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"That's a cut," a director shouted. "Print it."

"About damn time," Reverend Lex Lumbar said angrily. He dropped the baby on the floor. It hit like a two-by-four and just lay there. He walked over the other two. "I need a drink."

Eldon Sluggard saw from the broken arm that the dropped child was a wood-reinforced dummy. The two on the floor were real.

"And get those pickaninnies back to their mothers," Reverend Lex Lumbar called back. "And be sure you pay them good. I don't want this coming back to haunt me," he said.

"Remember me?" Eldon Sluggard asked, following him down the hall.

"No. Did I fire you once?"

"Ah tried stealing from you when you were a tent preacher."

Reverend Lex Lumbar turned. "Yeah, I remember you now. You took to the business. I know. I watch my competition. Not that you are that anymore. This is the electronic age. Tent preachers are pikers now. So what do you want?"

"Ah came to buy you out."

"You and your grandmother between you couldn't manage it."

"But Ah heard it over the TV that you're at your rope's end."

"Take a look at this suit, boy. You think a man at the end of his string is gonna wear threads like these?"

"It's a scam, isn't it?"

"And you ain't?"

"But this, it's so ... so-"

"Lucrative. That the word you're reachin' for? Lucrative?"

"Take me on," Eldon Sluggard said quickly.

"What's that you say?"

"Take me on. Show me the ropes. You told me stuff before."

"You want a lot for your twenty dollars, don't you, boy?"

"Ah'm not a boy anymore."

"And you're not in my league, either. But I'll tell you what. You work for me five years for nothing and it's a deal."

"Five years?"

"Don't tell me you ain't built up a stake of your own. "

"Yeah, but...."

"Live off that."

"But-"

"Take it or leave it," said Reverend Lex Lumbar, starting off.

Eldon Sluggard looked around him. Everywhere he saw a building with a man's name on it, but it wasn't Lex Lumbar's name he was seeing. It was his own. He ran after the man.

"Deal," he panted, offering his hand.

"Five years." Reverend Lex Lumbar grinned, taking it.

But it didn't take five years. Eldon Sluggard wrested away control over the Lex Lumbar World Ministries after barely three. He did it only after he had learned everything possible about proselytizing over television. He could have forced Lumbar out within six months, which was as long as it took to learn his weaknesses, especially his predilection for call girls. That was how he did it in the end, by exposing the man as a charlatan and a sinner.

When all was said and done, he bought out Lex Lumbar for three cents on the dollar.

And thus was born the Eldon Sluggard World Ministries, which took in eighty million dollars a year for twenty fat wonderful years.

Until the great shakeout.

It started slow. First there was the phenomenon known in TV evangelical circles as the Great Grandma Crunch. Donations began slowing. At first it was dismissed as a blip in the donation curve. But the drop-off continued. The Dissemblers of God Evangelical Alliance was formed to look into the matter. It turned out that every religious network and program was affected by the same mysterious dwindling of donations.

The Alliance commissioned extensive polls. What they found sent a shockwave through the industry. The little old ladies-the backbone of TV evangelism-were dying off. It was a demographic thing. There just weren't enough older women with religious convictions left to feed the voracious appetites of the TV preachers. And it would be a long time before the baby boomers hit sixty.

With fewer of the faithful to feed the machinery, the TV evangelists began feeding on one another. Internecine Lvurfare broke out. Brother accused brother of irreligious behavior on nationwide TV. The Charismatics denounced the Southern Baptists. The Pentecostals ridiculed the fundamentalists. And everyone jumped on the Catholics. Who jumped right back. The Dissemblers of God dissolved in nightly installments broadcast on the six-o'clock news.

It was a spectacle, transformed into a circus when, seeing the walls close in, the Reverend Sandy Krinkles jumped into the presidential race. He frightened middle America, but no segment of society panicked more than the other TV evangelists, who considered the prospect of one of their own in the White House as the kiss of death. The media attention alone, with the resulting IRS investigations and background checks, would have put them all in jail before it was over.

Then the bodies started to fall.

The Reverend Moral Robbins, seeing himself on the verge of bankruptcy, announced to the world that God was going to send everyone outside of his immediate family to hell if they didn't contribute fifty dollars a week to his show until the year 2012.

Dr. Quinton Shiller, while proclaiming that the judgment day was at hand before an open-air congregation, was struck by what was later identified as a meteor and squashed flat.

Slim and Jaimie Barker, while fighting off a hostile takeover from the Reverend Coyne Farewell, were revealed to be, not man and wife, but homosexual lovers. And the true symbolism behind their 69 Club came out.

And Reverend Sandy Krinkles, forgetting that he was no longer addressing a bussed-in studio audience of his Hour of Giving, told a skeptical group of voters that if elected President, he would outlaw the satanic ritual called Halloween and replace prime-time television programs with biblical reenactments. His bid for the presidency collapsed overnight, as did the waning support for his cable TV network.

And on the sidelines, untouched by scandal but suffering guilt by association, was the Reverend Eldon Sluggard.

"How bad is it?" Reverend Sluggard had asked his media advisers only three months before.

"I think you'd better fold your political-action group, the Moralistic Mass. Folks don't cotton to us being in politics no more."

"Done," said Reverend Sluggard.

"And the very word 'evangelist' is a no-no from now on. We suggest you call yourself a religious television personality. "

"What's the difference?"

"If you let the media call you an evangelist, the average American will dismiss you as a political kook, a ripoff artist, a whoremonger, or gay, depending on which of your brethren is in the headlines that day."

"Don't call those bastards mah brethren. They've loused up a good thing for everybody."

"As a religious television personality you have a chance for survival."

"Give it to me in percentages. How much of a chance?"

"One in ten."

"Ah'm sunk," Reverend Eldon Sluggard groaned.

"Not if we launch a fast fund-raiser."

"Our last three fund-raisers only broke even."

"You got a better idea, El?"

Eldon Sluggard did not have a better idea. But he knew that he needed to raise over sixty thousand dollars a day just to keep his TV show, Get with God, on the air. And so he launched the first Eldon Sluggard Cross Crusade.

After two months, he called in his media advisers. "How we doin'?"

"At this rate," he was told, "we're out of business by July."

"Any options?"

"We've drawn up a list of old folks-mostly women-who have put you in their wills as an act of faith."

"Yeah?"

"If they should-if something should happen . . . Well, you know, El."

El knew. He just didn't want to say it aloud. No telling which of the other preachers had the place bugged.

"How much we talkin' here? Round numbers."

"Maybe twenty million. Enough to keep us afloat until things settle down."