No, in these days of mental telepathy and extra sensory perception, crumbs do not erase other crumbs. They just grab some citizen and put him in a box until he is ready to do their dirty work for them. Guilt? That would be mine. A crime is a crime and the guy who does it is a criminal, no matter how he justifies his act of violence. The truth? Any court mentalist who waded through that pair of unwashed minds would find no evidence of any open deal with Steve Hammond. Sure, he would find violence there, but the Court is more than well aware of the fact that thinking of an act of violence is not illegal. This Rhine training has been too recent to get the human race trained into the niceties of polite mental behavior. Sure, they’d get a few months or maybe a few years for breaking and entering as well as assault, but after all, they were friends of Rambaugh and this might well be a matter of retaliation, even though they thought Rambaugh was an incompetent bungler. So if Steve Hammond believed that he could go free with a whole hand by planning to rub out a man named Scarmann, that would be Steve Hammond’s crime, not theirs. They didn’t take any chances, even though I knew that they could read my mind well enough to know that I would go through with their nasty little scheme. They hustled Martha into the kitchen, chair and all, and one of them stood there with my paring knife touching her soft throat enough to indent the skin but not enough to draw blood. The other rat untaped me and stood me on my feet. I hurt all over from the pasting I’d taken, so I took a boiling shower and dressed leisurely. The guy handed me my forty-five, all loaded, as I came out of the bathroom. The other bird hadn’t moved a muscle out in the kitchen. His knife was still pressing against Martha’s throat. He was still standing pat when I passed out of esper range on the street below. In pre-Rhine days, a citizen in my pinch would holler for the cops because he couldn’t be sure that the crooks would keep their end of the bargain. But Rhine training has produced a real "Honor Among Thieves" so that organized crime can run as fast as organized justice. If I kept my end and they didn’t keep theirs, the word would get around from their own dirty minds that they couldn’t keep a bargain. Well, I was going to keep mine for the same reason, even though I am not a thief. That’s the way it’s done these days. You get a good esper like me to knock off a sharp mental operator like Scarmann. The trouble was that I didn’t really want Scarmann, I wanted that pair of mental sadists up in my apartment who were holding a knife against Martha’s throat. I wanted them, and I wanted Martha Franklin’s skin to be happily whole. And if I crossed them now, the only guys that wouldn’t play ball with me in the future would be the crooks. Them I could do without. So if they figured that an esper could take a mental like Scarmann, why couldn’t an esper take the pair of them?