At the conclusion of the statement a profound silence spread through the General Assembly, and from there to the world beyond. In cities and towns all over the earth the streets were deserted, traffic abandoned as people waited quietly by their television sets. The President of the United Nations then rose and read out a declaration signed by three hundred scientists and divines. After two years of the most rigorous tests the existence of a supreme deity had been proved beyond a shadow of doubt. Mankind’s age-old faith in a divine principle had at last been scientifically confirmed, and a new epoch in human history would unfold before them.
The next day the newspapers of the world bore a hundred variants of the same headline: GOD EXISTS Supreme Being Pervades Universe During the following weeks the events of ordinary life were forgotten. All over the world services of thanksgiving were held, religious processions filled countless streets. Vast gatherings of penitents thronged the sacred cities and shrines of the world. Moscow, New York, Tokyo and London resembled medieval towns on an apocalyptic saint’s day. Heads raised to the skies, millions knelt in the streets, or walked in slow cavalcades, crosses and mandalas held before them. The cathedrals of St Peter’s, Notre Dame and St Patrick’s were forced to hold continuous services, so great were the crowds that flocked through their doors. Sectarian feuds were forgotten. Priests of the United Faith Assembly exchanged vestments and officiated at each other’s services. Buddhists were baptized, Christians turned prayer-wheels and Jews knelt before the statues of Krishna and Zoroaster.
More practical benefits were to follow. Everywhere doctors reported a marked drop in the numbers of their patients. Neuroses and other mental ills disappeared overnight, as the discovery of the deity’s existence worked its instant therapy. All over the world police forces were disbanded. Members of the armed services were sent on indefinite leave pending demobilization, long-closed frontiers were unsealed. The Berlin Wall was dismantled. Everywhere people behaved as if some immense victory had been won against an invincible enemy. Here and there, between particularly aggressive rivals, such as the United States and Cuba, Egypt and Israel, long-standing pacts of friendship were signed. Military aircraft and naval fleets were sent to the scrapyards, stockpiles of weapons were destroyed. (However, a few sporting rifles were retained when the spirit of universal brotherhood produced its first casualty — a Swedish engineer in Bengal who attempted to embrace a tiger. Warnings were issued that an awareness of God’s existence had yet to extend to the lower members of the animal kingdom, where for the time being the struggle for life remained as pitiless as ever.)
To begin with, such isolated episodes were barely noticed in the general euphoria. Thousands of spectators sat around the great telescopes at Jodrell Bank and Arecibo, not to mention a number of commercial TV aerials and any other structures that vaguely resembled radio antennae, waiting patiently for a direct message from the Almighty. Gradually people drifted back to work — or, more exactly, those returned who considered their work morally gainful. Manufacturing industry was able to keep going, but the agencies responsible for selling its products to the public found themselves in a dilemma. The elements of guile and exaggeration at the basis of all merchandizing, whether on the level of nationwide advertising campaigns or door-to-door salesmanship, were no longer tolerable under the new dispensation, but no alternative machinery of distribution was available.
The inevitable slackening of commerce and industry seemed unimportant during these first weeks. The majority of people in Europe and the United States were still celebrating a new estate of man, the beginnings of the first true millennium. The whole basis of private life had changed, and with it attitudes towards sex, morality and all human relationships. Newspapers and television had been transformed — the previous diet of crime reports and political gossip, westerns and soap-operas had given way to serious articles and programmes elaborating the background to the discovery of the deity.
