A low, gray door, without numeral or insignia, blocked the end of the corridor. Some yards short of it was a narrow side-door. Clawly II touched something and the side-door opened. Thorn followed him through it. After a few paces down a dim, curving passageway, they came to a large room, but Clawly II stopped them just short of it. Again he touched something. A door slid silently out of the wall behind them, changing the end of the passageway into a dark niche in the room ahead. Signing to Thorn that they were to wait and watch, Clawly II leaned back with a slow speculative smile.
IX.
Black Star, would I were steadfast as thou art—
John Keats (with an ironic alteration)
It was a notably bare room, smaller and lower-ceilinged than he had expected. It was furnished with ostentatious simplicity, and nothing broke the gray monotony of the walls.
Around the longer side of a kidney-shaped table, eleven men sat on stools. Their gray tunics, though clean, were like those of beggars. They were all old, some bald, some capped with close-cropped white or gray. They all sat very erect.
The first thing that struck Thorn—with surprise, he realized—was that the Servants of the People looked in no way malignant, villainous, or evil.
But looking at them a second time, Thorn began to wonder if there was not something worse. A puritanic grimness that knew no humor. A suffocating consciousness of responsibility, as if all the troubles of the world rested on their shoulders alone. A paternal aloofness, as if everyone else were an irresponsible child. A selflessness swollen to such bounds as to become supreme selfishness. An intolerable sense of personal importance that their beggarly clothes and surroundings only emphasized.
But Thorn had barely gleaned this impression, had had no time to survey the faces in detail, except to note that one of two seemed vaguely familiar, when his attention became rivetted on the man who was standing on the other side of the table, the focus of their converging eyes.
That man was obviously one of them. His manner and general appearance were the same.