hat the
antidote could react with it gradually. She stayed unconscious.

Then I felt it. Her heart muscle tugged back at my lift. It was
struggling to beat on its own. I matched my lifts to its ragged
impulses, feeling it steady to a normal seventy-two as the antidote took
effect.

Her eyes opened at last, and we stopped respiration. "Billy Joe!" she
smiled. She was back from the dead.

* * * * *

In an hour we had returned to the motel. She was as good as new, but
badly shaken.

"I still don't know what happened," she said.

I shrugged. "Smoke screen, Pheola. Every time there's a run of luck on a
crap table, somebody yells 'TK!' And I suppose there's a number of TK's
who aren't in the Lodge, and who figure to make a killing here and a
killing there by tipping the dice. But any decent TK, even a Fowler
Smythe, can spot them.

"There was TK in this, but not tipping dice. Smythe is a skunk. He's no
Twenty-fifth, or he wouldn't have any need to go crooked. He saw a
chance to make a killing. He suggested it to Rose, who fell for it and
went along. Rose decided to steal Simonetti's half of the business from
his partner with Smythe's help. It was no more complicated than
smuggling thousand dollar bills off the table in false bottoms of trays
that drinks were being served on. Smythe was using TK to lift the bills
into those false bottoms, well screened by the trays from the TV
monitors. Barney was in on it, of course. And after the joint had lost
enough dough that way, Rose and Simonetti would have had to sell out.
Only the buyer would have been a dummy for Rose and Smythe, using money
Smythe had lifted off the tables.

"The whole TK business was just a smoke screen to keep matters
confused," I concluded.

"How come they dared send for a TK like you? Why weren't they scared
you'd catch them, just like you did?"

"It took a little more than TK," I reminded her. "TK is just a power,
one more ability in life. It doesn't make you God. Once in a while it
gives you a little more vigorish than the other guy has, that's all. And
sometimes it's not enough."

"But you had enough vigorish to catch them," she pointed out.

"In a way," I said. "I told them TK wasn't enough--that it would take
precognition. And I don't have PC. I had to bring a PC with me. You,
Pheola. That's why I'm alive. Smythe would have killed me with that dart
gun of his. _You_ were my vigorish!"

We rode the 'copter to