"I'm in," Archie said.

"You weren't too eager about it, right?" Sam said. "If you were too eager about it, they're going to be suspicious of you right from the beginning."

"I wasn't too eager," Archie said. "I even bickered about what I was going to get paid."

"Really," Sam said.

"I asked for double time," Archie said.

"Did you get it?" Sam asked.

"You bet," Archie said. "Well, between the hours of six and eight, anyway."

"You aren't beautiful, Archie," Sam said, "but you sure are smart. Damn if you're just not the sexiest man I know."

"That sounds good," Archie said.

"Don't get too excited," Sam said. "There's no time for that You and I have an appointment at the meeting house. We've got to get you wired."

"I think these people would notice if I wore a wire, Sam," Archie said.

Sam smiled and reached for Archie's hand. "Only if you wear it on the outside, you silly man. Come on."

The meeting house was not so much of a meeting house as a meeting basement, located on three subfloors of an Alexandria corporate high-rise. The topmost of these floors was a private gym, a cover for the members' comings and goings. Occasionally someone working in the high-rise would come down and try to get a membership; it was, after all, conveniently located. These were all politely turned away, with coupons for a months free membership at the fitness center right down the street. This usually worked, as everybody likes "free." The bottom two levels were the meeting house proper, and did not exist on any architectural schematics; the members had long since amended the blueprints on file and anyway, the same organization that owned the meeting house also owned the high-rise.

Archie and Sam walked through the gym, waving at a few of their friends who were exercising (front or not, it was in fact an excellent, working gym), and headed to the men's locker room. At the back of the room was a door that read "Janitor" and featured a palm lock; Archie and Sam went through the door individually, each palming the lock.

Behind the janitor's door were janitor's supplies and a small stairwell that led down. Archie and Sam took the stairs, palmed a second lock at the bottom, and went through.

They now stood in a small antechamber which members jokingly referred to as the Hallway of Peril. About once a decade someone would get into the hallway who wasn't supposed to be there; these unfortunates were then "milk cartoned," to use an obscure but evocative phrase of The Founder's era.

Archie and Sam were scanned one last time; there was a small click as the door at the end of the hallway unlocked. The two went through, into the meeting house of the Church of the Evolved Lamb.

The Church of the Evolved Lamb was notable in the history of religions both major and arcane in that it was the first and only religion that fully acknowledged that its founding was a total scam. The Founder was M. Robbin Dwellin, an early 21st-century science fiction writer of admittedly modest talents and man on the make, who had published one novel to deafening critical and commercial indifference and had no prospects of a second when he found himself teaching an adult education short-story workshop at the Mt. San Antonio Community College in Walnut, California.

It was there, while vetting housewives' stories of plump, middle-aged women seducing high school quarterbacks and computer technicians' stories of freaky libertarian space orgies in zero-g, that Dwellin came across Andrea Hayter-Ross, his class's oldest participant at age 78—and incidentally the sole heir to the combined fortunes of the Hayter and Ross families, earned in bauxite ore and vending machines, respectively, which made her the 16th richest person on the globe.

Hayter-Ross was in fact an accomplished writer (six books under pseudonym) and was attending the class as research for an article. She was an interesting woman who used a facade of bored-rich-person-dilettante mysticism to hide sharp-eyed observation. She was the sort of person who enjoyed going to seances and crystal tunings for the atmosphere and to study those around her, but didn't actually expect to speak to dead great uncles or resonate with the subetherean vibrations of the universe. Dwellin was observant enough to note the first of these but not the second, and so when he hatched his scheme to graft some money off the old biddy, he was not aware to the extent to which Hayter-Ross was ahead of him in his game.

Cribbing liberally from various new age and science fiction texts and adding a dash of his own meager invention, he created a new "religion," in which he was the prophet and avatar, which foretold of the coming of the next level of humanity. Hayter-Ross's writing, he claimed, spoke of levels of sensitivity that he'd rarely seen before. He was ready to unfold the mysteries of the fourteen divine dimensions to her, as described to him by N'thul, a spirit of infinite empathy, who asked only for the construction of a temple, placed in a certain sacred location (a small commercially zoned strip of land in Victorville, off a frontage road, which Dwellin had bought some years earlier in a misguided development scheme), the better to focus its energies and assist humanity into the next stage of its evolution. Dwellirt's plan was to extract the construction costs from Hayter-Ross and pocket them himself while coming up with some plausible series of excuses as to why the temple never seemed to get built. He figured he could keep this up until Hayter-Ross dropped, which shouldn't be too long now.

Hayter-Ross, who knew a great story idea when she saw one, was also possessed of that casual sense of cruelty that incredibly rich people often develop at the first whiff of financial desperation from others. She pretended to swallow Dwellirt's line with wide eyes and then proceeded to make the man dance like a monkey on a leash. She funded the temple out of petty cash but did it in such a way that Dwellin had no access to the funds; instead Hayter-Ross would provide "offerings" based on prophetic short poems derived from Dwellirt's encounters with N'thul—prophetic writings which she would direct by occasionally dropping hints as to what she would like to see in them. One time she rather mischievously mentioned to Dwellin how much she enjoyed sheep. At Dwellirt's next "session" with N'thul, the "Evolved Lamb"—the melding of the gentle, pastoral qualities of sheep with the rough, aggressive nature of man—made its first appearance.

For six years Dwellin churned out thousands of prophetic poems, feverishly chasing the relatively paltry income Hayter-Ross doled out before finally dropping dead of exhaustion and anxiety at the relatively young age of 38. Hayter-Ross, who would live to 104, had his ashes interred in the newly completed (and, truth to tell, quite lovely) Temple of the Evolved Lamb, in the base of a statue representing N'thul. She then collected his prophetic poems and published them as a volume accompanying her book—the first under her own name—on Dwellirt's attempted scam of her and the "religion" founded thereof. Both books became huge bestsellers.

Ironically, Dwellirt's poems were the best things the man ever wrote and achieved a sort of mystical lyricism at the end of Dwellirt's life. Researchers suggested this was due to the hallucinatory effects of fever and alcoholic malnutrition, but some also believed that Dwellin, though a scam artist outwitted by his own elderly, sadistic muse, may have tapped into something mystical, quite accidentally and despite his own moneygrubbing nature.

These souls would be the first to identify themselves as members of a new Church of the Evolved Lamb, and who called themselves "Empathists" or "N'thulians." They would soon be joined by another group of individuals who liked the idea of taking the prophetic poems of Dwellirt's and working toward making them come true, not because they were divinely inspired but because they weren't. If a group actively working to make entirely fictional prophecies come true managed to pull off the stunt, the whole concept of divinely inspired prophecy was thrown into doubt, chalking up a victory for rational thought everywhere. This group became known as the "Ironists" or "Hayter-Rossians."