you do that the fact that regular hours of prayer are difficult to keep is no excuse for laxity. So I've become used to inward communication at my usual times of literal prayer."
The gray man's upper lip seemed to curl a little, but it was so thin Hal could not be sure.
"How many daily are your times of prayer - when it's convenient for you to pray, that is?"
Hal thought swiftly. He did not know the sectarian rules of the Revealed Church Reborn. But if it was a church in the North Oldcontinent region where Enterprise was located, then it was probably in the so-called "Old" Tradition, rather than the New. In any case, as the saying went, each Friendly was a sect on his own.
"Seven."
"Seven?" The interviewer kept his tone level and his face expressionless, but Hal suddenly suspected he was talking to one of those who held to the New Tradition, and believed that more than four times of formal prayer a day were arrogant and ostentatious.
"Matins and lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers and compline," said Hal.
He saw the hint of an unmistakable sourness on the face of the man before him as he reeled off the Latin names. It was a risk to do something like this deliberately; but he would be out of character if he did not clash with almost any other Friendly on details of religious dogma or observance. At the same time he did not want to goad anyone like this strongly enough to give the other a personal reason to make the conditions and results of this interview more harsh than they might otherwise be.
"Yes," said the interviewer, harshly. "But for all those gaudy names you pray secretly, like a coward. Perhaps you belong to that anathema, that new cult among our sinful youth, that professes to believe that prayer is unnecessary if you only live with God and His purposes in mind. There's a great Teacher just arrived here among us who could show you the error of that way…"
The tone of his voice was rising. He broke off abruptly and wiped his lips with a folded white handkerchief.
"Did you have much contact with other churched individuals during your years among the ungodly?" he asked, in a more controlled voice.
"By nature of my work," said Hal, "I had little contact with anyone from the Promised Worlds. My associations, of necessity, were with those people of the planets on which I was working."
"But you met and knew some from Harmony or Association?"
"A few," said Hal. "I don't think I can even remember the names of any."
"Indeed? Perhaps you might remember more than names. Do you recall meeting any of those who style themselves the Children of Wrath, or the Children of God's Wrath?"
"On occasion - " Hal began, but the interviewer broke in.
"I'm not referring merely to those who live in knowledge of, and sometimes admit, that they are deservedly forgotten of God. I'm talking of those who have taken this impious name to themselves as an organization counter to God's churches and God's commandments."
Hal shook his head.
"No," he said. "No, I've never even heard of them."
"Strange," the thin upper lip curled visibly this time, "that so widely traveled a person should be so ignorant of the scourge being visited upon the world of his birth. In all those four years, none of those from Harmony or Association that you met ever mentioned the Children of Wrath?"
"No," said Hal.
"Satan has your tongue, I see." The interviewer pressed one of a bank of studs on his desktop. "Perhaps after you think it over, you may come to a better memory. You can go, now."
Hal got up and reached for his papers, but the gray man opened a drawer of his desk and swept them in. Hal turned to leave, but discovered when he got to the door that that was as far as the freedom of his permission was extended. He was taken in charge by an armed and uniformed police guard and taken elsewhere in the building.
The two of them went down several floors and through a number of corridors to what now began to strongly resemble a jail rather than an office building. Past a couple of heavy, locked doors they came to a desk behind which another police guard sat; and here all pretence that this was anything but a jail ended. Hal had the personal possessions he was carrying taken from him, he was searched for anything he had not admitted carrying, then taken on by the guard behind the desk, down several more corridors and to a final, heavy metal door that was plainly locked and unlocked only from the outside.
"Could I get something to eat?" said Hal as the guard opened this door and motioned inside. "I haven't had anything since I landed - "
"Tomorrow's meal comes tomorrow," said the guard. "Inside!"
Hal obeyed, hearing the door crash shut and locked behind him.
The place into which he had been put was a large room or cell, with narrow benches attached to its bare concrete walls. The floor was also bare concrete with an unscreened latrine consisting of a stool, a urinal and a washstand occupying one blank corner. There was nothing else of note in the cell, except a double window with its sill two meters above the floor, in the wall opposite the door, and one fellow-prisoner.
Chapter Fourteen
The other occupant of the room, a man stretched out on one of the benches with his back to the room, was apparently trying to sleep; although this was something of an endeavor in the face of the fact that the room was brightly illuminated by a lighting panel let into the center of its ceiling. Hal recognized the man by the color of his hair and his general shape as the dark-skinned young man who had been in front of him through most of the procedure that had taken place since they had all disembarked from the jitney.