Robert Silverberg - Thomas the Proclaimer

And so forth. I think it was a pretty eloquent speech, especially coming from someone who isn’t in the habit of delivering orations. A transcript of it got into the local paper the next day and was reprinted all over. My “us the discerning few” line drew a lot of attention, and spawned an instant label for our previously unnamed movement. We became known as the Discerners. Once we had a name, our status was different. We weren’t simply a group of concerned citizens any longer. Now we constituted a cult—a skeptical, rational, anti-superstitious cult, true, but nevertheless a cult, a sect, the newest facet of the world’s furiously proliferating latter-day craziness.

I know it hasn’t been fashionable to believe in God these last twenty thirty forty years people haven’t been keeping His path much but I always did even when I was a little boy I believed truly and I loved Him and I wanted to go to church all the time even in the middle of the week I’d say to Mother let’s go to church I genuinely enjoyed kneeling and praying and feeling Him near me but she’d say no Davey you’ve got to wait till Sunday for that it’s only Wednesday now. So as they say I’m no stranger to His ways and of course when they called for that day of prayer I prayed with all my heart that he might give us a Sign but even so I’m no fool I mean I don’t accept everything on a silver platter I ask questions I have doubts I test things and probe a little I’m not one of your ordinary country bumpkins that takes everything on faith. In a way I suppose I could be said to belong to the discerning few although I don’t want any of you to get the idea I’m a Discerner oh no I have no sympathy whatever with that atheistic bunch. Anyway we all prayed and the Sign came and my first reaction was joy I don’t mind telling you I wept for joy when the sun stood still feeling that all the faith of a lifetime had been confirmed and the godless had better shiver in their boots but then a day or so later I began to think about it and I asked myself how do we know that the Sign really came from God? How can we be sure that the being we have invoked is really on our side I asked myself and of course I had no good answer to that. For all I knew we had conjured up Satan the Accursed and what we imagined was a miracle was really a trick out of the depths of hell designed to lead us all to perdition. Here are these Discerners telling us that they repent their atheism because they know now that God is real and God is with us but how naive they are they aren’t even allowing for the possibility that the Sign is a snare and a delusion I tell you we can’t be sure the thing is we absolutely can’t be sure. The Sign might have been from God or from the Devil and we don’t know we won’t know until we receive a second Sign which I await which I believe will be coming quite soon. And what will that second Sign tell us? I maintain that that has not yet been decided on high it may be a Sign announcing our utter damnation or it may be a Sign welcoming us to the Earthly Paradise and we must await it humbly and prayerfully my friends we must pray and purify ourselves and prepare for the worst as well as for the best. I like to think that in a short while God Himself will present Himself to us not in any indirect way like stopping the sun but rather in a direct manifestation either as God the Father or as God the Son and we will all be saved but this will come about only if we remain righteous. If we succumb to error and evil we will bring it to pass that the Devil’s advent will descend on us for as Thomas has said himself our destiny is in our hands as well as in His and I believe the first Sign was only the start of a process that will be decided for good or for evil in the days just ahead. Therefore I Davey Strafford call upon you my friends to keep the way of the faith for we must not waver in our hope that He Who Comes will be lovingly inclined toward us and I say that this is our time of supreme test and if we fail it we may discover that it is Satan who shows up to claim our souls. I say once more we cannot interpret the first Sign we can only have faith that it is truly from God and we must pray that this is so while we await the ultimate verdict of heaven therefore we have obtained the rental of a vacant grocery store on Coshocton Avenue which we have renamed the First Church of the Awaiters of Redemption and we will pray round the clock there are seventeen of us now and we will pray in three-hour shifts five of us at a time in rotation the numbers increasing as our expected rapid growth takes place I trust you will come to us and swell our voices for we must pray we’ve got to there’s no other hope now just pray a lot in order that He Who Comes may be benevolent and I ask you to keep praying and have a trusting heart in this our time of waiting.

Kraft enters the room as Thomas puts down the telephone. “Who were you talking to?” Kraft asks.

“Gifford the Discerner, calling from Boston.”

“Why are you answering the phone yourself?”

“There was no one else here.”

“There were three apostles in the outer office who could have handled the call, Thomas.”

Thomas shrugs. “They would have had to refer it to me eventually. So I answered. What’s wrong with that?”

“You’ve got to maintain distance between yourself and ordinary daily routines. You’ve got to stay up there on your pedestal and not go around answering telephones.”

“I’ll try, Saul,” says Thomas heavily.

“What did Gifford want?”

“He’d like to merge his group and ours.”

Kraft’s eyes flash. “To merge? To merge? What are we, some sort of manufacturing company? We’re a movement. A spiritual force. To talk mergers is nonsense.”

“He means that we should start working together, Saul. He says we should join forces because we’re both on the side of sanity.”

“Exactly what is that supposed to mean?”

“That we’re both anti-Apocalyptist. That we’re both working to preserve society instead of to bury it.”

“An oversimplification,” Kraft says. “We deal in faith and he deals in equations. We believe in a Divine Being and he believes in the sanctity of reason. Where’s the meeting point?”

“The Cincinnati and Chicago fires are our meeting point, Saul. The Apocalyptists are going crazy. And now these Awaiters too, these spokesmen for Satan—no. We have to act. If I put myself at Gifford’s disposal—”

“At his disposal?”

“He wants a statement from me backing the spirit if not the substance of the Discerner philosophy. He thinks it’ll serve to calm things a little.”

“He wants to co-opt you for his own purposes.”

“For the purposes of mankind, Saul.”

Kraft laughs harshly. “How naive you can be, Thomas! Where’s your sense? You can’t make an alliance with atheists. You can’t let them turn you into a ventriloquist’s dummy who—”

“They believe in God just as much as—”

“You have power, Thomas. It’s in your voice, it’s in your eyes. They have none. They’re just a bunch of professors. They want to borrow your power and make use of it to serve their own ends. They don’t want you, Thomas, they want your charisma. I forbid this alliance.”

Thomas is trembling. He towers over Kraft, but his entire body quivers and Kraft remains steady. Thomas says, “I’m so tired, Saul.”

“Tired?”

“The uproar. The rioting. The fires. I’m carrying too big a burden. Gifford can help me. With planning, with ideas. That’s a clever bunch, those people.”

“I can give you all the help you need.”