"And they don't conduct ceremonies. symbolizing the belief," Anne added, "and train specialists to reassure them of it every seven days."

"That's right. In the same way, John Doc used to feel that the basic religions of the West had some relationship to the real world which was valid even though it couldn't be proven. And that includes Communism, which was born in the West, after all. John Doc doesn't feel that way any more and, by my guess, neither do the Believers or they wouldn't be shouting so loud. In that sense, there's not much faith lying around loose these days anywhere, as far as I can see. None for me to pick up, that much I've found out the hard way."

"Here you are," the chauffeur said.

Paige helped the girl out of the car, trying not to notice how much fare he had to pay, and the two were shown to a table in the restaurant. Anne was silent again for a while after they were seated. Paige had about decided that she had chosen to freeze up once more and had begun to wonder if he could arrange to have the place invaded by Believers to start the conversation again when she said, "You seem to have been thinking about faith quite a bit. You talk as though the problem meant something to you. Could you tell me why?"

"I'd be glad to try," he said slowly. "The standard answer would be that while you're out in space you have lots of time to think but people use thinking time differently. I suppose I've been looking for some frame of reference that could be mine ever since I was four, when my father and mother split up. She was a Christian Scientist and he was a Dianeticist, so they had a lot to fight about. There was a court battle over custody that lasted for nearly five years.

"I joined the army when I was seventeen, and it didn't take me very long to find out that the army is no substitute for a family, let alone a church. Then I volunteered for space service school. That was no church either. The army got jurisdiction over space travel when the whole field was just a baby, because it had a long tradition of grafting off land grants, and it didn't want the navy or the air force to grab off the gravy from any such grants that might be made on the planets. That's one of the army's historic prerogatives; the idea is that anything that's found on an army site diamonds, uranium, anything of value is found money, to be lived off during peacetime when the Congress gets stingy with appropriations. I spent more time helping the army spacetravel department fight unification with the space arms of the other services than I did doing real work in space. That was what I was ordered to do but it didn't help me to think of space as the ultimate cathedral.