Jubal looked about to retch. Ben went on, “I’m afraid you can’t duck it. But in addition, Dawn thinks you’re beautiful. Aside from that quirk, she is an intelligent woman—and utterly charming. But I digress. Mike spotted us at once, waved and called out, ‘Hi, Ben! Later’—and went on with his spiel.

“Jubal, I’m not going to try to quote him, you’ll just have to hear it. He didn’t sound preachy and he didn’t wear robes—just a smart, well-tailored, white syntholinen suit. He sounded like a damned good car salesman, except that there was no doubt he was talking about religion. He cracked jokes and told parables—none of them straitlaced but nothing really dirty, either. The essence of it was a sort of pantheism . . . one of his parables was the oldy about the earthworm burrowing along through the soil who encounters another earthworm and at once says, ‘Oh, you’re beautiful! You’re lovely! Will you marry me?’ and is answered: ‘Don’t be silly! I’m your other end.’ You’ve heard it before?”

“‘Heard it?’ I wrote it!”

“I hadn’t realized it was that old. Anyhow, Mike made good use of it. His idea is that whenever you encounter any other grokking thing—he didn’t say ‘grokking’ at this stage—any other living thing, man, woman, or stray cat . . . you are simply encountering your ‘other end’ . . . and the universe is just a little thing we whipped up among us the other night for our entertainment and then agreed to forget the gag. He put it in a much more sugar-coated fashion, being extremely careful not to tread on competitors’ toes.”

Jubal nodded and looked sour. “Solipsism and Pantheism. Teamed together they can explain anything. Cancel out any inconvenient fact, reconcile all theories, and include any facts or delusions you care to name. Trouble is, it’s just cotton candy, all taste and no substance—and as unsatisfactory as solving a story by saying: ‘—and then the little boy fell out of bed and woke up; it was just a dream.’”

“Don’t crab at me about it; take it up with Mike. But believe me, he made it sound convincing. Once he stopped and said, ‘You must be tired of so much talk—’ and they yelled back, ‘No!’—I tell you, he really had them. But he protested that his voice was tired and, anyhow, a church ought to have miracles and this was a church, even though it didn’t have a mortgage. ‘Dawn, fetch me my miracle box.’ Then he did some really amazing sleight-of-hand—did you know he had been a magician with a carnival?”

“I knew he had been with it. He never told me the exact nature of his shame.”

“He’s a crackerjack magician; he did stunts for them that had me fooled. But it wouldn’t have mattered if it had been only the card tricks kids learn; it was his patter that had them rolling in the aisles. Finally he stopped and said apologetically, ‘The Man from Mars is supposed to be able to do wonderful things . . . so I have to pass a few miracles each meeting. I can’t help being the Man from Mars; it’s just something that happened to me. But miracles can happen for you, too, if you want them. However, to be allowed to see anything more than these narrow-gauge miracles, you must enter the Circle. Those of you who truly want to learn I will see later. Cards are being passed around.’

“Patty explained to me what Mike was really doing. ‘This crowd is just marks, dear—people who come out of curiosity or maybe have been shilled in by some of our own people who have reached one of the inner circles.’ Jubal, Mike has the thing rigged in nine circles, like degrees in a lodge—and nobody is told that there actually is a circle farther in until they’re ready to be inducted into it. ‘This is just Michael’s bally,’ Pat told me, ‘which he does as easy as he breathes—while all the time he’s feeling them out, sizing them up, getting inside their heads and deciding which ones are even possible. Maybe one in ten. That’s why he strings it out—Duke is up behind that grill and Michael tells him every mark who just might measure up, where he sits and everything. Michael’s about to turn this tip . . . and spill the ones he doesn’t want. Dawn will handle that part, after she gets the seating diagram from Duke.’”

“How did they work that?” asked Harshaw.

“I didn’t see it, Jubal. Does it matter? There are a dozen ways they could cut from the herd the ones they wanted as long as Mike knew which they were and had worked out some way to signal Duke. I don’t know. Patty says he’s clairvoyant and says it with a straight face—and, do you know, I won’t discount the possibility. But right after that, they took the collection. Mike didn’t do even this in church style—you know, soft music and dignified ushers. He said nobody would believe that this was a church service if he didn’t take a collection . . . so he would, but with a difference. Either take it or put it—suit yourself. Then, so help me, they passed collection baskets already loaded with money. Mike kept telling them that this was what the last crowd had left, so help themselves . . . if they were broke or hungry and needed it. But if they felt like giving . . . give. Share with others. Just do one or the other—put something in, or take something out. When I saw it, I figured he had found one more way to get rid of too much money.”