Metaphysical Mysteries

"It was that most loathsome of all things: an uncanny, routine-disrupting inconvenience and anomaly." That's what, as the result of an unforeseen event, unexpectedly invades and upsets Elmore Wiggins' safely ordered life. For Elmore had never reckoned on the paranormal or the preternatural. But now that he's had his accident, he is "seeing" certain events in the near future - including his own (although he doesn't know it yet).

Deep down, Robert Goldner knows he's a mistake. His mother told him so when he was just five years old. But he never found the courage to ask just what she meant before she was murdered under mysterious circumstances on his 11th birthday. Now, on the eve of his 17th birthday, Robert is dead set on becoming a Virginia high school state wrestling champion in order to redeem himself once and for all, reversing whatever curse his mother saw within him.

This short story by Philip K. Dick takes us back to the Cold War era, when nuclear war was everyone's fear. A family suddenly wakes up in the future. A future too terrible for the people living in the present to accept. The family has a choice: They can stay in the future, go underground, and be dehumanized or take a chance by staying in the house of surviving the next ROM bomb attack and being blown back to the present.

Frank Boston, retired Air Force Pararescueman, experienced two separate incidents involving three back-to-back deaths early in his Air Force career. He concluded after the second incident that he has a strange power he calls nose-smell, a sort of mystic instinct of seeing who will die in a group of related deaths. He goes years without using his ability until a small girl drowns in a pond on the nearby Air Force base. He knows two more water-related deaths will soon follow.

Il commissario Falò, uomo integerrimo la cui intransigente, coriacea, ferrea volontà morale di natura abissale e ancestrale, una volontà illesa e duramente intatta, da nessuno demoralizzata, tantomeno infranta, fluttua morbida nella spirale avvolgente, delirante e al contempo affascinante, misterica e cabalistica della sua fervida mente alla perenne, infrangibile ricerca immarcescibile delle verità più pure, nitidamente e nudamente cristalline in modo suadente, verità grandiosamente splendenti.