A Galaxy Of Strangers

by Lloyd Biggle Jr

  “Better save your sermons for the congregation,” Frayne said.

  Frayne put Naida Ainsley to work on a public-relations campaign. She hired a dozen college students who thought they were taking a public-opinion survey, but their questions were artfully designed to publicize Smith’s church. “Have you heard about the new church in the Golden Glow Shopping Center, the Tabernacle of the Blessed? Its doctrine is that God will reward people in this life for the good they do in this life. What do you think of that? Do you know a really good person who’s down on his luck and deserves to be rewarded now?” And so on, through a long list of questions.

  While the students were publicizing the church, Naida screened the names of the unfortunates that they collected and had them discreetly investigated. At the proper time the most deserving of them could be enticed to church and rewarded.

  “Things seem to be going well,” Frayne told his staff. “As soon as the remodeling is finished, I think we can—as our new assistant minister likes to put it—get this show on the road.”

  Prockly overheard him. “And about time,” he said.

  Outside the converted theater, a special electric sign was in use for the first time. It flashed on and off, service tonight. Inside, the theater was three-quarters filled—a respectable attendance for the first night of a new religion and a tribute to Naida Ainsley’s publicity efforts.

  A massive, double-tiered altar had been constructed at the back of the theater’s stage, where the motion-picture screen had been. Harvey Borne held forth on the lower level, flanked by choir and organ. On the upper level, Alton Smith performed his ritual, proclaimed his blessings, and inserted an occasional pronouncement that the amplifier caught with marvelous effect. Under the lower altar, at stage level, was a row of curtained compartments where the blessings of a Just God could be kept until their dramatic unveiling.

  Harvey Borne’s resonant twang filled the theater with the stirring sermon Harnon had written for him. The Lord will not suffer the soul of the righteous to famish. And Love ye your enemies and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great. Smith, on his high rostrum, was a kindly, reverential figure, yet awesome in his striking robes, and he rose to underscore Borne’s most telling points with murmured contrapuntal commentary.

  Then came the climax: The Procession of the Blessed. A stairway unfolded at Smith’s feet, and he slowly descended to the stage, proclaiming as he went, “Blessed are the deserving among you, for they shall be rewarded. Blessed are those of you who pray to be deserving, and doubly blessed are those whose prayers are answered. For the Time of the Just God is fulfilled, and He will reward good and punish evil.”

  The congregation bewilderedly allowed itself to be coaxed into the aisles, where each member was handed a lighted candle.

  “For the light of the righteous rejoiceth,” Smith proclaimed, “but the candle of the wicked shall be put out.”

  The members of the congregation, grappling awkwardly with their symbols of righteousness, filled the outer aisles and began to slowly circle the sanctuary, passing below the stage and the massive, sculptured cornucopia at its center that represented an unsubtle embodiment of the Just God’s beneficence. Occasionally one of the righteous—a member of the Prockly and Brannot staff planted in the audience to help establish the new church’s ritual—mounted to the stage and crossed it, and at the center knelt to receive Smith’s blessing.

  The balcony was closed to the public for this service, and Frayne and Prockly sat there with two of the Lottery Governors and a sprinkling of Lottery officials and Prockly and Brannot employees. With earphones they were able to monitor the instructions Harnon radioed to Smith. “The small boy with the crutch. He’s coming up the outer aisle on your right. That’s Timothy Allen. Start your prayer now.”

  Smith intoned, “O Just God, have you directed here tonight any whose goodness has gone unrewarded? I pray that you have, and that you will guide me to them to bestow on them the blessings that await them here, in the Tabernacle of the Blessed. Where are the unjustly persecuted? Where are the virtuous who have been slandered? Where are the honest who have been victimized? Where are those who labored to help others only to be abandoned in their own time of need? Guide my hand, O God of Justice, so that I can dispense a mite of this Earth’s plenty to the unrewarded righteous.”

  He raised both hands. “Stop!”

  The procession came to an uneasy halt. Smith made his way back along the line of curious but bewildered righteous, seemed to hesitate, to peer here and there, and then, under the Just God’s guidance, he pounced. He took the candle from a small boy with a crutch and held it aloft.

  ‘Timothy Allen,” Smith proclaimed. “The hour of your reward is at hand. On your lame leg have you ran errands for those weaker than yourself, you have helped others whenever you could, you have suffered without complaint, you have cheerfully accepted cruel taunts of those more fortunate, you have brightened one small corner of this dark world with your own pure sunshine. The Lord maketh poor, and maketh rich; he bringeth low, and lifteth up; to the righteous good shall be repaid; According to their deeds, accordingly He will repay; He shall reward every man according to his works. And to you, Timothy Allen, the most deserving of the righteous, here is the beginning of your good fortune.”

  Still carrying the candle aloft, Smith helped the crippled child up to the stage and led him to the row of curtained compartments. He paused dramatically, and then he gestured one of the curtains aside. An assistant was at his elbow to wheel out a gleaming autocycle with sidecar. In the future, Timothy Allen would perform his good deeds in style.

  The congregation’s first stunned reaction was silence. Then—many of those present were poor people from the neighborhood who knew Timothy—it burst into thunderous applause. Smith placed Timothy’s candle on a ledge below the altar while two assistants lowered the autocycle from the stage. Wet-faced, tears flowing freely, Timothy started to limp away supported by the cycle, but Harvey Borne, bluff, grinning, was there with a microphone to congratulate him.

  “How did he know me?” Timothy’s high-pitched voice blurted, and he pointed at Smith, who smiled down on them benignly from the stage.

  “A Just God knows you,” Borne said, patting him on the head.

  A moment later Smith, prompted by Harnon’s radio signals, began another blessing.

  As the row of candles left by the rewarded righteous lengthened, the congregation became increasingly excited. Some of the gifts were trivial: An old man who scraped together what he could from his pension money to feed birds during cold weather received a fifty-gallon can of birdseed and a pair of binoculars so he could observe his feathered friends more closely, and he left the stage shedding tears of happiness. An elderly couple received hearing aids; another received a television set. A Mrs. Schobetz, who had kept her family of five children together after her husband deserted her and who always had time for a neighbor in need, received a freezer full of food. For a bright teen-aged girl whose hands were paralyzed, there was a voicewriter. A housewife with a large family and a solvent allergy received a portable dishwasher.

  The end came on a climax that matched the beginning: Smith, guided by Harnon’s radio signals, pounced on a man in a worn pink suit—a man with one arm missing. “Jefferson Calder,” Smith murmured. But this time the magic curtain opened on an apparently empty compartment—empty except for a certificate entitling Calder to be fitted with an artificial limb. He left the stage to an avalanche of applause and embraced with his one arm a tearful wife and children. Like Timothy Allen, most of these people knew him: a good man who’d had a tough break but never whined; a man who helped others when he could.

  The services concluded triumphantly with the choir rendering a hymn of thanksgiving to the Just God for creating this bountiful Earth.

  “Pray,” Borne’s resonant voice proclaimed, “but ask not for yourself. Ask that the righteous be blessed, whoever and wherever they are, and if you pr
ay for yourself, ask only that God give you the strength to be righteous.”

  Finally Smith pronounced the benediction and invited everyone to join them on the following night.

  The Governors were delighted. Prockly, beaming his satisfaction, came over to congratulate Frayne, but Frayne ignored him. He had grabbed a microphone, and he snarled into it, “What’s going on? Services are supposed to be two nights a week—Sunday and Wednesday. Period. That’s all the budget allows.”

  “Smith wants daily services,” Harnon’s voice answered.

  “You should have stopped him.”

  “How?” Harnon asked. “It’s his church. He can hold services whenever he likes.”

  “He’s not getting a penny more than what’s allocated, and that covers two services a week.”

  “We figure that we can spread the money out, now that we’re started. Tomorrow’s giveaways will be a lot less expensive.”

  Frayne shrugged. “If that’s what Smith wants—what’d the offering amount to?”

  “About a thousand bucks.”

  Frayne whistled. “No wonder he wants daily services!”

  Harnon resigned from Prockly and Brannot the next morning. He thought the Tabernacle of the Blessed had a future, and he chose to remain with Smith. Frayne accepted the news indifferently. His part in the launching of Smith’s religion was finished. Prockly and Brannot’s part was finished except for twelve more weekly checks to cover the estimated overhead. Frayne was assigned to the next lottery drawing, and he found himself looking forward to it. As far as he was concerned, the next PR Board winner could want to be anything at all, as long as it wasn’t God.

  Edmund Cahill said indignantly, “You mean—Smith refuses to co-operate?”

  “He rather enjoys being head of a religion,” Franklin said. “You mean—after all of our work and expense—” Franklin chuckled. “We have a complete record of everything that’s happened, which is all the evidence we need. There’s nothing more he can tell us, and if he won’t co-operate, that just might make the exposure more effective.”

  Walner Frayne drew the easiest PR Board assignment of his career: A man who had everything but public recognition. Frayne laid out a campaign that would bring him, one at a time, all of those voluntary jobs fraught with recognition and civic achievement that no one else wanted. It took less than a week to get his subject appointed chairman of the local Community Fund Drive. In a month his campaign was rolling, his subject had received reams of local publicity, and they were ready to move on the state and regional levels.

  Then Prockly’s formidable visaphone presence summoned Frayne. “Get back here immediately,” Prockly said. “We’ve got a problem. Blake will take over for you.”

  A chilling premonition smote Frayne. “Smith?”

  Prockly nodded. “Smith. You’ve never seen a problem like this problem is a problem. Meeting this afternoon.”

  There were four men in the room, and all of them were strangers to Frayne. Prockly introduced them in turn: a plump, florid-looking person with the unlikely name of Benjamin Franklin; Edmund Cahill, a slender, elderly man with a matinee profile; Charles Jaffner, a tall, husky individual and the only one of the group who offered to shake hands; and an anonymous-looking character named John Ferguson.

  “This is Walner Frayne,” Prockly said. He added sadistically, “He’s the one that did it.” Once again Prockly had the air of looking for a scapegoat. He turned to Ferguson. “Tell him about it.”

  Ferguson took an envelope from an inside pocket, opened it, and took out some currency: twenty-and fifty-dollar bills. “Forty-eight thousand, seven hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of this stuff has turned up,” he said. “We have no idea how much of it is in circulation. We’ve traced most of the forty-eight grand to this Tabernacle of the Blessed. Some was given away in cash, but most of it was used to buy the merchandise they give away.” “Counterfeit?” Frayne exclaimed.

  Ferguson handed the bills to him, and Frayne examined them and handed them back, shaking his head. “They look genuine to me.”

  “They are genuine,” Ferguson said. “The paper is genuine, the ink is genuine, the engraving is genuine, and no expert in the world could find a thing wrong with these bills if it wasn’t for one thing.”

  “What?” Frayne asked feebly.

  “The serial numbers. The only thing wrong with these bills is that they haven’t been printed yet.”

  Frayne goggled at him. Prockly took Frayne’s arm and led him over to the man named Benjamin Franklin. “Tell him about it,” Prockly said.

  “Using the Lottery to establish a phony religion was our idea,” Franklin said. “We put Smith up to it—rigged the Lottery so he’d be the PR Board winner. We thought the Lottery was ruining our economy and we could destroy it by making it look ridiculous. We’re looking ridiculous. Smith’s church is ten times the danger to the economy that the Lottery is. Know how much Smith gave away last week in money and merchandise?”

  Frayne goggled again.

  “Just slightly under a million dollars,” Franklin said. “He’s holding services in shifts, early morning until late at night. He’s taken over the surrounding buildings in that old shopping center and he’s going to use them as extensions to his church. We’ve exerted every possible influence and pressure to keep him out of the newscasts, but word is spreading anyway. I understand he’s had people come from as far away as Maine and Indiana to attend his services. Relatives wrote to them about him. If he continues to expand at his present rate, by the end of the year he’ll be holding services in a hundred-thousand-seat stadium and his giveaways will top the national budget. We’ve got to stop him.”

  “But where does he get the money?” Frayne demanded.

  “That’s what the Secret Service would like to know,” Prockly said. “Smith says a Just God will provide. Harnon is the treasurer, and he says he doesn’t know. Smith tells him what’s needed in presents for the next day, and Harnon says they don’t have enough money, and Smith tells him to use the offering. And the offering always has enough. People toss it into that big cornucopia while they’re walking around with candles, and Harnon wants us to think that they tossed in almost a million dollars last week. That moth-eaten crowd wouldn’t have a million spare dollars in a hundred thousand years and wouldn’t give it away if it did.”

  “I don’t know about Just Gods,” Ferguson said grimly, from the other side of the room, “but if one ever shows up, I’m betting he won’t come as a counterfeiter.”

  “Harnon says he thought of that,” Prockly said. “He was worried because there were so many new bills in the offering, but the bank assured him that they were genuine. Smith says a Just God’s money has to be genuine.”

  “Except for serial numbers,” Ferguson muttered.

  The door opened, and Ron Harnon entered. “Smith and Borne are on their way,” he said. “I hurried ahead of them because there’s something I want you to know.”

  “Good,” Prockly said. “There are several things we’d like to know. I’ve been telling Frayne how a Just God rewards his faithful with counterfeit money.”

  “Listen.” Harnon’s face was pale, his manner intensely serious. “We had a system for the giveaways. We found out about deserving people and got them to church. They’d be pointed out to me, and I’d keep an eye on them, and when one approached the altar during the procession I’d tip Smith off and describe the person, and Smith would go into his spiel, and the Just God would guide him to the righteous. That went on for a couple of weeks. No slip-ups. Then one evening Smith walked right past the woman we’d picked for a washing machine and gave it to someone else. I thought we’d blown the show until it turned out that the woman he picked was more deserving. It went on that way—most of the time he passed up the people we’d investigated and made his own choices, and his choices always were better. When we asked him, he’d say a Just God was guiding him to the righteous. So we stopped the investigations. Now Smith tells us what to buy fo
r the next day—he knows who’s going to be there and what he wants to give them. And the money for what he wants us to buy is always in the offering. If a Just God isn’t responsible, who is?”

  Franklin muttered, “It’s a slicker operation than we thought. Someone’s tipping him off.”

  “It couldn’t be done without my knowing about it,” Harnon said fervently. Then he smiled. “Unless, of course, a Just God is telling him what to do.”

  Prockly roared, “Do you mean to tell me you believe—”

  Alton Smith entered, followed by Harvey Borne.

  “Peace, brothers,” Borne said, smiling benignly.

  Frayne was staring at Alton Smith. He was not the same little man whom Prockly and Brannot had costumed, bewigged, and chased to dentist and elocutionist. He had grown in confidence and inner stature. He had a sense of purpose and the aura of leadership. When he smiled, he was no longer the nonentity trying to be agreeable. He had the smile of a man confident that others would agree with him.

  As he positioned himself in the center of the room with a swirl of robes, Prockly demanded, “Where are you getting the money?” Smith smiled and did not answer.

  Borne planted himself beside Smith, towering over him protectively. “Look here, you,” he said to Prockly. “Man has been worshiping the One God of Judaism and Christianity for thousands of years, and the more he proclaims his beliefs, the less faith he has in them. Without the essential inner faith, he believes and expects nothing, and God gives him nothing. But the Bible proclaims the message, over and over, for any man who has the faith to believe: The righteous shall inherit the earth. The desire of the righteous shall be granted. To the righteous, good shall be repaid. He that putteth his trust in the Lord shall be made fat. Whatsoever good things any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord.”