But he continued anyhow. “They believed for two thousand years in a good god. And now we know it’s not true. There is a god, but he is—you know as well as I do; you were a kid during the war, but you, remember and you can see; you’ve seen the miles of dust that once were bodies… I don’t understand how you can in all honesty, intellectually or morally, accept an ideology that teaches that good played a decisive role in what happened. See?”

She did not disengage her hands. But she remained inert, so passive that he felt as if he held deceased organisms; the physical sensation repelled him and he voluntarily released her. She then picked up her coffee cup once more, with tranquility. And she said, “All right; we know that a Carleton Lufteufel, Chairman of the ERDA of the United States Government, existed. But he was a man. Not a god.”

“A man in form,” Father Handy said, “made by God. In God’s image, according to your own sacred writ.”

She became silent; this she could not answer.

“Dear,” Father Handy said, “to believe in the Old Church is to flee. To try to escape the present. We, our church; we try to live in this world and face what’s happening and how we stand. We’re honest. We, as living creatures, are in the hands of a merciless and angry deity and will be until death wipes us from the slate of his records. If perhaps one could believe in a god of death… but unfortunately—”

“Maybe there is one,” Lurine said abruptly.

“Pluto?” He laughed.

“Maybe God releases us from our torment,” she answered steadily. “And I may find him in Abernathy’s church. Anyhow—” She glanced up, flushed and small and determined and lovely. “I won’t worship a psychotic ex-official of the U.S. ERDA as a deity; that’s not being realistic; that’s—” She gestured. “It’s wrong,” she said, as if speaking to herself, trying to convince herself.