r lips can give you away if you keep your
thoughts screened around TP's. Later that may change--the Lodge is
preparing to come a little more into the open with Psis."

My whole membership nodded and left me. I was shaking from head to
foot.

* * * * *

We had things to do in the forenoon, and I didn't try to see His Honor
Judge Vito Passarelli until after lunch. But the docket was crowded,
and there was no chance until after court had adjourned, which was
well on toward four o'clock. His Honor was hanging his robes on a
clothes-tree as I came into his Chambers, and he nodded me politely to
a chair, just as if our last words hadn't been pretty heated.

"Mary Hall?" he asked, fumbling around to find his in-Chambers
glasses. He's too vain to wear them on the bench.

I nodded an answer to his question as he came back to take a creaky
horse-hair swivel, relic of more judges and years than I like to think
about. "I'm here as her counsel," I said.

"What else?" he asked mildly, taking the lid off a big humidor on his
desk and starting to fill a pipe.

"We'd like you to know that Mary has joined an organization that
should do for her all that the social workers would like to see done
for her. She's no longer a behavior problem for Normal society."

"Quite some organization," he said, showing interest. "What one?"

"It has no formal name," I said. "Being a secret organization. In
point of fact, it's an organization of Psis that is revealing itself
for the first time."

"Odd that I never heard of it," Passarelli said, looking at his
fingernails. He puffed smoke around the stem of his pipe. His coolness
bothered me. He should have been much more excited about what I was
saying. I threw my high hard one.

"This organization exercises a formidable discipline over its
members," I went on. "One of its firm rules is that no Psi may use his
powers to the detriment of a Normal."

He chuckled softly. "You're taking advantage of what I told you
yesterday, Maragon," he said calmly. "You know, and I know, that Psis
have never done any such thing. And if they had, why would they pick
you to run their errands? What Psi would ever trust a Normal?"

It was getting sticky. I was skating perilously close to the
brink--once I revealed to a Normal that I had the Stigma, my days as
an attorney were done. "This organization--I'll call it the Lodge, if
I may--has to have an attorney to represent it in Cour