The original plan had been for neat generations of a hundred children each, born together, growing up together, leaving in time for the next generation. More than twice that number were bouncing off the walls now.

The creche was being expanded, of course, and volunteer mothers and fathers were learning their trade. The din of construction and inevitable disasters in the course of parenttraining added to the pandemonium. The demographic profile helped the noise level, too: the Old Guard were at an age where they were fascinated with babies, and trampling each other in their efforts to help out, and the ones born in 2104 were now two years old, and into everything. Whereas the eighty infants would normally be enough to take up all of the creche’s time and the parents’ knowledge and patience.

Robin was not quite as reluctant as she used to be in the matter of letting O’Hara take her child home at the age of eight. Would you like a few more? Would you like to switch jobs?

One of the creche mothers-in-training, an angelic slender young thing with long ash-blond hair, stayed blissfully calm in the midst of the bedlam, smiling evenly, reacting to any outrage with clemency, to any disaster with slow serenity. O’Hara noticed her and asked Robin whether she was brain-damaged or just deaf?

Robin confided that it was the woman’s third and last day. She was all right with the little ones, but her bovine imperturbability was eroding the discipline they had over the Old Guard. The kids would play seven-year-old practical jokes on her, tests—thumbtack on the chair, wall Sticktite reversed—and she would smile and pat them on the head rather than scold them, which would result in an epidemic of deranged seven-year-old laughter. And then another little test.

The problem was her religion, the Church of the Eternal Now. O’Hara had never heard of it, which was not surprising, since at that time it had only five or six adherents. In another year it would have sixty, and begin to be a real problem.

The Church of the Eternal Now began as a conversation between Robert Lowell Devon and Nadia Szebehely. They convinced themselves, and then others, that past and future alike were nonexistent: that all the universe existed in one eternal instant of God’s love.

The logic was unassailable, at least for those who were vulnerable to its charm. It evolved from an old Christian Fundamentalist argument against scientific evidence that the Earth was more than a few thousand years old, which was what their holy book claimed. You point to carbon-dated fossils, for instance, and they say God created them in place, old carbon atoms and all, at the same time he created everything else, 5,014 years ago. Can you prove otherwise?