ou worry about anything. The stars are
all on your side right now."

She smiled, patted his hand, and then was gone in a flash of gold and
honey. Dr. Joachim looked at the door that had closed behind her, then
he looked down at the envelope in his hands. He opened it gently and
took out the sheaf of bills. Fifteen hundred dollars!

He smiled and shoved the money into his pocket. After all, he _was_ a
professional fortuneteller, even if he didn't like that particular
label, and he _had_ saved her life, hadn't he?

He returned to the small back room, sat down again at the typer, and,
after a minute, began typing again.

When he was finished, he addressed an envelope and put the letter
inside.

It was signed with his legal name: _Peter J. Forsythe_.

* * * * *

It required less than two hours for that letter to end up at its
destination in a six-floor brick building, a rather old-fashioned
affair that stood among similar structures in a lower-middle-class
section of Arlington, Virginia, hardly a hop-skip-and-jump from the
Pentagon, and not much farther from the Capitol.

The letter was addressed to _Mr. J. Harlan Balfour, President, The
Society for Mystical and Metaphysical Research, Inc._, but Mr. Balfour
was not at the Society's headquarters at the time, having been called
to Los Angeles to address a group who were awaiting the Incarnation of
God.

Even if he had been there, the letter wouldn't have reached him first.
All mail was sent first to the office of the Executive Secretary, Mr.
Brian Taggert. Most of it--somewhat better than ninety-nine per
cent--went directly on to Mr. Balfour's desk, if it was so addressed;
Brian Taggert would never have been so cruel as to deprive Mr. Balfour
of the joy of sorting through the thousands of crackpot letters in
search of those who had the true spark of mysticism which so
fascinated Mr. Balfour.

Mr. Balfour was a crackpot, and it was his job to take care of other
crackpots--a job he enjoyed immensely and wholeheartedly, feeling, as
he did, that that sort of thing was the only reason for the Society's
existence. Of course, Mr. Balfour never considered himself or the
others in the least bit crackpottish, in which he was just as much in
error as he was in his assumption of the Society's _raison d'etre_.

Ninety per cent of the members of the Society for Mystical and
Metaphysical Research were just what you would expect them to be.
Anyon