ounded by
a fence of fingers.

"How many?" he asked.

I shrugged. "The whole stack, Smythe," I told him. His eyebrows went
halfway up his tall, tall forehead. But he put them all down on the bar
top, about twenty-five silver dollars. "Show me," I said.

He ran his fingertips down the side of the stack of silver. Another
tactile. Well, he certainly wasn't much of a perceptive, or he would
have been able to handle the Blackout himself. He closed his eyes for
the hard lift. Some do that. The coins came up off the mahogany an inch
or so, and made a solid smack when the lift broke and he dropped them
back. Not very impressive work for a Twenty-fifth degree. The coins
spilled over.

* * * * *

I used the excuse of straightening up the stack to get a touch, myself.
I could have done it visually, of course, or I could have straightened
them up with TK, but touch helps my grip. I took a good look at the door
to the main casino, a heavy job of varnished native cedar. Just to show
him, I turned my back on the bar, leaning against it with one foot on
the brass rail. The lift was as clean as I've ever managed. Anger, fear,
any strong emotion, is a big help. They came up all together, staying in
a stack, and I could perceive that they hung in the air behind me, a
good foot clear of the bar, and about twenty feet from the door to the
casino. In a smug show of control, I dealt the cartwheels off the top of
the stack, one at a time, and fired them hard. Each one snapped away
from the hovering stack, like a thrown discus. My perception was of the
best. Each coin knifed into the soft cedar of the door, burying itself
about halfway. My best sustained lift, I suppose is about two hundred
times the weight of a silver dollar. But with the lift split by the need
to keep the stack together, about twenty gees was all the shove I gave
the cartwheels. Still, you might figure out how fast those cartwheels
were traveling after moving twenty feet across the bar at an
acceleration of twenty gees.

Smythe gasped. I doubted he had ever seen better, even in the controlled
conditions of Lodge Meeting. "A little something to remember me by," I
said, as I opened the silver-studded door. "Now let's see the boss."

"You're a TK bruiser," he said, impressed. "If you hit Barney's eyes
like that, he's a Blind Tom for fair."

"Hardly," I sniffed. "You ought to know that no respectable TK would lay
a lift on a retina. I jus