“Nothing much at all. It’s really quite vague to me now. It was only that we’d all get out of this, that no one would be hurt on the trip, that’s all. That’s why I suppose one would call it a presentiment. It was just a feeling of course. A kind of instinct.”
“Is that right? I’ve had them too.” Evans wondered if the ventilator was still leaking.
“Have you really? I know there’s a sort of intuition, a sort of sixth sense I would suppose you’d call it.”
“Sure, that’s what I’d call it.” Evans wondered if there was anything to religion. Probably not, at least he himself had gotten along without it. He tried to recall if he’d ever been inside a church. He could not remember. In the back of his mind there was a feeling of great space and peacefulness which might have been the memory of a childhood visit to a church. He had seen some movies, though, that had church interiors in them. Churches where gray-haired men in long black robes stood in what appeared to be upright coffins and talked interminably about large resonant things. He had learned about religion from the movies and from the Chaplains he had met.
The Chaplain, his sixth sense at work, guessed what he was thinking. “You are not particularly, ah, religious, are you, Mr Evans.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say that,” said Evans, who would have said just that if he had not disliked being thought different from other people.
“Oh no, I can tell that you’re a ... a pagan.” The Chaplain chuckled to show that this epithet was not serious.
“I hope not.” Evans was not too sure what “pagan” meant either. He wished that people would use simple familiar words. That was the main thing he disliked in Martin: the long words that sounded as if they meant something very important.
“Well, there are many, many people like you in the world,” said Chaplain O’Mahoney sadly, aware suddenly of the immensity of sin, the smallness of virtue.
“I guess there are.” Evans wondered if Martin had recorded the rising barometer readings regularly.