A Separate War and Other Stories by Joe Haldeman

this is the traffic at Sixth and University, and this…”
    He was looking at me in a funny way. “You see that stuff on them?”
    â€œ In them! They’re three-dimensional, moving. You can even smell them!” I picked up the prehistoric one and sniffed deeply, and thrust it at him. “Fire and brimstone!”
    He sniffed it gingerly and put it down. “Yeah, um, look…I don’t want to pry, but is this maybe an acid flashback? I know how—”
    â€œI’ve never taken drugs in my life!” The nerve.
    He held up a placating hand. “Just tryin’ to be scientific here.” He handed them back. “Study ’em. They’re still the same?”
    â€œExcept this one.” I turned it over. “You had it upside down.” I took the contract out of the envelope. It hadn’t changed. “How about this?”
    He stared at it, both sides, then sighted down it as if looking for dust on the surface. “Another picture?”
    â€œNo. This is a contract. It gives the human race fifty years to get off the Earth.”
    â€œNot gonna happen.” He squinted at it and then rubbed his beard, calculating. “Three and a half billon people, that’s about two hundred thousand a day, call it eight thousand per hour. You couldn’t move ’em across town in a bus in that time. Let alone to Mars or wherever.” He shook his head and sort of laughed through his nose. “Ain’t gonna happen.”
    â€œYou think I’m crazy.”
    He riveted me with his eyes, coal black and bloodshot. “I don’t say that about people. We all got different ways with reality.”
    The pizza came. I ordered two more beers and grabbed one as soon as they came.
    He was a pizza-consuming machine, six slices to my two. He couldn’t have weighed a hundred-twenty. Maybe he only ate when somebody else was paying.
    â€œWhat you want to do,” he said, lingering over the last piece, “is get some scientists interested in this plastic. There can’t be any plastic on Earth that does what you say.”
    â€œYou believe me.”
    â€œProvisionally, yeah. Why would you lie to me? I don’t have any money or prestige. Not gonna get any in this life.”
    He touched the middle one, leaving a little smear of grease. “This is Sixth and University.”
    â€œThat’s right.” I dabbed away the fingerprint.
    â€œWhat you’re seeing is the traffic going by there now?”
    â€œYes. Or I think so. It could be anytime recent, this time of day.”
    He got up. “Order me another beer. I’m gonna bicycle down there and hold up a certain number of fingers. Then I come back and you tell me how many.”
    I watched him pedal laboriously away, and ordered another beer and a cannoli. Maybe I could finish it before he got back, using the beer as a distraction.
    A few minutes later, he showed up at the intersection. He held up three fingers. He turned around, and behind his back, two fingers in a V.
    I’d finished most of the cannoli by the time he returned. “You want the rest of that?”
    I pushed it toward him. “You held up three fingers and had two behind your back.”
    He nodded slowly and nibbled at the pastry. “Suppose you don’t tell people about the intergalactic real estate man. Suppose you just say ‘I’m psychic. You go do anything at the corner of Sixth and University, and I’ll look at this piece of plastic and tell you what it is.’”
    â€œThey’d say I had a hidden camera.”
    He sipped his beer. “Wouldn’t do you any good if you were sitting in a newspaper office. A television station.”
    â€œA laboratory,” I said. “I want scientists to pay attention.”
    â€œUh-huh. First you got to get their attention.” He drank half the beer and set it down hard. “What time you get off