Orme did not try to rise. He lay on his back with his head turned towards the man, his heart beating hard, his hands clutching the sheets. This man looked as he had imagined Jesus Christ did; even in his fright he thought that he resembled the conventional pictures of Jesus hung on the walls of his parents' house.
The glowing man held up a hand and made a sign as if to bless him. Then he glided backward, and as he did so, the light began to fade. It was gone and with it the figure.
The whole event had taken perhaps ten seconds.
He thought that that man was not the Jesus whom he had first seen coming from the sun in the cavern. This was the man who had come to his bedside from time to time, the true Jesus Christ. He had been watching over him. And now, in his disciple's crisis of despair, he had appeared to him. The light had come, that light which shone from him. No words had been needed; his presence was enough.
Or it should have been. In previous ages the beholder of such a vision would have accepted it literally. The figure would have been what it seemed to be. There was no other explanation. But he was born in a less naive, more knowledgeable time. Could this shining figure be just one of those phenomena that occasionally happened to people when they were in a half-awake, half- asleep state? Orme had never experienced such things before, but he had read about them. He had known a man who sometimes experienced these visions. His friend had said that the things scared him, they seemed to truly exist, and he would swear that he had been wide awake when he saw them. But he admitted that he may just have thought he was fully conscious and that the phenomena were probably exteriorisations, projected subjectivities of his unconscious.
Orme, thinking of this, had to admit-that the figure he'd seen might be the same. After all, he was an engineer, he'd had rigorous scientific training, and he should choose the most probable explanation. Use Occam's razor. Let it cut no matter what the pain.
However, it did not matter whether or not the true Jesus had appeared. What had manifested itself was what he believed. 'I am the Way.' That vision was the gate through which he saw to the deepest part of his mind. Or, to be old- fashioned but nevertheless just as valid, to the deeps of his soul.
Assured by this revelation, he should have been able to go to sleep. But there were other problems to consider. And so, while his bunkmates slept, he considered what he should do and what he was able to do. As always, the difference was great.
23
Halfway to Earth, the fleet began decelerating. But when the ships took up orbit around the planet, the crews did not find themselves in free fall. Gravicle generators maintained a field equivalent to that of Mars within each vessel.
The Maranatha went into a stationary orbit just above Jerusalem. Two ships took circumpolar orbits in opposite paths. Two others went into equatorial orbits. The sixth angled over Earth at forth-five degrees to the equatorial line. The seventh, the giant Zara, prowled around the planet at a distance of 200,000 miles, changing its line of travel every other day.
No attention was paid to the communications and weather-survey satellites nor to the two space-colony satellites. But the 'space junk', pieces of satellites and the complete ones in decaying orbits, were disintegrated by the Zara. This cleaning up did two things. It made sure that no manmade falling objects would strike the surface and perhaps kill people. And it impressed Earth mightily with the power of the Zara.
The day after this event, Jesus himself asked for permission to land the Maranatha in a field outside Jerusalem. It was denied, though very politely and with many excuses. The Israeli parliament, the Knesset, was still hotly debating whether Jesus should be allowed to land as the political head of the Martian nation or as the Messiah. Since Jesus insisted that he was the Messiah, and the political head of the state was the Chief Judge, a Krsh named Eliakim ben- Yoktan, the issue seemed unsolvable. In fact, the Knesset was putting off its decision as long as possible. Israel was being torn apart, brother against brother, father against son. A tiny superorthodox group, so reactionary that it still refused to recognise Israel as a state because it was not religious enough, flatly rejected Jesus as the Messiah. The orthodox were divided, some ecstatic because the Messiah had finally come, others raging that he was not a true Jew, let alone the descendant of David called the Anointed. A large part of the population was agnostic or atheist or of the reformed branch of Judaism. Many unpractitioners of the faith, though calling themselves Jews, had been swept away and now were as devout as the most orthodox of the orthodox and calling loudly for the government to allow Jesus to come down and so begin the messianic era.
The whole nation was paralysed; business and the mundane duties of daily living were ignored as much as possible. The citizens were glued before their TV sets or arguing with relatives, neighbours, strangers in the streets. The air burned and quivered with quotations from the Prophets and the Talmud, each being used both to contradict and to prove.
Equalling the turmoil in Israel was that in all other nations. Despite great efforts in the communist countries to suppress the details of Jesus's messages, they had failed. Through underground channels and the radio, the news had got to the populaces, though often in distorted form. The socialist democracies had also tried, though not nearly as vigorously, to censor part of the news. There were even citizens' groups that demanded that the messages be heavily restricted, especially excluding all religious content.
In Rome the Pope appeared on TV and denounced the Messiah as the Antichrist. The Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church repeated the accusation an hour later. The Archbishop of Canterbury stated that the Church of England would at this time neither confirm nor deny the status of the claimant. More study of the messages and comparison of them with the theology derived from the Scriptures would have to be done. This was simply putting off the inevitable. Even the layman with a cursory knowledge of the Bible (which included most church members) could see at once that there was no reconciling most of the teachings of the Anglican Church with the claims of the Martian.
The Baptist churches, Southern and otherwise, had officially rejected this Jesus. But their constituents were divided, and already splinter movements had formed with various names.
The official heads of the Hindus, Moslems, and Buddhists had scorned Jesus. But, again, their flocks were divided. Everywhere, there were bitter words often followed by violence. Mass demonstrations, riots, and a revolution in Uganda, had occurred.
On the third day of the fleet's orbiting, the radios and TVs of the world were taken over. No matter what the channel, the broadcast from the communications room in the Maranatha came through. When some governments turned off the electrical power so that their citizens could not hear, the sets continued to operate. This threw the officials into a panic. How could the Martians do this? And if they could do this, what else could they do?
All nations protested, of course, but Jesus replied that it was necessary and for the good of the people.