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hundred believers, men and women, all fast asleep, all wearing spotless white suits, floated on slim, designer deckchairs.
    The couches stood about four feet from each other, forming a closely woven mesh that kept hovering weightlessly above the stretch of the chamber.
    Not all spots in the mesh were taken. Here and there, black gaps would be seen, looking like skipped stitches in a cloth’s fabric.
    The couches weren’t still. They kept shifting ever so slightly, the same way leaves fallen in a pond do.
    Spindly arms emerged from the darkness of the chamber’s bottom, supporting the couches and bringing them around in step with the unpredictable tide.
    It didn’t seem to matter to the believers that they were hanging over a gaping chasm more than one hundred feet deep. The trancelike state they had fallen into was but a peaceful oblivion.
    “Meet our believers,” said Benedict. “They float gracefully in their natural environment: the believers’ chamber. Through the feed they are administered, they receive all the information they need to flush all spaceships and whatever they carry in total accordance with the intergalactic timetable.”
    Benedict smiled seraphically, glanced over as well, then went on speaking.
    “Through the study of the marvel that is the human thalamus and the group of theories that go under the name of Pistocentrism, you will be admitted to the secrets of our trade. But make no mistake. Only a privileged few will master what’s actually needed to safely send space vehicles, their crew and the goods they carry to their destination on a daily basis: the Main Belief.”
    Benedict made a long, meaningful pause. It was critical that they got this right.
    “The Main Belief is the one strength of Credence, the hidden engine that moves all parts,” he said. “Without it, not even a test needle would spin. To build such an amazing force, all beliefs originating from every believer must be collected and synchronized. It can be done, of course, but it’s long, hard work. Much of the time we spend here at Credence is dedicated to properly training our apprentice believers so that, one day, they can enter the chamber and give their contribution to their privileged fellows.”
    Benedict motioned the applicants to a second window on the other side of the corridor. The group shuffled over obediently.
    “There. Our apprentice believers,” he said.
    Twenty apprentice believers, men and women, dressed in orange suits, sat in university chairs. They drank in every word of their instructor, occasionally taking notes in the electronic pads at their side.
    The instructor, a brawny man of about sixty, who sported silvery hair and a military haircut, strolled around a streamlined desk that protruded from the floor, standing on one side only.
    He waved a yard-long stick at a large screen hanging on the wall, where statistics, graphs and anatomy charts of the human brain kept rolling.
    The back and side walls of the lecture hall were lined with monitors showing maps of the Milky Way and of at least twenty other galaxies. A considerable number of them also displayed information about a hundred different spaceships in the form of black silhouettes standing against a white background.
    They resembled so very much the stills of enemy ships ancient Air Force commanders prompted their pilots with at mission briefings before air attacks in World War II.
    Some of the spaceships were as long and tapered as submarines, some were as massive as oil tankers, others as bulky as sports domes, others as sleek and elegant as ocean liners. But there were also a few that were as small as little houses.
    Benedict led the applicants to a third window.
    Inside another hall, a dozen fresh believers, wearing yellow suits, floated in their training deckchairs, about three feet above the polished floor. This time, the ubiquitous monitors displayed pictures of queer, lush and hulking exoplants, among which a weird barbed palm stood out