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can put a finger on, but the impression was there. He told me, when I left, how glad he was I’d come, but he didn’t ask me back and I’ve never gone back. I doubt I ever will.”
    â€œYou say,” said Tennyson, “he does not join the crowd at the bar at Human House. I suppose mostly humans are there.”
    â€œYes, of course,” the captain said. “The aliens have places they can go, but Human House is human. No alien would think of going there.”
    â€œHow about the humans at Vatican? Do they go to Human House?”
    â€œWell, now that you mention it, I don’t think they do. No one sees too much of the Vatican people, either robot or human. They stay pretty much up on their hill. My impression is that they don’t mix with the people in the town. I’m not talking about a lot of humans in town. There aren’t too many of them, and they’re a close-knit group. Most of the humans in the town have jobs of one sort or another that are tied in with Project Pope. I don’t mean Vatican stuff, but jobs that have some association with the Vatican. When you come right down to it, End of Nothing is Vatican. It’s the only thing that’s there. There are some aliens in the town. They cater to the pilgrims. Most of the pilgrims, as you know, are alien. I’ve never carried a human pilgrim. As a matter of fact, scarcely ever a human of any kind at all. Last trip in, the one before this, I did carry a human, but he wasn’t any pilgrim. He was a doctor. It seems to me, of late, that I’m getting a run on doctors.”
    â€œI don’t understand,” said Tennyson.
    â€œThis one, this other doctor, was going in to join the Vatican staff. His name was Anderson, a young fellow, kind of cocky chap. He sort of grated on me, but I got along with him the best I could. It wasn’t as if I would be saddled with him for too long a time. He was going out to replace the Old Doc—name of Easton—who’d been at the Vatican for years, taking care of the human staff, of course. Robots don’t need doctors. Or maybe they have their own, I don’t know. Anyhow, Easton finally died and Vatican had no doctor. Vatican had been trying to get another one for years, knowing Easton was getting old and wouldn’t live forever. I suspect it’s hard to attract anyone to End of Nothing, which is not the sort of place a doctor or anyone else would really care to live. Some months after Old Doc died, here was this whippersnapper of a medic showing up at Gutshot. I hauled him out, of course, but I was glad when I could wash my hands of him. He’s the only Vatican staff member who ever traveled on my ship. There’s not much going back and forth.”
    â€œThis matter of only aliens being pilgrims bothers me,” said Jill. “Vatican must be oriented to the human idea of religion. It’s run by robots, and robots by and large are surrogate humans. Then the terminology—Vatican and Pope. That’s straight out of Earth. Would it be a sort of bastardized Christianity?”
    â€œThat might be the far-back basis for it,” the captain said. “I’ve never got it straight. It may basically be Christianity, but interwoven with no one knows how many alien beliefs and faiths, all of it twisted out of human recognition by the perversity of robotic thinking.”
    â€œBut even so,” Jill continued, “there should be some human pilgrims, some human interest—outside the project itself, I mean.”
    â€œMaybe not,” said Tennyson. “While a lot of the humans who left Old Earth all those millennia ago also left Christianity behind them—or shucked it and probably other Earth religions as well, after a few centuries in space—the average human, almost any human, still would know something about it and have a sort of instinctive feeling for the religion his ancestors had left behind. They could spot