"And stop telling people we're going to get married!"

She didn't answer that, so I let myself out and went to my own apartment, sizzling.

The phone was ringing as I came in, and I walked over to press the "Accept" button. The screen lit up to show me a lined and wrinkled face framed in scraggling hair streaked with gray.

"Hello, Evaleen," I said to her.

"This is dynamite," she said in a graveyard tone. "In the gym, in about ten minutes?"

I could feel my eyebrows rise. "Sure," I said, and before I could foolishly ask her what it was all about, she cut the image.

It isn't that our phones are tapped. Maragon doesn't need that. But in a building full of telepaths, any conversation is going to be peeped if you carry it on long enough. And who can keep his mind closed while he's talking? It's hard enough when you're silent.

I rode directly down to twenty and let myself into the locker room. By the time I had changed into my gym suit, Evaleen Riley's ten minutes had elapsed, and I went into the gym.

If she wanted to be careful about our conversation there was no point going directly to wherever she was working out, so I wandered.

There was the usual dozen or so TK's there practicing with the weights, as well as twice as many who thought they were TK's trying to get the milligram weights to wiggle. About half of them were clustered around one table where a member from one of the other chapters was showing off by heaving at a two hundred and fifty gram weight. He was seated in the classic position, his elbows on the table, his fingers supporting his temples, and was concentrating fiercely on the weight.

He wasn't really up to it. I could see sweat starting from his brow as I watched him over the heads of the others at the table. Suddenly he dropped back, exhausted.

"Not tonight, Josephine!" he gasped. The man at his right, another stranger, chuckled, reached over to touch the weight with his finger tips and then TK'd it cleanly off the Formica. It was nice work, for a middleweight.

I looked in at a couple other workouts before wandering over to where Evaleen sat by herself in a corner. She was concentrating on a series of pith balls the size of peas that weighed from a tenth of a gram up. She was 

 Prev. P 8/30 next