“That dark man isn’t calling from heaven,” Stu sez. “If it’s a toll-call, I think it’s comin from someplace a lot lower down.”

“Which is Stu’s way of saying Old Scratch is after us,” Frannie pipes up.

“And that’s as good an explanation as any other,” Glen sez. We all looked at him. “Well,” he went on, a little on the defensive, I think, “if you look at it from a theological point of view, it does rather seem as if we’re the knot in a tug-o-war rope between heaven and hell, doesn’t it? If there are any Jesuit survivors of the superflu, they must be going absolutely bananas.”

That made Mark laugh his head off. I didn’t really get it, but kept my mouth shut.

“Well, I think the whole thing is ridiculous,” Harold put in. “You’ll be getting around to Edgar Cayce and the transmigration of souls before we know it.”

He pronounced Cayce Case, and when I corrected him (you say it like the initials for Kansas City), he gave me a really HORRID HAROLD-FROWN. He isn’t the type of guy who swamps you with gratitude when you point out his little flaws, diary!

“Whenever something overtly paranormal occurs,” Glen said, “the only explanation that really fits well and holds its interior logic is the theological one. That’s why psychics and religion have always gone hand in hand, right up to your modern-day faith-healers.”

Harold was grumbling, but Glen went on anyway.

“My own gut feeling is that everyone’s psychic… and it’s so ingrained a part of us that we very rarely notice it. The talent may be largely preventative, and that keeps it from being noticed, too.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it’s a negative factor, Fran. Have any of you ever read James D.L. Staunton’s 1958 study of train and airplane crashes? It was originally published in a sociology journal, but the tabloid newspapers rake it up every now and again.”

We all shook our heads.

“You ought to,” he said. “James Staunton was what my students of twenty years ago would have called ‘a real good head’—a mild-mannered clinical sociologist who studied the occult as a kind of hobby. He wrote any number of articles on the combined subjects before going over to the other side to do some first-hand research.”

Harold snorted, but Stu and Mark were grinning. I fear I was, too.

“So tell us about the planes and trains,” Peri sez.

“Well, Staunton got the stats on over fifty plane crashes since 1925 and over two hundred train crashes since 1900. He fed all the data into a computer. Basically, he was correlating three factors: those present on any such conveyance that met with disaster, those killed, and the capacity of the vehicle.”

“Don’t see what he was trying to prove,” Stu said.

“To see that, you have to understand that he fed a second series of figures into the computer—this time an equal number of planes and trains which didn’t meet with disaster.”

Mark nodded. “A control group and an experimental group. That seems solid enough.”

“What he found was simple enough, but staggering in its implications. It’s a shame one has to stagger through sixteen tables to get at the underlying statistical fact.”

“What fact?” I asked.

“Full planes and trains rarely crash,” Glen said.

“Oh fucking BULLSHIT! ” Harold just about screams.

“Not at all,” Glen sez calmly. “That was Staunton’s theory, and the computer bore him out. In cases where planes or trains crash, the vehicles are running at 61 percent capacity, as regards passenger loads. In cases where they don’t, the vehicles are running at 76 per cent capacity. That’s a difference of 15 percent over a large computer run, and that sort of across-the-board deviation is significant. Staunton points out that, statistically speaking, a 3 percent deviation would be food for thought, and he’s right. It’s an anomaly the size of Texas. Staunton’s deduction was that people know which planes and trains are going to crash… that they are unconsciously predicting the future.

“Your Aunt Sally gets a bad stomachache just before Flight 61 takes off from Chicago bound for San Diego. And when the plane crashes in the Nevada desert, everyone says, ‘Oh Aunt Sally, that bellyache was really the grace of God.’ But until James Staunton came along, no one had realized that there were really thirty people with bellyaches… or headaches… or just that funny feeling you get in your legs when your body is trying to tell your head that something is getting ready to go way off-course.”

“I just can’t believe that,” Harold sez, shaking his head rather woefully.

“Well, you know,” Glen said, “about a week after I finished the Staunton article for the first time, a Majestic Airlines jet crashed at Logan Airport. It killed everyone on board. Well, I called the Majestic office at Logan after things had settled down a bit. I told them I was a reporter from the Manchester Union-Leader —a small lie in a good cause. I said we were getting a sidebar on airline crashes together and asked if they could tell me how many no-shows there were on that flight. The man sounded kind of surprised, because he said the airline personnel had been talking about that. The number was sixteen. Sixteen no-shows. I asked him what the average was on 747 flights from Denver to Boston, and he said it was three.”

“Three,” Perion sez in a marveling kind of way.

“Right. But the guy went further. He said they’d also had fifteen cancelations, and the average number is eight. So, although the headlines after the fact screamed LOGAN AIR CRASH KILLS 94, it could just as well have read 31 AVOID DEATH IN LOGAN AIRPORT DISASTER.”

Well… there was a lot more talk about psychic stuff, but it wandered pretty far afield from the subject of our dreams and whether or not they come from the Big Righteous in the sky. One thing that did come up (this was after Harold had wandered away in utter disgust) was Stu asking Glen, “If we’re all so psychic, then how come we don’t know when a loved one has just died or that our house just blew away in a tornado, or something?”

“There are cases of exactly that sort of thing,” Glen said, “but I will admit they are nowhere near as common… or as easy to prove with the aid of a computer. It’s an interesting point. I have a theory—”

(Doesn’t he always, diary?)

“—that has to do with evolution. You know, once men—or their progenitors—had tails and hair all over their bodies, and much sharper senses than they do now. Why don’t we have them anymore? Quick, Stu! This is your chance to go to the head of the class, mortarboard and all.”

“Why, for the same reason people don’t wear goggles and dusters when they drive anymore, I guess. Sometimes you outgrow a thing. It gets to a point where you don’t need it anymore.”

“Exactly. And what is the point of having a psychic sense that’s useless in any practical way? What earthly good would it do you to be working in your office and suddenly know that your wife had been killed in a car-smash coming back from the market? Someone is going to call you on, the telephone and tell you, right? That sense may have atrophied long ago, if we ever had it. It may have gone the way, of our tails and our pelts.

“What interests me about these dreams,” he went on, “is that they seem to presage some future struggle. We seem to be getting cloudy pictures of a protagonist… and an antagonist. An adversary, if you like. If that’s so, it may be like looking at a plane on which we’re scheduled to fly… and getting a bellyache. We’re being given the means to help shape our own futures, perhaps. A kind of fourth-dimensional free will: the chance to choose in advance of events.”

“But we don’t know what the dreams mean,” I said.

“No, we don’t. But we may. I don’t know if a little tickle of psychic ability means we are divine; there are plenty of people who can accept the miracle of eyesight without believing that eyesight proves the existence of God, and I am one of them; but I do believe these dreams are a constructive force in spite of their ability to frighten us. I’m having second thoughts about the Veronal as a result. Taking it is very much like swallowing some Pepto-Bismol to quiet the bellyache, and then getting on the pane anyway.”