"It's the most artful hallucination I've ever experienced," I granted. "This snake has weight, a cold feel and a scratchy scaliness. This new witch of yours really knows her stuff. I just would have thought..." I dribbled off, raising my shoulders. "Thought what, Lefty?" "Oh," I said. "That it was somehow beneath the dignity of the Grand Master to drag himself down here to the hospital just to add a little conviction to the hallucination. I mean, working up a big entrance, and all this pretense of your seeing a snake." His smile was a little weary. "Try a lift, Lefty," Maragon said. He had finally overplayed his hand. Hallucinations don't respond to telekinesis--there's nothing there to lift. I fixed on the rattler's crouching head and lifted. The TK jerked the S-shaped curve out of his neck. I could feel his coils fight my lift. At some moment there I must have gotten the point that _this_ snake was real. I guess I was screaming and shaking it from me for five minutes after Maragon had unwrapped the coils from my arm. "All right. All right. All right," I said to him, shaking my head. "So it had no fangs. You've still got me sold. I'll go to Nevada for you." I'd have gone clear to Hell to get away from that hallucinating witch he had working on me. I'd gotten used to hallucinations--but who can get used to the doubt that one of those dreadful visions is real? I'd had my lesson. * * * * * It served me right, of course. It had begun when Peno Rose had first visored me from Lake Tahoe. I had told him "No." Too busy, _much_ too busy, with TK surgery at Memorial Hospital. It didn't mean a thing to me that some cross-roader with plenty of TK was stealing the Sky Hi Club's casino blind. But Peno had known me from my days on the Crap Patrol, and wasn't much impressed that I'd reached the thirty-third degree. He'd gotten the Senior United States senator from Nevada to put heat on the Lodge. When Maragon first visored me on it, I simply refused to discuss it and switched off. That was the big mistake. I had an obligation to the Lodge for my TK training, and there was no honorable way I could turn my back on it. The Grand Master is a patient, if deadly, old goat, and he came after me in person. I'd just walked out of surgery, and was still in mask and gown. The surgeon who had done the cutting while I had put TK clamps on the inaccessible arteries was at my side, breathing a sigh of relief that the patient hadn't died on the table. He'd still die, I figured, but not on the table. I'd felt the fluttery rasp of his heart muscle as it had strained against my lift. He didn't have too long.