Saul

Saul is a practical organizer in the community around Mike’s Church, helping its members carry their work beyond Mike’s death. When the question of how to continue arises, he looks beyond resolve to the capital, equipment, and sustained support the undertaking will require.

Planning for the Church’s Continuation

Saul agrees that new temples should be founded, but stresses that they cannot simply be improvised in a vacant shop or treated as a street-corner revival. The project needs staging and equipment, and therefore money. He also includes the cost of supporting Stinky Mahmoud and Maryam Mahmoud for a year or two on Mars, which he regards as essential rather than incidental to the plan.

His response gives institutional form to the group’s decision to wait for fullness and proceed. Saul is not arguing against continuation; he is specifying what will make it sustainable. The distinction is important: commitment alone cannot supply the material means of establishing temples or maintaining the community’s practical obligations.

Business Responsibility and the Inheritance

When Jubal Harshaw explains that Mike’s will leaves each member at least a million dollars, with no restrictions on how the inheritance is spent, Saul immediately takes up the question of administration. Jubal says Joseph Douglas can continue managing the capital for those who wish to leave it invested, but expects that Ben Caxton will eventually take over.

Caxton says the business can be put in his name and that he will hire a professional businessman, Saul. Saul’s proposed role connects the community’s spiritual plans to financial expertise: the group can found temples and provide for members without treating business management as a task it must perform unaided. The scene closes with the discovery that the group already owns the hotel, a practical detail that gives their new wealth an immediate, concrete setting.