His first instinctual response was to desire escape. Turning around he saw, directly behind him, a door which was ajar. Not that he wanted to escape very far, he just wanted to go off in a dark corner and sit and think the whole thing out.
The Grandfather was still speaking, as Comstock, unobserved, began to step backwards. The others, Comstock's fellow rebels were leaning forward, greedily drinking in what The Grandfather was saying.
"You will, in the next day or two," The Grandfather was saying as Comstock backed closer to the door, "be told just how our government operates. You will be told how, when the last scientists were martyred by an unreasoning mob, they tried, before death claimed them, in their wisdom to set up non-mechanical devices that would cure the sick. They knew that in the period of dark reaction by which they were swept to death, anything that smelled of machinery was doomed to destruction.
"You will then understand why I was in effect forced to cause this world of ours to enter a period of the strictest moral upbringing. Only under such a regime could the psychosomatic mechanisms that the scientists had explained, be able to work.
"I have been only too successful as you know. I have, by the restrictions I set up, brought into being a world where people fear sickness not because of the pain it brings, but because of the shame the sins which cure it bring in its path."
Then the door was near enough so that Comstock was able to duck through it. There was a hard bench just outside and as Comstock sat down on it, his brain awhirl, he heard the deep voice of The Grandfather say, just as Comstock pushed the door closed, "But enough of the way our world works now. I think the next subject under discussion will be just what we can do to make our world take the step from an inner-directed culture with ancestor-directed overtones, on and up to the next normal step which is an other-directed culture."
Inasmuch as the last thing that Comstock remembered clearly was when he brought the "car" under control and then tied up the man he knew as the Picaroon, he sat on the hard bench, his buttock muscles sore from lack of sleep, his stomach gurgling loudly from lack of food and water, and tried to reconstruct just what had been happening to him.
It was no use. There was a lapse he could not account for. He remembered that the Picaroon had asked him a question, but luckily he could not remember how it was phrased, and then the next thing he knew he was getting out of the R.A.'s car, being guided into the fearful sanctum of the Fathers, and then, first fearing instant death, he had then been apprised of his accession to power. Then the membership of the Board of Fathers had been revealed to be a sentence of death, and before his weary, battered brain could recover from that, The Grandfather had made it clear that the world's future was somehow his responsibility.
Comstock was only too aware of his mortality, as everyone is when fatigue has lowered one's defenses. He slouched down on the bench and tried to rationalize some of the recent events.