“No. I’m to get my heels in first; then my colleague comes on in a few weeks. That’s standard procedure. He’s a psychologist and an authority on Cavesword. We all are, of course—authorities, that is—but he’s gone into the early history and so on a little more thoroughly than us field men usually do.”
So there was to be another one, a cleverer one. I found myself both dreading and looking forward to the arrival of this dangerous person: it would be interesting to communicate with a good mind again, or at least an instructed one: though Butler has not given me much confidence in the new Cavite Communicators. Nevertheless, I am intensely curious about the Western world since my flight from it. I have been effectively cut off from any real communion with the West for two decades. Rumors, stray bits of information sometimes penetrate as far as Luxor but I can make little sense of them, for the Cavites are, as I well know, not given to candor while the Egyptian newspapers exist in a fantasy world of Pan-Arabic dominion. There was so much I wished to know that I hesitated to ask Butler, not for fear of giving myself away but because I felt that any serious conversation with him would be pointless: I rather doubted if he knew what he was supposed to know, much less all the details which I wished to know and which even a moderately intelligent man, if not hopelessly zealous, might be able to supply me with.
I had a sudden idea. “You don’t happen to have a recent edition of the Testament, do you? Mine’s quite old and out of date.”
“What date?” This was unexpected.
“The year? I don’t recall. About thirty years old, I should say.”
There was a silence. “Of course yours is a special case, being marooned like this. There’s a ruling about it which I think will protect you fully since you’ve had no contact with the outside; anyway, as a Communicator, I must ask you for your old copy.”
“Why certainly but ...”
“I’ll give you a new one, of course. You see it is against the law to have any Testament which predates the second Cavite Council.”
I was beginning to understand: after the schism a second Council had been inevitable even though no reference to it has ever appeared in the Egyptian press. “The censorship here is thorough,” I said. “I had no idea there had been a new Council.”
“What a bunch of savages!” Butler groaned with disgust. “That’s going to be one of our main jobs, you know, education, freeing the press. There has been almost no communication between the two spheres of influence....”