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CHOSEN Submitted for your approval: Vince Hansen, a man at the end of his rope. He's lost his job, his girl, his self-respect-and, as we first meet him, his credit cards. The world is not a place that treats him kindly, but he's determined to get his life back on track... if only the odds didn't seem so stacked against him. So when a GQ-type couple named Michael and Muriel show up like insistent Jehovah's Witnesses at his door one day, telling him he's "chosen," Vince tells them to get lost-even though they seem to know far too much about him... But later, when people in his neighborhood-like his best friend, Speed-start disappearing in a blaze of light, and his ex-girlfriend tells him he should join them, Vince starts to suspect Michael and Muriel might be part of an alien invasion. He'swrong, though-they're actually angels sent to save the "chosen" from the nuclear Armageddon about to happen. Vince discovers the truth too late; however-and is left behind to await the end of the world. THE PLACEBO EFFECT Dr. Leslie Coburn is the living embodiment of the term "caregiver": knowledgeable, kindhearted, understanding. But even she has her limits when it comes to treating Harry Raditch, a textbook case of a hypochondriac if ever there was one. Unfortunately, Harry's latest visit to her office involves an incurable disease he's actually contracted-from reading a science-fiction novel, of all things. It seems that Harry's overactive imagination has turned a fictional ailment into an all-too-real plague that threatens to wipe out everyone on the planet. Leslie's solution is to cure Harry's fictional disease with an equally fictional cure-a placebo created from the residue of "meteors" that she says crashed during the night. The cure works, but Harry gets so worked up about the talk of meteors that his imagination works overtime in manifesting his worst fear: an Earth ravaged by meteor strikes-and the onset of a new Ice Age. . . ..
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