The civilian joined him.

Donna Tedesco pushed the papers across Brian Taggert's desk. "Check them yourself, Brian. I've gone over them six ways from Septuagesima, and I still can't see any other answer."

Taggert frowned at the papers and tapped them with a thoughtful finger, but he didn't pick them up. "I'll take your word for it, Donna. At least for right now. If we get completely balled up, we'll go over them together."

"If you ask me, we've already completely balled up."

"You think it's that bad?"

She looked at him pleadingly. "Can you think of any other explanation?"

"Not just yet," Brian Taggert admitted.

"Nor can I. There it is. Every single one of his valid predictions, every single one of his precognitive intuitions—without exception—has been based on the actions of human beings. He can predict stock market fluctuations, and family squabbles, and South American election results. His disaster predictions, every one of them, were due to human error, human failure—not Acts of God. He failed to predict the earthquake in Los Angeles; he missed the flood in the Yangtze Valley; he knew nothing of the eruption of Stromboli. All of these were disasters that took human lives in the past three weeks, and he missed every one of them. And yet, he managed to get nearly every major ship, airplane, and even automobile accident connected with his subjects.

"Seven of his subjects had relatives or friends who were hurt or killed in the earthquake-flood-eruption sequence, but he didn't see them. Yet he could pick up such small things as a nephew of one of the men getting a bad scald on his arm.

"In the face of that, how can we rely on his one prediction about a meteor striking Moonbase One?"

Taggert rubbed his forehead thoughtfully. "I don't know," he said slowly. "There must be a connection somehow."

"Oh, Brian, Brian!" Her eyes were glistening with as yet unshed tears. "I've never seen you go off on a wild tangent like this before! On the word of an old fraud like Forsythe, a man who lies about half the time, you talk the Administration into sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into the biggest space lift in history!

"Oh, sure; I know. The old fraud is convinced he was telling the truth. But were you tapping his mind when the prediction flash came? No! Was anyone? No! And he's 

 Prev. P 16/20 next