ways of knowing what Tex was thinking?" she asked sweetly.

"Yes."

"Name any three!" Shari lashed at her furiously. The solid woman wasn't the least bit bowled over.

"Read his mind," she said matter-of-factly. "Just like I can tell that you're getting ready to screech 'Charlatan!' at me, and like you think I got a cast-iron girdle and homely shoes. Well, they're comfortable, dearie, which is more than you can say for those high-heeled slippers of yours. That left little toe of yours is killing you, dearie!"

Shari's lips moved, but her mouth was as empty of sound as her face was of blood. Milly had hit the bull's-eye.

"Everybody relax a moment," Wally said. "Tell me, Dr. King, what's your attitude toward PC?"

"I don't have any!" she snapped. "It's a phenomenon. I have as much attitude toward it as I do toward osmosis or toward peristalsis. None."

"Would you consider a person fortunate to possess the power of precognition?" Wally asked her.

Shari's head came up. "If there were such a thing," she said, much more quietly. "Yes. I should imagine that precognition would be a powerful talent."

"If you have no emotional bias against psi as such," he went on smoothly, "you'd be happy for Tex if he were a PC."

Her eyebrows drew together. She looked at me, veiling her violet eyes as if to hide her thoughts from us. "I would consider Tex quite fortunate. But only if you could show that such a thing really existed," she said more loudly.

"How about you, Tex?" Wally asked me.

"Nuts," I said. "You can't make me like the idea of being a snake, no matter how you dress it up." I shook my head. "Psi powers are the mark of a diseased mind, for my dough. They're pure poison. What have they ever done for you?" I insisted rudely.

"Made me a surgeon," he said.

"Never!" Shari said hotly.

"Ask Tex," Wally suggested. "He felt me put a lift on his coronary artery. I'm a TK surgeon—I've got enough TK to put clamps on inaccessible arteries and feel out mechanical disorders of the body. Check it. I'm on the staff at Universal Hospital."

"And what are you doing here?" she argued.

"Meeting my obligation to the Lodge," he said. "This is where I got my training, right in this building."

"I thought that brownstone house was the Lodge," I said.

"No," he said. "That's just the Grand Master's residence. The Lodge provides quarters for its brass. This building is the real chapter house."

He heaved a long sigh and dug into his drawer again. "You can beat it, Milly," he said. "Thanks."

"I know," she told him from the door. She had started out long before he spoke. Impressive stuff, but it got a sniff from Shari.

What Wally got out of his desk had a refreshing shape and color. It was oblong. It was green. It was money. It was, for a fact, a stack of one thousand dollar bills.

Wally shuffled the two cards under his desk again and piled them two-deep in front of Shari and me.

"You heard what Dr. King said," Wally reminded me. "She'll love you no less for being a PC. Now we'll play the game a little more realistically. Every time you guess the top card right, Tex, I'm going to give you a thousand dollars. No strings attached. When you miss, you give one back. But if you have none to give, you don't have to pay. You can't lose. Maybe you can win. All set?"

"One minute," I demanded. "Shari, is this a fair test?"

She shrugged. "Why not?"

"Is it gambling?"

She smiled faintly, her first sign of relaxation. "Hardly," she said.

"Then you don't mind if I win?"

She found a laugh this time. "You can try," she corrected me.

"This could be our nest egg," I said.