Tom Smith was standing beside him. He was twenty years younger than
Chalmers, he was an amateur boxer, and he had good reflexes. He caught
Chalmers' arm as it was traveling back for an uppercut, and held it.

"Take it easy, Ed; you don't want to start a slugfest in here. This is
the Faculty Club; remember?"

"I won't, Tom; it wouldn't prove anything if I did." He turned to
Fitch. "I won't talk about sending your students to pump mine, but at
least you could have told me before you gave that story out."

"I don't know what you're sore about," Fitch defended himself. "I
believed in you when everybody else thought you were crazy, and if I
hadn't collected signed and dated statements from your boys, there'd
have been no substantiation. It happens that extrasensory perception
means as much to me as history does to you. I've believed in it ever
since I read about Rhine's work, when I was a kid. I worked in ESP for
a long time. Then I had a chance to get a full professorship by coming
here, and after I did, I found that I couldn't go on with it, because
Whitburn's president here, and he's a stupid old bigot with an
air-locked mind...."

"Yes." His anger died down as Fitch spoke. "I'm glad Tom stopped me
from making an ass of myself. I can see your side of it." Maybe that
was the curse of the professional intellectual, an ability to see
everybody's side of everything. He thought for a moment. "What else
did you do, beside hand this story to the _Valley Times?_ I'd better
hear all about it."

"I phoned the secretary of the American Institute of Psionics and