He didn't have to wait long to find out. The man, apparently at the climax of a sermon, finished a litany of poison against abortion, the United Nations, evolution, the IRS, socialism, Satan ... and Mitchel Harris. As his voice modulated downward, deep chords of soothing organ music came up in the background and then a woman carefully intoned, "You're listening to the Reverend Doctor Ernest Farnsworth on the Righteous Tide Network. Stay tuned, and the Reverend will be right back with the last words on today's topic. Meanwhile, you can have a complete set of Doctor Farnsworth's tapes for only ..."

Mitch leaned over and fumbled in his briefcase with his right hand, nearly driving off the road again. Finally his fingers touched what he was searching for. Steering with his knee against the wheel, he pulled out the envelope, ripped out the letter, shook it open with one hand, and scanned down the crabbed writing to the initials at the end.

"EF"

Ernest Farnsworth!

The Reverend Doctor Ernest Julian Farnsworth the Third stood alone in a pool of light on the stage of the darkened santuary of the Church of the Faithful. Almost alone. A scattering of the Faithful dotted the seats of the large auditorium waiting for him to speak.

He stood silently behind the podium, a trim man dressed in a dark gray suit and dark maroon tie. A neat pony-tail, about a foot long, draped itself over the collar of his white shirt and ran down the back of his suit. His fingers stroked a trim but curly beard that ran from ear to ear across his jaw and around his mouth. The beard was the same color and texture as his hair -- gray streaked brown. The cheeks of his thin face were prominent, slightly rouge, and covered with downy gray hair. Dark brown eyes gazed expressionlessly over the small audience.

A knot of four elderly women sat together three rows from the front, and maybe a dozen older couples were scattered throughout the rest of the auditorium. A teenaged girl sat by herself in the center, smiling up at him, surrounded by empty seats.

He gazed quietly back, and a grim smile crossed his face. The Reverend didn't expect a large crowd for the Thursday afternoon broadcast service -- after all, people had to work. But it used to be larger than this.

A page from the Los Angeles Times lay neatly folded on his podium. It was the Op-Ed page, and the folds framed an article titled "The New West" written by Mitchell Harris.

Ernest heard a woman's voice say OK in his earpiece, a red light winked on in the dark recess of the podium, and he began speaking again.

"The New West?" he enunciated scornfully into the microphone. "Why do we have this fascination with the new? Whatever happened to the Old West and the Old Ways? Aren't they good enough anymore? Whatever happened to the faith of our parents? Do young people even listen to their elders anymore? Whatever happened to love of Jesus? Isn't he good enough any more? Whatever happened to Christian rapture, whatever happened to those wonderful religious experiences that used to excite our young people?"

Forty years earlier, a teenaged Ernest Farnsworth the Third had stood in front of his Sunday School class. Smiling grimly, he shook a tightly clinched fist at his audience. "You have to be willing to DIE for what you believe in. CHRIST was willing. He gave his LIFE for YOU. Give YOUR life for HIM."

A finger grew dramatically out of his fist, pointing into the air, and then it swept across the room, a machine gun spraying bullets of persuasion and intimidation into the tender attentions of teenaged boys and girls while his other fist thumped the podium rhymically. "JESUS has a MISSION for YOU."

In the back of the room, watching from a vantage point behind the rows of folding chairs, the Reverend Abraham Tims rocked gently backwards and forwards on his feet, heel to toe, toe to heel, beaming floridly at the young man he considered his protege'.

The pointing finger stopped. It rested momentarily on Jessica Tims in the third row, the Reverend Tim's daughter -- prettiest girl in the Sunday School class and probably in the whole congregation of the Church of the Righteous Savior.

Ernest's voice dropped. "You don't need to look hard for Jesus' plan." He spoke quietly, directly to Jessica, entering deeply into her eyes for the infinity of a second before the moving finger moved on.

"All you need to do ..." Ernest spread his hands towards rapt faces in supplication, pleading now, begging for understanding and empathy. "... All you need to do ... is listen silently ..." His voice was so quiet that they leaned forward, "... Listen silently ... and Jesus' plan ... will come to you."

No wonder the Reverend Tims beamed. Ernest had copied this riff directly from one of his own sermons, complete with clinched fist, pointing finger, and supreme self-righteousness. All of it. The Reverend had reason to be pleased: he saw himself.

Ernest had first noticed Jessica a few months earlier. She was willowy, beautiful, ripe, and he wanted her. The problem with his classmate, George Shay, had started the same time. George wanted her too. George was handsome, outgoing, and carefree. Ernest was intense, brooding, and manipulative.

The day he first noticed him flirting with her at school, Earnest began to see the potential for evil in George Shay. It didn't help that she flirted back. Ernest began to pray. Something would happen. Something bad.

After the Sunday School class, Reverend Tims came and smiled at Ernest, enclosed both his hands between his own, and shook his head side-to-side in wonder. "You have a calling, boy. The Lord has special things in store for Ernest Farnsworth," Jessica came to stand quietly beside her father, leaning against him, smiling up at Ernest.

The room had emptied out. "I have to prepare my sermon," Tims said. "Happy are those who do what the Lord commands." He shook Ernest's hands vigorously and left abruptly. Jessica stayed behind.

Pretty Jessica. Innocent Jessica, with wide doe eyes smiling up into his own. Ernest had planned well to arrive at this moment.

George and his parents did not go to church. Apparently they were not religious. Ernest subtly and discreetly worried this nugget of information out of a mutual friend. It was the first and maybe only flaw Ernest found when he began to descretely and systematically learn everything he could about his rival, but it was enough. He magnified the nugget, held it up to the light, turned it this way and that until he began to see George as atheistic. To a teenaged Ernest Farnsworth, the world was simple. It consisted of the God-fearing and the Godless, good and evil, friends and enemies.

George Shay had crossed a line. He didn't even know it. Made no difference. Crossing Ernest Farnsworth was the same as crossing the Lord. You don't do it. It may take a while, but eventually the Lord, working in wonderful and mysterious ways, smites the enemy.

"Daddy's right, you know," Jessica said fervently. "You have a talent."

"I have no talent," Ernest smiled back at her. "The Lord loaned me his. He loans all his talents. We please him by using them for his glory."

The room was empty. Jessica shook her head and looked up shyly at him. "I don't have any talent, Ernest. The Lord made me plain."

He shook his head in wonderment, took her hands in his own, just as her father had done to him, and looked profoundly into her eyes. Her perfume ravished his nostrils. "That's not so, Jessica. He gave you the talent of beauty and purity." He felt her tremble slightly. He trembled himself, but inside.

"But that's not a talent. That's not something I can use for the Lord," she said.

They left the Sunday School classroom and walked side-by-side through the hallway among the worshippers of the Church of the Righteous Savior. Their's was one of many conversations droning interminably like the buzz of insects on a summer night, until the worshippers, milling in the halls, began drifting slowly, inexorably through wide double doors into the Inner Santuary. The Service was about to begin.

Ernest stopped Jessica just outside the Santuary doors as the congregation moved past them and turned her toward him.

"You do have a talent," he said confidently. "The Lord uses us in many ways, Jessica. You have a talent to please."

She smiled up at him warmly. "Thank you, Ernest. I hope I please him." She blushed. "And you, too."

Now! He felt a tiny shiver run down his spine as he took her elbow and guided her beyond the double doors, down the hallway a little farther, until they stood outside the entrance of the children's classrooms. The last of the tide of worshippers disappeared into the sanctuary, and they were momentarily alone in the hallway. Ernest hesitated and looked around. No one watching. He steered Jessica into the classroom. He heard the organ playing next door, low bass notes coming through the walls.

"You do please me, Jessica." Her odor had penetrated his cranium and conquered an entire frontal lobe. "And Jesus, too. And he'd be pleased for us to get to know each other better, because I think he has plans for us, Jessica. We should be like lambs and submit to his will completely, don't you think?" Happy are those who do as the Lord commands.

Ernest had begun a campaign to turn George's acquaintances and friends against him. He found Buddy Sikes especially malleable. Buddy was a mill family kid who lived in the ragged part of town in one of a sprawl of decaying factory houses. If Buddy was underfunded in reasoning ability and independent action, he more than compensated with brawn and hot-headed temper. Even better, he was infatuated with a girl, Nancy Harper, who sat in front of him in English class. He went into stuttering mode every time she was nearby, and had barely spoken ten words to her since the beginning of the semester, much less asked her out for a date. Yet, Ernest saw that in Buddy's mind, he owned her, she was his girl. Buddy Sikes was smitten with Nancy Harper and putty in Ernest Farnsworth's hands.

It was easy, really easy. Ernest pointed out, very subtly and smoothly, that Nancy sat right across the aisle from George in History, and "Boy, doesn't George sure like girls a lot!" And it was true. George was always talking to the girls. All of them.

That was all it took to get Buddy launched. With a few words here and there to nudge him in the right direction, like midcourse corrections to a guided missile, Buddy was on a collision course with an unsuspecting George Shay. Buddy got more and more angry, more and more jealous. Everything Nancy Harper did, no matter how innocent, was interpreted as proof that she was under George's Godless control, that he was leading her toward iniquity, preparing to wrap her into a web of degradation and suck out her pure virgin blood.

Yet Ernest counciled restraint. Not yet, not yet.

Jessica seemed oblivious to her surroundings. She nodded her head yes and her large brown eyes belonged to him, following his every word and gesture. As he talked, he steered them through the large classroom, then through a doorway leading down a long hall from which smaller classrooms branched. He led her into the last of these at the end of the hallway. It adjoined the choir loft and the organ, which were behind the pulpit, and the singers voices came through the wall nearly unimpeded.

It was a tiny, windowless room. There was a wooden bench along one wall, and four child-sized folding chairs along each of the walls beside it. Ernest sat Jessica down on the bench and pulled one of the chairs over so that he sat directly in front of her, holding both her hands between his as he talked.

"You don't have a boyfriend, do you?"

"No."

He well knew that she didn't. George Shay had been the closest threat. "The Lord wants us to spend some time together, Jessica."

She was breathless. "Do you think so?"

"Oh, yes, I've felt him telling me, Jessica, and if you listen for his voice, deep down, you'll realize he's telling you the same thing."

"Really?" He saw her pupils dilate, and her chest heaved in a deep breath.

"He made us to depend on each other, Jessica, gave us needs that can only be satisfied by others. I have needs, Jessica, that can only be satisfied by you." He stroked her cheek gently with the back of his fingers.

"Oh, Ernest." She pressed his hand against her cheek.

They heard the Reverend Tims's voice very clearly through the wall, not more than fifteen feet away. He announced a hymn. Ernest slipped off his chair and knelt at Jessica's knees, placing his hand on one of them. He leaned forward to speak quietly to her, and in so doing, she had to lean forward to hear him, and he saw down into her Sunday gown, her breasts bulging at the top of her brassiere. "He wants us to know each other very well," he whispered.

"Oh, yes, Ernest, I want to know you, too."

It's almost like directing a choir, Ernest thought, as he orchestrated the various random instruments for George Shay's undoing into a single coherent flow which converged on a lunchtime schoolyard stage. The Lord helps them that help themselves. First, he located the Godless Enemy hanging out with his usual clique of friends near the gym. Then he sent out Nancy, telling her, "George was looking for you. He had something he wanted to give you." Nancy seemed mystified but pleased. She walked off briskly, smiling back at Ernest.

Next he organized a group of kibitzers, one at a time, that he'd made hostile to George. "I hear there's trouble out by the gym. There might be a fight starting between George and Buddy." Concern radiated from his face.

After that, he put the final mid-course impulse into Buddy Sykes. "You know, Buddy," he said, putting a friendly hand on the big teenager's shoulder, "I probably shouldn't tell you this, but I know you like Nancy, and ..."

Buddy's sensors came up to full sensitivity.

"... well ... you, know, I just saw George and Nancy out by the gym and they ..."

"Yeah? Whut?"

"They were, well ... they were ... they ..."

He didn't even have to say what it was they were doing -- in Buddy's fertile brain, they were copulating on the ground, writhing and undulating obscenely, urged on by a laughing, jeering crowd. He was off at a run.

Now, quickly, the final touch, the coup de grace. "Mary, would you tell Jessica Tims that George wants to see her out by the gym. It's really important! Will you? Now?"

A hymn started, and as the organ played and the congregation sang, the music poured into the tiny room and made it almost impossible for them to talk. They looked into each other's eyes, and their faces got closer and closer until finally their lips brushed together, just the merest touch, before he pulled away. He saw her lower lip quiver.

"The Lord wants us together."

"What?" The music was loud.

He put his hand on her neck and pulled her ear down to his mouth. "Happy are those who do as the Lord commands." His lips touched her ear lobe.

She shuddered. She put her hand on his cheek and her mouth to his ear. "Oh, Ernest."

Her fragrance and an underlying musky odor dominated his senses, now. He put his nose to her hair, blew into her ear and, hand still on her knee, pushed her legs apart a little.

She moaned. "Yes. Yes! Oh, Ernest, I need to know you. Please."

The hymn ended and they whispered again. He got onto the bench beside her, and they sat with their legs touching along the length of their thighs. She leaned her head onto his shoulder, and Ernest put his arm around her waist as her father led a chant to affirm the faith of the Faithful.

The two of them had gone off by themselves by the corner of the gym. They smiled at each other; engaged in sinful, licentious conversation; conspired together against him, Buddy saw. He walked briskly up behind George, took his shoulders, and spun him around.

As the organ began to play for the collection, Ernest stroked her hair slowly and nuzzled her cheek. As the congregation chanted the Lord's prayer in unison, he pulled her head back and stroked her exposed neck slowly with his hand as he kissed her and parted her lips gently with his tongue. As another hymn began, he felt her tongue and sweet, hot breath in his own mouth and sensed her hips beginning to gyrate slowly and rhythmically on the bench beside him.

The sermon began. As Jessica's father's melifluous voice

droned through the walls of the room, Ernest reached down below the hem of Jessica's dress and began to slide it slowly up along her calf. His hand shook.

"A full Christian experience leads to rapture in life," said the Reverend, as Ernest's right hand found the Reverend Daughter's breasts and pressed them gently, index finger running over the points of her nipples through the cloth, making her gasp.

"You may not expect the rapture when it comes ..." the Reverend said, as Ernest's left hand passed Jessica's knee and continued along the inside of her thigh, "... but when it does, you will know it." As Ernest's hand reached the top of her leg to the edge of her panties and his finger touched her sex through the material, her body jerked in a sudden spasm, and she exhaled loudly, "Oh!"

There was a satisfying crunch as Buddy's fist connected with George's left cheekbone and nose. George sat down heavily.

George was big, but so was Buddy. George was on the football team and in Honors English. Buddy was on the weight lifting team and in Remedial Reading. George might have had a chance if it was a fair fight, but there had been nothing fair in Buddy Sykes's life up to now, and Buddy felt no need to offer fairness to anyone else. George looked up at him in stunned surprise, mouth open in an O, blood beginning to trickle from his nose. Buddy kicked him in the face.

Ernest watched the crowd gather quickly, egging Buddy on. He saw Jessica walk up gingerly behind a thickening circle of jeering, hooting bodies. She stood on her toes and leaned side-to-side to see into the arena, her face radiating concern. Happy are those who do what the Lord commands.

It began to go out of control. George -- on his back on the ground -- struggled ineffectually while Buddy, whose rage was still building, sat astride him, pounding fists into his face. Most of the top front teeth were gone, and George's face was already a pulpy red mass.

Ernest began to worry. What if he kills him? Even the crowd had fallen silent, wondering how far Buddy was going to take this, how far out of control he really was. When Jessica screamed, "Stop him! For God's sake, somebody stop him," Ernest realized it was time to act.

He dove at Buddy and knocked him off George. Buddy's red fist connected with his forehead and snapped his head back, but didn't do any real damage. One of the kibitzers grabbed Buddy, then another and another, and just as quickly as the fight had begun, it was over.

George propped himself on an elbow, wheezing to catch his breath, and looked up into the faces of the now silent crowd that surrounded him. They stared back. His pants were wet, soaked with his own urine, his hair was matted with blood-wet sand, and several of his teeth were scattered in the dirt behind him. His face was unrecognizable.

Ernest was mopping the blood from Buddy's knuckle prints off his forehead with a handkerchief when he noticed Jessica watching him with interest. She smiled at him.

The Reverend Tims smiled over his flock as the last

verses of the final hymn washed through the santuary.

.....

The last reverberating note of the organ thundered to an abrupt close. As the echos of the hymm soaked into the minds and bodies of the five hundred worshippers standing at their pews in the Church of the Righteous Savior, the deep base of the organ was supplanted by a shrill female scream.

"OooooohhhhhhHHHHHH YESSSS! OOHHHHHH YES, YES, YES, YES, YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!"

Startled, the Reverend Tims wrinkled his nose as if at a bad smell. Suddenly his face turned pale, maybe because he recognized the voice. The female scream was harmonized by a male counterpoint:

"OOOHHHHHHH GOD, OHHH JESUS, OHHHHHHHHHHHH GOD!"

Spasms shook his body as she pulled him against her. Jessica Tims, voluptously naked, lay flat on her back along the length of the narrow bench, knees up, full hips overflowing the edges, thighs spead obscenely, calves pressing against Ernest's naked back as he straddled her in a crouch, feet planted on the floor on both sides of the bench. Their clothes were strewn across the room. They moved desperately, rhythmically together, exhaling little grunts in time to the motion. Her hands stroked his waist; his hands kneaded her breasts, erect nipples protruding between his fingers. He felt as if an enormous steel bar grew from his loins and joined them together. Happy are those who do what the Lord commands.

He heard running footsteps and a commotion in the hallway, but there was no time to move, it was too late to hide, too late to do anything but empty himself inside the ripe body of the Reverend Daughter. The Reverend Tims jerked open the door behind them and gazed in shocked silence at a remarkable tableau.

The Reverend Doctor Ernest Farnsworth the Third stood in a pool of light on the stage of the darkened santuary of the Church of the Faithful. He came to the wrap-up moment of his radio sermon.

"Why do we listen to MITCHEL HARRIS and all the other ENEMIES of the FAITH who mock our RELIGION and tell us we need a NEW religion, a religion of OUTER SPACE, a religion of the FUTURE .... A religion without GOD?"

He gazed out into the nearly empty santuary and smiled at the teenaged girl who sat by herself near the middle. So like Jessica, he thought. But those days are gone forever.

"New religion?" he said, incredulously. "New religion of outer space?" He paused to let it sink in. "What's wrong with the old religion of inner space?"

Soothing organ music came up in the background.

Is THAT what he's objecting to? Mitch wondered. It was just a throw-away line in the article.