She reached out a hand to take his. "Come," and led the way across the bowl of green. A group of men and women stood in their path. "We are going to look at flowers together," the girl announced gaily. "Pitrim Androvich thinks it would be good."
They all seemed to find something delightfully humorous in this, and there was a burst of laughter as they crowded round. "Flowers are nature's key to happiness!" boomed one of the men, patting Heidekopfer on the shoulder. "You will see what fine ones we produce in happy Tolstoia."
He was suddenly aware that they were staring at him with a peculiar intensity in the midst of their animated movements, and of a slight tension, like the beginning of a headache, at the back of his neck. This must be it; he was being high-pressured for some purpose. It was understandable how they would call this the brotherhood of man ... how they had developed the ability to put mass hypnotic pressure on any individual ... how the castaways had been similarly pressured into adopting the Tolstoian way of life ... how—
Sonia Grigorevna's voice came through his reverie, "Are you dreaming, little father? Let us go."
He shook himself a little, like a dog coming out of water. "By all means, let us go." She was really beautiful, not with the broad Slavic features at all, but a narrow face and high cheek-bones that must have come from some remote Nordic ancestor.
The others waved hands as she led him up the gentle slope at the edge of the bowl, and pushed through a screen of trees into a field of lush grass. There was a string of bushes toward the river-bank. "The best flowers are there," said Sonia.
"Tell me," he said, "when someone really does not want to do something the rest want, how do you make them do it?"
She gave him a glance of puzzlement. "I do not understand. We do not make them do it. It is the word of the Master that everything savoring of compulsion is harmful."
Pretty neat, he thought ... just like the Russian Soviets of the old days, who got away with dictatorship by calling it democracy. Aloud he said, "I know. But don't you ever have—deviationists?"
"Oh no. The will of all is the will of one. That is the brotherhood of man. But if a person doubts whether his will is fully given, he takes the cure. That is the law. This way."