Besides my duties as editor, I was also the official apologist and I was kept busy composing dialogues on various ethical matters, ranging from the virtues of cremation to fair business practices. Needless to say, I had a good deal of help and some of my most resounding effects were contrived by others, by anonymous specialists. Each installment, however, of Cavite doctrine (or rationalization as I preferred to think of my work) was received as eagerly by the expanding ranks of the faithful as it was denounced by the Catholic Church and the new league of Protestant Churches under Bishop Winston’s guidance.
We received our first serious setback when, in the autumn of our first year in the new building, we were banned from the television networks through a series of technicalities created by Congress for our benefit and invoked without warning. It took Paul’s lawyers a year to get the case through the courts which finally reversed the government’s ruling. Meanwhile, we counterattacked by creating hundreds of new Centers where films of Cave were shown regularly. Once a week he was televised for the Centers where huge crowds gathered to see and hear him and it was always Paul’s claim that the government’s spiteful action had, paradoxically, been responsible for the sudden victory of Cavesword: not being able to listen to their idol in their own homes the Cavites, and even the merely curious, were forced to visit the Centers where, in the general mood of camaraderie and delight in the same word, they were organized quite ruthlessly. Stokharin’s clinics handled their personal problems. Other departments assumed the guidance and even the support, if necessary, of their children while free medical and educational facilities were made available to all who applied.
At the end of the second year, there were more enrolled Cavites than any other single religious denomination including the Roman Catholic. I published this fact and the accompanying statistics with a certain guilt which, needless to say, my fellow directors did not share. The result of this revelation was a special Congressional hearing.
In spite of the usual confusion attendant upon any of the vigorous old Congress’s hearteningly incompetent investigations, this event was well-staged, preparing the way politically, to draw the obvious parallel, for a new Constantine.
It took place in March and it was the only official journey any of us, excepting Paul, had made from our yellow citadel for two years. The entire proceedings were televised, a bit of unwisdom on the part of the hostile Congressmen who, in their understandable eagerness for publicity, overlooked their intended victim’s complete mastery of that medium. I did not go to Washington but I saw Cave and Paul and Iris off from the roof of the Center. Because of the crowds which had formed in the streets, hoping for a glimpse of Cave, the original plan to fly to Washington aboard a chartered airplane was discarded at the last minute and two helicopters were ordered instead to pick up Cave and his party on the terrace in front of the penthouse, a mode of travel not then popular.
Paul saw to it that the departure was filmed. A dozen of us who were not going stood about among the trees and bushes while the helicopters hovered a few feet above the roof, their ladders dangling. Then Cave appeared with Paul and Iris while a camera crew recorded their farewell and departure. Cave looked as serene as ever, quite pale in his dark blue suit and white shirt ... a small austere figure with downcast eyes. Iris was bright-faced from the excitement and cold; there was a sharp wind on the roof which tangled her hair.
“I’m terrified,” she whispered fiercely in my ear as we shook hands formally for the camera.
“Paul seems in full command,” I said, comfortingly. And Paul, not Cave, was making a short speech to the camera while Cave stood alone and still; then, in a gust of wind, they were gone and I went to my office to watch the hearings.
The official reason for the investigation was based upon certain charges made by the various churches that the Cavites were subverting Christian morality by championing free love and publicly descrying the eternal institution of marriage. This was the burden of that complaint against Cave which the Committee most wished to contemplate since it was the strongest of the numerous allegations and, in their eyes, the most dangerous to the state, the one most likely to get the largest amount of publicity. For some years the realm of public morals had been a favorite excursion grounds for the Congress and their tournaments at public expense were attended delightedly by everyone. This particular one, affecting as it did the head of the largest single religious establishment in the country would, the Congressmen were quite sure, prove an irresistible spectacle. It was.
At first there was a good deal of confusion. Newspaper men stumbled over one another; flash bulbs were dropped; Congressmen could not get through the crowd to take their seats. To fill in, while these preliminaries were got over, the camera was trained upon the crowd which was beginning to gather in front of the Capitol; a crowd which grew, as one watched, to Inaugural size. Though it was orderly, a troop of soldiers in trucks soon arrived, as though by previous design, and they got out, forming a cordon of fixed bayonets before the various entrances to the Capitol.