id. "Were you?"

"You think I _want_ to be a psi?" I demanded. I told her all that
had happened the night before from the time Lefty had accused me
of being a snake until he had let me out of the brownstone house
and warned me against gambling.

Guess how Shari reacted. A big nothing!

* * * * *

"Well?" I asked, as she sat silent with her elbows on the edge of
her desk and her chin propped up on her knuckles.

"You're really quite naive, aren't you, Tex?" she asked me. "Let
me give you an objective statement of what happened to you last
night."

She counted these things off on her fingers: "You won some money
at poker. A gambler said you used TK to win. He took your
winnings, and then some, away from you as the price of silence.
He warned you not to gamble any more. He claimed he was part of
an organization of psi personalities. Is that a fair statement?"

"Except for one thing," I said. "He used his psi powers on me in
a pretty dramatic fashion."

"Try Occam's razor," she suggested.

She was getting insulting. "All right," I growled, feeling my
face get red. "Prefer the simpler explanation, if you can find
one. I was prodded in the back, both in the alley and in the
office at the brownstone house. Something hit me in the gut and
tripped me up. I had a heart seizure. What's simpler than TK in
accounting for the fact this was done without a soul around?"

"I suppose I shouldn't be critical of you," she said. "It's not
your field and you haven't been exposed to the lengths to which
charlatans go, just to prove they are supermen. The simpler
explanation is that there _was_ someone else in the alley,
carefully dressed in dull black to stay invisible in the
darkness. The second prodding of a gun in your spine was pure
suggestion--you'd been so well-sold by that time you were ready
to believe anything."

"And my heart attack?"

"I can think of ten poisons that would give you the symptoms,"
Shari said. "And don't tell me you let nothing pass your lips!"
she burst out hotly as I started to speak. "I suppose you've
never had a spray hypodermic? You'd never have felt it. Don't
you see why they went to all this trouble?"

"Honestly," I said. "I can't. I'm simply not that important to
anyone in the world."

"You're not," she said dryly. "But your eight thousand dollars
was. I'd say if people can steal that much money and convince the
victim he shouldn't go to the police, it was w