was as much
screwed up as the part I had heard so far, I decided, I might get out
with a whole skin at that.

That was my attempt at consolation--that and an order of sweet-breads,
Financiere, which is a ridiculous dish for a sawed-off shyster tending
toward overweight.

I was back in the law library by ten minutes of eight, trying to
occupy my mind with the latest _Harvard Law Review_, when the 'phone
rang. Keys' face, a little tight-lipped and bright-eyed, peered at me
from the screen, which it completely filled. He must have darned near
swallowed the 'scope.

"Ready?" he asked softly.

"Sure. You picking me up?"

His lip curled in half a smile. "What do I look like?" he sneered.
"Grab a cab. You know a bar called the Moldy Fig?" I nodded. "That's
where." He cut the image.

Well, this was more like it. You can't deal with Psis without the
whole affair acting like something out of E. Phillips Oppenheim. I
closed up the office, turned out the ceiling, and rode the elevator
down to the street.

The night howled and shrieked with air-borne traffic. A hot-rodding
kid gunned his fans up the street a way and ripped what silence might
have remained to the night into shreds as he streaked past me. The
jerk wasn't forty feet off the ground, and was pouring the coal to his
turbine. The whine of his impellers sounded a strong down-Doppler as
his ripped past me, nose dropped a good thirty degrees and dragging
every knot he could get out of his 'copter.

I waved to a cab standing at the rank up the block a way and watched
the skim-copter rise a couple inches off the ground as the hacker
skimmed on the ground-cushion toward me. City grit cut at my ankles
from the air blast before I could hop into the bubble and give him my
destination. He looked the question at me hopefully, over his
shoulder, his hand on the arm of his meter.

"Oh, what the hell," I said, still sore at the world, and a little
worried about what I was trying to do. "Let's 'copter!" He grinned and
swung the arm over to the "fly" position with its four-times-higher
rate. His turbine screamed to a keener pitch with wide throttle, and
he climbed full-bore into the down-town slow lane.

* * * * *

The swift ride down to the Village was long enough to induce that odd
motion-hypnosis so common in night flight over a metropolitan area.
The dizzy blur of red and green running lights from air-borne traffic
at levels above and be