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.“At least I can read here, at least my mind is free.” She had picked a book up from the table.He shook his head.“All that old world is dead and gone, my dear.Books are where you get your sick notions from.Throw it away and come into the light of day.The plague has gone and things’ll be better.”The children were screaming with delight outside.“Today or yesterday, I was reading about the scientific basis for the legend of the Golden Fleece,” Scally told Goddard.“Did you ever hear of the Greek legend of the Golden Fleece, and how Jason and theArgonauts went in search of it? The story has always related to the Black Sea area.When this book was published, researchers had analyzed pieces of cloth from the tomb of an old king of that area, Tumulus I, who lived in the fifth century B.C.That was the period of Jason and his crew.Do you know what the researchers found?”He tried to escape from the conversation, but she went on remorselessly, although the children had come back hooting into the room.“They found that the cloth from the tomb was composed of extremely fine fibers, with mean diameters of—I forget the exact measurements—about sixteen micrometers, I believe.That is the earliest appearance of true fine-wooled sheep by several centuries.So you see that all that golden legend was generated by Jason and his friends going in search of more comfortable underwear.” She laughed.The children had tied sticks around their heads with old fabric.“Look, Dad, Mother! We’re reindeer.We’ve gone wild! We’re going to head north and we’ll never let anyone milk us again!”Puzzled by her story, Goddard said to her over the racket, “I don’t understand you properly.Whatever happened to those Argonauts can’t affect us, can it?”She looked at him wearily, with her eyelids lowered.“Take these young reindeer away,” she said.“One day soon their myths will break down.Don’t you see, there’s a prosaic reality to every legend, but people like you beat legends into prosaic reality.”“I never beat you!”“Have you got remarkably thick in the head, or is that meant to be funny?”“You’re sick, Scally, really you are.Come away and let me look after you!”“Never say that again! You oaf, if you didn’t believe that I was sick, can’t you see that I might come with you willingly?”Goddard scratched his head.“Since you can always get the better of me in words, I can’t think why you’re afraid to come with me.” Then he turned away.The next day was mild and springlike.Goddard stripped to the waist and began to plant row after row of seed potatoes, which his father had carefully cherished throughout the winter.The two children played on the other side of the stream, building little planetoids in every bush, and pretending that Gripp was a monster from outer space.* * * *Here’s a story about a bar infested with gremlins—so that means it’s a fantasy, right? Well, maybe not: it’s also about the interface between alternate time-streams, a most respectable science fiction idea.Mainly, it’s an ingenious and funny story, which is the definition that really counts.Probability Storm is Julian Reid’s first published story.Born in London, he earned a B.A.in English and Philosophy at the University of Victoria and attended the first Clarion SF Writers’ Workshop in Seattle, where he “had a story (literally) torn to pieces by Harlan Ellison” and was involved with Samuel R.Delany in plotting the never-to-be-written adventures of Lust Hog, the Ultimate Male Chauvinist Pig.Considering this somewhat mad atmosphere, it isn’t surprising that the idea for Probability Storm came to Reid during that workshop.* * * *PROBABILITY STORMJulian ReidIf you’ve never been to Rafferty’s, you won’t believe a word of this—I’m warning you right off, because disbelieving can be dangerous.Look what happened to Howard Hopper and General Wilbur Prescott and Lady Beatrice Annabelle Scraggs; you’ve heard of them, I’m sure.Or remember how dynasties used to topple when Edward Everett Peaslake let his mind wander, and how the Dow-Jones Average dropped thirteen whole points the day Isadora Edison discovered a minor compositor’s error at the bottom of the third column on page forty-three of the Sunday New York Times.And then there was the infamous Barnabas Tobin with his terrible Exo-psychic Deontologizer, which was on the verge of reducing the entire world to a state of primordial chaos by the time the Duly Constituted Authorities belatedly intervened
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