Ferguson grinned. "Well, Father, that's the best excuse for an answer I ever heard, anyway." He dragged on his cigar, narrowing his eyes and pursing his lips, as if the cigar were a tube through which his brains were being sucked. "In other words," he said, "you don't think the big blowup back home was a judgment on us for our sins. You think it was a good thing, only more people should have got out the way we did. That right?"
"Oh, no," said Father Exarkos. "I believe that the Famines and the Collapse were a judgment of God. I have heard many theories about the causes of the Collapse, but I have not heard one which does not come back, in the end, to a condemnation of man's folly, cruelty, and blindness."
"Well," said Ferguson, "excuse me, Father, but if you believe that way, what are you doing here? Back there—" he jerked his head, as if Earth were some little distance behind his right shoulder—"people are living like animals. Chicago, where I come from, is just a stone jungle, with a few beast-like scavengers prowling around in it. If the dirt and disease don't get you, some bandit will split your head open, or you'll run into a wolf or some other hungry animal. If none of those things happen, you can expect to live to the ripe old age of forty, and then you'll be glad to die."
He had stopped smiling. Ferguson, Cudyk realized, was describing his own personal hell. He went on, "Now, if you want to call that a judgment, I won't argue with you. But if that's what you believe, why aren't you back there taking it with the rest of them?"
He really wanted to know, Cudyk thought. He had begun by trying to bait the priest, but now he was serious. It was odd to think of Ferguson having trouble with his conscience, but Cudyk was not really surprised. The most moralistic men he had ever known had been gangsters of Ferguson's type; whereas the few really good men he had known, Father Exarkos among them, had seemed as blithely unaware of their consciences as of their healthy livers.
The priest said, soberly, "Mr. Ferguson, I believe that we also are being punished. Perhaps we more than others. The Mexican peon, the Indian fellah, the peasant of China or Greece, lives very much as his father did before him; he scarcely has reason to know that judgment has fallen upon Earth. But I think that no inhabitant of the Quarter can forget it for so much as an hour."
Ferguson stared at him, then grunted and squashed out his cigar. He stood up. "I'll be getting along home," he said. "Good night." He walked out.
Cudyk and Exarkos sat for a while longer, talking quietly, and then left together. The streets were empty. Behind them and to their left as they walked to the corner, the ghostly blue of the Niori beehives shone above the dark human buildings.
The priest lived in a small second-floor apartment near the corner of Brasil and Athenai, alone since his wife had died ten years before. Cudyk had only to go straight across Ceskoslovensko, but he walked down toward Brasil with his friend.
Near the corner, Cudyk saw a dark form sprawled in a doorway. "One of your congregation, Astereos?" he asked.