The Dark Design by Phillip Jose Farmer

Later, Peter had sweated thinking about what would have hap­pened if they’d been caught by the police. Jail, public disgrace, the loss of his job at General Electric, the shame felt by his children, the wrath of his wife. And what if the old woman had had a heart attack? He searched the obituary columns and was relieved to find that no one on that street had died that night. This in itself was a rarity, since Sarah said that she couldn’t look out of the window from her apartment without seeing a funeral procession going down that street.

He also looked for a report of the incident in the papers. If the old lady had called the police, however, there was nothing in the papers about it.

A thirty-eight-year-old man shouldn’t be doing stupid childish things like that, he had told himself. Especially if innocent people might be hurt. Never again. But as the years passed, he chuckled when he thought of it.

Though an atheist at fifteen, Frigate had never been able to rid himself of doubts. When he was nineteen, he had attended a revival meeting with Bob Allwood. Allwood had been raised in a devout fundamentalist family. He, too, had become an atheist, but this lasted one year. In that time, Bob’s parents had died of cancer. The shock had set him thinking about immortality. Unable to endure the idea that his father and mother were dead forever, that he’d never see them again, he had begun visiting revival meetings. His conver­sion had taken place when he was eighteen.

Peter and Bob used to see much of each other, since they had been playmates in grade school and had gone to the same high school. They argued much about religion and the authenticity of the Bible. Finally, Peter agreed to go with Bob to a mass meeting at which the famous Reverend Robert Ransom was preaching.

Much to Peter’s astonishment, he found himself deeply stirred, though he had come to ridicule. He was even more amazed when he found himself on his knees before the reverend, promising to accept Jesus Christ as his Lord.

That promise was broken within a month. Peter just could not hold fast to his convictions. In Allwood’s parlance, he had “back­slid,” “fallen from grace.”

Peter told Bob that his early religious conditioning and the pas­sionate exhortations of the converts had been responsible for putting him in a fine frenzy of faith.

Allwood continued to argue with him, to “wrestle with his soul.” Peter remained adamant.

Peter approached the age of sixty. His schoolmates and friends were dying off; he himself was not in good health. Death was no longer a long way off. When he was young, he had thought much about the billions who had preceded him, been born, suffered, laughed, loved, wept, and died. And he thought of the billions who would come after him, who would be hurt, be hated, be loved, and be gone. At the end of Earth, all, caveman and astronaut, would be dust and less than dust.

What did it all mean? Without immortality, it meant nothing.

There were people who said that life was the excuse for life, its only reason.

These were fools, self-deluded. No matter how intelligent they might be in other matters, they were fools -in this. Self-blinkered, emotional idiots.

On the other hand, why should human beings have another chance at an afterlife? They were such miserable, conniving, self-deceiving, hypocritical wretches. Even the best were. He knew no saints, though he admitted that there might have been and might be some. It seemed to him that only saints would be worthy of immor­tality. Even so, he doubted the claims of some of those who had been awarded halos.

Take Saint Augustine, for instance. “Asshole” was the only word that fitted him. A monster of ego and selfishness.

St. Francis was about as saintly as a person could be. But he was undoubtedly psychotic. Kissing a leper’s sores to demonstrate humility, indeed!

Still, as Peter’s wife had pointed out, no one was perfect.

Then there was Jesus, though there was no proof that he was a saint. In fact, it was evident from the New Testament that he had restricted salvation to the Jews. But they had rejected him. And so, St. Paul, finding that the Jews were not about to give up the religion for which they had fought so hard and suffered so much, had turned to the Gentiles. He made certain compromises, and Christianity, better named Paulism, was launched. But St. Paul was a sexual pervert, since total sexual abstinence was a perversion.