hantine sarcasm, "I could show you the editorial in question."

"You needn't bother; I have a carbon copy," Dacre told him. "We've all
read it. If you did, at the time you suppressed it, you should have
known what Doctor Chalmers said in class."

"I knew he'd talked a lot of poppycock about a man who was still
living having been shot to death," Whitburn retorted. "And if
something of the sort actually happened, what of it? Somebody's always
taking a shot at one or another of these foreign dictators, and they
can't miss all the time."

"You claim this was pure coincidence?" Fitch demanded. "A ten-point
coincidence: Event of assassination, year of the event, place,
circumstances, name of assassin, nationality of assassin, manner of
killing, exact type of weapon used, guards killed and wounded along
with Khalid, and fate of the assassin. If that's a simple and
plausible coincidence, so's dealing ten royal flushes in succession in
a poker game. Tom, you figured that out; what did you say the odds
against it were?"

"Was all that actually stated by Doctor Chalmers a month ago?" one of
the trustees asked, incredulously.

"It absolutely was. Look here, Mr. Dacre, gentlemen." Fitch came
forward, unzipping his briefcase and pulling out papers. "Here are the
signed statements of each of Doctor Chalmers' twenty-three Modern
History Four students, all made and dated before the assassination.
You can refer to them as you please; they're in alphabetical order.
And here." He unfolded a sheet of graph paper a yard long and almost
as wide. "Here's a tabulated summary of the boys' statements. All
agreed on the first point, the fact of the assassination. All agreed
that the time was sometime this year. Twenty out of twenty-three
agreed on Basra as the place. Why, seven of them even remembered the
name of the assassin. That in itself is remarkable; Doctor Chalmers
has an extremely intelligent and attentive class."

"They're attentive because they know he's always likely to do
something crazy and make a circus out of himself," Whitburn
interjected.

"And this isn't the only instance of Doctor Chalmers' precognitive
ability," Fitch continued. "There have been a number of other cases...."

Chalmers jumped to his feet; Stanly Weill rose beside him, shoved the
cased sound-recorder into his hands, and pushed him back into his
seat.

"Gentlemen," the lawyer began, quietly but firmly and clearly. "This
is all getting pretty badly out o