"Try it," Wally insisted. "What's on top?" I hit it. Then I missed it. Then I hit three in a row. It wasn't fast work, because Wally hid the cards under his desk after each guess, shuffled the two cards around and then laid them before me again. This went on for about twenty minutes. At that point Shari spoke. "That makes exactly three hundred tries," she said, looking at the counter in her hand. "Have you been keeping score, Mr. Bupp?" "I thought _you_ were." "So I was," she snapped, throwing up her tiaraed head. He sure brought out the worst in people. "Tex has been right exactly one hundred and fifty times. He's never been more than five tries to the good in the whole series." "Interesting," Wally said. I took my first decent breath in the day. "This ought to let me off the hook," I said to him. "Are you convinced?" He shrugged. "How about it, Milly?" he asked. "A random sample," she said. "He doesn't want to score. He didn't try." Shari was ready for that one. She turned and spoke to Milly: "You have ways of knowing what Tex was thinking?" she asked sweetly. "Yes." "Name any three!" Shari lashed at her furiously. The solid woman wasn't the least bit bowled over. "Read his mind," she said matter-of-factly. "Just like I can tell that you're getting ready to screech 'Charlatan!' at me, and like you think I got a cast-iron girdle and homely shoes. Well, they're comfortable, dearie, which is more than you can say for those high-heeled slippers of yours. That left little toe of yours is killing you, dearie!" Shari's lips moved, but her mouth was as empty of sound as her face was of blood. Milly had hit the bull's-eye. "Everybody relax a moment," Wally said. "Tell me, Dr. King, what's your attitude toward PC?" "I don't have any!" she snapped. "It's a phenomenon. I have as much attitude toward it as I do toward osmosis or toward peristalsis. None." "Would 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.