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know, get into it
and, you know, stuff...” He breathed a sigh of relief and slumped
back in his seat with his Guinness. He’d done his bit, just like
Sam had wanted. Now it was all up to her.
    Jadie just kept on grinning at Sam
as if he hadn’t heard a word of it. “So,” said Sam, fighting down
her irritation. “Tell me how you came to be involved with the
Receivers of... whatever.”
    Jadie blinked, slowly registering
that a question had been asked. “Oh. Oh them. I just sort of met
one of them one day and they invited me in. They seemed OK.” He put
on a serious expression. “You know? Genuine.”
    Sam nodded. “Genuine. Right. That’s
what I’m looking for in my life. Something genuine. Something, er,”
she sought for an appropriately banal adjective, “something real .”
    “Yeah,” agreed Jadie and continued
to nod and stare at her for some time.
    Eventually, Sam said, “I don’t mean
to be rude, Jadie, but are you on some kind of medication?”
    Wayne rolled his eyes to Heaven and
took a long drink. Jadie grinned happily and nodded some more,
appreciating Sam’s wry humour.
    Barely concealing her frustration,
Sam changed tack. “So, tell me Jadie. What is it exactly that these
Receivers of Cosmic Thingy believe in?”
    Jadie leaned a little closer. “Now
you’ve got me,” he confided. “They’re really into something, you
know, but it’s pretty weird. I’ve never really managed to, like,
get it straight, you know?”
    Sam’s smile faltered a little. “But
I thought you were a member of this cul… I mean I thought you were
a follower.”
    “Oh I’m a believer all right. The
Sky People are coming and I’m going to be there, don’t you worry.”
Jadie raised his stubbie in salute to the Sky People and downed
half the bottle in one swallow. Sam took the opportunity to shoot a
quick scowl at her brother. Wayne got up to get another round in.
Sam was shouting the drinks so he was going to make the most of
it.
    “Sky People?” Sam asked.
    “Yeah, John says they’re living on
Mercury in, like, refrigerated domes or something and they’re going
to come and take us off to Paradise in their interstellar space
buggies, or, you know, that kind of stuff.”
    Sam struggled to make sense of it.
“So Paradise is on Mercury, then?”
    Jadie scoffed. “Shit, no! Mercury’s
a shit-hole! They’re just waiting there until the time’s
right.”
    “Right for what?”
    “Dunno. The end of the world or
something.” He took another bottle from the returning Wayne and
drank deeply. “Bit of a worry, eh?”
    It certainly is, thought Sam. “So
this John guy is the leader then?”
    “Yeah, the guru guy. He knows all
about it. You should be asking him, really, not me.”
    “But how can I meet him? Does he
hold services here in town that I could go to?”
    Jadie laughed. “No way! He never
leaves the Space Station.” He looked at her slyly and said
casually; “Why don’t you come out there with me tomorrow. I could
show you around?”
    “To the Space Station?” Sam asked,
nervously. Maybe this guy was more cracked than he looked.
    “Yeah. No-one’ll mind.” He waved
his beer around in a gesture of open-mindedness. “It’s only the
cops that get them worked up.” He leaned forward again. “They don’t
like cops sniffing around out there at all—or the media, of
course.”
    -oOo-
    Although it seemed like a lifetime,
it was just over three hours later that Sam and Wayne left the pub.
By then an Irish folk band had come onto the little stage in the
corner and a shaggy-looking creature dressed in black had mumbled
something about the Republic and begun to warble out "Kevin Barry".
That was Sam's cue to grab Wayne firmly by the shoulder of his
jacket and drag him to his feet saying, "Oh gosh, is that the
time?"
    Jadie, by then half smashed on
beers that Wayne had kept supplying at Sam’s expense, had waved his
arms about and shouted that they should all go to a club he knew
and score some