he squeezed his trigger and the
tiny dart leaped unseen across the crap layout. My lift had been way
off--it should have thrown the stick toward the ceiling, where no one
would have been hurt. Instead it merely twitched the crap-stick, and the
dart struck Pheola in the left hand. She screeched a little and grabbed
at the needle-prick with her fingernails.

You never know how much power there is in Psi until you use it without
restraint. I threw the crowd back away from us with a lift that nearly
blacked me out, and had Pheola on the wet boards of the floor before
she could blink. She had only seconds to live unless I blocked all
circulation to and from her arm. I found the spots in her armpit and
lifted the veins and arteries into a complete block.

A whiff of garlic told me that Simonetti had reached the table. He'd
been watching on the TV monitor, of course. He knelt down beside us.

"A doctor, quick," I said. "She's been pinked with nerve poison."

"She's gone, then," he said huskily. "Who done it?"

"Fowler Smythe," I said bitterly. "A snake within the Lodge. You might
try to stop him. But your partner, Rose, is the real crook. Get the doc,
then tie up Rose."

"She's gone," he insisted. "Nerve poison kills right now."

"He's right, Billy Joe," Pheola said softly. "I'm going numb all over."

"What did I tell you?" Simonetti husked at me. I had enough left to hit
him sharply over the temples with a lift. "A doctor. With antidote," I
snapped. He trotted away.

"Darlin' Billy!" she said, and her heart stopped. She was dead. I picked
her up in my arms and carried her to the same sawdust-strewn private
dining room where I'd given Barney the Blackout.

I had to split the lift. The tourniquet was an absolute necessity, or
more of the nerve poison would enter her system. But her heart
_couldn't_ stop. The brain can only stand a few seconds of that. I
hadn't let it miss three beats. Even as I carried her from the casino, I
lifted the main coronary muscle and started a ragged pumping, maybe
forty beats a minute. Once in the smaller room I began artificial
respiration with my mouth.

The sawbones was there in three minutes. I guided the tip of his
hypodermic into a vein in her right arm, the one that still had blood
coursing through it. He depressed the piston, pumping the antidote into
her bloodstream. Little by little I let up on the clamp on her wounded
left arm, dribbling the poisoned blood into her system, so t