"And so they were gone ... done ... dissipated into your machine ... souls no longer." Father Phillip's sigh was one of infinite disappointment.
"Binding energy to light ... light to mass, maybe ... and mass to energy again ... or is there anything but energy in the final analysis? You astronomers profess to know something of this. Why is it, then, that when you bump head-on into life you suppose it to be mysteriously something else? Something capable of complete extinction, of contradicting the laws of the universe?
"But I digress again. I am sorry. I have not said what you are waiting to hear."
Father Phillip drew in a long breath.
"In a frenzy of spirit I worked for months to refine the instrument and to make more precise the registering and recording, daily trying various tissues in the original machine ... getting reacquainted, too, with the personalities of various types of cells in the big projecting mike. Today I can show you, or any interested person, the endurance of personality in the energy quanta after the cell body is dead. Does this make a difference?"
Father Phillip's sigh this time was a relaxation of his whole being. "Somehow it does," he said, "but I don't know why."
"You know," I assured him, "that the crux of the Phoenix matter was the question of personal immortality. If the souls of the Phoenix folk are in the hand of God, what does it matter to you or to me where their bodies are? Suppose, just before the end, God told them that He would bless their physical passing and set it for a sign to a younger people that their savior was at hand? You have no way of knowing that He did not. You do know that He said: 'Other sheep I have which are not of this flock.' And when your own body dies, you may even meet your beloved folk of the Phoenix Nebula and there shall be 'one flock and one Shepherd.'"
Father Phillip's hand reached out and I grasped it. He returned the pressure firmly. "Thank you, Father," he said gravely. "I have been in mortal danger of making a mistake. You have been sent to me."
"As you were sent to the crew of the expedition, and have not yet wholly failed them. How do you feel at this moment ... in your body?"
His look became abstracted and he seemed to be searching himself internally. Then he looked back at me with a shade of a grin. "My incision itches like fury," he said, "and I need the bedpan."