Maybe that's why they can build good cars and stereo sets cheaper than we can. If we have just enough lawyers in this land, then won't the law schools make sure that in future years we have too many? Would you say, Senators, that a country with too many lawyers might have too much litigation?"

Hewlett said, "I have to admit a little bit of prejudice, being one myself. And so is Senator Train here. And the great majority of the legislative bodies in this country are jam packed with lawyers. I'll buy that concept, Reverend. When a decent man who has been wronged in some civil matter has to wait seven or eight years to be heard, something is wrong.

When major corporations with a good cash flow go into voluntary bankruptcy to protect the shareholders' assets from thousands of claims of damage allegedly done to the plaintiffs in past years, we all know that something is dreadfully wrong."

Lewis Train said to the little cowboy, "Marsh, I do believe we're going to hear about some kind of legal harassment from the government."

"Which is why we're here?" Marsh asked.

"Not at all," John Tinker said quickly. The Eternal Church of the Believer is being constantly examined by tax collectors with help from legal specialists on the government payroll. But it's nothing we can't continue to handle just as we have in the past. The Winchester brothers and their cadre of smart young lawyers have always taken good care of the Church and there's no reason to assume they won't be able to continue to do so in the future."

Charley sighed heavily. Thanks for the vote of confidence, John. But sometimes it do get a tad wearisome. The Reagan election made the fundamentalist churches sound too important in secular affairs, and so the tax people started coming down on us like a load of bricks, calling us political action groups and trying to pry away our legitimate tax exemption.

Then along comes the mid-term election and it proved we didn't have the clout people thought we had. But the machinizo cry to cut us down to size is still in place, and functioning."

"In all honesty," John Tinker said, right on cue, 'the lines are a little bit blurred. Suppose a country preacher, which is how my daddy started out, gets up in the pulpit and thunders that little kids should have the right to pray in school. And in his county there are two men running for office. Jones is for prayer in schools and Smith is against it. Is the preacher urging his flock to vote for Jones? And does not this whole controversy cut across a lot of social lines? Abortion, busing, welfare, protective tariffs. It is my feeling that if people look to this Church for guidance, then the Church must express its opinion on many secular matters."

Jim Ricardi, Marshall Howlett's aide, said, "When Jesus drove the money-changers out of the temple, was that a religious act or a political act?"

"It was a social act," John Tinker said.

"It was a religious leader acting for the social good, because Jesus knew that Christianity could never thrive in a corrupt society."

Robby Nathan, the other aide, a chubby balding young man with a very deep voice, said, "Let me, as the devil's advocate for a moment, speak of fairness. This came up in my classes at Yale. Suppose Mr. Jones, who advocates no-fault divorce, is up against Mr. Smith, who is agin it. The churches use their donated funds to fight no-fault divorce, calling it a social evil.

Several other organizations, which have no tax exemption, fight for it and try to get Jones elected. The people who are fighting Jones get a portion of their war fund picked up by Uncle Sam, as a charitable deduction. The people who are trying to get Jones elected have to use money that is all their own, that in fact is what they have left after paying taxes, so for the man in a fifty percent bracket, it costs him fifty dollars to give twenty-five to the cause. Unfair?"

"Good question. It so happens we do have a political action arm. It is called the Henrietta Fund, after my paternal grandmother, and it is made perfectly clear to all that any donation to it is not tax-exempt in any way, shape or manner. Through that fund we try to get men elected who are friendly to the causes in which we believe. We campaign for specific legislation. It is a healthy and sizable fund. We have a specialist here who has done wonders with all the Church funds and investments."

Charley stepped in and said, "On our commercial operations, and you saw some of them as we drove here from the airport, we pay tax on the same basis as any other business.

ECB Enterprises, Lakemore Construction, Meadows Development and a slew of smaller things all pay what's due and are all subject to periodic IRS audit. Our executives tithe to the Church. Ten percent. In auditing their returns, the IRS has made the arbitrary judgment that the tithes in total are a kickback to the Church which works to keep our business profits low and our business taxes low. They are trying to use that as a lever to open up our donation records from the entire membership. We have to fight that all the way down the line.

We have a perfect right to retain our exemption on the Church, the assets of the Church and the University. And, of course, if any individual Church member is unable to prove to the IRS his total annual gift we are more than glad to provide him with documentation from our records."

Robby Nathan spoke again.

"Would this Henrietta Fund be as big and strong as it is were it not for the weight and prestige of the Church?"

John Tinker's quick smile was charming. He spread his hands in a big shrug and said, "Probably not. But no tax exempt money goes into it. And it is expended on social matters and political matters. Are we to be totally muzzled by our government? Power equals responsibility and responsibility implies taking those actions deemed responsible. It's another good question, Robby. It helps clarify this whole area for all of us at this table. The Church is against crime, poverty, random dumping of toxic wastes, communism, sloth, indifference, police states, murder and littering the highways. In my sermons I touch on a whole list of social evils, from obscenity to adultery. In so doing, I am a political activist because politics is the art of devising ways for men to live together in peace and in relative comfort. And with, of course, minimal interference from the State in matters that are not the business of the State."

"And as a matter of fact," Charley Winchester said, 'we have almost as many checks and balances and safeguards as you fellows up there in our nation's capital and by the way, we no longer believe that D.C. means Deliberately Confusing. We have a powerful advisory board formed of all the pastors of our affiliated churches. Over eighty of them now. We have an in-house steering committee, and we have the guidance of the Founders of the Society of Merit. We are supposed to keep their identities secret. There can never be more than twenty living members at any one time. But I thought you'd find it interesting, so I brought along a list you can look at, but not keep."

After Lewis Train studied it, he said, "Every one from the Fortune Five Hundred?"

"All but four," Charley said.

"We get invaluable advice from it. It was old Doctor Meadows' idea to start that group. Those men have a financial and a spiritual investment in the Eternal Church."

"Speaking of our eighty-eight affiliated churches," John Tinker said, "I want to make a point about the causes we endorse and some of the causes endorsed by other church groups. We did not establish a lot of those churches. We picked them off. Quite a few of them came from national church organizations affiliated with the National Council of Churches, which is a part of the World Council of Churches. They were weak churches, discontented with the national church bureaucracy, and ready to split."

"Why," Senator Howlett asked, 'in this era which we could call a time of the resurgence of the Christian religion, have these churches become so weak?"

John Tinker Meadows shrugged.

"A lot of the church organizations have internal dissension. In the South we have the PCUS, the Presbyterian Church in the U.S." with over eight hundred thousand members. In the North they have the UPCUSA, the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A." with two and a half million members. They've been split apart since the Civil War. Back in 1969 they began to try to get together again, but a lot of the conservative members of both branches didn't like the sound of it. And we have been picking off some of their churches ever since. They did merge in June. But while they were fussing at each other, the Southern Church lost over a hundred and thirty thousand members, and the Northern Church lost three quarters of a million. Their dissension was our opportunity."

"I thought they'd have more members than that, "Jim Ricardi said, frowning.

"We tend to think too much about membership totals," John Tinker said.

"Fourteen million Southern Baptists. Ten million United Methodists. Forty-one million Catholics. Five and a half million Baptists in the National Baptist Convention." He shrugged.

"We're one of the little ones. Over half a million. But growing faster than most because we make a better effort. We keep in better touch. The affiliated churches that decided to come in with us were quite weak. Now they are strong, so strong that the National Council of Churches keeps pecking at us, trying to find some leverage to make us give them back.

They won't go back, for the same reason that so many members of the National Council of Churches tried to resign from the World Council of Churches, but it was voted down. A piece of every dollar that goes into the collection plates goes to the World Council of Churches with their headquarters abroad, and that World Council sends seed money to every Marxist revolutionary group in Latin America and in Africa.

The World Council defends it on the grounds that the money goes for food and medicines, to help the poor, as Jesus Christ ordered us as Christians to do. But a lot of people believe, and I am among them, that if you provide food and medicine, it leaves the revolutionaries with more money for arms and terror.

"I bring this up only because you gentlemen might hear some strange things about the Eternal Church of the Believer from that big building they call the God Box. It might come directly or indirectly, but when it does, consider the source. The only revolution we sponsor is the return to Jesus Christ. And in this country that is long overdue."

Conversation returned to aimless generalities until finally Charley said, glancing at his watch, "I happen to know that Doctor Meadows here has a morning meeting coming up, and what I would like to do is take you fellows on a little walking tour of the Tabernacle and the Garden of Mercy before we head back to the plane."

They shook hands around, all smiling, all showing teeth.

They would take their little tour, and when they were walking in the Garden of Mercy, a very pretty woman with a camera would recognize one of the Senators and would take their picture in the Garden with the Tabernacle as the background.

Charley would get them to the jet in time to put them back in 1x4 Washington a little after eleven-fifteen as promised. The color picture and the negative would go into the vault, properly labeled.

And just how did it go this time? John Tinker wondered.

Pretty well. A few moments of tension. Not any more than usual. To his dismay he had almost lost his train of thought a couple of times while speaking to them. The same lines had been said perhaps too many times. He remembered his father saying to him long ago, "So far only four Senators and ten Members of the House have seen fit to answer our invitation to come see us. But we'll keep on asking. We'll always make it nice. No pressure. They'll tell the others. You'll see."

And now the grand total of Senators was over sixty, and he could not remember how many from the House of Representatives, some out of curiosity, some out of suspicion, some out of awe and a certain spiritual hunger. And many, of course, who had the natural politician's instinct to move in close to any kind of visible power.

Charley had said these two were on 'useful' committees. The ones who didn't bring along any staff were almost always easier to handle, and would usually accept a touch of Charley's Wild Turkey or Finlandia vodka. His lines were getting a little tired and more difficult to say. He decided to put Spencer McKay to work on the problem and see if he could freshen it up a little. It went well, of course, but he was getting weary of it. It was the same kind of listlessness which seemed to have settled over everything. The Senators would go back to Washington and, in time, at the right time, they would have something to say about certain practices of the IRS as regards religious institutions.

Employees of the Manse were cleaning up the breakfast debris. He took a final cup of coffee back into his suite. A few minutes later his private line rang just once. He glanced at his watch. When it rang again, just once, five minutes later, he knew who it was and what she expected. He was tempted to ignore it. Yet she had promised to use that particular code only in emergency situations.

The affair was beginning to make him irritable. It was sliding slowly downhill a familiar feeling. It had been one of his more idiotic risks. And she had been a little too obvious from the very beginning. His taste ran more to the shy and quiet ones, game difficult to stalk, especially for a public person. Maybe he had gotten into it this time not only out of boredom, or the sexual challenge of it, but also because Rolf Wintergarten was so openly adoring of his new, second wife, and Rolf was such a hardworking stuffed shirt, it seemed more like a bad script than a genuine, heartfelt affair. In fact it was so much like a bad soap opera that it had never seemed quite real to him, even when Molly lay under him, pumping and huffing.

It seemed like some strange rehearsal, in which everything they said had already been written down and studied, and the camera crew, director, executive producer, script girl and the sound and lighting technicians stood by in readiness for the clap boards and the real take that somehow never happened.

So, with a deep sigh, and a leaden resignation, he went down and took one of the blue Ford vans from the motor pool and drove down to the Mall. He parked around in back, near the Sears service garage, and walked to the bank of telephones just inside that entrance to the Mall. As he looked for a coin in his pockets, three middle-aged women stopped and stood staring at him, jaws sagging, eyes wide.

"It is! It is! I told you!" the heaviest one said.

"Oh, Doctor Meadows!" the thin one said.