“I don’t know. All I am sure of, Doctor Neal Cloud, is this: If we don’t go, we’ll both wish we had, to the day we die.”
“You’re probably right . . . but I haven’t got a glimmering of an idea as to what we’re going to look for.”
“I don’t know whether I have or not, but we’ve simply got to go. Even if we don’t find anything, we will at least have tried. Besides, your most pressing work is done, so you can take the time . . . and besides that . . . well, something those Fives said is bothering me terribly . . . the Purpose, you know . . . do you think. . . ?”
“That my Purpose in Life is to go solve the mystery of the Red Dwarf and its Enigmatic Microcompanion?” he gibed. “Hardly. Furthermore, the coincidence of the Fives getting here just one jump ahead of the fine-tooth is much—very much—too coincidental.”
Joan caught her breath and, if possible, paled whiter than before. “You may think you’re joking, Storm, but you aren’t. Believe me, you aren’t. That’s one of the things that are scaring me witless. You see, if I learned anything at all in my quite-a-few years of semantics, philosophy, and logic, it was that coincidence has no more reality than paradox has. Both are completely meaningless terms. Neither does or can exist.”
Cloud paled, then. “You believe that is my purpose in life?” he demanded.
“Now it’s you who are extrapolating.” Joan laughed, albeit shakily. “To quote you, ‘I merely stated a fact,’ et cetera.”
“Facts hurt, when they hit as hard as that one did.” Cloud paced about, immersed in thought, for minutes.
“I can’t find any point of attack,” he said, finally. “No foothold. No finger-hold, even. But what you just said rocked me to the foundations . . . you said, a while back, that you believe in God.”
“I do. So do you, Storm.”