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Devil?
    Impossible. It would require someone who was an esper, a medium, and had some unnamed power to break the “Laws of Nature” by, essentially, merely wishing for things to happen. That was the stuff of fairy tales; neither science nor religion even admitted its possibility, had even a chink in its wall of reason through which such powers might seep.
    Which, of course, was what made it so delightful a fantasy. If any such individual ever did actually come to light, those walls of reason would come tumbling down—and who could tell what new and shining palaces might emerge as they were rebuilt?
    “Gentlefolk,” said a canned voice, “the ship is lifting.”
    Father Al bundled up his paper, thrust it in his breast pocket, and pressed his nose against the port. No matter how many times he flew, it still seemed new to him—that wonderful, faerie sight of the spaceport growing smaller, falling away, of the whole city, then the countryside, being dwarfed, then spread out below him like a map, one that dropped away further and further beneath him, till he could see Europe enameled on the bottom of a giant bowl, its rim the curve of the Earth… and that was just on the ballistic rocket flights from one hemisphere to another. The few times he had been in space, it had been even better—the vast bowl dropping further away, till it seemed to turn inside out and become a dome, then a vast hemisphere filling the sky, somehow no longer below him, but beside him, continents mottling its surface through a swirl of clouds…
    He knew that seasoned passengers eyed him with amusement, or contempt; how naïve he must seem to them, like a gawking yokel. But Father Al thought such delights were rare, and not to be missed; to him, it was wrong to ever cease to glory in the wonder of God’s handiwork. And, at the moment when he sat most enthralled with the majestic vista on the other side of the port, a question sometimes tickled the back of his mind: Who was the true sophisticate, they or he?
    This time, the overcast quickly cut off sight of the faerie landscape below, but turned into a dazzling sea of cotton beneath him, sinking away till it seemed a vast snowfield. Then, just barely, he felt the ship quiver, then begin a low, threshold hum of muted power. The antigravity units had been shut off, and the powerful planetary drive now propelled the shuttle.
    Father Al sighed, and sat back, loosening his webbing, gazing out the port as his current problem floated to the surface of his mind again. There was one big question that the PBB bio hadn’t answered: How Page 16
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    could McAran have known about this man Gallowglass, about something that would happen more than a thousand years after his own death? And that question, of course, raised another: How had McAran known just when to have the letter opened, or who would be Pope at the time?
    The boarding ramp shivered to a stop, and Father Al filed out into Luna Central with a hundred other passengers. Gradually, he worked his way through the flow to a data wall, and gazed up at the list of departing ships. Finally, he found it—Proxima Centauri, Gate 13, lifting off at 15:21. He glanced up at the digital clock above—15:22! He looked back at the Proxima line in horror, just as the time winked out, to be replaced by the glowing word, “Departed.” Then the gate number blanked, too. Father Al just stared at it, numbed, waiting for the departure time of the next ship to light up. Presently, it did—3:35Greenwich Standard Time. Father Al spun away, fueled by a hot surge of emotion. He identified it as anger and stilled, standing quiet, letting his whole body go loose, letting the outrage fill him, tasting it, almost relishing it, then letting it ebb away till it was gone. Finagle had struck again—or his disciple Gundersun, in this case: “The least desirable possibility will always exert itself when the