“Honest,” Jim insisted, when be bad ceased snorting, “are you young punks so stupid as all that? Why you’re worse than your elders.”
“But you just got through saying,” Hugh protested in hurt tones, “that all our accepted religious notions are so much bunk. That is just what my friends think. They want to junk all that old nonsense.”
Joe started to speak; Jim cut in ahead of him. “Why bother with him, Joe? He’s hopeless.”
“No, he’s not. I’m enjoying this. He’s the first one I’ve talked with in I don’t know how long who stood any chance at all of seeing the truth. Let us be — I want to see whether that’s a head he has on his shoulders, or just a place to hang his ears.”
“O.K.,” Jim agreed, “but keep it quiet. I’m going to take a nap.” The left-hand head closed its eyes, soon it was snoring. Joe and Hugh continued their discussion in whispers.
“The trouble with you youngsters,” Joe said, “is that if you can’t understand a thing right off, you think it can’t be true. The trouble with your elders is, anything they didn’t understand they reinterpreted to mean something else and then thought they understood it. None of you has tried believing clear words the way they were written and then tried to understand them on that basis. Oh, no, you’re all too bloody smart for that! If you can’t see it right off, it ain’t so; it must mean something different.”
“What do you mean?” Hugh asked suspiciously.
“Well, take the Trip, for instance. What does it mean to you?
“Well, to my mind, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a piece of nonsense to impress the peasants.”
“And what is the accepted meaning?”
“Well, it’s where you go when you die, or rather what you do. You make the Trip to Centaurus.”
“And what is Centaurus?”
“It’s — mind you, I’m just telling you the orthodox answers; I don’t really believe this stuff — it’s where you arrive when you’ve made the Trip, a place where everybody’s happy and there’s always good eating.” Joe snorted. Jim broke the rhythm of his snoring, opened one eye, and settled back again with a grunt.
“That’s just what I mean,” Joe went on in a lower whisper. “You don’t use your head. Did it over occur to you that the Trip was just what the old books said It was: the Ship and all the Crew actually going somewhere, moving?” Hoyland thought about it. “You don’t mean for me to take you seriously. Physically, it’s an impossibility. The Ship can’t go anywhere. It already is everywhere. We can make a trip through it, but the Trip, that has to have a spiritual meaning, if it has any.”
Joe called on Jordan to support him. “Now, listen,” he said, “get this through that thick head of yours. Imagine a place a lot bigger than the Ship, a lot bigger, with the Ship inside it, moving. D’you get it?”
Hugh tried. He tried very hard. He shook his bead. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “There can’t be anything bigger than the Ship. There wouldn’t be any place for it to be.”
“Oh, for Huff’s sake! Listen. Outside the Ship, get that? Straight down beyond the level in every direction. Emptiness out there. Understand me?”
“But there isn’t anything below the lowest level. That’s why it’s the lowest level.”
“Look. If you took a knife and started digging a hole in the floor of the lowest level, where would it get you?”
“But you can’t. It’s too hard.”
“But suppose you did and it made a hole. Where would that hole go? Imagine it.”
Hugh shut his eyes and tried to imagine digging a hole in the lowest level. Digging as if it were soft, soft as cheese. He began to get some glimmering of a possibility, a possibility that was unsettling, soul-shaking. He was falling, falling into a hole that he had dug which had no levels under it. He opened his eyes very quickly. “That’s awful!” he ejaculated. “I won’t believe it.”
Joe-Jim got up. “I’ll make you believe it,” he said grimly, “if I have to break your neck to do it.” He strode over to the outer door and opened it. “Bobo!” he shouted.