"Well, Cliff, no offense to your religion, but they're wrong because they claim to know what the answers are. They say the Bible is literally true because it's the word of God, but that can't be: because the Bible is full of contradictions. There are two accounts of the Creation in Genesis, two genealogies of Jesus, two different accounts of the death of Judas Iscariot."
"I never heard that before."
"Well, it's true -- you can look it up."
Linck coughed delicately. "In justice to the Christians, I should say that they have explanations for all this. They say that the second chapter of Genesis merely expands on the first chapter, for instance, and that one of the genealogies is Jesus' father's father's line, the other one his father's mother's line. And they say that Judas hanged himself, and then the rope broke and he burst his bowels over a stone."
"Yes, but the Jews never reckoned descent through the female line. We aren't even told who Mary's father was."
"According to the Coptic Gospels, and I think also in Pseudo-Matthew, her father was Cleopas," Linck said apologetically. "But that gets us into a terrible muddle, because Hegesippus says that Cleopas or Cleophas was an uncle of Jesus, who was married to another Mary, who also had three sons with the same names -- James, Joses, and Simon. And then, some authorities say that Cleopas is a Greek form of the name Alphaeus, which turns up in some of the Gospels as the name of one of the disciples, and these names are also a terrible muddle. For instance, in the Gospel of Matthew the disciple who is a publican" -- he bowed slightly toward Cliff Guthrie -- " is called Matthew, in Mark he is Levi of Alphaeus, in Luke he is just Levi, and John does not mention him at all. And so on. I sometimes think that when we read the name Cleopas or Alphaeus in the Bible, it is a code word meaning, 'We don't know this person's name.' "
Later Guthrie found Linck alone in the garden, lighting a cigar.
"Piet, there were a couple of things you said before that I didn't quite understand. Those gospels you mentioned, I never heard of them -- the Coptic, and pseudo-Matthew?"
"They are apocryphal gospels. They were not included in the canon, but some of them were quite widely read -- more so than one or two of the canonical gospels, perhaps."
"And you read these, what, in the original languages?"
"I do read a little Coptic and Greek," said Linck mildly, "but that is not necessary. You can find them in a translation by M. R. James called 'The Apocryphal Gospels.' "
Guthrie produced a small notebook and wrote it down. "The other thing," he said, "I noticed you looked at me when you were talking about the publican, and I had a feeling I was missing something."
"Don't you feel that we are all Gene's disciples, Cliff?"
Guthrie stared at him. "But what's that got to do with -- A publican is a bartender, isn't it?"
"Yes, quite right, but at the time the King James Bible was translated, it meant a tax collector."
Chapter Twenty-five
All around him, the other worlds sheaved away in layers of gray mist. There were worlds in which the Chinese had colonized North and South America, in which the Christian religion did not exist, in which giant sloths and tapirs roamed the Great Plains. Even closer to home, there were things even more bizarre in their own way: there was a world in which Shirley Temple had been appointed an ambassador, and Ronald Reagan was President of the United States. Most of the time it seemed to make no difference at all who was president, premier, or chairman; the world drifted in its massive way toward the same catastrophe just the same.
There were worlds in which it had already happened: there were rotting corpses along the highways, beside the lines of abandoned cars. The cities were fields of rubble, like vast firebombed junkyards.
Since the idea had occurred to him, or rather since the first moment when he had known with an electric tingle in his nerves that he was going to take the risk, he had thought carefully about groups and their dynamics. He already knew that the only comfortable place in a group for him was at the center; he had formed groups around himself again and again solely for that reason, and not because of any impulse toward hospitality or benevolence, although he was glad enough to let people think those were his reasons.
Others liked to be near the center of power but did not care for the responsibility or the risk of managing a group of their own. And there were still others who liked to be on the fringe, to be told what to do. He did not understand it, but it must be so, or every adult human being would have his own group, with a membership of one.
He ate in his room, and did not go downstairs until the others had had time to finish breakfast. He found them in the dining room, with pads and pencils in front of them. They fell silent and their heads turned as he walked in.
"Good morning," he said. "I hope you've all been thinking about what I said last night. You probably have some questions, but I'd like to hold those until later. What I want us to do this morning is to have a brainstorming session -- does everybody know what that is?"
"Sounds like a fit of lunacy," said Wilcox.
"Brainstorming is a way of getting ideas," Coomaraswami explained. "The rule is, you have a certain problem to talk about, and you try to generate as many ideas as possible, never mind whether they are good ideas or not: that you can decide later. But I am not quite clear what we are going to talk about."
"All right," said Gene. "The problem is this: the organization that we talked about last night has to be a political movement, even if it looks like something else, and yet it can't be a nationalist or ethnic movement -- it has to be universal, or it won't work. That suggests to me that we must have a very simple core message. It has to be something that even a child can understand, and something that can be expressed in any language. Yes, Stan?"
"When you say the idea has to be simple, that rules out things like 'Support scientific education,' for instance."
"Yes, and also it's not enough to be simple. 'Save the whales' is a simple idea, and a good idea, but it's not universal -- not everybody can do anything about saving the whales."
"So, then, you just want something that will improve people's behavior generally, is that it?"
"Maybe."
"What about, 'You shall love thy neighbor as thyself'?" Irma asked quietly.
"That has been tried," said Linck. "Unfortunately it always turns out that most people love themselves better."
"Not always," Salomon retorted. "I'm tired of hearing that you can't change 'human nature.' People who say that usually assume that whatever behavior their own society produces is natural. So if you grew up in a highly competitive and cynical society, you think that's human nature. But the Pueblo Indians were not like that, for instance -- they were cooperative, nurturant, nonaggressive. To them, that was human nature."
"Remember that we're not going to criticize these ideas now, just try to get as many out as we can. Maggie, are you making notes?"
She nodded. Linck, she saw, was also writing on his pad; one or two of the others were doodling.
"So, then," said Coomaraswami, "what we are looking for is an idea that will make people behave better toward each other? How about 'Be kind'? That is simple enough -- two words."
"Before we go any further," Salomon said, "I think I see something missing. It isn't enough for your idea to be simple and universal; there also has to be some reward for the person who adopts the idea. It could be something just as simple as 'Be kind.' And if everybody heard that and said, 'Great, I'll be kind,' it would make a big difference. But how are you going to get them to do it? What's in it for them?"
"We could give them a dollar whenever they're kind to somebody," Wilcox said with a grin. There was a ripple of laughter.