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 pray 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 slipups. 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 for 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?"