The pare turned on Corsi. Now there was another question which had to be answered. Was there a single hint, anywhere in the sixteen hundred mimeographed pages of the report, that the Bridge was incomplete without what was going on at mo. Pfitzner & Sons?

No, there was not. Wagoner let the report fall, with a sigh of relief of which he was hardly conscious. That was that.

He filed the report, and reached into his "In" basket for the dossier on Paige Russell, Colonel, Army Space Corps, which had come in from the Pfitzner plant only a week ago. He was tired, and he did not want to perform an act of judgment on another man for the rest of his life but he had asked for the job, and now he had to work at it.

Bliss Wagoner had not been cut out to be a general. As a god he was even more inept.

CHAPTER FIVE: New York

The original phenomena which the soul hypothesis attempted to explain still remain. Homo sapiens does have some differences from other animal species. But when his biological distinctions and their consequences are clearly described, man's 'morality,' his 'soul,' and his 'immortality' all become accessible to a purely naturalistic formulation and understanding, . . . Man's 'immortality' (in so far as it differs from the immortality of the germ plasm of any other animal species) consists in his time transcending inter-individually shared values, symbol systems, languages, and cultures and in nothing else.

WESTON LA BARRE

IT TOOK Paige no more than Anne's mandatory ten seconds, during breakfast of the next day in his snuggery at the spaceman's Haven, to decide that he was going back to the Pfitzner plant and apologize. He didn't quite understand why the date had ended as catastrophically as it had, but of one thing he was nearly certain: the fiasco had had something to do with his space rusty manners, and if it were to be mended, he had to be the one to tool up for it.

And now that he came to think of it over his cold egg, it seemed obvious in essence. By his last line of questioning, Paige had broken the delicate shell of the evening and spilled the contents all over the restaurant table. He had left the more or less safe womb of technicalities, and had begun, by implication at least, to call Anne's ethics into question first by making clear his first reaction to the business about the experimental infants, and then by pressing home her irregular marriage to her firm.

In this world called Earth of disintegrating faiths, one didn't call personal ethical codes into question without getting into trouble. Such codes, where they could be found at all, obviously had cost their adherents too much pain to be open for any new probing. Faith had once been self-evident; now it was desperate. Those who still had it or had made it, chunk by fragment by shard, wanted nothing but to be allowed to hold it.