“Where’s Jackie?” Kit called, but Saul had to turn away to face his opponent.

It was what Kit had forever most hated and feared, to be pointed at and stared at and mocked. In the Passion story when she was a kid it was this that hurt her most, that the crowds mocked Jesus and spit on him. But she felt none of that now. She could see and assess the crowd around them as though they were etched. Almost all were men, many wearing their fraternity sweatshirts and their varsity jackets, some of them though in blazers and ties, with American-flag pins in their lapels and wolfish grins, not guys who got to be part of a mob very often and seeming to be enjoying it. One guy who bore down on them wore the button that the SANE women had worn, the three white lines on black, but when he came closer to Kit—so close and yelling so loud that she could see the fillings in his teeth—she saw that on his button the white lines were formed into a great swept-wing bomber, and beneath it were small letters that spelled DROP IT.

“Keep the women in the center!” Saul yelled back at his shrinking group. “Keep the women in the center, men on the outside!” The marchers had ceased their chanting, Peace Now and Hands Off Cuba, it was obvious that it just goaded the crowd around them dangerously; but the women who walked with Kit and Fran, arms now more protectively linked than before, started to sing. They sang, amazingly, in Latin: Dona, dona nobis, dona nobis pacem.

It was a round: one took up after the other had started, kept on after she ended. Fran laughed aloud, apparently she knew what they were singing, she right away began singing along in a loud hoarse voice perfectly on key, and Kit sang too when after a moment she got the little tune: Dona, dona nobis, dona nobis pacem, pacem, the women’s voices cycled.

Then through the marchers and the shifting crowd coming and going, Kit saw Falin.

He was just turning from looking elsewhere, and now his look passed over the marchers and the others with interest and something like delight. It seemed he didn’t recognize Kit in the mass of them, though she felt the instant of his look toward her like a stab of wonder.

“Then it’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay.”

“What’s okay?” Fran said.

“It’s him,” Kit said. “Falin.”

He was coming closer to them, it seemed. Kit was about to call out to him when he turned away, looking elsewhere. In a second she couldn’t see him anymore. But just before the crowd closed around him she saw—she thought she saw—that his big pale feet were bare.

No. Where had he gone? There was no way to turn back, no way to leave the little group of marchers now, Kit was carried forward by all of it without a choice. She untangled herself from Fran and the women and stood still while the others passed by her, until the rear guard caught up with her and Max came close, his arms wide to keep them moving, like a shepherd.

“We’ve got to break this up,” he said. “Somebody’ll get hurt.”

“Max.”

“Get up and tell Saul and the people in front. We’ve got to break it up. Go do that.”

She went back up along the edge of the marching group, too tightly and defensively bound together now to pass through. When she came to the front she saw that Saul was less certain too than he had been, and that ahead the opposing crowd was coming together in a wall that wouldn’t let them pass. “Where’s the cops?” she heard him say. “Now where’s the cops? Free speech, people. Free speech. Land of the free.”

In a minute the march would not be a march any longer, it would be a huddle of victims, the ones in the rear were pressing already against the slowing front rank. Almost all their signs were gone. Then, just as their forward progress was about to stop altogether, Saul stepped quickly out ahead and turned to face his group, walking backward like a drum major. With both hands he waved them to the right, off the main way and onto the walks of the campus.

“Okay, quick!” he called out. “Keep on, keep together! We’re going to end this at the library! Everybody hear? Pass that on! At the library steps!” All the while waving them to the right and on. They did go faster too, almost broke into a run, and for the first time Kit felt fear, that they might run, and what might happen to them then. But they didn’t, even though the crowd around gave an awful cry of rage and triumph to see that they had given up and were getting away.

But what had happened to him? Kit thought. What had he done, where had he gone?

The library was open. At the steps Saul and Max ushered them all inside, medieval outlaws claiming sanctuary; a few though stayed outside to deal with the crowd—Saul, whose chest was heaving maybe from the unaccustomed exercise, and Max, unperturbed, hands clasped behind his back and even smiling when Kit went by him into the dark silent inside. For a moment she felt it had grown suddenly not dark but black, and her feet lost touch with the floor, as though it melted to liquid; then she felt someone take her arm, and steady her.

“Okay?”

“Yes. Yes. Okay.”

How long did they hide there? The librarian came to speak to them more than once, hushing them and telling them, which they knew, that the library was a place of study and work, not conversation and mingling. Someone was crying. Time passed. Above their heads, all around the base of the rotunda, were words printed in gold: A Good Book Is the Precious Life Blood of a Master Spirit. The doors kept opening to show the day and admitting more of the demonstrators, and also those who had bones to pick with them, their voices dropping to hissing whispers, until the librarian chased them away too.

Kit sat huddled on the bench by the great doors where you could sit to pull off your galoshes or overshoes, which were not allowed in the halls and stacks.

“Kit,” Fran said, studying her. “Are you sick?”

“I don’t know.”

“How long since you ate?”

“I forget.”

Fran nodded. “I do that,” she said. “I fainted once in Saks.” She sat beside her. “Listen,” she said. “What happened. With Falin.”

“I saw him,” Kit said. “Now, just now, out there. I have to find him. I have to.” She bent over, feeling she might fall asleep here, again, on this bench. “My throat hurts so much.”

“We’ll go eat,” Fran said. “Hell with those people.”

In the Castle the arguments were continuing; Max came in with an entourage of questioners, not all of them angry, and he sat to talk with them. Saul and Rodger came in too, warily.

“Sit,” Fran said. “What do you want?”

“Just a sec,” Kit said.

Taking hold of the backs of booths she made her way to the phone in the back, in its little wooden house that had long ago lost its door. She called his office at the liberal arts tower but there was no answer there, the office closed on a Saturday. She called the operator and asked for the number at his house, not expecting to be told it. “Falin,” she said, and spelled it, and the operator told her what it was, Orchard 9-5066, not secret at all. She dialed, almost unable to turn the worn dial plate with her finger, why so weak. She listened to the Princess ring. Ben had told her that actually the ring you hear isn’t the one that’s heard or not heard in the room you call: just an illusion.

After a long time she hung up.

Fran stood by the booth where Saul and Rodger sat. “All those people,” she was saying. “It’s like they want it to go off. Like they’re tired of standing on the edge, and they want to jump. But that can’t be. It just can’t.”

“1914,” Saul said. “War fever. The workers all joined the armies of their countries. Even though it was in none of their interests. Even though they knew it. They just did it. As though they were sleepwalking, or possessed. They weren’t even drafted. They volunteered. They were called, they went.”