The Kid was waiting in front of the restaurant when the Iceman returned to the spaceport.

“Everything go okay?” asked the Iceman.

“I'm a little bit sore,” replied the Kid. “He used a local anesthetic, and it's starting to wear off.”

“Small price to pay to be the fastest gun in the galaxy,” said the Iceman wryly. “Now if you were only the most accurate gun as well...”

“I'm working on it,” the Kid assured him.

“It'll take a lot of practice.”

“Practice is for losers. I'll do it with chips.” Suddenly he grinned. “I'm the Silicon Kid, remember?”

“I'll try not to forget again,” said the Iceman sardonically.

“How was your day?” asked the Kid after a momentary silence.

“Not good,” said the Iceman, frowning. “Not good at all.”

“Oh?”

“There's no sense standing here talking,” said the Iceman. “Let's get some dinner, and then we'll take off.”

He summoned the maitre d', who led them past a multi-colored fountain in the middle of the floor and escorted them to a secluded table toward the back of the restaurant.

The Kid immediately picked up a menu and studied it. “Everything seems imported,” he noted. “You'd think a temperate world like this could grow its own food.”

“That's not what this world was created for,” replied the Iceman.

“But it's so expensive to do it this way.”

“If you live on Sweetwater, you don't worry about prices.”

“I suppose you're right,” said the Kid, surveying his surroundings and toying with his crystalline wine and water glasses. “It's a pretty nice place.”

“I've seen worse,” said the Iceman. “See those shellfish in that tank?” he added, pointing to a saltwater tank that was discreetly place against a wall.

“Yeah?”

“Those are mutated shellfish,” said the Iceman. “They come from the Pinnipes system.” He paused. “I can't pronounce their name, but they're supposed to be the best-tasting seafood in the galaxy.”

“I've never been a seafood fan.”

“Well, take my word for it,” said the Iceman. He looked across the room. “And those are real Hesporite paintings on the wall, not fakes,” he continued.

“How can you tell?”

“Watch when a waiter passes in front of them,” said the Iceman. “They'll glow wherever his shadow falls.”

“How come?”

“They use the larvae of some phosphorescent insect in their paints,” answered the Iceman. “They look like oils in the daylight, but they glow in the dark.”

“I never knew that.”

The Iceman smiled. “There are probably a lot of things you never knew. Live long enough and you'll learn some of them.”

“I get the feeling that you don't have much use for anyone younger than the Gravedancer,” said the Kid wryly.

“Not much,” agreed the Iceman. He signaled a waiter and ordered an Antarrean wine, while the Kid requested a beer.

“You know, I'd never seen a live waiter until I left Greycloud,” remarked the Kid. “Now I've seen them twice in a week.”

“They're like most luxuries,” responded the Iceman. “You pay for what you get—and you pay plenty at a place like this.”

“Uh ... until I figure out exactly what I'm going to do on the Frontier, I'm on a budget,” said the Kid.

“No problem,” said the Iceman. “When you travel with me or work for me—and right now you're doing both—I pick up the tab.”

“Are you that rich?”

“As a matter of fact, I am.”

“How does someone get to be as rich as you?” asked the Kid.

“Live a long time and don't do anything too stupid,” replied the Iceman with a smile.

“There it is again,” said the Kid.

“There what is?”

“This contempt for people my age.”

“Not for all of them,” answered the Iceman. “Right now the most dangerous person in the galaxy is a 28-year-old woman named Penelope Bailey. She's probably been the most dangerous person since the day she was born.”

“I never heard of her.”

“Yes, you did,” said the Iceman. “You just never knew her real name.”

“Who is she?”

“At various times she's been known as the Soothsayer and the Oracle.”

“The Oracle?” asked the Kid, suddenly enthused.

“Right.”

“Tell me about her.”

“In a minute,” said the Iceman, as their waiter brought them their drinks and recited the day's special off-the-menu selections. The Kid had a plain steak, and the Iceman ordered a shellfish in a cream sauce.

“Would you like to select your own, sir?” asked the waiter.

The Iceman shook his head. “I'll trust to your taste.”

“Very good, sir.”

“I do love seafood,” said the Iceman when the waiter left. “You sure you don't want to have some? You can get steak anywhere.”

“No, thanks.”

“You're making a big mistake,” continued the Iceman. “The sauce alone is worth the price of the meal.”

“Get back to the Oracle,” said the Kid impatiently. “What is she like?”

“She's a young woman with a gift,” answered the Iceman. “I first met her twenty years ago, when she was just a frightened little girl—but even then, two hundred of the best bounty hunters on the Inner Frontier were no match for her.”

“You're telling me an eight-year-old girl stood off two hundred armed bounty hunters?” said the Kid skeptically.

The Iceman smiled and shook his head. “You make it sound like she beat them in a shoot-out. Her gift doesn't work like that.”

“How does it work?”

“She's precognitive.”

The Kid frowned. “What does that mean?”

“It means she can see the future,” said the Iceman. “More to the point, it means she can see a number of futures, and through her actions she can bring about the one that's the most favorable to her.”

“How?”

The Iceman shrugged as a string quartet walked over to the fountain and started filling the room with their music. “I don't know how it works. I only know that it does work.”

“Give me an example,” said the Kid.

“All right,” said the Iceman. “Let's say she's hiding from you in the cargo area here, and you've been hired to kill her.” He paused and leaned forward. “Whatever approach you take, whatever entrance you use, she'll know it even before you do. She'll see an infinite number of futures. Maybe you kill her in all but three of them. She'll figure out what she has to do to bring one of those three favorable futures into being.”

“How?” asked the Kid.

The Iceman shrugged. “Maybe it'll be something as simple as her walking out one door while you walk in through another. Maybe it will be more complex, like positioning you under a crate that will drop on you and kill you once in a million times, and doing whatever it takes to make that million-to-one possibility come to pass. Maybe she'll see that of all the possible futures, there's one in which you die of a sudden heart attack; she'll analyze every facet of that future, see how it differs from all the others, and do what she can to bring it into being.”

“But surely there must be some futures in which she doesn't survive,” said the Kid. “What if I surrounded the building with fifty gunmen?”

“Probably she'd still manage to find a future in which she escaped.”

“Hah!” said the Kid, and one of the violinists glared at him.

“Keep your voice down,” said the Iceman. “Most of the diners would rather hear the music.”

“Sorry,” said the Kid. “But you said ‘probably.’ What if she couldn't?”

“Then she'd surrender to you, and find some way to escape an hour or a day or a week from now.” The Iceman paused. “Not all problems are capable of immediate solution. She was a prisoner of some alien bounty hunter, chained to a bed in his room, when a friend of mine first found her.” He paused. “To this day, I still haven't decided whether my friend actually found her, or if she manipulated events so she would be found.”

“That's some gift, that—what did you call it? —that precognition,” said the Kid.

“That it is,” agreed the Iceman. “That's why the Democracy was so set on exploiting it.”

“The Democracy?”

“Who do you think hired all those bounty hunters?” said the Iceman. “Think of what someone who could not only see but manipulate the future could do. They'd never lose a war, or even a battle. They'd know exactly how to handle a galactic economy. They could probably just stand her on a new world and have her tell them whether it was worth the effort to set up mining operations or not.” He paused, then smiled. “And of course, if they found a way to control her, they'd never lose an election, never make a bad investment in the market, never cheat on their spouses if there was a chance of being caught. They'd know before they contracted cancer or some other disease, and take whatever precautions were necessary to avoid it.”

“I begin to see now,” said the Kid. “Hell, she'd be worth billions.”

“That's what they thought,” answered the Iceman. “That's why they were so hot to get their hands on her.”

“You make it sound like they were wrong.”

“They didn't know what they were dealing with,” said the Iceman, lowering his voice still further as the quartet's violinist began walking slowly throughout the room, playing romantic solos at those tables where he thought he might cadge a tip.

“What did they think they were dealing with?” asked the Kid.

“From their point of view, this was a little eight-year-old girl who just managed to elude their grasp. From mine—and I think time has proven me right—this was a child who managed to remain free despite the best efforts of the largest and most powerful government in history to capture her. A lot of legendary bounty hunters caught up with her at one time or another—Cemetery Smith, Three-Fisted Ollie, Jimmy Sunday—but when the dust cleared, they were dead and she was still free.”

“She killed them all?” asked the Kid, his voice filled with disbelief.

“Not directly, but yes, she was responsible for their deaths as surely as if she had killed them herself.” The Iceman paused again, thinking back to the first time he had encountered Penelope Bailey. “The thing was, she didn't look like the most dangerous human being in the galaxy. She looked like a frightened little girl who was always hugging a rag doll for comfort. But in the end, everyone who was associated with her—those who tried to capture or kill her and those who tried to protect her—was dead, and she was still free.”

“What about you?”

“I was lucky.” The Iceman patted his prosthetic leg. “Still, this used to be flesh and blood.”

“But she didn't kill you.”

“She was very young, and her powers weren't fully developed,” answered the Iceman. “She left me for dead. She couldn't see far enough ahead then to know that I'd survive.”

“And that was your experience with the Oracle?”

The Iceman shook his head. “She was just Penelope Bailey back then, though some alien who had latched onto her—practically worshipped her, for all the good it did him in the long run—called her the Soothsayer, and for a while the name caught on.”

The waiter brought their salads out. The Kid pushed his aside, while the Iceman began eating his own.

“Needs a little pepper,” said the Iceman.

“Certainly, sir,” said the waiter, supplying it and then walking off to the kitchen.

“How did she become the Oracle?” asked the Kid.

“Well, as I said, she was very young and her powers weren't mature,” answered the Iceman. “She and her alien friend sought asylum on a planet called Hades. Somehow the race that lived there figured out what she was, and managed to imprison her in a room protected by an impenetrable force field—as I said, her powers weren't fully developed at the time.” He took another bite of his salad. “Anyway, they made a deal with her: they would feed her and keep her alive, and she would direct them in their attempt to remain independent of the Democracy. Over the next fourteen years pronouncements would come forth from her cell, and the government of Hades would act upon them; that's how she became the Oracle.”

“How did you get involved with her again?”

The Iceman sighed. “It's a long story. Basically, a man named 32, who worked for the Democracy—he's the same man I saw earlier today—hired me to kill her.” He took a last bite of his salad and pushed the bowl aside. “And since I knew what kind of threat she represented, I took the commission—but because she knew who I was, I farmed it out to someone who was younger and tougher than I was.”

“You don't take any risks if you can avoid it, do you?” said the Kid.

“Not if I can help it,” said the Iceman, showing no irritation at the question. “I didn't get to be this old by looking for trouble.”

The waiter arrived with their dinners, and both men fell silent again until he left.

“Excellent!” said the Iceman, taking a mouthful of his shellfish. “I'm going to have to make a point of visiting 32 more often.”

“Okay,” said the Kid as soon as the waiter was out of earshot. “So you hired someone else to kill her. Where do you come in?”

“You had to go through a lot of Blue Devils—that's what we called the aliens—to get to her,” said the Iceman, taking a taste of his meal and nodding his approval. “She was very valuable to them, so she had layer upon layer of protection. It was when I realized that my man was working his way to her too easily that I went there to try to stop him.”

“To stop him?” repeated the Kid, frowning. “Why?”

“The fact that no one else had been able to stop him—or even appreciably slow him down—meant that she wanted him to succeed, not in killing her but in reaching her prison. And if she wanted it, then I didn't.”

“So you saved her life.”

The Iceman shook his head. “Her life was never in danger. It probably hasn't been in danger since the day she was born.”

“But if your killer made it to her prison...”

“You still don't understand,” said the Iceman. “Stand her against that wall"—he gestured toward a wall of the restaurant—"and program a dozen laser weapons to fire randomly at her, and she'll know when each one will discharge and where each beam will hit, and she'll simply avoid them. And if you fired so many beams from so many weapons that she couldn't avoid them all, then she'd find a future in which one of the weapons was a dud and exploded in your face before you could activate the rest of them.”

“So what happened on Hades?”

“My man had certain information she needed, something that could effectuate her escape. He was killed before she could make use of him.” The Iceman stared blankly out the window across the landing field. “He was a damned good man.”

“So she was still a prisoner on Hades?”

“That's right.”

“And now she's free again?”

The Iceman nodded.

“When did she escape?”

The Iceman shrugged. “I have no idea. At least eighteen months ago.”

“How does someone escape from a force field? I didn't know we'd even developed the technology.”

“We haven't. The inhabitants of Hades weren't human; they developed it.”

“So how did she escape from it?”

“I don't know.”

“Where is she now?”

The Iceman shrugged again. “I had rather hoped she was the Anointed One, but I've got a feeling she isn't. Too many people have seen him and testified that he's a man in his forties.”

“Just a minute,” said the Kid. “You don't know when she escaped, you don't know how she escaped, and you don't know where she is. Is that right?”

“That's right.”

“Then how do you know she's escaped at all?”

“Because a meteor crashed into Hades eighteen months ago and blew the whole damned world to smithereens. No survivors.”

“Well, then, that's it. She died when the meteor hit.”

The Iceman shook his head. “Not her. If there was one future in a trillion in which the meteor didn't hit Hades, in which it missed the planet or was blown to bits by a weapon or another meteor, she'd have found a way to make it come to pass.”

“But that doesn't make any sense,” said the Kid. “If she could make it miss the planet, how come the planet was demolished?”

“Because it was payback time,” answered the Iceman with utter conviction. “Sometime before it hit, she found a way to escape from that forcefield ... and just as she could have chosen a future in which the meteor missed Hades if she were still on the planet, she could also choose the one-in-a-million future in which it smashed into Hades once she had left. This was a race that had imprisoned her for close to two decades; there was no way she was going to let them off the hook with merely a reprimand.”

The Kid considered what the Iceman had said. “You really think she had the power to do that?” he asked dubiously.

“I know she has,” said the Iceman firmly.

The Kid finally tried a piece of his steak, and made a face.

“What's the matter?” asked the Iceman.

“It's cold.”

The Iceman, who had been eating while they had been speaking, took the last bite of his own meal. “Pity,” he said. “You probably won't eat this well again for months.”

“You think she'll be coming after you?” asked the Kid, chewing on a piece of no-longer-warm meat.

“No,” said the Iceman. “I'm no more to her than an insect. No man is.”

“Good,” said the Kid. “Leave her to the Democracy, and let's worry about the Anointed One.”

“After twenty years, the Democracy still doesn't know what they're dealing with,” said the Iceman. “Besides, they think she's dead.”

“From the meteor?”

“Yes.”

“Well, who knows? Maybe they're right and you're wrong.”

“I'm not wrong!” said the Iceman angrily.

“Okay, you're not wrong,” said the Kid. “What do you plan to do about it?”

“Nothing,” said the Iceman. “Yet.”

“You're not going to go after her?”

“Go where?”

“So it's like I said: let's concentrate on stopping the Anointed One.”

“The Anointed One is nothing but a minor irritant,” said the Iceman.

“A minor irritant who's paid five men to kill you,” the Kid pointed out.

“Lomax will handle him,” said the Iceman, dismissing the subject. “Or at least he'll warn me if anyone else is coming after me. We have more important things to worry about.”

The Kid frowned. “Like what?”

The Iceman stared at him. “Haven't you heard a word I've said?” he demanded. “There is a monster loose in the galaxy, and no one else is aware of the threat she presents.” He paused. “I've got to find out where she is, what name she's using, how well protected she is.”

The Kid frowned in confusion. “I thought you just said you weren't going to go after her.”

“I'm not. She knows who I am, what I look like. I'd be dead before I could get anywhere near her.”

“Then what—?”

“Once I locate her, the next step is to find out what she's planning to do.” He stared at the Kid. “That's when I send you in.”

“Me?”

“You want to be a genuine Inner Frontier hero, don't you?” said the Iceman with a grim smile.

“Yeah,” said the Kid, suddenly excited. “Yeah, I do.”