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reflected. But these two people, in contradistinction to Carl Gantrix, appeared to have no connection with Roberts, and this altered his attitude. “Anything in particular?” he asked the girl in a kindly fashion, wanting to reassure her; she was obviously easily intimidated.
    The girl said in a soft little voice, “My husband just wanted me to find out all I could.”
    “My suggestion,” Appleford told her, “is that rather than plowing through manuscripts and books you consult an expert in contemporary religious history.” A man who, by the way, enjoyed an attractive woman—as Appleford did. He toyed with a ballpoint pen, for dramatic emphasis. “As a matter of fact I personally know more than a little about the late Anarch.” He leaned back in his swivel chair, folded his hands, observed the inlaid ceiling of his office.
    “Whatever you can tell me would be appreciated,” Mrs. Hermes said in her shy way.
    Shrugging, with a smile, pleased in fact to be encouraged, Doug Appleford began his oration. Both Mrs. Hermes and Officer Tinbane listened with obedient attention, and this pleased him, too.
    At the time of his death the Anarch had been fifty years old. He had led an interesting—and unusual—life. In his college days, as a brilliant student, he had studied at Cambridge; he had in fact become a Rhodes scholar, majoring in classic languages: Hebrew, Sanskrit, Attic Greek, and Latin. Then, at twenty-two, he had abruptly abandoned his academic career—and his country; he had migrated to the United States to study jazz with the then great jazz performer Herbie Mann. After a time he had formed his own jazz combo, he himself playing the flute.
    In connection with this he had lived on the West Coast, in San Francisco. At that time, the late sixties, the Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of California, James Pike, had been arranging to have jazz masses performed at Grace Cathedral, and one of the groups he had called on was Thomas Peak’s combo. At this point, Peak had turned composer; he had written a lengthy jazz mass and it had been a success. Pike’s Peak, the local newspaper columnist Herb Caen had dubbed him, then; that had been in 1968. Bishop Pike himself had been an interesting person, too. A former lawyer, active in the A.C.L.U., one of the most brilliant and radical clerical figures of his time, he had become involved in what had been called “social action,” the issues of the day: in particular, Negro rights. He had for instance been at Selma with Dr. Martin Luther King. From all this, Thomas Peak had learned. He, too, had become involved in the issues of the day—on a much smaller scale than Bishop Pike, of course. At Bishop Pike’s suggestion he had entered seminary school, had become at last an ordained Episcopal priest—and, like James Pike, his bishop, quite radical for those times, although now the doctrines which he advocated had become more or less accepted. It was a case of being ahead of his time.
    Peak had, in fact, been charged in a heresy trial, had been booted out of the Episcopal Church; whereupon he had gone on and founded his own. And, when the Free Negro Municipality had been born, he had headed that way; he had made its capital the place of origin for his cult.
    There was not much resemblance between Peak’s new cult and the Episcopal Church which he had left. The experience of Udi, the group mind, comprised the central—if not the sole—sacrament, and it was for this that the congregation gathered. Without the hallucinogenic drug employed, the sacrament could not take place; hence, like the North American Indian cult which it resembled, Peak’s church depended on the availability, not to mention the legality, of the drug. So a curious relationship between the cult and cooperative authorities had to exist.
    As to the Udi experience, the most enlightened reports, based on firsthand testimony of undercover agents, stated categorically that the group-mind fusion was real, not