As a devout agnostic, Jubal consciously evalued all religions, from the animism of the Kalahari Bushmen to the most sober and intellectualized of the major western faiths, as being equal. But emotionally he disliked some more than others . . . and the Church of the New Revelation set his teeth on edge. The Fosterites’ flat-footed claim to utter gnosis through a direct pipeline to Heaven, their arrogant intolerance implemented in open persecution of all other religions wherever they were strong enough to get away with it, the sweaty football-rally & sales-convention flavor of their services—all these ancillary aspects depressed him. If people must go to church, why the devil couldn’t they be dignified about it, like Catholics, Christian Scientists, or Quakers?

If God existed (a question concerning which Jubal maintained a meticulous intellectual neutrality) and if He desired to be worshipped (a proposition which Jubal found inherently improbable but conceivably possible in the dim light of his own ignorance), then (stipulating affirmatively both the above) it nevertheless seemed wildly unlikely to Jubal to the point of reductio ad absurdum that a God potent to shape galaxies would be titillated and swayed by the whoop-te-do nonsense the Fosterites offered Him as “worship.”

But with bleak honesty Jubal admitted to himself that the Universe (correction: that piece of the Universe he himself had seen) might very well be in toto an example of reduction to absurdity. In which case the Fosterites might be possessed of the Truth, the exact Truth, and nothing but the Truth. The Universe was a damned silly place at best . . . but the least likely explanation for its existence was the no-explanation of random chance, the conceit that some abstract somethings “just happened” to be some atoms that “just happened” to get together in configurations which “just happened” to look like consistent laws and then some of these configurations “just happened” to possess self-awareness and that two such “just happened” to be the Man from Mars and the other a bald-headed old coot with Jubal himself inside.

No, Jubal would not buy the “just happened” theory, popular as it was with men who called themselves scientists. Random chance was not a sufficient explanation of the Universe—in fact, random chance was not sufficient to explain random chance; the pot could not hold itself.

What then? “Least hypothesis” held no place of preference; Occam’s razor could not slice the prime problem, the Nature of the Mind of God (might as well call it that to yourself, you old scoundrel; it’s a short, simple, Anglo-Saxon monosyllable, not banned by having four letters—and as good a tag for what you don’t understand as any).

Was there any basis for preferring any one sufficient hypothesis over another? When you simply did not understand a thing: No! And Jubal readily admitted to himself that a long lifetime had left him completely and totally not understanding the basic problems of the Universe.

So the Fosterites might be right. Jubal could not even show that they were probably wrong.

But, he reminded himself savagely, two things remained to him: his own taste and his own pride. If indeed the Fosterites held a monopoly on Truth (as they claimed), if Heaven were open only to Fosterites, then he, Jubal Harshaw, gentleman and free citizen, preferred that eternity of pain-filled damnation promised to all “sinners” who refused the New Revelation. He might not be able to see the naked Face of God . . . but his eyesight was good enough to pick out his social equals—and those Fosterites, by damn, did not measure up!

But he could see how Mike had been misled; the Fosterite “going to Heaven” at a pre-selected time and place did sound like the voluntary and planned “discorporation” which, Jubal did not doubt, was the accepted practice on Mars. Jubal himself held a dark suspicion that a better term for the Fosterite practice was “murder”—but such had never been proved and had rarely been publicly hinted, much less charged, even when the cult was young and relatively small. Foster himself had been the first to “go to Heaven” on schedule, dying publicly at a self-prophesied instant. Since that first example, it had been a Fosterite mark of special grace . . . and it had been years since any coroner or district attorney had had the temerity to pry into such deaths.

Not that Jubal cared whether they were spontaneous or induced. In his opinion a good Fosterite was a dead Fosterite. Let them be!

But it was going to be hard to explain to Mike.

No use stalling, another cup of coffee wouldn’t make it any easier—“Mike, who made the world?”

“Beg pardon?”

“Look around you. All this. Mars, too. The stars. Everything. You and me and everybody. Did the Old Ones tell you who made it?”