Keys was openmouthed. "What a bruiser!" he marveled.
"So I've got the Stigma, Elmer," I said quietly. "Now why won't you do
what I tell you?"
"Ah don't do what _anybody_ tells me!"
"What do you hate and fear the most?" I asked him.
"Snakes, ah reckon," he decided.
"Show him a snake, Mary," I said. Her face twisted in indecision. I
rammed a lift in under her heart--I know it hurt her. "Show him!" I
snapped.
Elmer didn't jump more than three feet. Mary gave all of us the same
hallucination. Her first try was a pretty sad kind of a snake, but it
was bigger than the nine-by-twelve rug it squirmed on, and was making
right for Elmer's legs, hissing in a horrible fashion.
"Enough," I said. "That's how, Elmer. And if that doesn't trouble you,
how about this?" I gave him a sample of what TK means when it's
clamped on the mitral valve. A heart attack is no joking matter, and
just before he hit the deck I eased off.
"Now," I said, "will you do what I tell you, or do I have to kill you
outright?"
He sank down to his knees, resting his palms on the carpet so recently
vacant of illusory snake. "Yo' got me convinced, suh," he admitted.
"No mo', you hear?"
"Any more protests?" I said. I got none. "Here's what we have to do,"
I went on, and spelled it out for them. At last they were ready to go,
three shaken young people. "I repeat--absolute secrecy--none of you is
a telepath, so only your 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 Court. And you know
as well as I do they can't hire a Psi attorney--the Bar Association
has taken care of that. They came to me because...."
"Yes, yes," he interrupted, taking his eyes off his nails, and showing
some real interest at last. "If you only knew how much I want to
believe you, Maragon. But I will never believe that Psis would permit
themselves to be represented by a Normal. Too bad, but the social
workers, and not your mythical Lodge, will get Mary Hall. That or a
Federal Grand Jury."
Well, this was the fork in the road, I had been kidding myself, and
now I knew it. Persist in my masquerade as a Normal, and I'd never get
Mary off the hook. But reveal myself as a Psi, and I was through as an
attorney. It really wasn't much of a decision--I had made it when I
revealed myself to Keys, Mary and Elmer.
I looked at the humidor of tobacco on his desk. Without changing
expression, I aimed a lift at it. The container came up smoothly from
the polished walnut and hovered in the air before us.
Passarelli looked at it blandly. I don't think anything in my life has
ever been a greater shock than his unconcern. He should have dropped
his teeth. Slowly I let the lift break, and lowered the humidor to his
desk.
"Fairly good TK, if that's all you're capable of," Passarelli said.
"Or can you do better, Maragon?"
"You slimy Normal!" I exploded. "You _tricked_ me into exposing
myself!"
"What am I, an idiot?" he snapped. "I had to know."