The Dead Zone(72)

Johnny's smile thinned. 'What I owe or don't owe,' he said, 'is my business.'

'All right, of course, sure. I didn't mean to offend, Mr. Smith. Inside View would like to offer you a job. A rather lucrative job.'

'No. Absolutely not.'

'If you'll just give me a chance to lay this out for you...

Johnny said, 'I'm not a practicing psychic. I'm not a Jeanne Dixon or an Edgar Cayce or an Alex Tannous. 'That's over with. The last thing I want to do is rake it up again.'

'Can I have just a few moments?'

'Mr Dees, you don't seem to understand what I'm -'

'Just a few moments?' Dees smiled winningly.

'How did you find out where I was, anyway?'

'We have a stringer on a mid-Maine paper called the Kennebec Journal He said that although you'd dropped out of the public view, you were probably staying with your father.'

'Well, I owe him a real debt of thanks, don't I?'

'Sure,' Dees said easily. 'I'm betting you'll think so when you hear the whole deal. May I?'

'All right,' Johnny said. 'But just because you flew up here on Panic Airlines, I'm not going to change my mind.'

'Well, however you see it. It's a free country, isn't it? Sure it is. Inside View specializes in a psychic view of things, Mr. Smith, as you probably know. Our readers, to be perfectly frank, are out of their gourds for this stuff. We have a weekly circulation of three million. Three million readers every week, Mr. Smith, how's that for a long shot straight down the fairway? How do we do it? We stick with the upbeat, the spiritual...'

'Twin Babies Eaten By Killer Bear,' Johnny murmured.

Dees shrugged. 'Sure, well, it's a tough old world, isn't it? People have to be informed about these things. It's their right to know. But for every downbeat article we've got three others telling our readers how to lose weight painlessly, how to find sexual happiness and compatibility, how to get closer to God...

'Do you believe in God, Mr. Dees?'

'Actually, I don't,' Dees said, and smiled his winning smile. 'But we live in a democracy, greatest country on earth, right? Everyone is the captain of his own soul. No, the point is, our readers believe in God. They believe in angels and miracles...

'And exorcisms and devils and Black Masses ...

'Right, right, right. You catch. It's a spiritual audience. They believe all this psychic bushwah. We have a total of ten psychics under contract, including Kathleen Nolan, the most famous seer in America. We'd like to put you under contract, Mr. Smith.'

'Would you?'

'Indeed we would. What would it mean for you? Your picture and a short column would appear roughly twelve times a year, when we run one of our All-Psychic issues. Inside View's Ten Famous Psychics Preview the Second Ford Administration, that sort of thing. We always do a New Year's issue, and one each Fourth of July on the course of America over the next year - that's always a very informative issue, lots of chip shots on foreign policy and economic policy in that one - plus assorted other goodies.'

'I don't think you understand,' Johnny said. He was speaking very slowly, as if to a child. 'I've had a couple of precognitive bursts - I suppose you could say I "saw the future" - but I don't have any control over it. I could no more come up with a prediction for the second Ford administration - if there ever is one - than I could milk a bull.'

Dees looked horrified. 'Who said you could? Staff writers do all those columns.'

'Staff...?' Johnny gaped at Dees, finally shocked.

'Of course,' Dees said impatiently. 'Look. One of our most popular guys over the last couple of years has been Frank Ross, the guy who specializes in natural disasters. Hell of a nice guy, but Jesus Christ, he quit school in the ninth grade. He did two hitches in the Army and was swamping out Greyhound buses at the Port Authority terminal in New York when we found him. You think we'd let him write his own column? He'd misspell cat.

'But the predictions...

'A free hand, nothing but a free hand. But you'd be surprised how often these guys and gals get stuck for a real whopper.

'Whopper,' Johnny repeated, bemused. He was a little surprised to find himself getting angry. His mother had bought inside View for as long as he could remember, all the way back to the days when they had featured pictures of bloody car wrecks, decapitations, and bootlegged execution photos. She had sworn by every word. Presumably the greater part of inside View's other *,999,999 readers did as well. And here sat this fellow with his dyed gray hair and his fortydollar shoes and his shirt with the store-creases still in it, talking about whoppers.

'But it all works out,' Dees was saying. 'If you ever get stuck, all you have to do is call us collect and we all take it into the pro-shop together and come up with something. We have the right to anthologize your columns in our yearly book, Inside Views of Things to Come. You're perfectly free to sign any contract you can get with a book publisher, however. All we get is first refusal on the magazine rights, and we hardly ever refuse, I can tell you. And we pay very handsomely. That's over and above whatever figure we contract for. Gravy on your mashed potatoes, you might say.' Dees chuckled.

'And what might that figure be?' Johnny asked slowly. He was gripping the arms of his rocker. A vein in his right temple pulsed rhythmically.