* * *

You're supposed to have nightmares at night. I had mine the whole
next day. No, I wasn't a TK, Lefty had said. I was a PC. You
don't have anemia, Tex. It's leukemia!

I made a farce of trying to get some work done in the lab. After
letting the third test tube slip through my fingers and shatter
on the lab bench, I gave it up. How would you have acted if you
had gotten that kind of news? That first gut-twisting admission
that you really _may_ be a snake! Then sharp awareness of what it
means. A guillotine couldn't cut you off more sharply from Normal
humanity. But the spirit struggles and refuses to accept it. You
_can't_ be a snake!

"Take action!" I said aloud, getting a worried look from my lab
assistant, busy mopping up my last shattered culture. "Don't spin
around like this. Do _something_!"

I did the only thing I could think of, and dialed Shari at her
laboratory. She refused to accept the call at first. Finally she
tore herself away from a "delicate experiment" long enough to
look at me angrily in the screen.

"We don't have anything to say to each other," she said coldly.
"There are delicate experiments--"

"Can you test me for psi powers?" I interrupted.

"Whatever for?"

"To settle whether I have any," I snapped. "It's important to
me."

"Not necessary," she said. "Do you think I'd be successful in the
psi field if I weren't sensitive to this sort of thing? Don't
worry, Tex. You're a Normal."

"Thanks," I said. "So you've told me. Now prove it to my
satisfaction."

"We shut up shop at five o'clock," she said. "I'll be here for
about an hour after that. My dinner date isn't until seven."

"Bet he doesn't gamble," I said, trying to win a little sympathy.

"You _bet_ he doesn't" she sniffed.

Shari's laboratory was nothing more than a large windowless
office that could be cut into two sound-proof parts with a
movable partition. She had a whopper desk with full controls and
other evidences of academic pelf. On a table against the short
wall was her apparatus--if that's what you call decks of cards, a
roulette wheel, a set of Rhine ESP cards, several dice and, so
help me, a crystal ball.

* * * * *

Shari stood up behind her desk when I came in. It was something of a shock
to find that her colorful peasant getup was antiseptically sheathed in a
white laboratory coat. She was sure dressed for dirtier work than she would
ever have to do in t