"I know the Fifth," she said, "but how about the Fourth?" "Unreasonable and unwarranted search," I told her. "But isn't a man guilty when he's guilty?" "I wish it were as simple as that." "But why isn't it?" "Little Miss Wood, you are now asking me to solve an ethical question that's been unanswered for more than ten thousand years." I smiled wistfully. "I am not--repeat not--big enough to answer the following question: 'Shall a killer in the confessional, who has been given absolution by his God, subsequently be punished by his fellow man?'" "But what has that to do with it?" "Let's have _you_ answer one: 'Could you truly bare your secret soul to God if you suspected that some prying human being was taking it all down on a tape recorder?'" "No, I suppose not." "Then our 'Thought Police' would be standing as a human barrier between any man and his God." "I suppose so--but couldn't I _tell_?" "Tell?" "Tell whether someone was listening to my thoughts?" That was another stumper. Does the sign wear out any faster if it's read? Can the radio transmitter be measured to tell whether the broadcast has any audience? Does the tree that falls in the forest barren of animal life generate the same wave-motion as it would if all the leaves were replaced by active eardrums? There are lots of analogs, but are any of them valid? I said, "If I cry out, how can I know whether I am being heard?" And in my mind I made my own reply. I thought in deep concentration: "_How do you read me, Psi-man?_" The response was zero-zero. And it meant--nothing. My Psi-man could have been following my every thought from the moment that my ringing telephone summoned me to Gordon Andrews' apartment to the present instant, so far as I could tell. There was no feeling of intrusion, no feeling of _presence_. III Florence Wood giggled. "Going to stop the rain again, Captain Schnell?" The storm was still howling. In the near suburbs, the rain came in more gracefully draped sheets and the wind was not whirlpooled by the fluelike canyons between the buildings, but residential rainwater is just as wet per cubic centimeter as the metropolitan variety. "Maybe I should drive up over the lawn," I suggested. "Daddy would blow a fuse." "We might wait for it to let up." "I'd rather not," she said soberly. "It's one thing to be driven home in a strange car during a cloudburst, but it's something else to sit out here making it look as if I were paying off by making out." It came as a pleasant surprise that she did not consider me a superannuated gaffer, and it was her youth that allowed her to discuss parapsychic phenomena without the tongue-in-cheek attitude of the older know-it-alls. I considered Florence Wood and realized that she was at least old enough so that I wouldn't be jugged for cradle-robbing so long as I had a parental acceptance. And I did want someone to talk out the business of psionics without having someone wind me in a sheet and ship me to a shrinker.