The Project Gutenberg EBook of Vigorish, by Gordon Randall Garrett

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Title: Vigorish

Author: Gordon Randall Garrett

Release Date: January 21, 2008 [EBook #24382]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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VIGORISH

By WALTER BUPP

Illustrated by Petrizzo

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science
Fiction June 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

_If it "takes a thief to catch a thief" ... what does it take to
catch a psi-gifted thief?_

What do you hate and fear the most? I know a girl who gags and throws up
at the mere sight of a bird. Poor kid, when she was a barefoot moppet
she stepped on a fledgling robin in the grass. She hasn't gotten over
the squish of it yet.

Birds don't trouble me. I can look at them all day. It takes snakes to
give me the green shudders. I hate them.

She was getting better at them, I decided. This was the fourth one since
breakfast and the roughest-looking of the lot. It was a diamondback
rattler, and lay coiled on the rug at my feet. I turned my swivel chair
slowly back to my desk and riveted my eyes to the blotter. Snakes are
ghastly things. But there was no future in letting them shake me up.

I bent over in my swivel chair and swung my left arm like a flail just
below this rattler's raised head. He struck at me, but late, and missed.
The swipe I took at him should have swept him over, but he got his coils
around me. When I heaved back up straight before my desk, he was as
neatly wrapped around my forearm as a Western Union splice.

Enough of his tail was free to make that buzz that means "Look out!"
About a foot of his business end stood up off my arm. His forked tongue
flicked out over his horny lip, pink and dainty.

"Now, vanish!" I said to the snake. It didn't. Instead the door to my
office opened, letting in a lit