d 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