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Bounty didn’t
go in for it. In fact, if he’d known about the prayer thing when he
joined, he might have given the whole thing a miss.
    He’d asked John, the guru guy,
straight out just last week, why the Receivers of Cosmic Bounty
didn’t pray. John had just looked at him and said, “There’s no
point, Jadie. The Sky People are all on Mercury so they couldn’t
hear us, could they now?” It had seemed so reasonable at the time,
with John’s steady, grey eyes looking straight into his and John’s
smooth, hypnotic voice, lapping around him. Everything John said
always seemed absolutely true. Yet, when he thought about it
afterwards, Jadie couldn’t see why the Sky People couldn’t be
telepathic or something. Still, he didn’t say anything about that
to John or the others, ’cos he didn’t want to look stupid or
anything. Theology wasn’t really Jadie’s department. He was more
the blind faith type. He left the deep issues to the guru types,
like John.
    Still, at least they didn’t have
all those stupid restrictions on drinking and sex and all that.
According to John, the guru guy, all you had to do to get to Heaven
was be there when the Sky People came. Of course, since no-one knew
quite when they were coming, it meant you had to hang out at the
station a lot, which was pretty dull. The station was an old sugar
cane farm that had gone broke years ago and was half derelict
now—Saunders’ Station, named after the family that had owned it for
the past four generations. The disciples all jokingly called it the
Space Station but Jadie could see they all believed in it really.
John had everybody patching the place up all the time just for
something to do but Jadie wasn’t into all that home improvement
crap so he tended to hitch into Brisbane a lot to do what he liked
doing best—hanging around in pubs.
    O’Shaunessey’s was definitely
Jadie’s kind of pub. No yuppies. No dress code. No frills. There
were live bands and the ceaseless racket of jangling poker
machines. What more could a bloke want? He walked in with a smile
on his face, anticipating his first cold drink of the day and an
evening of relaxed chat with his mates.
    "That's him," Wayne said, too
loudly, as he spotted Jadie heading for the bar.
    Sam looked up from her untouched
glass of Chardonnay and eyed Jadie with professional interest and a
certain dismay. Tall and skinny, with lank blonde hair and a wispy
blonde goatee, Jadie looked a lot like an unemployed youth about to
drink his dole money and very little like a pathetic brainwashing
victim desperately reaching out to the media for help. Ah
well , she thought, no pictures .
    She turned to Wayne who was busily
chugging down the last of his beer and scowled. It was so typical
of him to have been blind drunk even before she arrived. And now
she had to sit in this awful dive, surrounded by the dregs of
Brisbane and interview his scrawny mate whilst worrying about how
to keep her brother sober enough to walk home afterwards. The
selfish little shit! “OK,” she said, giving Wayne an angry shove.
“Go and get him, then.”
    Clutching the stubbie that Wayne
had surprisingly bought for him, Jadie wandered over with him to
where Sam sat waiting. He was always happy to meet people’s
sisters—you never know where that might lead—but his smile
broadened to a sloppy grin when he saw Sam. She had dressed down
for the occasion but still looked beautifully out of place in her
designer jeans and T-shirt, Estée Lauder make-up and expensive
hairdo. Jadie took a chair opposite her and grinned at her while
Wayne slurred his way through the introductions. Sam slipped her
hand into her handbag and switched on her tape recorder.
    “I was telling Sam about the
Receivers of Cosmic Bounty and she was really keen to meet you,”
Wayne said with obvious difficulty. He had to swallow hard on a
rising giggle before he could get the next words out. “Sam is a
very spiritual person. She’d really like to, you