‘You saved me!’ he whispered. ‘You wouldn’t let me die. You knew it was wrong.’
He rushed over to Father Stone, who still lay quietly asleep. ‘Father, Father, wake up!’ He shook him and brought him round. ‘Father, they saved me!’
‘Who saved you?’ Father Stone blinked and sat up.
Father Peregrine related his experience.
‘A dream, a nightmare; go back to sleep,’ said Father Stone irritably. ‘You and your circus balloons.’
‘But I was awake!’
‘Now, now, Father, calm yourself. There now.’
‘You don’t believe me? Have you a gun? Yes, there, let me have it.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Father Stone handed over the small pistol they had brought along for protection against snakes or other similar and unpredictable animals.
Father Peregrine seized the pistol. ‘I’ll prove it!’
He pointed the pistol at his own hand and fired.
‘Stop!’
There was a shimmer of light, and before their eyes the bullet stood upon the air, poised an inch from his open palm. It hung for a moment, surrounded by a blue phosphorescence. Then it fell, hissing, into the dust.
Father Peregrine fired the gun three times—at his hand, at his leg, at his body. The three bullets hovered, glittering, and, like dead insects, fell at their feet.
‘You see?’ said Father Peregrine, letting his arm fall, and allowing the pistol to drop after the bullets. ‘They know. They understand. They are not animals. They think and judge and live in a moral climate. What animal would save me from myself like this? There is no animal would do that. Only another man, Father. Now, do you believe?’
Father Stone was watching the sky and the blue lights, and now, silently, he dropped to one knee and picked up the warm bullets and cupped them in his hand. He closed his hand tight.
The sun was rising behind them.
‘I think we had better go down to the others and tell them of this and bring them back up here,’ said Father Peregrine.
By the time the sun was up, they were well on their way back to the rocket.
Father Peregrine drew the round circle in the center of the blackboard.
‘This is Christ, the Son of the Father.’
He pretended not to hear the other Fathers’ sharp intake of breath.
‘This is Christ, in all His Glory,’ he continued.
‘It looks like a geometry problem,’ observed Father Stone.
‘A fortunate comparison, for we deal with symbols here. Christ is no less Christ, you must admit, in being represented by a circle or a square. For centuries the cross has symbolized His love and agony. So this circle will be the Martian Christ. This is how we shall bring Him to Mars.’
The Fathers stirred fretfully and looked at each other.
‘You, Brother Mathias, will create, in glass, a replica of this circle, a globe, filled with bright fire. It will stand upon the altar.’
‘A cheap magic trick,’ muttered Father Stone.
Father Peregrine went on patiently: ‘On the contrary. We are giving them God in an understandable image. If Christ had come to us on Earth as an octopus, would we have accepted Him readily?’ He spread his hands. ‘Was it then a cheap magic trick of the Lord’s to bring us Christ through Jesus, in man’s shape? After we bless the church we build here and sanctify its altar and this symbol, do you think Christ would refuse to inhabit the shape before us? You know in your hearts He would not refuse.’
‘But the body of a soulless animal!’ said Brother Mathias.
‘We’ve already gone over that, many times since we returned this morning. Brother Mathias. These creatures saved us from the avalanche. They realized that self-destruction was sinful, and prevented it, time after time. Therefore we must build a church in the hills, live with them, to find their own special ways of sinning, the alien ways, and help them to discover God.’
The Fathers did not seem pleased at the prospect.
‘Is it because they are so odd to the eye?’ wondered Father Peregrine. ‘But what is a shape? Only a cup for the blazing soul that God provides us all. If tomorrow I found that sea lions suddenly possessed free will, intellect, knew when not to sin, knew what life was and tempered justice with mercy and life with love, then I would build an undersea cathedral. And if the sparrows should, miraculously, with God’s will, gain everlasting souls tomorrow, I would freight a church with helium and take after them, for all souls, in any shape, if they have free will and are aware of their sins, will burn in Hell unless given their rightful communions. I would not let a Martian sphere burn in Hell either, for it is a sphere only in mine eyes. When I close my eyes it stands before me, an intelligence, a love, a soul—and I must not deny it.’
‘But that glass globe you wish placed on the altar,’ protested Father Stone.
‘Consider the Chinese,’ replied Father Peregrine imperturbably. ‘What sort of Christ do Christian Chinese worship? An oriental Christ, naturally. You’ve all seen oriental Nativity scenes. How is Christ dressed? In Eastern robes. Where does He walk? In Chinese settings of bamboo and misty mountain and crooked tree. His eyelids taper. His cheekbones rise. Each country, each race adds something to Our Lord. I am reminded of the Virgin of Guadalupe, to whom all Mexico pays its love. Her skin? Have you noticed the paintings of her? A dark skin, like that of her worshipers. Is this blasphemy? Not at all. It is not logical that men should accept a God, no matter how real, of another color. I often wonder why our missionaries do well in Africa, with a snow-white Christ. Perhaps because white is a sacred color, in albino, or any other form, to the African tribes. Given time, mightn’t Christ darken there too? The form does not matter. Content is everything. We cannot expect these Martians to accept an alien form. We shall give them Christ in their own image.’
‘There’s a flaw in your reasoning, Father,’ said Father Stone. ‘Won’t the Martians suspect us of hypocrisy? They will realize that we don’t worship a round, globular Christ, but a man with limbs and a head. How do we explain the difference?’
‘By showing there is none. Christ will fill any vessel that is offered. Bodies or globes, He is there, and each will worship the same thing in a different guise. What is more, we must believe in this globe we give the Martians. We must believe in a shape which is meaningless to us as to form. This spheroid will be Christ. And we must remember that we ourselves, and the shape of our Earth Christ, would be meaningless, ridiculous, a squander of material to these Martians.’
Father Peregrine laid aside his chalk. ‘Now let us go into the hills and build our church.’
The Fathers began to pack their equipment.
The church was not a church but an area cleared of rocks, a plateau on one of the low mountains, its soil smoothed and brushed, and an altar established whereon Brother Mathias placed the fiery globe he had constructed.
At the end of six days of work the ‘church’ was ready.
‘What shall we do with this?’ Father Stone tapped an iron bell they had brought along. ‘What does a bell mean to them?’
‘I imagine I brought it for our own comfort,’ admitted Father Peregrine. ‘We need a few familiarities. This church seems so little like a church. And we feel somewhat absurd here—even I; for it is something new, this business of converting the creatures of another world. I feel like a ridiculous play actor at times. And then I pray to God to lend me strength.’
‘Many of the Fathers are unhappy. Some of them joke about all this, Father Peregrine.’
‘I know. We’ll put this bell in a small tower for their comfort, anyway.’
‘What about the organ?’
‘We’ll play it at the first service, tomorrow.’
‘But, the Martians—’
‘I know. But again, I suppose, for our own comfort, our own music. Later we may discover theirs.’
They arose very early on Sunday morning and moved through the coldness like pale phantoms, rime tinkling on their hab
its: covered with chimes they were, shaking down showers of silver water.
‘I wonder if it is Sunday here on Mars?’ mused Father Peregrine, but seeing Father Stone wince, he hastened on, ‘It might be Tuesday or Thursday—who knows? But no matter. My idle fancy. It’s Sunday to us. Come.’
The Fathers walked into the flat wide area of the ‘church’ and knelt, shivering and blue-lipped.
Father Peregrine said a little prayer and put his cold fingers to the organ keys. The music went up like a flight of pretty birds. He touched the keys like a man moving his hands among the weeds of a wild garden, startling up great soarings of Beauty into the hills.
The music calmed the air. It smelled the fresh smell of morning. The music drifted into the mountains and shook down mineral powders in a dusty rain.
The Fathers waited.
‘Well, Father Peregrine.’ Father Stone eyed the empty sky where the sun was rising, furnace-red. ‘I don’t see our friends.’
‘Let me try again.’ Father Peregrine was perspiring.
He built an architecture of Bach, stone by exquisite stone, raising a music cathedral so vast that its furthest chancels were in Nineveh, its furthest dome at St Peter’s left hand. The music stayed and did not crash in ruin when it was over, but partook of a series of white clouds and was carried away among other lands.
The sky was still empty.
‘They’ll come!’ But Father Peregrine felt the panic in his chest, very small, growing. ‘Let us pray. Let us ask them to come. They read minds; they know.’
The Fathers lowered themselves yet again, in rustlings and whispers. They prayed.
And to the East, out of the icy mountains of seven o’clock on Sunday morning or perhaps Thursday morning or maybe Monday morning on Mars, came the soft fiery globes.
They hovered and sank and filled the area around the shivering priests. ‘Thank you: oh, thank you, Lord.’ Father Peregrine shut his eyes tight and played the music, and when it was done he turned and gazed upon his wondrous congregation.
And a voice touched his mind, and the voice said:
‘We have come for a little while.’
‘You may stay,’ said Father Peregrine.
‘For a little while only,’ said the voice quietly. ‘We have come to tell you certain things. We should have spoken sooner. But we had hoped that you might go on your way if left alone.’
Father Peregrine started to speak, but the voice hushed him.
‘We are the Old Ones,’ the voice said, and it entered him like a blue gaseous flare and burned in the chambers of his head. ‘We are the old Martians, who left our marble cities and went into the hills, forsaking the material life we had lived. So very long ago we became these things that we now are. Once we were men, with bodies and legs and arms such as yours. The legend has it that one of us, a good man, discovered a way to free man’s soul and intellect, to free him of bodily ills and melancholies, of deaths and transfigurations, of ill humors and senilities, and so we took on the look of lightning and blue fire and have lived in the winds and skies and hills forever after that, neither prideful nor arrogant, neither rich nor poor, passionate nor cold. We have lived apart from those we left behind, those other men of this world, and how we came to be has been forgotten, the process lost; but we shall never die, nor do harm. We have put away the sins of the body and live in God’s grace. We covet no other property; we have no property. We do not steal, nor kill, nor lust, nor hate. We live in happiness. We cannot reproduce; we do not eat or drink or make war. All the sensualities and childishnesses and sins of the body were stripped away when our bodies were put aside. We have left sin behind. Father Peregrine, and it is burned like the leaves in the autumn, and it is gone like the soiled snow of an evil winter, and it is gone like the sexual flowers of a red-and-yellow spring, and it is gone like the panting nights of hottest summer, and our season is temperate and our clime is rich in thought.’
Father Peregrine was standing now, for the voice touched him at such a pitch that it almost shook him from his senses. It was an ecstasy and a fire washing through him.
‘We wish to tell you that we appreciate your building this place for us, but we have no need of it, for each of us is a temple unto himself and needs no place wherein to cleanse himself. Forgive us for not coming to you sooner, but we are separate and apart and have talked to no one for ten thousand years, nor have we interfered in any way with the life of this planet. It has come into your mind now that we are the lilies of the field; we toil not, neither do we spin. You are right. And so we suggest that you take the parts of this temple into your own new cities and there cleanse others. For, rest assured, we are happy and at peace.’
The Fathers were on their knees in the vast blue light, and Father Peregrine was down, too, and they were weeping, and it did not matter that their time had been wasted; it did not matter to them at all.
The blue spheres murmured and began to rise once more, on a breath of cool air.
‘May I’—cried Father Peregrine, not daring to ask, eyes closed—‘may I come again, someday, that I may learn from you?’
The blue fires blazed. The air trembled.
Yes, Someday he might come again. Someday.
And then the Fire Balloons blew away and were gone, and he was like a child, on his knees, tears streaming from his eyes, crying to himself, ‘Come back, come back!’ And at any moment Grandfather might lift him and carry him upstairs to his bedroom in a long-gone Illinois town…
They filed down out of the hills at sunset. Looking back, Father Peregrine saw the blue fires burning. No, he thought, we couldn’t build a church for the likes of you. You’re beauty itself. What church could compete with the fireworks of the pure soul?
Father Stone moved in silence beside him. And at last he spoke:
‘The way I see it is there’s a Truth on every planet. All parts of the Big Truth. On a certain day they’ll all fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw. This has been a shaking experience. I’ll never doubt again, Father Peregrine. For this Truth here is as true as Earth’s Truth, and they lie side by side. And we’ll go on to other worlds, adding the sum of the parts of the Truth until one day the whole Total will stand before us like the light of a new day.’
‘That’s a lot, coming from you, Father Stone.’
‘I’m sorry now, in a way, we’re going down to the town to handle our own kind. Those blue lights now. When they settled about us, and that voice…’ Father Stone shivered.
Father Peregrine reached out to take the other’s arm. They walked together.
‘And you know,’ said Father Stone finally, fixing his eyes on Brother Mathias, who strode ahead with the glass sphere tenderly carried in his arms, that glass sphere with the blue phosphorous light glowing forever inside it, ‘you know, Father Peregrine, that globe there—’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Him. It is Him, after all.’
Father Peregrine smiled, and they walked down out of the hills toward the new town.
The Last Night of the World
‘What would you do if you knew that this was the last night of the world?’
‘What would I do? You mean seriously?’
‘Yes, seriously.’
‘I don’t know. I hadn’t thought.’
He poured some coffee. In the background the two girls were playing blocks on the parlor rug in the light of the green hurricane lamps. There was an easy, clean aroma of the brewed coffee in the evening air.
‘Well, better start thinking about it,’ he said.
‘You don’t mean it!’
He nodded.
‘A war?’
He shook his head.
‘Not the hydrogen or atom bomb?’
‘No.’
‘Or germ warfare?’
‘None of those at all,’ he said, stirring his coffee slowly. ‘But just, let’s say, the closing of a book.’
‘I don’t think I understand.’
‘No, nor do I, really;
it’s just a feeling. Sometimes it frightens me, sometimes I’m not frightened at all but at peace.’ He glanced in at the girls and their yellow hair shining in the lamplight. ‘I didn’t say anything to you. It first happened about four nights ago.’
‘What?’
‘A dream I had. I dreamed that it was all going to be over, and a voice said it was; not any kind of voice I can remember, but a voice anyway, and it said things would stop here on Earth. I didn’t think too much about it the next day, but then I went to the office and caught Stan Willis looking out the window in the middle of the afternoon, and I said, A penny for your thoughts, Stan, and he said, I had a dream last night, and before he even told me the dream I knew what it was. I could have told him, but he told me and I listened to him.’
‘It was the same dream?’
‘The same. I told Stan I had dreamed it too. He didn’t seem surprised. He relaxed, in fact. Then we started walking through the office, for the hell of it. It wasn’t planned. We didn’t say, Let’s walk around. We just walked on our own, and everywhere we saw people looking at their desks or their hands or out windows. I talked to a few. So did Stan.’
‘And they all had dreamed?’
‘All of them. The same dream, with no difference.’
‘Do you believe in it?’
‘Yes. I’ve never been more certain.’
‘And when will it stop? The world, I mean.’
‘Sometime during the night for us, and then as the night goes on around the world, that’ll go too. It’ll take twenty-four hours for it all to go.’
They sat awhile not touching their coffee. Then they lifted it slowly and drank, looking at each other.
‘Do we deserve this?’ she said.
‘It’s not a matter of deserving; it’s just that things didn’t work out. I notice you didn’t even argue about this. Why not?’
‘I guess I’ve a reason,’ she said.