'No, you don't. How about the loan of that bottle for a moment?

She handed him the bottle.

'I don't know the entire story, she said. 'I'm going out to have a look at it. It should provide material for several articles. Perhaps even a book.

'But you must have some idea, which is more than I have.

'Just the basic rumor. Just the tangled stories that one hears. Actually rumor may be all, but I think not. There must be something out there, with all this pilgrim traffic. I tried first to track down where the pilgrims were coming from, but that proved a dead end. There is no concentration of them. A few come from one planet, a few from still another, one or two from yet a third. All of them non-human — maybe specific kinds of aliens, although of that I'm not sure. Apparently all members of obscure cults or sects. Maybe each sect has a different faith — if you can call what they have a faith — but all of them are somehow tied in with this Pope project. That doesn't necessarily mean they know anything about it. It may just be something on which they can base a shaky faith. Creatures of all kinds reaching for a faith, willing to grab at almost anything just so it's mysterious or spectacular, preferably both. The thing that bothers me, the thing that sends me out, is that the whole business has a human ring to it. The site of Project Pope, as I understand it, is called Vatican-17 and-

'Hold up a minute, said Tennyson. 'That does have a human ring. There was a Vatican on Earth…

'There still is, she said. 'The center of the Roman Catholic faith, which still exists on Earth and on several other human planets, is still headed by a pope and is still as strong as ever, perhaps stronger, its people still as devout as ever. But I doubt that this Vatican-17 has anything to do with the one on Old Earth. It sounds like some sort of take-off. For one thing, there are robots-

'What would robots have to do with an Old Earth religion?