Heidekopfer checked the sets of his radio, walked to the door and flung it open. The fifteen or twenty men and women of the Supreme Soviet were seated in chairs scattered in no particular order around the classroom, with Samsonov at the teacher's desk, his back to Heidekopfer as the latter entered. But the thing that made the reporter catch his breath as the faces turned toward him like flowers toward the sun was the sight of Ann Starnes, sitting just to the right of the Patriarch. Her glance was coldly unfriendly.
For a second or two the tableau held. Then Samsonov turned round and rose majestically to his feet. "The session of the Supreme Soviet is secret," he said, and glared.
Heidekopfer once more felt the headache sensation at the back of his neck, accompanied by an almost overwhelming impulse to get out of there, to escape from that place before something dreadful happened, a strange malaise, which he could not name possessed him. He staggered back a step, then caught Ann's eye fixed on him with the same quality as the rest, and was abruptly seized by another impulse, even more overwhelming.
The second one struck him as a better idea, anyway, so he yielded to it. He took three rapid steps toward the Patriarch Samsonov and let him have one fetched up from the region of the belt-line.
It took the big man flush on the button, and down he went, thrashing and kicking, as the room burst into a turmoil of shouts and chairs knocked to the floor. Ann screamed. Heidekopfer grabbed her by the arm. "You're coming with me whether you like it or not," he said in English, and turned to face the group menacingly. But nobody seemed inclined to offer him any opposition, and the thought flashed through his head that they probably had a law against physical violence, too.
Samsonov had hauled himself to his feet with the aid of the desk. There was a little trickle of blood from his mouth and his eyes were deadly. The last thing Heidekopfer heard him say as he pulled the girl through the door was, "There will be a law—"
Kazetzky had disappeared. Ann was limp as he bundled her into the droshky, and didn't say anything until he had unhitched the horse, climbed to the driver's seat, and with a combination of yells and jerking on the reins, urged it into plodding motion. Then she said, "Oh, Bob!"
He didn't turn around. "Yeah. What is it?"
"I was hating you. I knew they were going to pass a law that you should commit suicide, and I was going to help them."
"Nice of you."