'The sheep could have been a robot,' Madeleine Danton was saying. She put down her fork by the plate, on which her food grew cold. 'In fact, it must have been. That's the only reasonable explanation, and I'm not going to listen to anything unreasonable.'
'You're unreasonable,' her husband said. 'Could we make such a lifelike robot?'
'Not quite. But then these people are far ahead of us in technology.'
'Perhaps you think that Jesus is a robot. Or that all the Martians are.'
'You needn't be so sarcastic, Nadir. Nor do I care for your implication that
I'm paranoiac.'
'I don't think that,' Shirazi said. 'What I do think is that you are not taking a scientific attitude. You're too stubborn. Not only about this but about other things, too.'
He was still angry because Madeleine refused to cook their j meals. She claimed that that was no more her responsibility than his. Anyway, she didn't know how to cook.
'And you a biochemist,' Nadir had said disgustedly. That remark hadn't lessened the tension between them.
'Well, I'm not a robot,' Orme said. 'And I know that no mechanical or electrical devices were used to levitate me. If these people have antigravity, they didn't attach any anti-gravity machines to me.'
Danton picked up her fork again, looked at the roast beef, boiled potatoes, and asparagus, and put the fork down.
'Perhaps they have some sort of tractor beam.'
Orme laughed and said, 'Surely I'd have felt it.'
Bronski said, 'How about the evaporating blood?'
'A chemical compound or mixture of some sort,' she said.
'But,' Orme said, 'surely you could feel the aliveness of that animal?'
'I felt nothing.'
'You don't feel anything,' Nadir said. 'I've noticed that lately.'
'Let's keep this conversation on an impersonal level,' she said, coldly.
Nadir rose abruptly, and, scowling, strode out of the house. Undoubtedly, he would have liked to bang the door behind him, but a hydraulic device prevented him.
Danton said, 'I don't know what to do with him. We could get along fine if only it wasn't for this... Jesus thing.'
Orme and Bronski were silent. What was troubling the Iranian was also troubling them. But Nadir's resistance was even greater because he was a Moslem. Bronski, after all, had been raised as an orthodox Jew. To rejoin the faith was easier for him. Orme was a Christian, and, though he would become a Jew, he would also, in a sense, still be a Christian, though not what most Terrestrials would define as such. Not as yet, anyway, he thought sombrely.
Nadir Shirazi, like his two male colleagues, was overwhelmed by the evidence that the man known as Jesus Christ was more than just a man. In his religion, Jesus was a great prophet, the greatest until Mohammed had appeared. No devout Moslem spoke disparagingly of Jesus. It was the idolatrous attitude of Christians towards Jesus that the Moslem objected to. He was not the son of God by divine intercourse and also God, and there was no Holy Trinity. But here was a man who seemed to tie Jesus, and he disclaimed godhead and the virgin birth. But he was the son of God, if only His adopted son. He had been resurrected, but the Moslem holy book, the Koran, denied that he had even died on the cross.
The main obstacle to conversion was becoming a Jew. Mohammed, in his struggles to found his religion, had been betrayed by some desert Jewish tribes, composed mainly of converted Arabs, and so the foundation of prejudice against Jews had been established early. Yet the Prophet had included Jews among the People of the Book, the Old Testament, which he revered. The more tolerant Moslem chiefs of the dark and medieval ages, especially in Iberia, had let the Jews worship as they pleased and even appointed them as viziers of their states. Jewish philosophers and scholars were highly regarded. But the Palestinian issue, Zionism, and the birth of the Israeli nation had hardened and sharpened the conflict. It was as much political, economic, and national as religious, but to most Moslems the conflict was religious. Shirazi was an Iranian, not an Arab, and his country had not until recently been directly involved in the war against Israel. Nevertheless, many Iranians sympathised with their fellow Moslems, and to be a Moslem was to loathe the Jew.
Shirazi had had no difficulty in becoming Bronski's friend. He was highly educated and sceptical of the literary validity of the Koran. In Iran, he had been wise enough to keep these opinions to himself except when with like-minded friends. Eventually, though, he had to flee Iran because he couldn't any longer endure the suppression of free speech and the jailing of some of his friends for their lack of discretion. Shirazi could be a good friend of individual Jews, but the profound antipathy to their religion itself lived in him. He would admit that this attitude was emotionally based, but his conditioned reflexes were so strong they overcame his rationality. He knew that, yet had been unable to do anything about it. He was a Moslem - confronted with undeniable evidence that Judaism was the true religion. It had to be if it could produce the living Jesus, whom, despite the Koran, he had thought of as mouldering bones in a rock tomb, awaiting the resurrection of all the dead in the last days. Thus, though he admitted that Jesus was whom he claimed to be, he was still torn. The battle inside him was as fierce as that in Danton though the elements of conflict were different.
Orme was having his own civil war. The solution to peace within himself seemed clear. All he had to do was to go to the nearest rabbi and say that he wished to convert. Rationally, emotionally, he desired to do this. But there was something in him that was fighting this, a deep strong counter-current. What it was, he did not know. Perhaps it was all that he'd heard about the Antichrist, the false Christ who would appear in the days before the Last Judgement. He'd read about him in the Bible, he'd heard many sermons preached about him, and his parents had talked much of him. The Antichrist would seem to many to be the true Christ. Was this Jesus that man?
Orme didn't know, and he had no way of proving or disproving the truth. He would have to rely on his faith or, to put it another way, his intuition. If he were a true Christian, he should be able to see through the facade, determine whether the real or the false Jesus was behind it.
Perhaps that was the trouble. He wasn't a genuine Christian. He may have been giving to his religion more than lip-service, but it still wasn't enough.
The silence continued. Suddenly, he rose.
'I'm going for a walk. It's too much like a funeral here. I want to see some live people.'
Bronski also stood up. 'I'm going home. Sorry about this, Madeleine. Thanks for the supper, anyway.'
'I think we're all going crazy,' she said. 'Why not? We're in an irrational environment.'
Orme thanked her for the supper and left. Bronski followed him to the middle of the street. _ 'You want to come along?' Orme said.
'No. I have some thinking to do. Or some feeling. I don't know which. Whatever it is, I hope it comes to a head.'
'Well, if we're confused and upset,' Orme said, 'we have company. I imagine that there are billions like us on Earth.'
'They can't be as disturbed as us. After all, we've lived this, and they're only seeing something on TV. It's the difference between being actually shot at and viewing an actor in a film dodging bullets.'
They said goodnight, and Orme walked on down the street. The only light was that from the windows of houses and the 'moon'. The latter, however, was at least a fourth brighter than Earth's full moon. A sliver of darkness edged the globe, emulating the waning of Earth's satellite. When he'd first seen this, Orme had wondered why it was being done. He was told that it followed the same pattern of phases as the moon as seen from Palestine. The ancient festivals and holy days that had been scheduled according to the real moon were still followed, but with some modifications. There were three harvest seasons here, and so the necessary adjustments had been made.