t me on the noggin and put me out, and then I'd be cold when
that cigarette fell into the gunpowder and ruined my hand.

I made myself a firm, solid promise that if, as, and when I got out of
this fix I would find Scarmann, shove the nose of my automatic down his
throat through his front teeth and empty the clip out through the top of
his head.

Then the hotboy behind me lifted the cigarette from my fingers very gently
and squibbed it out in the ashtray, and I got the pitch.

This is the way it is done in these enlightened days. Rhine Institute and
the special talents that Rhine developed should and could have made the
world a better, brighter place to live in. But I've heard it said and had
it proved that the minute someone comes up with something good, there are
a lot of buzzards who turn it bad and make it a foul, rotten medium for
their lousy way of life.

No, in these days of mental telepathy and extra sensory perception, crumbs
do not erase other crumbs. They just grab some citizen and put him in a
box until he is ready to do their dirty work for them.

Guilt? That would be mine. A crime is a crime and the guy who does it is a
criminal, no matter how he justifies his act of violence.

The truth? Any court mentalist who waded through that pair of unwashed
minds would find no evidence of any open deal with Steve Hammond. Sure, he
would find violence there, but the Court is more than well aware of the
fact that thinking of an act of violence is not illegal. This Rhine
training has been too recent to get the human race trained into the
niceties of polite mental behavior. Sure, they'd get a few months or maybe
a few years for breaking and entering as well as assault, but after all,
they were friends of Rambaugh and this might well be a matter of
retaliation, even though they thought Rambaugh was an incompetent bungler.

So if Steve Hammond believed that he could go free with a whole hand by
planning to rub out a man named Scarmann, that would be Steve Hammond's
crime, not theirs.

They didn't take any chances, even though I knew that they could read my
mind well enough to know that I would go through with their nasty little
scheme. They hustled Martha into the kitchen, chair and all, and one of
them stood there with my paring knife touching her soft throat enough to
indent the skin but not enough to draw blood. The other rat untaped me and
stood me on my feet.

I hurt all over from the pasting I'd taken, s