“Boss, you mind your own business.”

It was all very puzzling—both that Jill could smell still more like Jill . . . and that Dorcas should wish to smell like Jill when she already smelled like herself . . . and that Jubal would say that Dorcas smelled like a cat when she did not. There was a cat who lived on the place (not as a pet, but as co-owner); on rare occasions it came to the house and deigned to accept a handout. The cat and Mike had grokeed each other at once, and Mike had found its carniverous thoughts most pleasing and quite Martian. He had discovered, too, that the cat’s name (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche) was not the cat’s name at all, but he had not told anyone this because he could not pronounce the cat’s real name; he could only hear it in his head.

The cat did not smell like Dorcas.

Giving presents was a great goodness and the buying thereof taught Mike much about the true value of money. But he had not forgotten even momentarily that there were other things he was eager to grok. Jubal had put off Senator Boone’s invitation to Mike twice without mentioning it to Mike and Mike had not noticed, since his quite different grasp of time made “next Sunday” no particular date.

But the next repetition of the invitation came by mail and was addressed to Mike; Senator Boone was under pressure from Supreme Bishop Digby to produce the Man from Mars and Boone had sensed that Harshaw was stalling him and might stall indefinitely.

Mike took it to Jubal, stood waiting. “Well?” Jubal growled. “Do you want to go, or don’t you? You don’t have to attend a Fosterite service. We can tell ’em to go to hell.”

So a Checker Cab with a human driver (Harshaw refused to trust his life to an autocab) picked them up the next Sunday morning and delivered Mike, Jill, and Jubal to a public landing flat just outside the sacred grounds of Archangel Foster Tabernacle of the Church of the New Revelation.



23

Jubal had been trying to warn Mike all the way to church; of what, Mike was not certain. He had listened, he always listened—but the landscape below them tugged for attention, too; he had compromised by storing what Jubal said. “Now look, boy,” Jubal had admonished, “these Fosterites are after your money. That’s all right, most everybody is after your money; you just have to be firm. Your money and the prestige of having the Man from Mars join their church. They’re going to work on you—and you have to be firm about that, too.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Damn it, I don’t believe you’ve been listening.”

“I am sorry, Jubal.”

“Well . . . look at it this way. Religion is a solace to many people and it is even conceivable that some religion, somewhere, really is Ultimate Truth. But in many cases, being religious is merely a form of conceit. The Bible Belt faith in which I was brought up encouraged me to think that I was better than the rest of the world; I was ‘saved’ and they were ‘damned’—we were in a state of grace and the rest of world were ‘heathens’ . . . and by ‘heathen’ they meant such people as our brother Mahmoud. It meant that an ignorant, stupid lout who seldom bathed and planted his corn by the phase of the Moon could claim to know the final answers of the Universe. That entitled him to look down his nose at everybody else. Our hymn book was loaded with such arrogance—mindless, conceited, self-congratulation on how cozy we were with the Almighty and what a high opinion he had of us and us alone, and what hell everybody else was going to catch come Judgment Day. We peddled the only authentic brand of Lydia Pinkham’s—”

“Jubal!” Jill said sharply. “He doesn’t grok it.”

“Uh? Sorry. I got carried away. My folks tried to make a preacher out of me and missed by a narrow margin; I guess it still shows.”

“It does.”

“Don’t rub it in, girl. I would have made a good one if I hadn’t fallen into the fatal folly of reading anything I could lay hands on. With just a touch more self confidence and a liberal helping of ignorance I could have been a famous evangelist. Shucks, this place we’re headed for today would have been known as the ‘Archangel Jubal Tabernacle.’”

Jill made a face. “Jubal, please! Not so soon after breakfast.”

“I mean it. A confidence man knows that he’s lying; that limits his scope. But a successful shaman ropes himself first; he believes what he says—and such belief is contagious; there is no limit to his scope. But I lacked the necessary confidence in my own infallibility; I could never become a prophet . . . just a critic—which is a poor thing at best, a sort of fourth-rate prophet suffering from delusions of gender.” Jubal frowned. “That’s what worries me about Fosterites, Jill. I think that they are utterly sincere . . . and you and I know that Mike is a sucker for sincerity.”