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sure that fool kid didn’t screw up. Pyotr, you Litvak Samaritan, go on out and wake up your wheels. Here, Drink, you get her out to the parking lot; I can’t hold her up much longer~ Margie, you’re the girl friend she went to spend the weekend with yesterday, okay? You’re gonna put her up until she’s ready to face the cops. Doc, you figure out what she’s contracted that she doesn’t want to bother her husband by calling. Shorty, if nobody discovers the body by, say, tomorrow noon, you make a service call to the wrong address and find him. Mike-“
    Callahan was already holding out one finger of Irish.
    “Say, Jake,” Callahan said softly, “didn’t I hear your wife’s name was Diane? Kinda short and red-haired and jolly, gray eyes?”
    We smiled at each other. “It was a plausible miracle that didn’t take a whole lot of buildup and explanation. What if I’d told her we stopped an alien from blowing up the earth in here once?”
    “You talk good on your feet, son.”
    I walked up to the chalk line. “Let me make the toast now,” I said loudly. “The same one I’ve made annually for five years-with a little addition.”
    Folks hushed up and listened.
    “To my family,” I said formally, then-drained the Irish and gently underhanded my glass onto the hearth.
    And then I turned around and faced them all and added, “Each and every one of you.”
     
    Concerning “Fivesight”:
     
    There’s been a wave of stuff about precognition in the popular media these days-people who dream disasters before they happen and so forth. Whether or not there’s anything to it I couldn’t say, but I’m willing to believe it can happen.
    But when I will become seriously interested in precogni tion is the first time I hear of a disaster averted because of precognition. If some guy dreams a given flight is going to go down, and they cancel the flight and discover on inspection that it would have gone down, then I will join my local Support Your Prophets Club.
    Unless and until that happens, I suspect the kindest thing to doforprecognitors is to shoot them. Kindest for the future victims, too-if you know the date and manner of my death, kindly keep it to yourself.
    Life’s greatest virtue is its ability to surprise.
    Postscript: both of the anecdotes told by Tommy Janssen. and Long-Drink McGonnigle early in “Fivesight” actually occurred, exactly as described-but not to them. Each stole his story from me (that’s all right-I’ve stolen them back). The first happened to my old college chum, Dirty Jack, and the second happened to my brother-in-law, John Moore. Honest.

SOUL SEARCH
    Rebecca Howell stood beside the plexiglass tank that contained the corpse of her husband Archer, trembling with anticipation.
    A maelstrom of conflicting emotions raged within her; fondness, yearning, awe, lust, triumphant satisfaction, fierce joy and an underlayer of fear all trying to coexist in the same skull. Perhaps no one in all human history had experienced that precise mix of emotions, for her situation was close, to unique. Because she was who and what she was, it would shortly lead her to develop the first genuinely new motive for murder in several thousand years.
    “Go ahead,” she said aloud, and eight people in white crowded around the transparent cryotank with her. In practiced silence, they began doing things.
    John Dimsdale touched her shoulder. “Reb,” he said softly, “come on. Let them work.”
    “No.”
    “Reb, the first part is not pretty. I think you should-“
    “Dammit, I know that!”
    “I think, “he repeated insistently, “you should come with me.”
    She stiffened; and then she saw some of the things the technicians were doing. “All right. Doctor Bharadwaj!”
    One of the white-suited figures looked up irritably.
    “Call me before you fire the pineal. Without fail.” She led Dimsdale lead her from the room, down white tile corridors to Bharadwaj’s offices. His secretary looked up as they