"We have encountered and passed the spirit, which broods on these immense waters. There is no fear left now of chaos." "Now that Gab's insulted everybody at least once," Helen Wheeler told the Navy officer, "the stargazing party's properly over." Navy Chaplain Madiel came out of a half-doze to see her carefully smother a yawn. "I've put in a long day," she said, "and I'm tired. But it's a sort of delicious, dreamy tired." "Best kind," the chaplain murmured. "I'm up way past my bedtime, too, and I have to hold services in the morning." Yet neither he nor she made any move to emulate the people now descending the slope, by ones and twos and threes, to the camp, to their waiting beds. Helen and the chaplain sat on a limestone bulge. Gabbert, a stick-figure of a man, stood a short distance away; he appeared to the chaplain to be gazing raptly upward. By day the heights afforded an unobstructed view of an estuarine marsh, tents and Quonset huts neatly laid out on a grid plan, and a bay opening onto the great Paleozoic sea. By night, with the camp darkened and the moon vanished into clouds, the men and the woman hung suspended in an infinite black void. At some indeterminate distance, the sea's oily blackness merged with that of the sky. The stars blazed. A meteor cut a fine straight streak toward the invisible horizon. Nothing else in the world moved or made a sound until Helen delivered herself of a deep, contented-sounding sigh and said, "How could anyone look at this sky and not feel the presence of God?" Madiel said, "It's certainly quiet here. I've never heard such quiet before. And lovely and strange. The moon, most of all. It's the same moon, yet it isn't. It's--let's see if I can recite this correctly--it's inclined only about five degrees to the equator, and it's only about fifty earth radii away. It's sixty radii back home." "Excellent, Chaplain," Gabbert said crisply, "go to the head of the class," and, after a moment, "Are you by chance an amateur astronomer?" "Oh, no. But the subject interests me. I talk with the team on the ship sometimes, about navigational applications. Pretty small potatoes, I guess, compared with the radio telescope you're building." "The radio telescope's pretty small potatoes, too. But it will double as the world's biggest colander." Helen groaned. "Oh, please don't get Gab going about the radio telescope again! Gab, don't you dare start. Nobody wants to hear any more about it tonight or for the next month." "If I'm an amateur anything," said the chaplain, "it's a mythologist. My parents raised me on the Bible and Bulfinch." "Weren't they at all worried that the two would work at cross-purposes?" "Evidently not. I became quite the connoisseur of myths and folk tales from around the world. We lived in Nashville, Tennessee. The centerpiece of Centennial Park there's a permanent full-size replica of the ancient Parthenon. Inside is a huge statue of Athena in full regalia. Not the sort of thing you expect to find adorning the buckle of the Bible Belt. But I liked the old gal just fine. Still do. She was the goddess of wisdom, the arts, cottage industry, defensive war--things that appeal even to a modern Christian sensibility. Also, her morals were better than Aphrodite's, and she wasn't insanely jealous like Hera." "Or Jehovah?" "Gab," Helen said in a warning tone. "I can see how an interest in mythology might be very useful in your line of work. Even essential." "Mythology's interesting in its own right," the chaplain replied easily, "especially the creation myths." "You're not a stealth creationist, are you?" "Not any kind of creationist. Only fundamentalists find faith and reason incompatible." "Ah. Personally, I have nothing against faith except reason. I always found the Biblical story of the creation pretty childish." |
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