How much of what he has picked up around here this morning will be peeped by some Russian telepath before you get him out of town?"

"Relax," Fred scoffed. "He's a short-range punk."

That was too much. "I'll do my own thinking, Fred," I said. "From now on, you follow orders."

* * * * *

I turned on the telepath. "Before I sentence you," I said. "What have you got to say?"

"I never hurt nothin'," he grumbled.

They're all alike, so help me. "You are a telepath?" I asked him.

"Shoah."

"Prove it," I demanded, opening a chink in my mind.

His long red face twisted in a crooked grin, showing poorly-cared-for teeth scattered here and there in his gums.

"Yo' think I never had no orthodonture, whatever _thet_ is," he said.

I shut my mind like a clam. If there's anything I detest, it's the ghastly creeping of a telepath into my own thoughts. "Hello, Pete!" he exclaimed. "Yo' done shet yo' mind!" He shook his head. "Ain't never seen a body could do _thet_!" I'll bet he hadn't. There are only a few of us who can keep telepaths out of our thoughts. It takes a world of practice. Well, I'd had that.

"Can you do that?" I asked the snake.

He shook his head. "No, suh," he admitted.

"So here you are," I said, more heatedly. "Wandering around in a town full of _secrets_--Washington, the capital of your country, where the military, the diplomatic people, the security people, all of them have locked in their heads the things that keep us one step ahead of the Russians. Isn't that true?"

"I reckon. But--"

"But nothing," I snapped, getting sore about it for the thousandth time. "And you, you miserable snake, you _can't_ keep your thoughts from being read by another telepath. No telepath can. Your mind is open _two_ ways--to let thoughts in but, damn it, equally to leak out anything you know." I smiled coldly at him. "Can you get my thoughts now?"

The telepath shook his head. "Still got yo' mind closed," he said. He sounded bitter about it.

"You're right," I told him. "Something that few can do, and that _no telepath can do_! How can we let you wander around Washington leaking out thoughts of every secret your mind might accidentally have overheard from some ranking official? How many Russian telepaths have been accredited to their Embassy? How many crypto-telepaths have the Reds got in town? How many secrets have you _already_ given away? How big a traitor have you been?"

That was the one that got him. "Traitor!" he yelled at me, starting across the office to where I stood leaning against my desk. Fred grabbed him and twisted his arm cruelly to stop all movement.

"Cut that out!" he snapped.

"Cut it out yourself, Fred," I said. "Just because you're sore at me, you don't have to take it out on the snake."

The telepath was not to be silenced. "My folks been in this country over three hundred years," he stormed at me. "And it takes someone like you to call me a traitor!"

I am very dark, and my hair is black and curly. I don't mind.