It had occurred to him one day as he and Blackburn were crossing the campus and he had observed to his colleague that things were looking bad for God. "It's every man for Himself," Blackburn had replied. "If I'm not mistaken that's one of His own laws. After all, who invented survival of the fittest?"
"Seriously," Shaheen said. "A, we've got a time machine. B, having A, there's no reason that I can see why we can't change the past. And C, if we do, well, they'll be using cathedrals for bowling alleys."
"Maybe now we'll see what kind of a loser He makes."
"Look here Blackburn, you needn't parade your atheism so ostentatiously. I'm well aware of it. In fact that's what's bothering me. You're an atheist whereas I ... well, I never did make up my mind about God. That's not very astute of me, I suppose, but I haven't. I'm betwixt and between, and so I was wondering if it wouldn't be only fair to have a representative of the other side in on this."
For a few seconds there was only the sound of their shoes on the bluestone walk that threaded across the stunted fall grass of the campus.
"Fair? You're using the word fair in connection with a scientific experiment?"
"Only because its outcome seems so obvious to us. We have strong preconceptions and because of them we're liable to overlook possibilities. I think we should have someone with us who expects the experiment to work out differently, someone who believes implicitly in His existence."
Blackburn thought about it as they rose in the Physics building elevator. "Well why not," he said, smiling in his peculiar catastrophic fashion. "You and I have an aggregate of 70 years experience in the laboratory, why not bring in a clergyman to check our techniques, be in keeping with the general tone of this whole thing. Hell, yes!"
Later that day Brokley L. Rowan listened with a frozen serious face as they declared their intentions to him. A young and conscientious man who spent a great deal of time telling budding undergraduate physicists that God was every bit as ubiquitous as Planck's constant, he listened without one word of complaint, not protesting that they'd put him in a theologically impossible position, a position in which the only two alternatives were to either refuse to look after His interests or else participate in a piece of sacrilegion the purpose of which was to demonstrate that the first alternative was not a valid one. And when he met Pendelton a week later in the Physics building, Pendelton told him: "You and I'll get along fine. I want it to be clearly understood that I have nothing against the church."