“We can see Carleton Lufteufel with our unaided senses,” he explained to Lurine. “But I believe—” There was another order of reality and the unaided eyes did not penetrate this; if you took ultraviolet and infrared rays as an example…

Lurine, curled up in a chair opposite him, smoking an Algerian briar pipe with a prewar utterly dried-out Dutch cavendish mixture in it, said, “Instead of taking pills, build instruments that register its presence. Whatever it is you’re after. Read it off a dial. That’s safer.” Always she was afraid that he would enter a drug-induced state and not return; after all, the medications were not medications: they were neurological and metabolic enzymes, poorly understood even by their makers… their effects varied from person to person.

“I don’t want to see a reading on a dial,” he answered. “It’s not a record I want; it’s an—” He gestured. “An experience.”

Lurine sighed. “Let it come to you, then. Sit and wait.”

“I can’t wait,” he said. “Because it won’t come this side of the grave.” That enemy which the New Church, the SOWs, craved: their solution. Although at the same time the SOWers liked to think of themselves, the survivors of the war, as the Chosen, the elite whom the God of Wrath had spared.

He saw in their logic the basic fault. If the God of Wrath was evil, as the SOWers maintained, he would spare not the good but the most evil. Hence, by their own logic, they were the wicked of the world; like Carleton Lufteufel himself, they were alive because they were too wicked to be offered the healing balm of death.

Such lunatic logic bored him. So he turned back to the display of pills on the table before him, in his little living room.

“Okay,” Lurine said. “What is there that you’re seeking? You must have some idea, at least as to its worth… or you wouldn’t be always buying those little placebos for all that silver the peddlers charge. I’m very unhappy; maybe tonight I’ll join you.” Today she had told Father Handy that she intended to join the Christian Church, but she had not told either Pete Sands or Dr. Abernathy. As usual, she was having it both ways… an instinct kept her from making the terminal move.