"We will shortly do that," E. B. Black promised. "Are the killers of my colleague, Wade Hawthorne, among the dead?"

"Yes," Joe Schilling said.

"A relief," E. B. Black said. "Give us your location and we will send someone out to undertake whatever dispositionary chores are necessary."

Pete gave him the information.

"That's that," Schilling said, as the screen faded. He did not know how to feel. Had they done the right thing? We will know before very long, he said to himself. Together, they walked back to the motel room, neither of them saying anything.

"If they get us," Pete said, pausing at the door of the room, "I still say we did the best we could. You can't know everything. This is all—" He gestured. "Blurred and twisting, people and things merging back and forth into each other. Maybe I haven't recovered from last night."

Joe Schilling said, "Pete, 1 saw the Game-players of Titan. It was enough."

"What should we do?" Pete said.

"Get Pretty Blue Fox back into being."

"And then what?"

Joe Schilling said, "Play."

"Against?"

"The Titanian Game-players," Joe Schilling said. "We have to; they're not going to give us any choice."

Together, they re-entered the motel room.

As they flew back to San Francisco, Mary Anne said faintly, "I don't feel their control over me as strongly as I did. It's waned."

Mutreaux glanced at her. "Let's hope so." He looked utterly tired. "I preview," he said to Pete Garden, "your efforts to get your group restored. Want to know the outcome?"

"Yes," Pete said.

"The police will grant it. By tonight you'll be a legal Game-playing body again, as before. You will meet at your

condominium apartment in Carmel and plan your strategy. At this point there is a division into parallel futures. They hinge in a disputed fact. Whether your group permits you to bring Mary Anne McClain in as a new Game-playing Bindman."

"What are the two futures branching from that?" Pete asked.

"I can see the one without her very clearly. Let's simply say it's not good. The other—it's blurred because Mary is a variable and can't be previewed within causal frameworks; she introduces the acausal principle of synchronicity." Mutreaux was silent a moment. "I think, on the basis of what I preview, I would advise you to make the attempt to bring her into the group. Even though it's illegal."

"That's right," Joe Schilling said, nodding. "It's strictly against the bylaws of Bluff-playing entities. No Psi of any description can be admitted. But our antagonists aren't non-Psi humans; they're Titans and telepaths. I see her value. With her in our group the telepath factor is balanced. Otherwise, they hold an absolute advantage." He recalled the alteration in the card which he had drawn, its change from twelve to eleven. We couldn't win against that, he realized. And even with Mary—

"I should be admitted, too, if possible," Mutreaux said. "Although, again, legally I'm also admissible. Pretty Blue Fox must be made to comprehend the issues involved, what the stakes are this time. It's not just an exchange of property deeds, not a competition among Bindmen to see who's top man. It's our old struggle with an enemy, renewed after all these years. If it ever ceased in the first place."

"It never did cease," Mary Anne spoke up. "We knew that, the people in our organization. Whether we were vugs or Terrans; we agreed on that."

"What can you see us obtaining from E. B. Black and the police power?" Pete asked Mutreaux.

"I preview a meeting between the Area Commissioner, U. S. Cummings, and E. B. Black. But I can't seem to foresee the outcome. There is something which U. S. Cummings is involved in that introduces another variable. I wonder. U. S. Cummings may be an extremist. What is it called?"

"The Wa Pei Nan," Joe Schilling said. "That's what E. B. Black called it." He had never heard the words before the vug detective had said them; he rolled them around in his mind, trying to get the flavor of them. But they were impenetrable, shut tight to him. He gave up. He could not imagine what such a party was like or how it felt to belong to it.

I can't empathize with them, he realized. And that's bad because if we can't put ourselves in their places we can't predict what they're going to do. Even with the use of our pre-cog.

He did not feel very confident. However, he did not tell that to the people in the car with him.

Soon, he thought, we—the augmented Game-playing group Pretty Blue Fox—will make our first move against the Titanians. We'll have, perhaps, the help of Mutreaux and Mary Anne McClain; will that be enough? Mutreaux can't see, and no one can count on Mary Anne, as Doctor Philip-son pointed out. And yet he was glad they had her. Without Mary Anne, he thought caustically, Pete and I would be back there at that motel, in the middle of the Nevada Desert. Sitting in on Titanian strategy.

I'll be glad to contribute title deeds to both of you," Pete said to Mary Anne and Dave Mutreaux. "Mary, you can have San Rafael. Mutreaux, you can have San Anselmo. Those will bring you to the table. I hope."

No one spoke; no one felt optimistic enough to.

"How do you bluff?" Pete said, "against telepaths?"

It was a good question. It was, in fact, the question on which everything depended.

And none of them could answer it. They can't alter the values of the cards we draw, Schilling said to himself, because we've got Mary Anne to exert a contra-pressure stabilizing them as we hold them. But—

"If we can develop a strategy," Pete said, "we'll need the collective minds of everyone in Pretty Blue Fox. Among all of us there must be an idea we can use."

"You think so?" Schilling said.

"It's got to be," Pete said, harshly.

XV

AT TEN O'CLOCK that night they met in the group condominium apartment in Carmel. First came Silvanus Angst, this time—for perhaps the first time in his life—sober and silent, but as always carrying a paper bag containing a fifth of whiskey. He set it on the sideboard and turned to Pete and Carol Garden who followed him.

"I just can't see letting Psis in," Angst murmured. "I mean, you're talking about something that'll make Game-playing impossible forever."

Bill Calumine said drily, "Wait until everyone's here." His tone, to Angst, was unfriendly. "I want to meet the two of them," he said to Pete, "before I decide. The girl and the pre-cog, who, I understand, is on Jerome Luckman's staff back in New York." Although now voted out as spinner, Calumine automatically assumed the position of authority. And perhaps it was well he did, Pete reflected.

"That's right," Pete murmured absently. At the sideboard he looked to see what Silvanus Angst had brought. Canadian whiskey, this time, and very good. Pete got himself a glass, held it under the ice machine.

"Thank you sir," the ice machine piped.

Pete mixed himself a drink, his back to the room as it slowly, steadily, filled with people. Their murmuring voices came to him.

"And not just one Psi but two!"

"Yes, but the issue involved; it's patriotic."

"So what. Game-playing ends when Psis comes in."

"It can be with the proviso that they terminate as Bindmen as soon as this fracas with the—what're they called? The Woo Poo Non? Something like that, according to the Chronicle this evening. Anyhow, the vug firebrands. You know. The ones we thought we beat."

"You saw that article? The homeopape system at the Chronicle inferred that it's been these Woo Poo Noners who've kept our goddam birthrate down."

"Implied."

"Pardon?"

"You said 'inferred.' That's grammatically unsound."

"Anyhow, my point is, without quibbling, is that it's our duty to let these two Psi-people into Pretty Blue Fox. That vug detective, that E. B. Black, told us that it was to our national advantage to—"