James Blish - Cities in Flight

“SHAME! SHAME!” the popai-robot thundered. “YOUR SINS HAVE FOUND YOU OUT! REPENT, AND FIND FORGIVENESS!”

A thin glass globe of some gas, evidently a narcosynthetic, broke beside the car, and not only the unfortunate chauffeur but also the part of the crowd which had begun to collect about him—mostly women, of course—began to weep convulsively.

“REPENT!” the robot intoned, over a sneaked-in-choir now singing “Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-h-h-h-h” somewhere in the warm evening air. “REPENT, FOR THE TIME IS AT HAND!”

Paige, astonished to find himself choking with sourceless, maudlin self-pity, flung himself out of the Caddy in search of a nose to break. But there were no live Believers in sight. The members of the order, all of whom were charged with spreading the good word by whatever means seemed good to them, had learned decades ago that their proselytizing was often resented, and had substituted technology for personal salesmanship wherever possible.

Their machines, too, had been forced to learn. The point-of-purchase robot retreated as Paige bore down upon it. The thing had been conditioned against allowing itself to be broken.

The Caddy’s driver, rescued, blew his nose resentfully and started the car again. The wordless choir, with its eternal bridge-passage straight out of the compositions of Dmitri Tiomkin, diminished behind them, and the voice of the lay preacher came roaring back through to them over the fading, characterless music.

“I say to you,” the P.A. system was moaning unctuously, like a lady hippopotamus reading A. E. Housman, “I say to you, the world, and the things which are the world’s come to an end and a quick end. In his overweening pride, man has sought even to wrest the stars from their courses, but the stars are not man’s, and he shall rue that day. Ah, vanity of vanities, all is vanity (Preacher v: 796). Even on mighty Jove man dared to erect a great Bridge, as once in Babel he sought to build a tower to heaven. But this also is vanity, it is vicious pride and defiance, and it too shall bring calamity upon men. Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down! (Ezra lxxxi: 99). Let there be an end to pride, and there shall be peace. Let there be love, and there shall be understanding. I say to you—”

At this point, the Believers’ over-enthusiastic booby-trapping of the square cut off whatever the preacher was going to say next as far as the occupants of the Caddy were concerned. The car passed over another trigger, and there was a blinding, rose-colored flash. When Paige could see again, the car seemed to be floating in midair, and there were actual angels flapping solemnly around it. The vox humana of a Hammond organ sobbed among the clouds.

Paige supposed that the Believers had managed to crystalize temporarily, perhaps with a supersonic pulse, the glass of the windows, which he had rolled up to prevent another intromission of bubbles, and to project a 3-V tape against the glass crystals with polarized ultra-violet light. The random distribution of fluorescent trace compounds in ordinary window glass would account for the odd way the “angels” changed color as they moved.

Understanding the vision’s probable modus operandi left Paige no less furious at the new delay, but luckily the thing turned out to be a trick, left over from last year’s Revival, for which the Caddy was prepared. The driver touched something on the dash and the saccharine scene vanished, hymns and all. The car lunged abruptly through an opening in the crowd, and a moment later the square was behind them.

“Whew!” Paige said, leaning back at last. “Now I understand why taxi depots have vending machines for trip-insurance policies. The Believers weren’t much in evidence the last time I was on Earth.”

“Every tenth person you meet is a Believer now,” Anne said. “And eight of the other nine claim that they’ve given up religion as a bad job. While you’re caught in the middle of one of those Revivals, though, it’s hard to believe the complaints you read about our times—that people have no faith and so on.”

“I don’t find it so,” Paige said reflectively. This certainly did not strike him as light social conversation, but since it was instead a kind of talk he much more enjoyed—talk which was about something—he could only be delighted that the ice was broken. “I’ve no religion of my own, but I think that when the experts talk about ‘faith’ they mean something different than the shouting kind, the kind the Believers have. Shouting religions always strike me as essentially like pep-meetings among salesmen; their ceremonies and their manners are so aggressive because they don’t really believe the code themselves. Real faith is so much a part of the world you live in that you seldom notice it, and it isn’t always religious in the formal sense. Mathematics is based on faith, for instance, for those who know it.”

“I should have said that it was based on the antithesis of faith,” Anne said, turning a little cooler. “Have you had any experience in the field, Colonel?”

“Some,” he said, without rancor. “I’d never have been allowed to pilot a ship outside the orbit of the Moon without knowing tensors, and if I expect to get my next promotion, I’m going to have to know spinor calculus as well—which I do.”

“Oh,” the girl said. She sounded faintly dashed. “Go on; I’m sorry I interrupted.”

“You were right to interrupt; I made my point badly. I meant to say that the mathematician’s belief that there is some relationship between maths and the real world is a faith; it can’t be proven, but he feels it very strongly. For that matter, the totally irreligious man’s belief that there even is a real world, corresponding to what his senses show him, can’t be proven. John Doe and the most brilliant of physicists both have to take that on faith.”

“And they don’t conduct ceremonies symbolizing the belief,” Anne added, “and train specialists to reassure them of it every seven days.”

“That’s right. In the same way, John Doe used to feel that the basic religions of the West had some relationship to the real world which was valid even though it couldn’t be proven. And that includes Communism, which was born in the West, after all. John Doe doesn’t feel that way any more—and by my guess, neither do the Believers or they wouldn’t be shouting so loud. In that sense, there’s not much faith lying around loose these days anywhere, as far as I can see. None for me to pick up, that much I’ve found out the hard way.”

“Here you are,” the chauffeur said.

Paige helped the girl out of the car, trying not to notice how much fare he had to pay, and the two were shown to a table in the restaurant. Anne was silent again for a while after they were seated. Paige had about decided that she had chosen to freeze up once more and had begun to wonder if he could arrange to have the place invaded by Believers to start the conversation again when she said, “You seem to have been thinking about faith quite a bit. You talk as though the problem meant something to you. Could уоu tell me why?”

“I’d be glad to try,” he said slowly. “The standard answer would be that while you’re out in space you have lots of time to think—but people use thinking time differently. I suppose I’ve been looking for some frame of reference that could be mine ever since I was four, when my father and mother split up. She was a Christian Scientist and he was a Scientologist, so they had a lot to fight about. There was a court battle over custody that lasted for nearly five years.

“I joined the army when I was seventeen, and it didn’t take me very long to find out that the army is no substitute for a family, let alone a church. Then I volunteered for space service school. That was no church either. The army got jurisdiction over space travel when the whole field was just a baby, because it had a long tradition of grafting off land-grants, and it didn’t want the navy or the air force to grab off the gravy from any such grants that might be made on the planets. That’s one of the army’s historic prerogatives; the idea is that anything that’s found on an army site—diamonds, uranium, anything of value—is found money, to be lived off during peacetime when the Congress gets stingy with appropriations. I spent more time helping the army space-travel department fight unification with the space arms of the other services than I did doing real work in space. That was what I was ordered to do—but it didn’t help me to think of space as the ultimate cathedral ….