“So far,” Sam said, expelling a big cloud of green smoke, “we have—you have, not I—the postulated soul of the Christians and the Moslems and others ad nauseam. But you claim that the soul does not go to a hell or a heaven. It flits around in some sort of fourth-dimensional limbo. It would do so forever if it were not for the interference of other beings. These are extra-Terrestrials who came into existence long before humanity did. These superbeings came to Earth when mankind did not yet exist—in fact, they visited every planet in the universe that might have sentient life some day.”
“You’re not phrasing it exactly as we do,” Goring said. “We maintain that every Galaxy has one—or perhaps many—ancient species inhabiting certain planets. These beings may have arisen in our Galaxy or they may have originated in an earlier, now dead, Galaxy or universe. In any event, they are wise and knew long ago that sentient life would arise on Earth, and they set up devices which started recording these sentients from the moment they appeared. These devices are undetectable by the sentients.
“At some time which these Ancients, as we call them, have determined, the recordings are sent to a special place. There the dead are fleshed out from the recordings by energy-matter converters, made whole and young again and then recordings are made of these bodies—which are destroyed and the dead are raised on a new world, such as this, again through e-m conversion.
“The psychomorphs, or kas, have an affinity to their protoplasmic twins. The moment a duplicate of the dead body is made, the ka attaches itself and begins recording.
So that, if the body is killed and duplicated a hundred times, the ka still retains the identity, the mind, and the memories of all the bodies. So that it is not just one duplicate after another being created. It is a matter of preservation of the pristine individual with a recording of everything that ever occurred in the immediate environment of all the protoplasmic bodies of the ka.
“But!” Sam said, waving his cigar and then stabbing its glowing end close to Goring’s cheek. “But! You maintain that a man cannot be killed an indefinite number of times. You say that, after a couple of hundred times, death does have a final effect. Continued dying weakens the link between body and ka and eventually the duplication of the body does not cause the ka to merge with it. The ka wanders off, haunts the spooky corridors of the fourth dimension, or whatever. It becomes, in effect, a ghost, a lost soul. It is done for.”
“That is the essence of our faith,” Goring said. “Or I should say our knowledge, since we know this to be true.” Sam raised his bushy eyebrows. “Indeed? Know?”
“Yes. Our founder heard The Truth a year after Resurrection, a year to the day after all of humanity rose from the dead. A man came to him at night as he prayed for a revelation on a high ledge up in the mountains. This man told him certain things, showed him certain things, that no terrestrial mortal could tell or show. This man was an agent of The Ancients and he revealed The Truth, and he told our founder to go out and preach the doctrine of the Second Chance.
“Actually, the term Second Chance is a misnomer. It is really our First Chance, because we never had a chance for salvation and eternal life while we were on Earth. But life on Earth was a necessary prelude to this Riverworld. The Creator made the universe and then The Ancients preserved humankind—indeed, all sentients throughout the universe. They preserved! But salvation is up to mankind only!
“It is up to each man to save himself, now that he has been given the chance!”
“Through the Church of the Second Chance and that only, I suppose,” Sam said. He did not want to sneer but he could not help himself. “That is what we believe,” Goring said.
“What were the credentials of this mysterious stranger?” Sam said. He thought of his Mysterious Stranger, and he felt panic. Could the two be the same? Or could both be from the same beings who called themselves the Ethicals? His Stranger, tie man who sent the nickeliron meteorite here and who had enabled Joe Miller to see the Tower in the far-off misty North Polar Sea, was a renegade of the Ethicals. If he were to be believed. “Credentials?” Goring said. “Papers from God?” He laughed.