," I demanded. "Shari, is this a fair test?"

She shrugged. "Why not?"

"Is it gambling?"

She smiled faintly, her first sign of relaxation. "Hardly," she
said.

"Then you don't mind if I win?"

She found a laugh this time. "You can _try_," she corrected me.

"This could be our nest egg," I said.

[Illustration]

She blushed. "If that's a proposal," she said tartly. "The answer
is 'no.'"

"I'll talk to you later," I growled. "When I'm richer!"

I looked at the back of the card on the desk. Wally was leaning
back in his swivel chair and wasn't within four feet of the
pasteboards. If there was any hanky-panky, I couldn't see how he
planned to work it.

"Heart," I said.

"Why don't you turn it over, Dr. King?" Wally suggested. "Remove
any possible chance of manipulation." It was the two of hearts
that Shari turned over. I was a thousand dollars richer.

I won the next. And the next. My stomach tightened up. Every
thousand dollars drove another nail into my coffin--went that
much farther to prove I was a snake. Well, I wasn't!

I missed the fourth one.

"Cut that out!" Wally snapped at me. I jumped a foot. I _had_
tried to miss it.

With a sickening realization of doom, I called the next four
right.

"Stop it!" Shari screeched, grabbing at the cards. "I'll
shuffle!" she announced. She hid the pasteboards from me with her
body, and took care, in putting them before me on the desk, that
I didn't see the face of the bottom card.

Her eyes were violet pools of hate and rage and she spoke to me:
"_Now_ try it!"

"Spade!" That made eight straight.

Even Shari succumbed to the ghastly fascination of it. There had
been fifty thousand dollars in the stack of bills Wally had taken
from his desk. Soon all fifty of the bills were stacked in front
of me. Except for the one time I had tried to, I had never
missed.

Lefty stuck his sharp chin at Shari. "I'd call that a fairly
convincing string," he said. "Will you concede, Dr. King?"

She gave him an awful mouthful of silence. A pitiless blackness
descended over my spirit. I looked at the money in front of me.
It had been like selling my soul to the Devil. There it was, all
that money. All I'd had to give up was any claim to being a
human--I wasn't a Normal any more. I was a psi!

Then Shari was talking, in short gasping bursts, half choking,
half sobbing. "No wonder Tex is in a whirl," she said. "I've seen
some good illusions, worked by the best light-f