Paige supposed that the Believers had managed to crystallize temporarily, perhaps with a supersonic pulse, the glass of the windows, which he had rolled up to prevent another intromission of bubbles, and to project a 3V tape against the glass crystals with polarized ultraviolet light. The random distribution of fluorescent trace compounds in ordinary window glass would account for the odd way the "angels" changed color as they moved.

Understanding the vision's probable modus operandi left Paige no less furious at the new delay, but luckily the thing turned out to be a trick, left over from last year's Revival, for which the Caddy was prepared. The driver touched something on the dash and the saccharine scene vanished, hymns and all. The car lunged abruptly through an opening in the crowd, and a moment later the square was behind them.

"Whew!" Paige said, leaning back at last. "Now I understand why taxi depots have vending machines for trip Insurance policies. The Believers weren't much in evidence the last time I was on Earth."

"Every tenth person you meet is a Believer now," Anne said. "And eight of the other nine claim that they've given up religion as a bad job. While you're caught in the middle of one of those Revivals, though, it's hard to believe the complaints you read about our times that people have no faith and so en."

"I don't find it so," Paige said reflectively. This certainly did not strike him as light social conversation, but since it was instead a kind of talk he much more enjoyed talk which was about something he could only be delighted that the ice was broken. "I've no religion of my own, but I think that when the experts talk about 'faith' they mean something different than the shouting kind, the kind the Believers have. Shouting religions always strike me as essentially like pep meetings among salesmen; their ceremonies and their manners are so aggressive because they don't really believe the code themselves. Real faith is so much a part of the world you live in that you seldom notice it, and it isn't always religious in the formal sense. Mathematics is based on faith, for instance, for those who know it."

"I should have said that it was based on the antithesis of faith," Anne said, turning a little cooler. "Have you had any experience in the field, Colonel?"

"Some," he said, without rancor. "I'd never have been allowed to pilot a ship outside the orbit of the Moon without knowing tensors, and if I expect to get my next promotion, I'm going to have to know spinor calculus as well which I do."

"Oh," the girl said. She sounded faintly dashed. "Go on; I'm sorry I interrupted."

"You were 'Eight 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 is a real world, corresponding to what his senses show him, can't be proven. John Doc and the most brilliant of physicists both have to take that on faith."