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prominently.
    A second instructor glanced at a fan-shaped pad in his hands, checking the synchronization levels of the fresh believers afloat. Though a couple of dots fluttered wildly above and below the fluorescent-green bell of the syncing level, the rest of them crowded along it with commendable precision.
    “Before our fresh believers can deal with the largest spaceships,” continued Benedict, “they are required to test their skills on lesser objects.”
    He showed the applicants to one last, narrow window.
    Beyond a thick security glass, opened an empty, spotless-white hall the dimension of a large hangar. Except for the slit window, every inch of it had been lined with large, square ceramic tiles.
    For a minute or so, nothing happened.
    Then, all at once, a ripple propagated through the air like a quickly expanding heat wave. Amazingly, one of the barbed exoplants seen in the training room materialized from thin air.
    Gnarled and thorny, it was more than twenty feet high. Its roots deprived of the supporting soil, the exoplant crashed loudly to the ceramic floor, sending clods of alien soil all over.
    The plant just lay there for a while when, unexpectedly, something dropped from its crown ...
    It rolled to the plain tiles of the floor, looking like a round eggplant. But it was no fruit. It uncurled, revealing the black, blinking eyes of a small, dark-blue alien creature resembling a scaled salamander.
    There was something disturbing about the way the two gills at either side of its head frantically opened and closed, in the attempt to filter or suck in something that clearly wasn’t air. In moments, it started to squirm and spasm helplessly, choking inexorably ...
    Until it noticed the window above, from which the disconcerted applicants were looking. Fighting for life, the creature resorted to its last strength. Clawing at the walls of the hangar, it desperately rushed upward.
    To the horror of the onlookers, the creature slithered to level with the corridor window and crawled around the frame like a cockroach trapped in a jar, looking for a way out—but it couldn’t find any.
    Almost at the end of its resources as well as of its wits, the only thing the creature could think of was to slam its head into the thick glass. It tried once again, harder this time, but it almost knocked itself out.
    Unable to figure out what that place was, wondering where the comfortable world that used to be home had gone, the stunned alien glowered at the humans.
    Ever so slowly, the gills stopped pumping and never moved again. The creature had died with its eyes open.
    As if the pitiful sight had triggered a hidden switch in the test room circuitry, flames erupted from the ceiling, inundating the hangar below, mercifully obliterating both the exoplant and the alien creature.
    Benedict looked up at the shocked applicants. He could sense the many unanswered questions that flooded their minds. Was the horrible death of the little, scaled salamander an unpredictable mistake? Or was it a deliberate show of the overwhelming powers that lay behind Credence?
    “The test required for the fresh believers to flush the Arcturian Palm alone. Not the small critters that live on it,” he said. “I’m afraid they’ll have to try again.”
    More concerned about the poor performance of his believers than the critter’s demise, he sighed.
    “The people who depend on Credence and our services depend in first place on our believers’ total devotion and dedication,” he said. “It is the responsibility of the believers, of their instructors as well as mine that no errors are made in the production of the Main Belief. As I told you, it’s hard, long work, but being a believer is no ordinary job. More than a mission, it’s a call. Don’t ever forget that.”
    Nobody said anything. The applicants were still shaken by what they had just witnessed.
    Benedict wondered who among them was going to become a believer. In the last five years, he had