Page 9 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Prologue

“Your first case is already waiting for you in a sealed manila
envelope at your apartment,” he said as we stood up to depart. “Take
all the time you need to research and familiarize yourself with your
man and his life’s work. Then make contact and give him the break
my father could not get. I will be monitoring your progress, but not
obtrusively: I fully expect the fruits of our beneficence to receive
public notice, one way or another. Do not attempt to contact me: my
staff has instructions not to grant you—under your own name or any
of your aliases—access to me. Address all concerns to the issuer of
your target’s dossier, via the return address; those people will be able
to handle any personal problems you encounter as well as the
unfamiliar aspects of handling relatively large sums of money.
Goodbye and good luck!”
We padded silently out of the bar, he to a waiting limousine and I
to the sidewalk and a long walk home. I later learned that he owned
the hotel. And that was the first and last time I saw Al Magnus. His
own theory of matching people to jobs probably died with him last
year; he, too, was a crackpot—or, as he himself might have been
convinced to say, a psychoceramic—whose ideas were tested in a fire
of his own making. Whether or not his aptitude software would crack
in the kiln, at least in his choice of me as surrogate Santa Claus, you
will see in the following pages. They also reveal what happened when
twelve other passionately-held hypotheses were put to the test.

7