Like the many thousand million in the System, Fred referred to the President familiarly as Jake, but he never thought he would get to talk to him, or be talked to personally. "What did he want to talk to me for?" Fred asked, dazed. "That's what I want to show you," said Dr. Sprinnell. "You understood what the President said about keeping this entirely confidential?" "Hell, no one would believe it if I said I'd been talking to the President, anyway." "That's what we figure," said the doctor, smiling slightly. He picked up a pack of cards and flipped five of them onto the desk, a circle, a cross, two wavy lines, a rectangle and a star. "These are Zener cards, Fred. Ever see them before?" No, but they didn't look like much. This was cockeyed, the whole situation--having the President call him so that he and a quack could play cards. "It will be clearer in a little while," Dr. Howard Sprinnell said. "But first we must run this little check. Please point to one of these cards every minute when I say 'now.'" Fred shifted himself in the high chair and pointed to one of the five cards obediently every minute. After twenty minutes, the doctor increased the rate. He noted every selection. "Last lap now, Fred." He was sick of this, but it was better than sitting in the apartment with Elsie. Fred pointed to a card for the last time. "And now," the doctor said, standing up and feeding his notations into a machine in the corner of the room, "we have here the results." He pulled a tape from the machine as it purred out, and showed it to Fred. It was a score of some sort. "In another room," Dr. Howard Sprinnell explained, "we have a synchronized telepath trying to influence your selections of these cards. If you have psi qualities, Fred, these results will show how high they are. If you have none, then your chances of picking the right card are one in five. That goes for picking the card ahead of the right one, or behind it, or two ahead and so on. In other words, if the cards had been selected here by a machine instead of you, we would expect twenty per cent of the answers to be right, by sheer chance--or statistical probability, to put it more accurately." "So how did I do? Am I a mind-reader? That would make me laugh." * * * * * The doctor glanced at the result tape he was holding. "You have the results we want," he said. "Otherwise I would not tell you this. You would be thanked, given a reward, made a fuss of by some civil servant of prominence and sent home in style." He looked up at Fred in the dentist's chair. "Do you remember that contest in the _Sunday News_?"