"Good eye, man," Jimmy said. "Sure enough. That's one, too."

"Can you enlarge these regions, Jimmy?" Marc asked, towel hung over his neck, still breathing fast, but not from treadmill work any longer.

"No point in it. Real-time observation, folks. We can just plain look at them with the telescope." A few minutes later, they could see the first planet directly, appearing now as a fuzzy ball, grayish and lumpy. And then the second, the one Marc had spotted, much larger and with two substantial companion bodies.

"Moons," George said softly, putting his arm around Anne and pulling her close. "Moons!"

"Forget the first one. There's our planet," Marc said, with complete confidence. "A good-sized moon keeps a planet's precession steady enough for stable weather patterns to develop. If there's open water, moons make tides, and tides breed life." Anne looked at him, brows up, the question unasked. The naturalist smiled. "Because that's the way God likes it, Madame."

And then everyone was talking at once, congratulating Jimmy and George and Marc, discussing how long it would take to get to the planet with the moons, excitement swamping the funk they'd been in as the sterile weeks had dragged by. The buzz of conversation halted when D.W. looked around for Emilio and then called out sharply, "Sit down 'fore you fall down, son," and pushed past the little crowd around the display, making his way through the common room benches and tables. He wasn't quite quick enough to catch Emilio before he hit the floor.

There was, at first, a burst of laughter because Emilio looked so comical, going down like a puppet with the strings cut, but in slow motion because of the low gravity. Alan Pace thought impatiently that he'd only done it as a joke and was irritated as usual at the man's habitual frivolity.

Anne was right behind Yarbrough. "It's okay," she said matter-of-factly as the laughter died and turned to consternation. "He's just fainted." She could have lifted Emilio off the floor herself; at.25 G, he only weighed about thirty pounds. But intellectual equality aside, Anne Edwards retained a certain deference toward male sensibilities, so she looked up at D.W., intending to ask him to carry Emilio into his cabin for her. She was astonished to see that Yarbrough was trembling. Then it clicked and many things became clearer to her.

"Jimmy, would you lug him into his room for me, please?" she called out in a slightly bored voice, to minimize the drama. D.W. opened the door to Emilio's room and stepped out of the way as Jimmy went by, a giant Raggedy Andy carrying Emilio, who looked like a rag doll himself, limp in the big man's arms. Anne gave the situation about three seconds' consideration and then gave D.W. a firm and reassuring hug, brief but forthright, before squeezing past Jimmy into the little cabin. Jim left and she closed the door behind him.

Emilio was already coming out of it. Anne could hear D.W. just outside the door, in full East Texas cry, making everyone laugh and steering the conversation back to the planet. The voices receded, and Anne looked back to Emilio, who was now sitting up, feet over the side of the bed, eyes wide and blinking.

"What happened?" he asked.

"You passed out. Must have been the surprise about the planet. The autonomic nervous system will do that to you. You can feel your arms and legs get cold and then everything turns white."

He nodded. "That never happened to me before. What a strange sensation." He shook his head to clear it and his eyes widened again.

"Whoa. Just sit there a while. Takes a little time for your blood pressure to get settled." She was leaning against the bulkhead, arms crossed, watching him with a clinical eye but thinking about what she'd just seen. He laughed a little and then sat still, letting his equilibrium reassert itself.

"I am surprised," Anne said judiciously, "that you were surprised."

"About the planet?"

"Yes. I mean, this whole thing was your idea. I thought you had some kind of direct line to God about this." She wasn't as sarcastic as she might have been. In fact, she said this with a straight face, almost, with only a hint of insincerity to protect herself.

He was silent for a long time, starting twice to say something and then stopping again. Finally, he said, "Anne, may I tell you something? In confidence?" She slid down the wall, as controlled in her drop to the floor as Emilio had been boneless, and sat cross-legged, looking up at him. "I've never told anybody this, Anne, but—" He stopped again and laughed nervously. "This must be some kind of record, yes? A man who can be completely inarticulate in fourteen languages."

"You don't have to tell me if you don't want to."

"No. I need to talk to someone about this. Not someone. You. I need to talk to you about this. Anne, I'm just getting somewhere that everyone thinks I've been all along."

There was another silence, as he tried to decide how much to tell her, where to start. She waited, watching him, pleased to see the color come back and then touched to realize that he was blushing. Self-disclosure is almost like sex, she thought. It isn't easy to bare your soul.

"You have to understand, Anne, I'm not one of those guys who decided to be a priest when he was seven. I started out—well, you've seen La Perla, right? But you can't imagine what it's like to grow up there." There was another pause, as the memories crowded in. "Anyway, the Jesuits, D.W. especially, they showed me a different kind of life. I'm not saying that I became a priest because I was grateful. Okay, I admit, that was probably part of it. But I wanted to be like them. Like D.W."

"Not a shabby ambition," she said, eyes steady.

He took a deep breath. "No. It was a good ambition. And it wasn't all hero worship. I wanted this life and I have no regrets. But—Anne, do you remember when I said that it's difficult to tell from the way people behave whether or not they believe in God?" Emilio watched her carefully, looking for shock or disappointment, but she didn't seem horrified or even terribly surprised. "You'd make a good priest, you know."

"Except for that celibacy shit," she laughed. "And the popes keep saying I have too many X chromosomes. Don't change the subject."

"Right. Right." He hesitated again, but finally the words began to come for him. "I was like the physicists you talked about. I was like a physicist who believes in quarks intellectually, but doesn't feel quarks. I could make all the Thomist arguments about God and discuss Spinoza and say all the right things. But I didn't feel God. It was not a thing of the heart for me. I could defend the idea of God but it was all from hearsay evidence, a lawyer would call it. None of it had any emotional truth for me. Not like it does for guys like Marc." He hugged himself and leaned forward over his knees. "I mean, there was a place in me that wanted God to be in it, but it was empty. So, I thought, Well, not yet. Maybe someday. And to be honest, I sort of looked down on that kind of thing. You know how there are people who'll tell you that Jesus is a close personal friend of theirs, yes?" His voice was very low and he made a face that said, Who are they kidding? "I always thought, Sure, right, and you probably see Elvis at the laundromat."

"Hey! What's wrong with that!" Anne cried, offended. "I have personally seen Keith Richards at a grocery store in Cleveland Heights."

He laughed and moved back onto the bed so he could sit against the wall. "Okay. So, one day, I get this call at four in the morning. And then we're all sitting in Jimmy's office, listening to this incredible music and I say, I wonder if we could go there? And George and Jimmy and Sofia say, Sure, no problem, just do the math. And you thought we were crazy? Well, so did I, Anne. I mean, at first, it all was sort of a game! I was just toying with the idea of it's being God's will, really." Anne remembered the playfulness. It had seemed so strange at the time. "I kept expecting the game to stop, and everyone would have a good laugh at my expense, and I'd go back to trying to get Ortega to give me that house for the preschool and arguing with Richie Gonzales and the council about the sewers in the east end and all the rest of it, right? But it just kept going. The Father General and the asteroid and the plane and all these people working on this crazy idea. I kept waiting for someone to say, Sandoz, you idiot, what a lot of trouble for nothing! But everything kept happening."