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Abbot Zerchi suddenly realized that the tenor of his thinking had changed during the previous day or two. A few days ago, everyone had been waiting for the sky to burst asunder. But nine days had passed since Lucifer had prevailed in space and scorched a city out of existence. Despite the dead, the maimed, and the dying, there had been nine days of silence. Since the wrath had been stayed thus far, perhaps the worst could be averted. He had found himself thinking of things that might happen next week or next month, as if — after all — there might really be a next week or a next month. And why not? Examining conscience, he found that he had not altogether abandoned the virtue of hope.
A monk returned from an errand in the city that afternoon and reported that a camp for refugees was being set up at the park two miles down the highway. “I think it’s being sponsored by Green Star, Domne,” he added.
“Good!” the abbot said. “We’re overflowing here, and I’ve had to turn three truckloads of them away.”
The refugees were noisy in the courtyard, and the noise jangled overwrought nerves. The perpetual quiet of the old abbey was shattered by strange sounds: the boisterous laughter of men telling jokes, the cry of a child, the rattle of pots and pans, hysterical sobbing, a Green Star medic shouting: “Hey, Raff, go fetch an enema hose.” Several times the abbot suppressed an urge to go to the window and call to them for silence.
After bearing it as long as he could, he picked up a pair of binoculars, an old book, and a rosary, and went up to one of the old watchtowers where a thick stone wall cut off most of the sounds from the courtyard. The book was a slim volume of verse, really anonymous, but by legend ascribed to a mythical saint, whose “canonization” was accomplished only in fable and the folklore of the Plains, and not by any act of the Holy See. No one, indeed, had ever found evidence that such a person as Saint Poet of the Miraculous Eyeball had ever lived: the fable had probably arisen out of the story that one of the early Ha
The book was a satirical dialogue in verse between two agnostics who were attempting to establish by natural reason alone that the existence of God could not be established by natural reason alone. They managed only to demonstrate that the mathematical limit of an infinite “doubting the certainty with which something doubted is known to be unknowable when the ‘something doubted’ is still a preceding statement of ‘unknowability’ of something doubted,” that the limit of this process at infinity can only be equivalent to a statement of absolute certainty, even though phrased as an infinite series of negations of certainty. The text bore traces of St. Leslie’s theological calculus, and even as a poetic dialogue between an agnostic identified only as “Poet” and another only as “Thon,” it seemed to suggest a proof of the existence of God by an epistemological method, but the versifier had been a satirist; neither poet nor don relinquished his agnostic premises after the conclusion of absolute certainty had been reached, but concluded instead that: Non cogitamus, ergo nihil sumus.
Abbot Zerchi soon tired of trying to decide whether the book was high intellectual comedy or more epigrammatic buffoonery. From the tower, he could see the highway and the city as far as the mesa beyond. He focused the binoculars on the mesa end watched the radar installation for a time, but nothing unusual appeared to be happening there. He lowered the glasses slightly to watch the new Green Star encampment down at the roadside park. The area of the park had been roped off. Tents were being pitched. Utility crews worked at tapping the gas and power lines. Several men were engaged in hoisting a sign at the entrance to the park, but they held it edgewise to his gaze and he could not read it. Somehow the boiling activity reminded him of a nomad “carnival” coming to town. There was a big red engine of some sort. It seemed to have a firebox and something like a boiler, but he could not at first guess its purpose. Men in Green Star uniforms were erecting something that looked like a small carousel. At least a dozen trucks were parked on the side road. Some were loaded with lumber, others with tents and collapsible cots. One seemed to be hauling firebricks, and another was burdened with pottery and straw.
Pottery?
He studied the last truck’s cargo carefully. A slight frown gathered on his forehead. It was a load of urns or vases, all alike, and packed together with cushioning wads of straw. Somewhere, he had seen the like of them, but could not remember where.
Still another truck carried nothing but a great “stone” statue — probably made of reinforced plastic — and a square slab upon which the statue was evidently to be mounted. The statue lay on its back, supported by a wooden framework and a nest of packing material. He could see only its legs and one outstretched hand that thrust up through the packing straw. The statue was longer than the bed of the truck; its bare feet projected beyond tailgate. Someone had tied a red flag to one of its great toes. Zerchi puzzled over it. Why waste a truck on a statue, when there was probable need of another truckload of food?
He watched the men who were erecting the sign. At last one of them lowered his end of the board and climbed a ladder to perform some adjustment of the overhead brackets. With one end resting on the ground, the sign tilted, and Zerchi, by craning, managed to read its message:
Hurriedly, he looked again at the trucks. The pottery!
Recognition came to him. Once he had driven past a crematorium and seen men unloading the same sort of urns from a truck with the same company markings. He swung the binoculars again, searching for the truck loaded with firebrick. The truck had moved. At last he located it, now parked inside the area. The bricks were being unloaded near the great red engine. He inspected the engine again. What had at first glance appeared to be a boiler, now suggested an oven or a furnace. “Evenit diabolus!” the abbot growled, and started for the wall stairs.