Margaret pointed at the metal objects in front of her. “Other than these soup cans, how is this any different from, say, Norman Vincent Peale’s ideas?”

“Can Dr. Peale cure seventy percent of man’s illnesses?” Hubbard demanded. “We can raise your IQ one point for every hour of auditing,” he continued as if he were on a stage. “Our most spectacular feat was raising a boy’s IQ from eighty-three to two hundred and twelve!”

Margaret picked up the cans gingerly and felt a slight electric current, a not unpleasant tingle. She put the cans back on the table. “Didn’t Dale Carnegie make that same claim?” she asked.

Hubbard smiled. “No, no. There’s no comparison.”

His words alone were utterly unconvincing, but Hubbard’s avuncular charm and matter-of-fact presentation carried them into the neighborhood of believability. It wasn’t hard to see how someone vulnerable or eager to change or just plain hungry for human contact might be taken in.

Julius returned, looking irritated, perhaps even alarmed. He leaned toward Hubbard and whispered briefly in his ear. Hubbard rose from his seat. “Will you ladies excuse me for a moment?” The two men hurried out of the room, Julius speaking in low, urgent tones to a newly serious Hubbard. They left the door open behind them.

Margaret tilted her head toward the tin cans in front of her. “This is so weird. Can you adjust the current on the whatchamacallit there?”

“E-Meter,” Sheryl Ann said.

“Yes, yes,” said Margaret. “That.”

As Sheryl Ann fiddled with the contraption, Margaret leaned back in her seat to peer out the open door, where she saw Hubbard and Julius in a heated conversation near the front desk. “Quick,” she said, “gimme the file.”

Sheryl Ann slid the folder across the table. “I’ll keep an eye on the door,” she whispered.

Margaret opened the folder to see a head shot of Chris Powell gazing up at her. Beneath that was a list of his credits, which tracked his career trajectory like a chart tracking population growth: bigger roles in smaller films, smaller roles in bigger films. The next page listed everyone in Powell’s life who was more famous than him, from the stars of Kid Galahad to his romantic attachments, including Lola Bridgewater, to others more peripherally in his orbit, such as Sinatra, Martin, and Davis.

“This is strange,” said Margaret. She turned the page to a memo titled “Project Celebrity.”

If we are to heal society at large, we must do something about its communication lines. A key part of this plan is Project Celebrity. There are many to whom America and the world listens. It is vital to put such persons into wonderful condition. It is obvious what would happen to Scientology if prime communicators benefiting from it would mention it now and then.