"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," I demanded. "Shari, is this a fair test?" She shrugged. "Why not?" "Is it gambling?" She smiled faintly, her first sign of relaxation. "Hardly," she said. "Then you don't mind if I win?" She found a laugh this time. "You can _try_," she corrected me. "This could be our nest egg," I said. [Illustration] She blushed. "If that's a proposal," she said tartly. "The answer is 'no.'" "I'll talk to you later," I growled. "When I'm richer!" I looked at the back of the card on the desk. Wally was leaning back in his swivel chair and wasn't within four feet of the pasteboards. If there was any hanky-panky, I couldn't see how he planned to work it. "Heart," I said. "Why don't you turn it over, Dr. King?" Wally suggested. "Remove any possible chance of manipulation." It was the two of hearts that Shari turned over. I was a thousand dollars richer. I won the next. And the next. My stomach tightened up. Every thousand dollars drove another nail into my coffin--went that much farther to prove I was a snake. Well, I wasn't! I missed the fourth one. "Cut that out!" Wally snapped at me. I jumped a foot. I _had_ tried to miss it. With a sickening realization of doom, I called the next four right. "Stop it!" Shari screeched, grabbing at the cards. "I'll shuffle!" she announced. She hid the pasteboards from me with her body, and took care, in putting them before me on the desk, that I didn't see the face of the bottom card.