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Show Acting Alone Page 397 in unavoidable idleness, due to the generally decoy-like nature of this whole part of the enterprise. The Elder knew that the missionaries had been trained to want more than anything to wear three-piece suits and ride one-speed bikes; and so they had ample opportunity to do just that.. The energy generated by the pumping of their rock-hard, blond legs was fed directly into a ground wire, or into a static eliminator set back in a cave somewhere, or into a giant purple bugwhacker or some such contrivance suspended overhead in the tops of the lifelike trees. (The real power, of course, came via huge cables that boa-constricted up from the solid granite at the "Companions'" feet, from a source not to be discussed even in one's private-most mind.) The only sign of life came when a couple of them balked, in their chillingly monotonic way of balking, about not being allowed to hold Family Home Evening prayer meeting out in the open. But the Elder had had to remain obdurate on that matter. Such a thing would doubtlessly turn the stomach of someone as pink and professedly godless as Axelrad. The Elder knew that a pure social scientist like this little Jew would scoff at the idea of prayer to someone or -thing larger and more significant than he, even while desiring some kind of outside guidance more adamantly than the missionaries themselves; so the Elder had accommodatingly provided the poor boy with some trendy self-help buzzwords and -phrases and -processes to fasten his emotional health onto: something like Accessing into your Center of Inner Strength, and so on, all of it provided by and therefore imbued with the personality of Mr. Cicerone himself - which, in all modesty, yet in all realism, was the actual thing the boy wanted most to cling to in the first place. For the Elder had plied his most intense charisma upon the weakwilled, diminutive, fatherless |
