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
“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 ….
“Somewhere along in there, I got married and we had one son; he was born the same day I entered space school. Two years later, the marriage was annulled. That sounds funny, I know, but the circumstances were unusual.
“When Pfitzner approached me and asked me to pick up soil samples for them, I suppose I saw another church with which I could identify myself—something humanitarian, long-range, impersonal. And when I found this afternoon that the new church wasn’t going to welcome the convert with glad cries—well, the result is that I’m now weeping on your shoulder.” He smiled. “That’s hardly flattering, I know. But you’ve already helped me to talk myself into a spot where the only next step is to apologize, which I hereby do. I hope you’ll accept it.”
“I think I will,” she said, and then, tentatively, she smiled back. The result made him tingle as though the air- pressure had dropped suddenly by five pounds per square inch. Anne Abbott was one of those exceedingly rare plain girls whose smiles completely transform them, as abruptly as the bursting of a star-shell. When she wore her normal, rather sullen expression, no one would ever notice her—but a man who had seen her smile might well be willing to kill himself working to make her smile again, as often as possible. A woman who was beautiful all the time, Paige thought, probably never could know the devotion Anne Abbott would be given when she found that man.
“Thank you,” Paige said, rather inadequately. “Let’s order, and then I’d like to hear you talk. I dumped The Story of My Life into your lap rather early in the game, I’m afraid.”
“You order,” she said. “You talked about flounder this afternoon, so you must know the menu here—and you handed me out of the Caddy so nicely that I’d like to preserve the illusion.”
“Illusion?”
“Don’t make me explain,” she said, coloring faintly. “But …. Well, the illusion of there being one or two cavaliers in the world still. Since you haven’t been a surplus woman on a planet full of lazy males, you wouldn’t understand the value of a small courtesy or two. Most men I meet want to be shown my mole before they’ll bother to learn my last name.”
Paige’s surprised shout of laughter made heads turn all over the restaurant. He throttled it hurriedly, afraid that it would embarrass the girl, but she was smiling again, making him feel instead as though he had just had three whiskies in quick succession.
“That’s a quick transformation for me,” he said. “This afternoon I was a blackmailer, and by my own intention, too. Very well, then, let’s have the flounder; it’s a specialty of the house. I had visions of it while I was on Ganymede munching my concentrates.”
“I think you had the right idea about Pfitzner,” Anne said slowly when the waiter had gone. “I can’t tell you any secrets about it, but maybe I can tell you some bits of common knowledge that you evidently don’t know. The project the plant is working on now seems to me to fit your description exactly: it’s humanitarian, impersonal, and just about as long-range as any project I can imagine. I feel rather religious about it, in your sense. It’s something to tie to, and it’s better for me than being a Believer or a WAC. And I think you could understand why I feel that way—better than either Hal Gunn or I thought you could.”
It was his turn to be embarrassed. He covered by dosing his Blue Points with Worcestershire until they flinched visibly. “I’d like to know.”
“It goes like this,” she said. “In between 1940 and 1960, a big change took place in Western medicine. Before 1940—in the early part of the century—the infectious diseases were major killers. By 1960 they were all but knocked out of the running. The change started with the sulfa drugs; then came Fleming and Florey and mass production of penicillin during World War II. After that war we found a whole arsenal of new drugs against tuberculosis, which had really never been treated successfully before—streptomycin, PAS, isoniazid, viomycin, and so on, right up to Bloch’s isolation of the TB toxins and the development of the metabolic blocking agents.
“Then came the broad-spectrum antibiotics, like Terramycin, which attacked some virus diseases, protozoan diseases, even worm diseases; that gave us a huge clue to a whole set of tough problems. The last major infectious disease—bilharzia, or schistosomiasis—was reduced to the status of a nuisance by 1966.”
“But we still have infectious diseases,” Paige objected.
“Of course we do,” the girl said, the little atom points in her brooch picking up the candle-light as she leaned forward. “No drug ever wipes out a disease, because it’s impossible to kill all the dangerous organisms in the world just by treating the patients they invade. But you can reduce the danger. In the 1950’s, for instance, malaria was the world’s greatest killer. Now it’s as rare as diphtheria. We still have both diseases with us—but how long has it been since you heard of a case of either?”
“You’re asking the wrong man—germ diseases aren’t common on space vessels. We bump any crewman who shows up with as much as a head-cold. But you win the point, all the same. Go on. What happened then?”
“Something kind of ominous. Life insurance companies, and other people who kept records, began to be alarmed at the way the degenerative diseases were coming to the fore. Those are such ailments as hardening of the arteries, coronary heart disease, embolisms, and almost all the many forms of cancer—diseases where one or another body mechanism suddenly goes haywire, without any visible cause.”
“Isn’t old age the cause?”
