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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Supermind, by
+Gordon Randall Garrett and Laurence Mark Janifer
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Supermind
+
+Author: Gordon Randall Garrett
+        Laurence Mark Janifer
+
+Release Date: August 16, 2007 [EBook #22342]
+
+Date Last Updated: October 2, 2007
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUPERMIND ***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+This etext was produced from the 1963 book publication of the story.
+Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the copyright on
+this publication was renewed.
+
+Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without
+note.
+
+The word "PLaza" (two capital letters) was correct usage to designate
+a telephone exchange at the time the story was written. It has been
+left as printed.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+Supermind
+
+Mark Phillips
+
+
+1
+
+In 1914, it was enemy aliens.
+
+In 1930, it was Wobblies.
+
+In 1957, it was fellow travelers.
+
+In 1971, it was insane telepaths.
+
+And, in 1973:
+
+"We don't know _what_ the hell it is," said Andrew J. Burris, Director
+of the FBI. He threw his hands in the air and looked baffled and
+confused.
+
+Kenneth J. Malone tried to appear sympathetic. "What what is?" he
+asked.
+
+Burris frowned and drummed his fingers on his big desk. "Malone," he
+said, "make sense. And don't stutter."
+
+"Stutter?" Malone said. "You said you didn't know what it was. What
+the hell it was. And I wanted to know what it was."
+
+"That's just it," Burris said. "I don't know."
+
+Malone sighed and repressed an impulse to scream. "Now wait a minute,
+Chief--" he started.
+
+Burris frowned again. "Don't call me Chief," he said.
+
+Malone nodded. "Okay," he said. "But if you don't know what it is, you
+must have some idea of what you don't know. I mean, is it larger than
+a breadbox? Does it perform helpful tasks? Is it self-employed?"
+
+"Malone," Burris sighed, "you ought to be on television."
+
+"But--"
+
+"Let me explain," Burris said. His voice was calmer now, and he spoke
+as if he were enunciating nothing but the most obvious and eternal
+truths. "The country," he said, "is going to hell in a handbasket."
+
+Malone nodded again. "Well, after all, Chief--"
+
+"Don't call me Chief," Burris said wearily.
+
+"Anything you say," Malone agreed peacefully. He eyed the Director of
+the FBI warily. "After all, it isn't anything new," he went on. "The
+country's always been going to hell in a handbasket, one way or
+another. Look at Rome."
+
+"Rome?" Burris said.
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "Rome was always going to hell in a handbasket,
+and finally it--" He paused. "Finally it did, I guess," he said.
+
+"Exactly," Burris said. "And so are we. Finally." He passed a hand
+over his forehead and stared past Malone at a spot on the wall. Malone
+turned and looked at the spot, but saw nothing of interest. "Malone,"
+Burris said, and the FBI agent whirled around again.
+
+"Yes, Ch--Yes?" he said.
+
+"This time," Burris said, "it isn't the same old story at all. This
+time it's different."
+
+"Different?" Malone said.
+
+Burris nodded. "Look at it this way," he said. His eyes returned to
+the agent. "Suppose you're a congressman," he went on, "and you find
+evidence of inefficiency in the government."
+
+"All right," Malone said agreeably. He had the feeling that if he
+waited around a little while everything would make sense, and he was
+willing to wait. After all, he wasn't on assignment at the moment, and
+there was nothing pressing waiting for him. He was even between
+romances.
+
+If he waited long enough, he told himself, Andrew J. Burris might say
+something worth hearing. He looked attentive and eager. He considered
+leaning over the desk a little, to look even more eager, but decided
+against it; Burris might think he looked threatening. There was no
+telling.
+
+"You're a congressman," Burris said, "and the government is
+inefficient. You find evidence of it. What do you do?"
+
+Malone blinked and thought for a second. It didn't take any longer
+than that to come up with the old, old answer. "I start an
+investigation," he said. "I get a committee and I talk to a lot of
+newspaper editors and magazine editors and maybe I go on television
+and talk some more, and my committee has a lot of meetings--"
+
+"Exactly," Burris said.
+
+"And we talk a lot at the meetings," Malone went on, carried away,
+"and get a lot of publicity, and we subpoena famous people, just as
+famous as we can get, except governors or presidents, because you
+can't--they tried that back in the Fifties, and it didn't work very
+well--and that gives us some more publicity, and then when we have all
+the publicity we can possibly get--"
+
+"You stop," Burris said hurriedly.
+
+"That's right," Malone said. "We stop. And that's what I'd do."
+
+"Of course, the problem of inefficiency is left exactly where it
+always was," Burris said. "Nothing's been done about it."
+
+"Naturally," Malone said. "But think of all the lovely publicity. And
+all the nice talk. And the subpoenas and committees and everything."
+
+"Sure," Burris said wearily. "It's happened a thousand times. But,
+Malone, that's the difference. It isn't happening this time."
+
+There was a short pause. "What do you mean?" Malone said at last.
+
+"This time," Burris said, in a tone that sounded almost awed, "they
+want to keep it a secret."
+
+"A secret?" Malone said, blinking. "But that's--that's not the
+American way."
+
+Burris shrugged. "It's un-congressman-like, anyhow," he said. "But
+that's what they've done. Tiptoed over to me and whispered softly that
+the thing has to be investigated quietly. Naturally, they didn't give
+me any orders--but only because they know they can't make one stick.
+They suggested it pretty strongly."
+
+"Any reasons?" Malone said. The whole idea interested him strangely.
+It was odd--and he found himself almost liking odd cases, lately. That
+is, he amended hurriedly, if they didn't get _too_ odd.
+
+"Oh, they had reasons, all right," Burris said. "It took a little
+coaxing, but I managed to pry some loose. You see, every one of them
+found inefficiency in his own department. And every one knows that
+other men are investigating inefficiency."
+
+"Oh," Malone said.
+
+"That's right," Burris said. "Every one of them came to me to get me
+to prove that the goof-ups in his particular department weren't his
+fault. That covers them in case one of the others happens to light
+into the department."
+
+"Well, it must be _somebody's_ fault," Malone said.
+
+"It isn't theirs," Burris said wearily, "I ought to know. They told
+me. At great length, Malone."
+
+Malone felt a stab of honest pity. "How many so far?" he asked.
+
+"Six," Burris said. "Four representatives, and two senators."
+
+"Only two?" Malone said.
+
+"Well," Burris said, "the Senate is so much smaller. And, besides, we
+may get more. As a matter of fact, Senator Lefferts is worth any six
+representatives all by himself."
+
+"He is?" Malone said, puzzled. Senator Lefferts was not one of his
+favorite people. Nor, as far as he knew, did the somewhat excitable
+senator hold any place of honor in the heart of Andrew J. Burris.
+
+"I mean his story," Burris said. "I've never heard anything like it--
+at least, not since the Bilbo days. And I've only heard about those,"
+he added hurriedly.
+
+"What story?" Malone said. "He talked about inefficiency--"
+
+"Not exactly," Burris said carefully. "He said that somebody was out
+to get him--him, personally. He said somebody was trying to discredit
+him by sabotaging all his legislative plans."
+
+"Well," Malone said, feeling that some comment was called for, "three
+cheers."
+
+"That isn't the point," Burris snapped. "No matter how we feel about
+Senator Lefferts or his legislative plans, we're sworn to protect him.
+And he says 'they' are out to get him."
+
+"They?" Malone said.
+
+"You know," Burris said, shrugging. "The great 'they.' The invisible
+enemies all around, working against him."
+
+"Oh," Malone said. "Paranoid?" He had always thought Senator Lefferts
+was slightly on the batty side, and the idea of real paranoia didn't
+come as too much of a surprise. After all, when a man was batty to
+start out with ... and he even _looked_ like a vampire, Malone thought
+confusedly.
+
+"As far as paranoia is concerned," Burris said, "I checked with one of
+our own psych men, and he'll back it up. Lefferts has definite
+paranoid tendencies, he says."
+
+"Well, then," Malone said, "that's that."
+
+Burris shook his head. "It isn't that simple," he said. "You see,
+Malone, there's some evidence that somebody _is_ working against him."
+
+"The American public, with any luck at all," Malone said.
+
+"No," Burris said. "An enemy. Somebody sabotaging his plans. Really."
+
+Malone shook his head. "You're crazy," he said.
+
+Burris looked shocked. "Malone, I'm the Director of the FBI," he said.
+"And if you insist on being disrespectful--"
+
+"Sorry," Malone murmured. "But--"
+
+"I am perfectly sane," Burris said slowly. "It's Senator Lefferts
+who's crazy. The only trouble is, he has evidence to show he's not."
+
+Malone thought about odd cases, and suddenly wished he were somewhere
+else. Anywhere else. This one showed sudden signs of developing into
+something positively bizarre. "I see," he said, wondering if he did.
+
+"After all," Burris said, in a voice that attempted to sound
+reasonable, "a paranoid has just as much right to be persecuted as
+anybody else, doesn't he?"
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "Everybody has rights. But what do you want me to
+do about that?"
+
+"About their rights?" Burris said. "Nothing, Malone. Nothing."
+
+"I mean," Malone said patiently, "about whatever it is that's going
+on."
+
+Burris took a deep breath. His hands clasped behind his head, and he
+looked up at the ceiling. He seemed perfectly relaxed. That, Malone
+knew, was a bad sign. It meant that there was a dirty job coming, a
+job nobody wanted to do, and one Burris was determined to pass off on
+him. He sighed and tried to get resigned.
+
+"Well," the FBI director said, "the only actual trouble we can
+pinpoint is that there seem to be a great many errors occurring in the
+paperwork. More than usual."
+
+"People get tired," Malone said tentatively.
+
+"But computer-secretary calculating machines don't," Burris said. "And
+that's where the errors are, in the computer-secretaries down in the
+Senate Office Building. I think you'd better start out there."
+
+"Sure," Malone said sadly.
+
+"See if there's any mechanical or electrical defect in any of those
+computers," Burris said. "Talk to the computer technicians. Find out
+what's causing all these errors."
+
+"Yes, sir," Malone said. He was still trying to feel resigned, but he
+wasn't succeeding very well.
+
+"And if you don't find anything--" Burris began.
+
+"I'll come right back," Malone said instantly.
+
+"No," Burris said. "You keep on looking."
+
+"I do?"
+
+"You do," Burris said. "After all, there has to be _something_ wrong."
+
+"Sure," Malone said, "if you say so. But--"
+
+"There are the interview tapes," Burris said, "and the reports the
+Congressmen brought in. You can go through those."
+
+Malone sighed. "I guess so," he said.
+
+"And there must be thousands of other things to do," Burris said.
+
+"Well--" Malone began cautiously.
+
+"You'll be able to think of them," Burris said heartily. "I know you
+will. I have confidence in you, Malone. Confidence."
+
+"Thanks," Malone said sadly.
+
+"You just keep me posted from time to time on what you're doing, and
+what ideas you get," Burris said. "I'm leaving the whole thing in your
+hands, Malone, and I'm sure you won't disappoint me."
+
+"I'll try," Malone said.
+
+"I know you will," Burris said warmly. "And no matter how long it
+takes, I know you'll succeed."
+
+"No matter how long it takes?" Malone said hesitantly.
+
+"That's right!" Burris said. "You can do it, Malone! You can do it."
+
+Malone nodded slowly. "I hope so," he said. "Well, I--Well, I'll start
+out right away, then."
+
+He turned. Before he could make another move Burris said, "Wait!"
+
+Malone turned again, hope in his eyes. "Yes, sir?" he said.
+
+"When you leave--" Burris began, and the hope disappeared. "When you
+leave," he went on, "please do one little favor for me. Just one
+little favor, because I'm an old, tired man and I'm not used to things
+any more."
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "Anything, Chief."
+
+"Don't call me--"
+
+"Sorry," Malone said.
+
+Burris breathed heavily. "When you leave," he said, "please, please
+use the door."
+
+"But--"
+
+"Malone," Burris said, "I've tried. I've really tried. Believe me.
+I've tried to get used to the fact that you can teleport. But--"
+
+"It's useful," Malone said, "in my work."
+
+"I can see that," Burris said. "And I don't want you to, well, to stop
+doing it. By no means. It's just that it sort of unnerves me, if you
+see what I mean. No matter how useful it is for the FBI to have an
+agent who can go instantaneously from one place to another, it
+unnerves me." He sighed. "I can't get used to seeing you disappear
+like an overdried soap bubble, Malone. It does something to me, here."
+He placed a hand directly over his sternum and sighed again.
+
+"I can understand that," Malone said. "It unnerved me, too, the first
+time I saw it. I thought I was going crazy, when that kid--Mike
+Fueyo--winked out like a light. But then we got him, and some FBI
+agents besides me have learned the trick." He stopped there, wondering
+if he'd been tactful. After all, it took a latent ability to learn
+teleportation, and some people had it, while others didn't. Malone,
+along with a few other agents, did. Burris evidently didn't, so he
+couldn't teleport, no matter how hard he tried or how many lessons he
+took.
+
+"Well," Burris said, "I'm still unnerved. So please, Malone, when you
+come in here, or go out, use the door. All right?"
+
+"Yes, sir," Malone said. He turned and went out. As he opened the
+door, he could almost hear Burris' sigh of relief. Then he banged it
+shut behind him and, feeling that he might as well continue with his
+spacebound existence, walked all the way to the elevator, and rode it
+downstairs to the FBI laboratories.
+
+The labs, highly efficient and divided into dozens of departments,
+covered several floors. Malone passed through the Fingerprint section,
+filled with technicians doing strange things to great charts and
+slides, and frowning over tiny pieces of material and photographs.
+Then came Forgery Detection, involving many more technicians, many
+more slides and charts and tiny pieces of things and photographs, and
+even a witness or two sitting on the white bench at one side and
+looking lost and somehow civilian. Identification Classified was next,
+a great barn of a room filled with index files. The real indexes were
+in the sub-basement; here, on microfilm, were only the basic
+divisions. A man was standing in front of one of the files, frowning
+at it. Malone went on by without stopping.
+
+Cosmetic Surgery Classification came next. Here there were more
+indexes, and there were also charts and slides. There was an agent
+sitting on a bench looking bored while two female technicians--
+classified as O&U for Old and Ugly in Malone's mind--fluttered around
+him, deciding what disguises were possible, and which of those was
+indicated for the particular job on hand. Malone waved to the agent,
+whom he knew very slightly, and went on. He felt vaguely regretful
+that the FBI couldn't hire prettier girls for Cosmetic Surgery, but
+the trouble was that pretty girls fell for the Agents, and vice versa,
+and this led to an unfortunate tendency toward only handsome and
+virile-looking disguises. The O&U division was unfortunate, he
+decided, but a necessity.
+
+Chemical Analysis (III) was next. The Chemical Analysis Section was
+scattered over several floors, with the first stages up above.
+Division III, Malone remembered, was devoted to nonpoisonous
+substances, like clay or sand found in boots or trouser cuffs, cigar
+ashes and such. They were placed on the same floor as Fingerprints to
+allow free and frequent passage between the sections on the problems
+of plastic prints, made in putty or like substances, and visible
+prints, made when the hand is covered with a visible substance like
+blood, ketchup or glue.
+
+Malone found what he was looking for at the very end of the floor. It
+was the Computer Section, a large room filled with humming, clacking
+and buzzing machines of an ancient vintage, muttering to themselves as
+they worked, and newer machines which were smaller and more silent.
+Lights were lighting and bells were ringing softly, relays were
+relaying and the whole room was a gigantic maze of calculating and
+control machines. What space wasn't filled by the machines themselves
+was filled by workbenches, all littered with an assortment of gears,
+tubes, spare relays, transistors, wires, rods, bolts, resistors and
+all the other paraphernalia used in building the machines and
+repairing them. Beyond the basic room were other, smaller rooms, each
+assigned to a particular kind of computer work.
+
+The narrow aisles were choked here and there with men who looked up as
+Malone passed by, but most of them gave him one quick glance and went
+back to work. A few didn't even do that, but went right on
+concentrating on their jobs. Malone headed for a man working all alone
+in front of a workbench, frowning down at a complicated-looking
+mechanism that seemed to have neither head nor tail, and prodding at
+it with a long, thin screwdriver. The man was thin, too, but not very
+long; he was a little under average height, and he had straight black
+hair, thick-lensed glasses and a studious expression, even when he was
+frowning. He looked as if the mechanism were a student who had cut too
+many classes, and he was being kind but firm with it.
+
+Malone managed to get to the man's side, and coughed discreetly. There
+was no response.
+
+"Fred?" he said.
+
+The screwdriver waggled a little. Malone wasn't quite sure that the
+man was breathing.
+
+"Fred Mitchell," he said.
+
+Mitchell didn't look up. Another second passed.
+
+"Hey," Malone said. Then he closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
+"Fred," he said in a loud, reasonable-sounding voice, "the State
+Department's translator has started to talk pig-Latin."
+
+Mitchell straightened up as if somebody had jabbed him with a pin. The
+screwdriver waved wildly in the air for a second, and then pointed at
+Malone. "That's impossible," Mitchell said in a flat, precise voice.
+"Simply impossible. It doesn't have a pig-Latin circuit. It can't
+possibly--" He blinked and seemed to see Malone for the first time.
+"Oh," he said. "Hello, Malone. What can I do for you?"
+
+Malone smiled, feeling a little victorious at having got through the
+Mitchell armor, which was almost impregnable when there was a job in
+hand. "I've been standing here talking to you for some time."
+
+"Oh, have you?" Mitchell said. "I was busy." That, obviously,
+explained that. Malone shrugged.
+
+"I want you to help me check over some calculators, Fred," he said.
+"We've had some reports that some of the government machines are out
+of kilter, and I'd like you to go over them for me."
+
+"Out of kilter?" Fred Mitchell said. "No, you can forget about it.
+It's absolutely unnecessary to make a check, believe me. Absolutely.
+Forget it." He smiled suddenly. "I suppose it's some kind of a joke,
+isn't it?" he said, just a trifle uncertainly. Fred Mitchell's world,
+while pleasant, did not include much humor, Malone knew. "It's
+supposed to be funny," he said in the same flat, precise voice.
+
+"It isn't funny," Malone said.
+
+Fred sighed. "Then they're obviously lying," he said, "and that's all
+there is to it. Why bother me with it?"
+
+"Lying, Fred?" Malone said.
+
+"Certainly," Fred said. He looked at the machinery with longing.
+
+Malone took a breath. "How do you know?" he said.
+
+Fred sighed. "It's perfectly obvious," he said in a patient tone.
+"Since the State Department translator has no pig-Latin circuit, it
+can't possibly be talking pig-Latin. I will admit that such a circuit
+would be relatively easy to build, though it would have no utility as
+far as I can see. Except, of course, for a joke." He paused. "Joke?"
+he said, in a slightly uneasy tone.
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "Joke."
+
+Mitchell looked relieved. "Very well, then," he began. "Since--"
+
+"Wait a minute," Malone said. "The pig-Latin is a joke. That's right.
+But I'm not talking about the pig-Latin."
+
+"You're not?" Mitchell asked, surprised.
+
+"No," Malone said.
+
+Mitchell frowned. "But you said--" he began.
+
+"A joke," Malone said. "You were perfectly right. The pig-Latin is a
+joke." He waited for Fred's expression to clear, and then added: "But
+what I want to talk to you about isn't."
+
+"It sounds very confused," Fred said after a pause. "Not at all the
+sort of thing that--that usually goes on."
+
+"You have no idea," Malone said. "It's about the political machines,
+all right, but it isn't anything as simple as pig-Latin." He
+explained, taking his time over it.
+
+When he had finished, Fred was nodding his head slowly. "I see," he
+said. "I understand just what you want me to do."
+
+"Good," Malone said.
+
+"I'll take a team over to the Senate Office Building," Fred said, "and
+check the computer-secretaries there. That way, you see, I'll be able
+to do a full running check on them without taking any one machine out
+of operation for too long."
+
+"Sure," Malone said.
+
+"And it shouldn't take long," Fred went on, "to find out just what the
+trouble is." He looked very confident.
+
+"How long?" Malone asked.
+
+Fred shrugged. "Oh," he said, "five or six days."
+
+Malone repressed an impulse to scream. "Days?" he said. "I mean--well,
+look, Fred, it's important. Very important. Can't you do the job any
+faster?"
+
+Fred gave a little sigh. "Checking and repairing all those machines,"
+he said, "is an extremely complex job. Sometimes, Malone, I don't
+think you realize quite how complex and how delicate a job it is to
+deal with such a high-order machine. Why--"
+
+"Wait a minute," Malone said. "Check and repair them?"
+
+"Of course," Fred said.
+
+"But I don't want them repaired," Malone said. Seeing the look of
+horror on Fred's face, he added hastily, "I only want a report from
+you on what's wrong, whether they are actually making errors or not.
+And if they are making errors, just what's making them do it. And just
+what kind of errors. See?"
+
+Fred nodded very slowly. "But I can't just leave them there," he said
+piteously. "In pieces and everything. It isn't right, Malone. It just
+isn't right."
+
+"Well, then," Malone said with energy, "you go right ahead and repair
+them, if you want to. Fix 'em all up. But you can do that after you
+make the report to me, can't you?"
+
+"I--" Fred hesitated. "I had planned to check and repair each machine
+on an individual basis."
+
+"The Congress can allow for a short suspension," Malone said. "Anyhow,
+they can now, or as soon as I get the word to them. Suppose you check
+all the machines first, and then get around to the repair work."
+
+"It's not the best way," Fred demurred.
+
+Malone discovered that it was his turn to sigh. "Is it the fastest?"
+he said.
+
+Fred nodded.
+
+"Then it's the best," Malone said. "How long?"
+
+Fred rolled his eyes to the ceiling and calculated silently for a
+second. "Tomorrow morning," he announced, returning his gaze to
+Malone.
+
+"Fine," Malone said. "Fine."
+
+"But--"
+
+"Never mind the buts," Malone said hurriedly. "I'll count on hearing
+from you tomorrow morning."
+
+"All right."
+
+"And if it looks like sabotage," Malone added, "if the errors aren't
+caused by normal wear and tear on the machines, you let me know right
+away. Phone me. Don't waste an instant."
+
+"I'll--I'll start right away," Fred said heavily. He looked sadly at
+the mechanism he had been working on, and put his screwdriver down
+next to it. It looked to Malone as if he were putting flowers on the
+grave of a dear departed. "I'll get a team together," Fred added. He
+gave the mechanism and screwdriver one last fond parting look, and
+tore himself away.
+
+Malone looked after him for a second, thinking of nothing in
+particular, and then turned in the opposite direction and headed back
+toward the elevator. As he walked, he began to feel more and more
+pleased with himself. After all, he'd gotten the investigation
+started, hadn't he?
+
+And now all he had to do was go back to his office and read some
+reports and listen to some interview tapes, and then he could go home.
+
+The reports and the interview tapes didn't exactly sound like fun,
+Malone thought, but at the same time they seemed fairly innocent. He
+would work his way through them grimly, and maybe he would even
+indulge his most secret vice and smoke a cigar or two to make the work
+pass more pleasantly. Soon enough, he told himself, they would be
+finished.
+
+Sometimes, though, he regretted the reputation he'd gotten. It had
+been bad enough in the old days, the pre-1971 days when Malone had
+thought he was just lucky. Burris had called him a Boy Wonder then,
+when he'd cracked three difficult cases in a row. Being just lucky had
+made it a little tough to live with the Boy Wonder label. After all,
+Malone thought, it wasn't actually as if he'd done anything.
+
+But since 1971 and the case of the Telepathic Spy, things had gotten
+worse. Much worse. Now Malone wasn't just lucky any more. Instead, he
+could teleport and he could even foretell the future a little, in a
+dim sort of way. He'd caught the Telepathic Spy that way, and when the
+case of the Teleporting Juvenile Delinquents had come up he'd been
+assigned to that one too, and he'd cracked it. Now Burris seemed to
+think of him as a kind of God, and gave him all the tough dirty jobs.
+
+And if he wasn't just lucky any more, Malone couldn't think of himself
+as a fearless, heroic FBI agent, either. He just wasn't the type. He
+was ... well, talented. That was the word, he told himself: talented.
+He had all these talents and they made him look like something
+spectacular to Burris and the other FBI men. But he wasn't, really. He
+hadn't done anything really tough to get his talents; they'd just
+happened to him.
+
+Nobody, though, seemed to believe that. He heaved a little sigh and
+stepped into the waiting elevator.
+
+There were, after all, he thought, compensations. He'd had some good
+times, and the talents did come in handy. And he did have his pick of
+the vacation schedule lately. And he'd met some lovely girls...
+
+And besides, he told himself savagely as the elevator shot upward, he
+wasn't going to do anything except return to his office and read some
+reports and listen to some tapes. And then he was going to go home and
+sleep all night, peacefully. And in the morning Mitchell was going to
+call him up and tell him that the computer-secretaries needed nothing
+more than a little repair. He'd say they were getting old, and he'd be
+a little pathetic about it; but it wouldn't be anything serious.
+Malone would send out orders to get the machines repaired, and that
+would be that. And then the next case would be something both normal
+and exciting, like a bank robbery or a kidnapping involving a gorgeous
+blonde who would be so grateful to Malone that...
+
+He had stepped out of the elevator and gone down the corridor without
+noticing it. He pushed at his own office door and walked into the
+outer room. The train of thought he had been following was very nice,
+and sounded very attractive indeed, he told himself.
+
+Unfortunately, he didn't believe it. His prescient ability,
+functioning with its usual efficient aplomb, told Malone that things
+would not be better, or simpler, in the morning. They would be worse,
+and more complicated.
+
+They would be quite a lot worse.
+
+And, as usual, that prescience was perfectly accurate.
+
+
+2
+
+The telephone, Malone realized belatedly, had had a particularly
+nasty-sounding ring. He might have known it would be bad news.
+
+As a matter of fact, he told himself sadly, he had known.
+
+"Nothing at all wrong?" he said into the mouthpiece. "Not with any of
+the computers?" He blinked. "Not even one of them?"
+
+"Not a thing," Mitchell said. "I'll be sending a report up to you in a
+little while. You read it; we put them through every test, and it's
+all detailed there."
+
+"I'm sure you were very thorough," Malone said helplessly.
+
+"Of course we were," Mitchell said. "Of course. And the machines
+passed every single test. Every one. Malone, it was beautiful."
+
+"Goody," Malone said at random. "But there's got to be something--"
+
+"There is, Malone," Fred said. "There is. I think there's definitely
+something odd going on. Something funny. I mean peculiar, not
+humorous."
+
+"I thought so," Malone put in.
+
+"Right," Fred said. "Malone, try and relax. This is a hard thing to
+say, and it must be even harder to hear, but--"
+
+"Tell me," Malone said. "Who's dead? Who's been killed?"
+
+"I know it's tough, Malone," Fred went on.
+
+"Is everybody dead?" Malone said. "It can't be just one person, not
+from that tone in your voice. Has somebody assassinated the entire
+senate? Or the president and his cabinet? Or--"
+
+"It's nothing like that, Malone," Fred said, in a tone that implied
+that such occurrences were really rather minor. "It's the machines."
+
+"The machines?"
+
+"That's right," Fred said grimly. "After we checked them over and
+found they were in good shape, I asked for samples of both the input
+and the output of each machine. I wanted to do a thorough job."
+
+"Congratulations," Malone said. "What happened?"
+
+Fred took a deep breath. "They don't agree," he said.
+
+"They don't?" Malone said. The phrase sounded as if it meant something
+momentous, but he couldn't quite figure out what. In a minute, he
+thought confusedly, it would come to him. But did he want it to?
+
+"They definitely do not agree," Fred was saying. "The correlation is
+erratic; it makes no statistical sense. Malone, there are two
+possibilities."
+
+"Tell me about them," Malone said. He was beginning to feel relieved.
+To Fred, the malfunction of a machine was more serious than the murder
+of the entire Congress. But Malone couldn't quite bring himself to
+feel that way about things.
+
+"First," Fred said in a tense tone, "it's possible that the
+technicians feeding information to the machines are making all kinds
+of mistakes."
+
+Malone nodded at the phone. "That sounds possible," he said. "Which
+ones?"
+
+"All of them," Fred said. "They're all making errors--and they're all
+making about the same number of errors. There don't seem to be any
+real peaks or valleys, Malone; everybody's doing it."
+
+Malone thought of the Varsity Drag and repressed the thought. "A bunch
+of fumblebums," he said. "All fumbling alike. It does sound unlikely,
+but I guess it's possible. We'll get after them right away, and--"
+
+"Wait," Fred said. "There is a second possibility."
+
+"Oh," Malone said.
+
+"Maybe they aren't mistakes," Fred said. "Maybe the technicians are
+deliberately feeding the machine with wrong answers."
+
+Malone hated to admit it, even to himself, but that answer sounded a
+lot more probable. Machine technicians weren't exactly picked off the
+streets at random; they were highly trained for their work, and the
+idea of a whole crew of them starting to fumble at once, in a big way,
+was a little hard to swallow.
+
+The idea of all of them sabotaging the machines they worked on, Malone
+thought, was a tough one to take, too. But it had the advantage of
+making some sense. People, he told himself dully, will do nutty things
+deliberately. It's harder to think of them doing the same nutty things
+without knowing it.
+
+"Well," he said at last, "however it turns out, we'll get to the
+bottom of it. Frankly, I think it's being done on purpose."
+
+"So do I," Fred said. "And when you find out just who's making the
+technicians do such things--when you find out who gives them their
+orders--you let me know."
+
+"Let you know?" Malone said. "But--"
+
+"Any man who would give false data to a perfectly innocent computer,"
+Fred said savagely, "would--would--" For a second he was apparently
+lost for comparisons. Then he finished: "Would kill his own mother."
+He paused a second and added, in an even more savage voice, "And then
+lie about it!"
+
+The image on the screen snapped off, and Malone sat back in his chair
+and sighed. He spent a few minutes regretting that he hadn't chosen,
+early in life, to be a missionary to the Fiji Islands, or possibly
+simply a drunken bum without any troubles, but then the report
+Mitchell had mentioned arrived. Malone picked it up without much
+eagerness, and began going through it carefully.
+
+It was beautifully typed and arranged; somebody on Mitchell's team had
+obviously been up all night at the job. Malone admired the work,
+without being able to get enthusiastic about the contents. Like all
+technical reports, it tended to be boring and just a trifle obscure to
+someone who wasn't completely familiar with the field involved. Malone
+and cybernetics were not exactly bosom buddies, and by the time he
+finished reading through the report he was suffering from an extreme
+case of ennui.
+
+There were no new clues in the report, either; Mitchell's phone
+conversation had covered all of the main points. Malone put the sheaf
+of papers down on his desk and looked at them for a minute as if he
+expected an answer to leap out from the pile and greet him with a glad
+cry. But nothing happened. Unfortunately, he had to do some more work.
+
+The obvious next step was to start checking on the technicians who
+were working on the machines. Malone determined privately that he
+would give none of his reports to Fred Mitchell; he didn't like the
+idea of being responsible for murder, and that was the least Fred
+would do to someone who confused his precious calculators.
+
+He picked up the phone, punched for the Records Division, and waited
+until a bald, middle-aged face appeared. He asked the face to send up
+the dossiers of the technicians concerned to his office. The face
+nodded.
+
+"You want them right away?" it said in a mild, slightly scratchy
+voice.
+
+"Sooner than right away," Malone said.
+
+"They're coming up by messenger," the voice said.
+
+Malone nodded and broke the connection. The technicians had, of
+course, been investigated by the FBI before they'd been hired, but it
+wouldn't do any harm to check them out again. He felt grateful that he
+wouldn't have to do all that work himself; he would just go through
+the dossiers and assign field agents to the actual checking when he
+had a picture of what might need to be checked.
+
+He sighed again and leaned back in his chair. He put his feet up on
+the desk, remembered that he was entirely alone, and swung them down
+again. He fished in a private compartment in his top desk drawer, drew
+out a cigar and unwrapped it. Putting his feet back on the desk, he
+lit the cigar, drew in a cloud of smoke, and lapsed into deep thought.
+
+Cigar smoke billowed around him, making strange, fantastic shapes in
+the air of the office. Malone puffed away, frowning slightly and
+trying to force the puzzle he was working on to make some sense.
+
+It certainly looked as though something were going on, he thought.
+But, for the life of him, he couldn't figure out just what it was.
+After all, what could be anybody's purpose in goofing up a bunch of
+calculators the way they had? Of course, the whole thing could be a
+series of accidents, but the series was a pretty long one, and made
+Malone suspicious to start with. It was easier to assume that the
+goof-ups were being done deliberately.
+
+Unfortunately, they didn't make much sense as sabotage, either.
+
+Senator Deeds, for instance, had sent out a ten-thousand-copy form
+letter to his constituents, blasting an Administration power bill in
+extremely strong language, and asking for some comments on the
+Deeds-Hartshorn Air Ownership Bill, a pending piece of legislation
+that provided for private, personal ownership, based on land title, to
+the upper stratosphere, with a strong hint that rights of passage no
+longer applied without some recompense to the owner of the air.
+Naturally, Deeds had filed the original with a computer-secretary to
+turn out ten thousand duplicate copies, and the machine had done so,
+folding the copies, slipping them into addressed envelopes and sending
+them out under the Senator's franking stamp.
+
+The addresses on the envelopes, however, had not been those of the
+Senator's supporters. The letter had been sent to ten thousand
+stockholders in major airline companies, and the Senator's head was
+still ringing from the force of the denunciatory letters, telegrams
+and telephone calls he'd been getting.
+
+And then there was Representative Follansbee of South Dakota. A set of
+news releases on the proposed Follansbee Waterworks Bill contained the
+statement that the artificial lake which Follansbee proposed in the
+Black Hills country "be formed by controlled atomic power blasts, and
+filled with water obtained from collecting the tears of widows and
+orphans."
+
+Newsmen who saw this release immediately checked the bill. The wording
+was exactly the same. Follansbee claimed that the "widows and orphans"
+phrase had appeared in his speech on the bill, and not in the proposed
+bill itself. "It's completely absurd," he said, with commendable calm,
+"to consider this method of filling an artificial lake."
+Unfortunately, the absurdity was now contained in the bill, which
+would have to go back to committee for redefinition, and probably
+wouldn't come up again in the present session of Congress. Judging
+from the amount of laughter that had greeted the error when it had
+come to light, Malone privately doubted whether any amount of
+redefinition was going to save it from a landslide defeat.
+
+Representative Keller of Idaho had made a speech which contained so
+many errors of fact that newspaper editorials, and his enemies on the
+floor of Congress, cut him to pieces with ease and pleasure. Keller
+complained of his innocence and said he'd gotten his facts from a
+computer-secretary, but this didn't save him. His re-election was a
+matter for grave concern in his own party, and the opposition was,
+naturally, tickled. They would not, Malone thought, dare to be tickled
+pink.
+
+And these were not the only casualties. They were the most blatant
+foul-ups, but there were others, such as the mistake in numbering of a
+House Bill that resulted in a two-month delay during which the
+opposition to the bill raised enough votes to defeat it on the floor.
+Communications were diverted or lost or scrambled in small ways that
+made for confusion--including, Malone recalled, the perfectly horrible
+mixup that resulted when a freshman senator, thinking he was talking
+to his girlfriend on a blanked-vision circuit, discovered he was
+talking to his wife.
+
+The flow of information was being blocked by bottlenecks that suddenly
+existed where there had never been bottlenecks before.
+
+And it wasn't only the computers, Malone knew. He remembered the
+reports the senators and representatives had made. Someone forgot to
+send an important message here, or sent one too soon over there. Both
+courses were equally disturbing, and both resulted in more snarl-ups.
+Reports that should have been sent in weeks before arrived too late;
+reports meant for the eyes of only one man were turned out in
+triplicate and passed all over the offices of Congress.
+
+Each snarl-up was a little one. But, together, they added up to
+inefficiency of a kind and extent that hadn't been seen, Malone told
+himself with some wonder, since the Harding administration fifty years
+before.
+
+And there didn't seem to be anyone to blame anything on.
+
+Malone thought hopefully of sabotage, infiltration and mass treason,
+but it didn't make him feel much better. He puffed out some more smoke
+and frowned at nothing.
+
+There was a knock at the door of his office.
+
+Speedily and guiltily, he swung his feet off the desk and snatched the
+cigar out of his mouth. He jammed it into a deep ashtray and put the
+ashtray back into his desk drawer. He locked the drawer, waved
+ineffectively at the clouds of smoke that surrounded him, and said in
+a resigned voice: "Come in."
+
+The door opened. A tall, solidly-built man stood there, wearing a
+fringe of beard and a cheerful expression. The man had an enormous
+amount of muscle distributed more or less evenly over his chunky body,
+and a pot-belly that looked as if he had swallowed a globe of the
+world. In addition, he was smoking a cigarette and letting out little
+puffs of smoke, rather like a toy locomotive.
+
+"Well, well," Malone said, brushing feebly at the smoke that still
+wreathed him faintly. "If it isn't Thomas Boyd, the FBI's answer to
+Nero Wolfe."
+
+"And if the physique holds true, you're Sherlock Holmes, I suppose,"
+Boyd said.
+
+Malone shook his head, thinking sadly of his father and the cigar.
+"Not exactly," he said. "Not ex--" And then it came to him. It wasn't
+that he was ashamed of smoking cigars like his father, exactly, but
+cigars just weren't right for a fearless, dedicated FBI agent. And he
+had just thought of a way to keep Boyd from knowing what he'd been
+doing. "That's a hell of a cigarette you're smoking, by the way," he
+said.
+
+Boyd looked at it. "It is?" he said.
+
+"Sure is," Malone said, hoping he sounded sufficiently innocent.
+"Smells like a cigar or something."
+
+Boyd sniffed the air for a second, his face wrinkled. Then he looked
+down at his cigarette again. "By God," he said, "you're right, Ken. It
+_does_ smell like a cigar." He came over to Malone's desk, looked
+around for an ashtray and didn't find one, and finally went to the
+window and tossed the cigarette out into the Washington breeze. "How
+are things, anyhow, Ken?" he said.
+
+"Things are confused," Malone said. "Aren't they always?"
+
+Boyd came back to the desk and sat down in a chair at one side of it.
+He put his elbow on the desk. "Sure they are," he said. "I'm confused
+myself, as a matter of fact. Only I think I know where I can get some
+help."
+
+"Really?" Malone said.
+
+Boyd nodded. "Burris told me I might be able to get some information
+from a certain famous and highly respected person," he said.
+
+"Well, well," Malone said. "Who?"
+
+"You," Boyd said.
+
+"Oh," Malone said, trying to look disappointed, flattered and modest
+all at the same time. "Well," he went on after a second, "anything I
+can do--"
+
+"Burris thought you might have some answers," Boyd said.
+
+"Burris is getting optimistic in his old age," Malone said. "I don't
+even have many questions."
+
+Boyd nodded. "Well," he said, "you know this California thing?"
+
+"Sure I do," Malone said. "You're looking into the resignation out
+there, aren't you?"
+
+"Senator Burley," Boyd said. "That's right But Senator Burley's
+resignation isn't all of it, by any means."
+
+"It isn't?" Malone said, trying to sound interested.
+
+"Not at all," Boyd said. "It goes a lot deeper than it looks on the
+surface. In the past year, Ken, five senators have announced their
+resignations from the Senate of the United States. It isn't exactly a
+record--"
+
+"It sounds like a record," Malone said.
+
+"Well," Boyd said, "there was 1860 and the Civil War, when a whole lot
+of senators and representatives resigned all at once."
+
+"Oh," Malone said. "But there isn't any Civil War going on now. At
+least," he added, "I haven't heard of any."
+
+"That's what makes it so funny," Boyd said. "Of course, Senator Burley
+said it was ill health, and so did two others, while Senator Davidson
+said it was old age."
+
+"Well," Malone said, "people do get old. And sick."
+
+"Sure," Boyd said. "The only trouble is--" He paused. "Ken," he said,
+"do you mind if I smoke? I mean, do you mind the smell of cigars?"
+
+"Mind?" Malone said. "Not at all." He blinked. "Besides," he added,
+"maybe this one won't smell like a cigar."
+
+"Well, the last one did," Boyd said. He took a cigarette out of a pack
+in his pocket, and lit it. He sniffed. "You know," he said, "you're
+right. This one doesn't."
+
+"I told you," Malone said. "Must have been a bad cigarette. Spoiled or
+something."
+
+"I guess so," Boyd said vaguely. "But about these retirements--the FBI
+wanted me to look into it because of Burley's being mixed up with the
+space program scandal last year. Remember?"
+
+"Vaguely," Malone said. "I was busy last year."
+
+"Sure you were," Boyd said. "We were both busy getting famous and well
+known."
+
+Malone grinned. "Go on with the story," he said.
+
+Boyd puffed at his cigarette. "Anyhow, we couldn't find anything
+really wrong," he said. "Three senators retiring because of ill
+health, one because of old age. And Farnsworth, the youngest, had a
+nervous breakdown."
+
+"I didn't hear about it," Malone said.
+
+Boyd shrugged "We hushed it up," he said. "But Farnsworth's got
+delusions of persecution. He apparently thinks somebody's out to get
+him. As a matter of fact, he thinks _everybody's_ out to get him."
+
+"Now that," Malone said, "sounds familiar."
+
+Boyd leaned back a little more in his chair. "Here's the funny thing,
+though," he said. "The others all act as if they're suspicious of
+everybody who talks to them. Not anything obvious, you understand.
+Just worried, apprehensive. Always looking at you out of the corners
+of their eyes. That kind of thing."
+
+Malone thought of Senator Lefferts, who was also suffering from
+delusions of persecution, delusions that had real evidence to back
+them up. "It does sound funny," he said cautiously.
+
+"Well, I reported everything to Burris," Boyd went on. "And he said
+you were working on something similar, and we might as well pool our
+resources."
+
+"Here we go again," Malone said. He took a deep breath, filling his
+nostrils with what remained of the cigar odor in the room, and felt
+more peaceful. Quickly, he told Boyd about what had been happening in
+Congress. "It seems pretty obvious," he finished, "that there is some
+kind of a tie-up between the two cases."
+
+"Maybe it's obvious," Boyd said, "but it is just a little bit odd. Fun
+and games. You know, Ken, Burris was right."
+
+"How?" Malone said.
+
+"He said everything was all mixed up," Boyd went on. "He told me the
+country was going to Rome in a handbasket, or something like that."
+
+Wondering vaguely if Burris had really been predicting mass religious
+conversions, Malone nodded silently.
+
+"And he's right," Boyd said. "Look at the newspapers. Everything's
+screwy lately."
+
+"Everything always is screwy," Malone said.
+
+"Not like now," Boyd said. "So many big-shot gangsters have been
+killed lately we might as well bring back Prohibition. And the labor
+unions are so busy with internal battles that they haven't had time to
+go on strike for over a year."
+
+"Is that bad?" Malone said.
+
+Boyd shrugged. "God knows," he said. "But it's sure confusing as all
+hell."
+
+"And now," Malone said, "with all that going on--"
+
+"The Congress of the United States decides to go off its collective
+rocker," Boyd finished. "Exactly." He stared down at his cigarette for
+a minute with a morose and pensive expression on his face. He looked,
+Malone thought, like Henry VIII trying to decide what to do about all
+these here wives.
+
+Then he looked up at Malone. "Ken," he said in a strained voice,
+"there seem to be a lot of nutty cases lately."
+
+Malone considered. "No," he said at last. "It's just that when a nutty
+one comes along, we get it."
+
+"That's what I mean," Boyd said. "I wonder why that is."
+
+Malone shrugged. "It takes a thief to catch a thief," he said.
+
+"But these aren't thieves," Boyd said. "I mean, they're just nutty."
+He paused. "Oh," he said.
+
+"And two thieves are better than one," Malone said.
+
+"Anyhow," Boyd said with a small, gusty sigh, "it's company."
+
+"Sure," Malone said.
+
+Boyd looked for an ashtray, failed again to find one, and walked over
+to flip a second cigarette out onto Washington. He came back to his
+chair, sat down, and said, "What's our next step, Ken?"
+
+Malone considered carefully. "First," he said finally, "we'll start
+assuming something. We'll start assuming that there is some kind of
+organization behind all this, behind all the senators' resignations
+and everything like that."
+
+"It sounds like a big assumption," Boyd said.
+
+Malone shook his head. "It isn't really," he said. "After all, we
+can't figure it's the work of one person: it's too widespread for
+that. And it's silly to assume that everything's accidental."
+
+"All right," Boyd said equably. "It's an organization."
+
+"Trying to subvert the United States," Malone went on. "Reducing
+everything to chaos. And that brings in everything else, Tom. That
+brings in the unions and the gang wars and everything."
+
+Boyd blinked. "How?" he said.
+
+"Obvious," Malone said. "Strife brought on by internal confusion,
+that's what's going on all over. It's the same pattern. And if we
+assume an organization trying to jam up the United States, it even
+makes sense." He leaned back and beamed.
+
+"Sure it makes sense," Boyd said. "But who's the organization?"
+
+Malone shrugged.
+
+"If I were doing the picking," Boyd said, "I'd pick the Russians. Or
+the Chinese. Or both. Probably both."
+
+"It's a possibility," Malone said. "Anyhow, if it's sabotage, who else
+would be interested in sabotaging the United States? There's some
+Russian or Chinese organization fouling up Congress, and the unions,
+and the gangs. Come to think of it, why the gangs? It seems to me that
+if you left the professional gangsters strong, it would do even more
+to foul things up."
+
+"Who knows?" Boyd said. "Maybe they're trying to get rid of American
+gangsters so they can import some of their own."
+
+"That doesn't make any sense," Malone said, "but I'll think about it.
+In the meantime, we have one more interesting question."
+
+"We do?" Boyd said.
+
+"Sure we do," Malone said. "The question is: how?"
+
+Boyd said: "Mmm." Then there was silence for a little while.
+
+"How are the saboteurs doing all this?" Malone said. "It just doesn't
+seem very probable that _all_ the technicians in the Senate Office
+Building, for instance, are spies. It makes even less sense that the
+labor unions are composed mostly of spies. Or, for that matter, the
+Mafia and the organizations like it. What would spies be doing in the
+Mafia?"
+
+"Learning Italian," Boyd said instantly.
+
+"Don't be silly," Malone said. "If there were that many spies in this
+country, the Russians wouldn't have to fight at all. They could _vote_
+the Communists into power, and by a nice big landslide, too."
+
+"Wait a minute," Boyd said. "If there aren't so many spies, then how
+is all this getting done?"
+
+Malone beamed. "That's the question," he said. "And I think I have an
+answer."
+
+"You do?" Boyd said. After a second he said: "Oh, no."
+
+"Suppose you tell me," Malone said.
+
+Boyd opened his mouth. Nothing emerged. He shut it. A second passed
+and he opened it again. "Magic?" he said weakly.
+
+"Not exactly," Malone said cheerfully. "But you're getting warm."
+
+Boyd shut his eyes. "I'm not going to stand for it," he announced.
+"I'm not going to take any more."
+
+"Any more what?" Malone said. "Tell me what you have in mind."
+
+"I won't even consider it," Boyd said. "It haunts me. It gets into my
+dreams. Now, look, Ken, I can't even see a pitchfork any more without
+thinking of Greek letters."
+
+Malone took a breath. "Which Greek letter?" he said.
+
+"You know very well," Boyd said. "What a pitchfork looks like. _Psi._
+And I'm not even going to think about it."
+
+"Well," Malone said equably, "you won't have to. If you'd rather start
+with the Russian-spy end of things, you can do that."
+
+"What I'd rather do," Boyd said, "is resign."
+
+"Next year," Malone said instantly. "For now, you can wait around
+until the dossiers come up--they're for the Senate Office Building
+technicians, and they're on the way. You can go over them, and start
+checking on any known Russian agents in the country for contacts. You
+can also start checking on the dossiers, and in general for any
+hanky-panky."
+
+Boyd blinked. "Hanky-panky?" he said.
+
+"It's a perfectly good word," Malone said, offended. "Or two words.
+Anyhow, you can start on that end, and not worry about anything else."
+
+"It's going to haunt me," Boyd said.
+
+"Well," Malone said, "eat lots of ectoplasm and get enough sleep, and
+everything will be fine. After all, I'm going to have to do the real
+end of the work, the psionics end. I may be wrong, but--"
+
+He was interrupted by the phone. He flicked the switch and Andrew J.
+Burris' face appeared on the screen.
+
+"Malone," Burris said instantly, "I just got a complaint from the
+State Department that ties in with your work. Their translator has
+been acting up."
+
+Malone couldn't say anything for a minute.
+
+"Malone," Burris went on. "I said--"
+
+"I heard you," Malone said. "And it doesn't have one."
+
+"It doesn't have one what?" Burris said.
+
+"A pig-Latin circuit," Malone said. "What else?"
+
+Burris' voice was very calm. "Malone," he said, "what does pig-Latin
+have to do with anything?"
+
+"You said--"
+
+"I said one of the State Department translators was acting up," Burris
+said. "If you want details--"
+
+"I don't think I can stand them," Malone said.
+
+"Some of the Russian and Chinese releases have come through with the
+meaning slightly altered," Burris went on doggedly. "And I want you to
+check on it right away. I--"
+
+"Thank God," Malone said.
+
+Burris blinked. "What?"
+
+"Never mind," Malone said. "Never mind. I'm glad you told me, Chief.
+I'll get to work on it right away, and--"
+
+"You do that, Malone," Burris said. "And for God's sake stop calling
+me Chief! Do I look like an Indian? Do I have feathers in my hair?"
+
+"Anything," Malone said grandly, "is possible." He broke the
+connection in a hurry.
+
+
+3
+
+The summer sun beat down on the white city of Washington, D. C, as if
+it had mistaken its instructions slightly and was convinced that the
+city had been put down somewhere in the Sahara. The sun seemed
+confused, Malone thought. If this were the Sahara, obviously there was
+no reason whatever for the Potomac to be running through it. The sun
+was doing its best to correct this small error, however, by exerting
+even more heat in a valiant attempt to dry up the river.
+
+Its attempt was succeeding, at least partially. The Potomac was still
+there, but quite a lot of it was not in the river bed any more.
+Instead, it had gone into the air, which was so humid by now that
+Malone was willing to swear that it was splashing into his lungs at
+every inhalation. Resisting an impulse to try the breaststroke, he
+stood in the full glare of the straining sun, just outside the Senate
+Office Building. He looked across at the Capitol, just opposite,
+squinting his eyes manfully against the glare of its dome in the
+brightness.
+
+The Capitol was, at any rate, some relief from the sight of Thomas
+Boyd and a group of agents busily grilling two technicians. That was
+going on in the Senate Office Building, and Malone had come over to
+watch the proceedings. Everything had been set up in what Malone
+considered the most complicated fashion possible. A big room had been
+turned into a projection chamber, and films were being run off over
+and over. The films, taken by hidden cameras watching the
+computer-secretaries, had caught two technicians red-handed punching
+errors into the machines. Boyd had leaped on this evidence, and he and
+his crew were showing the movies to the technicians and questioning
+them under bright lights in an effort to break down their resistance.
+
+But it didn't look as though they were going to have any more success
+than the sun was having, turning Washington into the Sahara. After
+all, Malone told himself, wiping his streaming brow, there were no
+Pyramids in Washington. He tried to discover whether that made any
+sense, but it was too much work. He went back to thinking about Boyd.
+
+The technicians were sticking to their original stories that the
+mistakes had been honest ones. It sounded like a sensible idea to
+Malone; after all, people did make mistakes. And the FBI didn't have a
+single shred of evidence to prove that the technicians were engaged in
+deliberate sabotage. But Boyd wasn't giving up. Over and over he got
+the technicians to repeat their stories, looking for discrepancies or
+slips. Over and over he ran off the films of their mistakes, looking
+for some clue, some shred of evidence.
+
+Even the sight of the Capitol, Malone told himself sadly, was better
+than any more of Boyd's massive investigation techniques.
+
+He had come out to do some thinking. He believed, in spite of a good
+deal of evidence to the contrary, that his best ideas came to him
+while walking. At any rate, it was a way of getting away from four
+walls and from the prying eyes and anxious looks of superiors. He
+sighed gently, crammed his hat onto his head and started out.
+
+Only a maniac, he reflected, would wear a hat on a day like the one he
+was swimming through. But the people who passed him as he trudged
+onward to no particular destination didn't seem to notice; they gave
+him a fairly wide berth, and seemed very polite, but that wasn't
+because they thought he was nuts, Malone knew. It was because they
+knew he was an FBI man.
+
+That was the result of an FBI regulation. All agents had to wear hats.
+Malone wasn't sure why, and his thinking on the matter had only
+dredged up the idea that you had to have a hat in case somebody asked
+you to keep something under it. But the FBI was firm about its
+rulings. No matter what the weather, an agent wore a hat. Malone
+thought bitterly that he might just as well wear a red, white and blue
+luminous sign that said _FBI_ in great winking letters, and maybe a
+hooting siren too. Still, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was not
+supposed to be a secret organization, no matter what occasional
+critics might say. And the hats, at least as long as the weather
+remained broiling, were enough proof of that for anybody.
+
+Malone could feel water collecting under his hat and soaking his head.
+He removed the hat quickly, wiped his head with a handkerchief and
+replaced the hat, feeling as if he had become incognito for a few
+seconds. The hat was back on now, feeling official but terrible, and
+about the same was true of the fully-loaded Smith & Wesson .44
+Magnum revolver which hung in his shoulder holster. The harness chafed
+at his shoulder and chest and the weight of the gun itself was an
+added and unwelcome burden.
+
+But even without the gun and the hat, Malone did not feel exactly
+chipper. His shirt and undershirt were no longer two garments, but
+one, welded together by seamless sweat and plastered heavily and not
+too skillfully to his skin. His trouser legs clung damply to calves
+and thighs, rubbing as he walked, and at the knees each trouser leg
+attached and detached itself with the unpleasant regularity of a wet
+bastinado. Inside Malone's shoes, his socks were completely awash, and
+he seemed to squish as he walked. It was hard to tell, but there
+seemed to be a small fish in his left shoe. It might, he told himself,
+be no more than a pebble or a wrinkle in his sock. But he was willing
+to swear that it was swimming upstream.
+
+And the forecast, he told himself bitterly, was for continued warm.
+
+He forced himself to take his mind off his own troubles and get back
+to the troubles of the FBI in general, such as the problem at hand. It
+was an effort, but he frowned and kept walking, and within a block he
+was concentrating again on the _psi_ powers.
+
+_Psi_, he told himself, was behind the whole mess. In spite of Boyd's
+horrified refusal to believe such a thing, Malone was sure of it.
+Three years ago, of course, he wouldn't have considered the notion
+either. But since then a great many things had happened, and his
+horizons had widened. After all, capturing a double handful of totally
+insane, if perfectly genuine telepaths, from asylums all over the
+country, was enough by itself to widen quite a few stunned horizons.
+And then, later, there had been the gang of juvenile delinquents. They
+had been perfectly normal juvenile delinquents, stealing cars and
+bopping a stray policeman or two. It happened, though, that they had
+solved the secret of instantaneous teleportation, too. This made them
+just a trifle unusual.
+
+In capturing them, Malone, too, had learned the teleportation secret.
+Unlike Boyd, he thought, or Burris, the idea of psionic power didn't
+bother him much. After all, the psionic spectrum (if it was a spectrum
+at all) was just as much a natural phenomenon as gravity or magnetism.
+
+It was just a little hard for some people to get used to.
+
+And, of course, he didn't fully understand _how_ it worked, or _why_.
+This put him in the position, he told himself, of an Australian
+aborigine. He tried to imagine an Australian aborigine in a hat on a
+hot day, decided the aborigine would have too much sense, and got back
+off the subject again.
+
+However, he thought grimly, there was this Australian aborigine. And
+he had a magnifying glass, which he'd picked up from the wreck of some
+ship. Using that--assuming that experience, or a friendly missionary,
+taught him how--he could manage to light a fire, using the sun's
+thermonuclear processes to do the job. Malone doubted that the
+aborigine knew anything about thermonuclear processes, but he could
+start a fire with them.
+
+As a matter of fact, he told himself, the aborigine didn't understand
+oxidation, either. But he could use that fire, when he got it going.
+In spite of his lack of knowledge, the aborigine could use that nice,
+hot, burning fire...
+
+Hurriedly, Malone pried his thoughts away from aborigines and heat,
+and tried to focus his mind elsewhere. He didn't understand psionic
+processes, he thought; but then, nobody did, really, as far as he
+knew. But he could use them.
+
+And, obviously, somebody else could use them too.
+
+Only what kind of force was being used? What kind of psionic force
+would it take to make so many people in the United States goof up the
+way they were doing?
+
+That, Malone told himself, was a good question, a basic and an
+important question. He was proud of himself for thinking of it.
+
+Unfortunately, he didn't have the answer.
+
+But he thought he knew a way of getting one.
+
+It was perfectly true that nobody knew much about how psionics worked.
+For that matter, nobody knew very much about how gravity worked. But
+there was still some information, and, in the case of psionics, Malone
+knew where it was to be found.
+
+It was to be found in Yucca Flats, Nevada.
+
+It was, of course, true that Nevada would probably be even hotter than
+Washington, D. C. But there was no help for that, Malone told himself
+sadly; and, besides, the cold chill of the expert himself would
+probably cool things off quite rapidly. Malone thought of Dr. Thomas
+O'Connor, the Westinghouse psionics expert and frowned. O'Connor was
+not exactly what might be called a friendly man.
+
+But he did know more about psionics than anyone else Malone could
+think of. And his help had been invaluable in solving the two previous
+psionic cases Malone had worked on.
+
+For a second he thought of calling O'Connor, but he brushed that
+thought aside bravely. In spite of the heat of Yucca Flats, he would
+have to talk to the man personally. He thought again of O'Connor's
+congealed personality, and wondered if it would really be effective in
+combating the heat. If it were, he told himself, he would take the man
+right back to Washington with him, and plug him into the
+air-conditioning lines.
+
+He sighed deeply, thought about a cigar and decided regretfully
+against it, here on the public street where he would be visible to
+anyone. Instead, he looked around him, discovered that he was only a
+block from a large, neon-lit drugstore and headed for it. Less than a
+minute later he was in a phone booth.
+
+The operators throughout the country seemed to suffer from heat
+prostration, and Malone was hardly inclined to blame them. But, all
+the same, it took several minutes for him to get through to Dr.
+O'Connor's office, and a minute or so more before he could convince a
+security-addled secretary that, after all, he would hardly blow
+O'Connor to bits over the long-distance phone.
+
+Finally the secretary, with a sigh of reluctance, said she would see
+if Dr. O'Connor were available. Malone waited in the phone booth,
+opening the door every few seconds to breathe. The booth was
+air-conditioned, but remained for some mystical reason an even ten
+degrees above the boiling point of Malone's temper.
+
+Finally Dr. O'Connor's lean, pallid face appeared on the screen. He
+had not changed since Malone had last seen him. He still looked, and
+acted, like one of Malone's more disliked law professors.
+
+"Ah," the scientist said in a cold, precise voice. "Mr. Malone. I am
+sorry for our precautions, but you understand that security must be
+served."
+
+"Sure," Malone said.
+
+"Being an FBI man, of course you would," Dr. O'Connor went on, his
+face changing slightly and his voice warming almost to the boiling
+point of nitrogen. It was obvious that the phrase was Dr. O'Connor's
+idea of a little joke, and Malone smiled politely and nodded. The
+scientist seemed to feel some friendliness toward Malone, though it
+was hard to tell for sure. But Malone had brought him some fine
+specimens to work with--telepaths and teleports, though human, being
+no more than specimens to such a very precise scientific mind--and he
+seemed grateful for Malone's diligence and effort in finding such
+fascinating objects of study.
+
+That Malone certainly hadn't started out to find them made, it
+appeared, very little difference.
+
+"Well, then," O'Connor said, returning to his normal, serious tone.
+"What can I do for you, Mr. Malone?"
+
+"If you have the time, Doctor," Malone said respectfully, "I'd like to
+talk to you for a few minutes." He had the absurd feeling that
+O'Connor was going to tell him to stop by after class, but the
+scientist only nodded.
+
+"Your call is timed very well," he said. "As it happens, Mr. Malone, I
+do have a few seconds to spare just now."
+
+"Fine," Malone said.
+
+"I should be glad to talk with you," O'Connor said, without looking
+any more glad than ever.
+
+"I'll be right there," Malone said. O'Connor nodded again, and blanked
+out. Malone switched off and took a deep, superheated breath of phone
+booth air. For a second he considered starting his trip from outside
+the phone booth, but that was dangerous--if not to Malone, then to
+innocent spectators. Psionics was by no means a household word, and
+the sight of Malone leaving for Nevada might send several citizens
+straight to the wagon. Which was not a place, he thought judiciously,
+for anybody to be on such a hot day.
+
+He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second. In that time he
+reconstructed from memory a detailed, three-dimensional, full-color
+image of Dr. O'Connor's office in his mind. It was perfect in detail;
+he checked it over mentally and then, by a special effort of will, he
+gave himself the psychic push that made the transition possible.
+
+When he opened his eyes, he was in O'Connor's office, standing in
+front of the scientist's wide desk. He hoped nobody had been looking
+into the phone booth at the instant he had disappeared, but he was
+reasonably sure he'd been unobserved. People didn't go around peering
+into phone booths, after all, and he had seen no one.
+
+O'Connor looked up without surprise. "Ah," he said. "Sit down, Mr.
+Malone." Malone looked around for the chair, which was an
+uncomfortably straight-backed affair, and sat down in it gingerly.
+Remembering past visits to O'Connor, he was grateful for even the
+small amount of relaxation the hard wood afforded him. O'Connor had
+only recently unbent to the point of supplying a spare chair in his
+office for visitors, and, apparently, especially for Malone. Perhaps,
+Malone thought, it was more gratitude for the lovely specimens.
+
+Malone still felt uncomfortable, but tried bravely not to show it. He
+felt slightly guilty, too, as he always did when he popped into
+O'Connor's office without bothering to stay space-bound. By law, after
+all, he knew he should check in and out at the main gate of the huge,
+ultra-top-secret Government reservation whenever he visited Yucca
+Flats. But that meant wasting a lot of time and going through a lot of
+trouble. Malone had rationalized it out for himself that way, and had
+gotten just far enough to do things the quick and easy way and not
+quite far enough to feel undisturbed about it. After all, he told
+himself grimly, anything that saved time and trouble increased the
+efficiency of the FBI, so it was all to the good.
+
+He swallowed hard. "Dr. O'Connor--" he began.
+
+O'Connor looked up again. "Yes?" he said. He'd had plenty of practice
+in watching people appear and disappear, between Malone and the
+specimens Malone had brought him; he was beyond surprise or shock by
+now.
+
+"I came here to talk to you," Malone began again.
+
+O'Connor nodded, a trifle impatiently. "Yes," he said. "I know that."
+
+"Well--" Malone thought fast. Presenting the case to O'Connor was
+impossible; it was too complicated, and it might violate governmental
+secrecy somewhere along the line. He decided to wrap it up in a
+hypothetical situation. "Doctor," he said, "I know that all the
+various manifestations of the _psi_ powers were investigated and named
+long before responsible scientists became interested in the subject."
+
+"That," O'Connor said with some reluctance, "is true." He looked sad,
+as if he wished they'd waited on naming some of the psionic
+manifestations until he'd been born and started investigating them.
+Malone tried to imagine a person doing something called O'Connorizing,
+and decided he was grateful for history.
+
+"Well, then--" he said.
+
+"At least," O'Connor cut in, "it is true in a rather vague and general
+way. You see, Mr. Malone, any precise description of a psionic
+manifestation must wait until a metalanguage has grown up to encompass
+it; that is, until understanding and knowledge have reached the point
+where careful and accurate description can take place."
+
+"Oh," Malone said helplessly. "Sure." He wondered if what O'Connor had
+said meant anything, and decided that it probably did, but he didn't
+want to know about it.
+
+"While we have not yet reached that point," O'Connor said, "we are
+approaching it in our experiments. I am hopeful that, in the near
+future--"
+
+"Well," Malone cut in desperately, "sure. Of course. Naturally."
+
+Dr. O'Connor looked miffed. The temperature of the room seemed to drop
+several degrees, and Malone swallowed hard and tried to look
+ingratiating and helpful, like a student with nothing but A's on his
+record.
+
+Before O'Connor could pick up the thread of his sentence, Malone went
+on: "What I mean is something like this. Picking up the mental
+activity of another person is called telepathy. Floating in the air is
+called levitation. Moving objects around is psychokinesis. Going from
+one place to another instantaneously is teleportation. And so on."
+
+"The language you use," O'Connor said, still miffed, "is extremely
+loose. I might go so far as to say that the statements you have made
+are, essentially, meaningless as a result of their lack of rigor."
+
+Malone took a deep breath. "Dr. O'Connor," he said, "you know what I
+mean, don't you?"
+
+"I believe so," O'Connor said, with the air of a king granting a
+pardon to a particularly repulsive-looking subject in the lowest
+income brackets.
+
+"Well, then," Malone said. "Yes or no?"
+
+O'Connor frowned. "Yes or no what?" he said.
+
+"I--" Malone blinked. "I mean, the things have names," he said at
+last. "All the various psionic manifestations have names."
+
+"Ah," O'Connor said. "Well. I should say--" He put his fingertips
+together and stared at a point on the white ceiling for a second.
+"Yes," he said at last.
+
+Malone breathed a sigh of relief. "Good," he said. "That's what I
+wanted to know." He leaned forward. "And if they all do have names,"
+he went on, "what is it called when a large group of people are forced
+to act in a certain manner?"
+
+O'Connor shrugged. "Forced?" he said.
+
+"Forced by mental power," Malone said.
+
+There was a second of silence.
+
+"At first," O'Connor said, "I might think of various examples: the
+actions of a mob, for example, or the demonstrations of the Indian
+Rope Trick, or perhaps the sale of a useless product through
+television or through other advertising." Again his face moved, ever
+so slightly, in what he obviously believed to be a smile. "The usual
+name for such a phenomenon is 'mass hypnotism,' Mr. Malone," he said.
+"But that is not, strictly speaking, a _psi_ phenomenon at all.
+Studies in that area belong to the field of mob psychology; they are
+not properly in my scope." He looked vastly superior to anything and
+everything that was outside his scope. Malone concentrated on looking
+receptive and understanding.
+
+"Yes?" he said.
+
+O'Connor gave him a look that made Malone feel he'd been caught
+cribbing during an exam, but the scientist said nothing to back up the
+look. Instead he went on: "I will grant that there may be an
+amplification of the telepathic faculty in the normal individual in
+such cases."
+
+"Good," Malone said doubtfully.
+
+"Such an amplification," O'Connor went on, as if he hadn't heard,
+"would account for the apparent--ah--mental linkage that makes a mob
+appear to act as a single organism during certain periods of--ah--
+stress." He looked judicious for a second, and then nodded. "However,"
+he said, "other than that, I would doubt that there is any psionic
+force involved."
+
+Malone spent a second or two digesting O'Connor's reply.
+
+"Well," he said at last, "I'm not sure that's what I meant. I mean,
+I'm not sure I meant to ask that question." He took a breath and
+decided to start all over. "It's not like a mob," he said, "with
+everybody all doing the same thing at the same time. It's more like a
+group of men, all separated, without any apparent connections between
+any of the men. And they're all working toward a common goal. All
+doing different things, but all with the same objective. See?"
+
+"Of course I do," O'Connor said flatly. "But what you're suggesting--"
+He looked straight at Malone. "Have you had any experience of this
+... phenomenon?"
+
+"Experience?" Malone said.
+
+"I believe you have had," O'Connor said. "Such a concept could not
+have come to you in a theoretical manner. You must be involved with an
+actual situation very much like the one you describe."
+
+Malone swallowed. "Me?" he said.
+
+"Mr. Malone," O'Connor said. "May I remind you that this is Yucca
+Flats? That the security checks here are as careful as anywhere in the
+world? That I, myself, have top-security clearance for many special
+projects? You do not need to watch your words here."
+
+"It's not security," Malone said. "Anyhow, it's not only security. But
+things are pretty complicated."
+
+"I assure you," O'Connor said, "that I will be able to understand even
+events which you feel are complex."
+
+Malone swallowed again, hard. "I didn't mean--" he started.
+
+"Please, Mr. Malone," O'Connor said. His voice was colder than usual.
+Malone had the feeling that he was about to take the extra chair away.
+"Go on," O'Connor said. "Explain yourself."
+
+Malone took a deep breath. He started with the facts he'd been told by
+Burris, and went straight through to the interviews of the two
+computer-secretary technicians by Boyd and Company.
+
+It took quite awhile. By the time he had finished, O'Connor wasn't
+looking frozen any more; he'd apparently forgotten to keep the freezer
+coils running. Instead, his face showed frank bewilderment, and great
+interest. "I never heard of such a thing," he said. "Never. Not at any
+time."
+
+"But--"
+
+O'Connor shook his head. "I have never heard of a psionic
+manifestation on that order," he said. It seemed to be a painful
+admission. "Something that would make a random group of men co-operate
+in that manner--why, it's completely new."
+
+"It is?" Malone said, wondering if, when it was all investigated and
+described, it might be called O'Connorizing. Then he wondered how
+anybody was going to go about investigating it and describing it, and
+sank even deeper into gloom.
+
+"Completely new," O'Connor said. "You may take my word." Then, slowly,
+he began to brighten again, with all the glitter of newly-formed ice.
+"As a matter of fact," he said, in a tone more like his usual one, "as
+a matter of fact, Mr. Malone, I don't think it's possible."
+
+"But it happened," Malone said. "It's still happening. All over."
+
+O'Connor's lips tightened. "I have given my opinion," he said. "I do
+not believe that such a thing is possible. There must be some other
+explanation."
+
+"All right," Malone said agreeably. "I'll bite. What is it?"
+
+O'Connor frowned. "Your levity," he said, "is uncalled-for."
+
+Malone shrugged. "I didn't mean to be--" He paused. "Anyhow, I didn't
+mean to be funny," he went on. "But I would like to have another idea
+of what's causing all this."
+
+"Scientific theories," O'Connor said sternly, "are not invented on the
+spur of the moment. Only after long, careful thought."
+
+"You mean you can't think of anything," Malone said.
+
+"There must be some other explanation," O'Connor said. "Naturally,
+since the facts have only now been presented to me, it is impossible
+for me to display at once a fully-constructed theory."
+
+Malone nodded slowly. "Okay," he said. "Have you got any hints, then?
+Any ideas at all?"
+
+O'Connor shook his head. "I have not," he said. "But I strongly
+suggest, Mr. Malone, that you recheck your data. The fault may very
+well lie in your own interpretations of the actual facts."
+
+"I don't think so," Malone said.
+
+O'Connor grimaced. "I do," he said firmly.
+
+Malone sighed, very faintly. He shifted in the chair and began to
+realize, for the first time, just how uncomfortable it really was. He
+also felt a little chilly, and the chill was growing. That, he told
+himself, was the effect of Dr. O'Connor. He no longer regretted
+wearing his hat. As a matter of fact, he thought wistfully for a
+second of a small, light overcoat.
+
+O'Connor, he told himself, was definitely not the warm, friendly type.
+
+"Well, then," he said, conquering the chilly feeling for a second,
+"maybe there's somebody else. Somebody who knows something more about
+psionics, and who might have some other ideas about--"
+
+"Please, Mr. Malone," O'Connor said. "The United States Government
+would hardly have chosen me had I not been uniquely qualified in my
+field."
+
+Malone sighed again. "I mean, maybe there are some books on the
+subject," he said quietly, hoping he sounded tactful. "Maybe there's
+something I could look up."
+
+"Mr. Malone." The temperature of the office, Malone realized, was
+definitely lowering. O'Connor's built-in freezer coils were working
+overtime, he told himself. "The field of psionics is so young that I
+can say, without qualification, that I am acquainted with everything
+written on the subject. By that, of course, I mean scientific works. I
+do not doubt that the American Society for Psychical Research, for
+instance, has hundreds of crackpot books which I have never read, or
+even heard of. But in the strictly scientific field, I must say
+that--"
+
+He broke off, looking narrowly at Malone with what might have been
+concern, but looked more like discouragement and boredom.
+
+"Mr. Malone," he said, "are you ill?"
+
+Malone thought about it. He wasn't quite sure, he discovered. The
+chill in the office was bothering him more and more, and as it grew he
+began to doubt that it was all due to the O'Connor influence. Suddenly
+a distinct shudder started somewhere in the vicinity of his shoulders
+and rippled its way down his body.
+
+Another one followed it, and then a third.
+
+"Mr. Malone," O'Connor said.
+
+"Me?" Malone said. "I'm--I'm all right."
+
+"You seem to have contracted a chill," O'Connor said.
+
+A fourth shudder followed the other three.
+
+"I--guess so," Malone said. "I d-d--I do s-seem to be r-r-rather
+chilly."
+
+O'Connor nodded. "Ah," he said. "I thought so. Although a chill is
+certainly odd at seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit." He looked at the
+thermometer just outside the window of his office, then turned back to
+Malone. "Pardon me," he said. "Seventy-one point six."
+
+"Is--is that all it is?" Malone said. Seventy-one point six degrees,
+or even seventy-two, hardly sounded like the broiling Nevada desert
+he'd expected.
+
+"Of course," O'Connor said. "At nine o'clock in the morning, one would
+hardly expect great temperatures. The desert becomes quite hot during
+the day, but cools off rapidly; I assume you are familiar with the
+laws covering the system."
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "S-sure."
+
+The chills were not getting any better. They continued to travel up
+and down his body with the dignified regularity of Pennsylvania
+Railroad commuter trains.
+
+O'Connor frowned for a second. It was obvious that his keen scientific
+eye was sizing up the phenomenon, and reporting events to his keen
+scientific brain. In a second or less, the keen scientific brain had
+come up with an answer, and Dr. O'Connor spoke in his very keenest
+scientific voice.
+
+"I should have warned you," he said, without an audible trace of
+regret. "The answer is childishly simple, Mr. Malone. You left
+Washington at noon."
+
+"Just a little before noon," Malone said. Remembering the burning sun,
+he added: "High noon. Very high."
+
+"Just so," O'Connor said. "And not only the heat was intense; the
+humidity, I assume, was also high."
+
+"Very," Malone said, thinking back. He shivered again.
+
+"In Washington," O'Connor said, "it was noon. Here it is nine o'clock,
+and hardly as warm. The atmosphere is quite arid, and about twenty
+degrees below that obtaining in Washington."
+
+Malone thought about it, trying to ignore the chills. "Oh," he said at
+last. "And all the time I thought it was you."
+
+"What?" O'Connor leaned forward.
+
+"Nothing," Malone said hastily. "Nothing at all."
+
+"My suggestion," O'Connor said, putting his fingertips together again,
+"is that you take off your clothes, which are undoubtedly damp, and--"
+
+Naturally, Malone had not brought any clothes to Yucca Flats to change
+into. And when he tried to picture himself in a spare suit of Dr.
+O'Connor's, the picture just wouldn't come. Besides, the idea of doing
+a modified striptease in, or near, the O'Connor office was thoroughly
+unattractive.
+
+"Well," he said slowly, "thanks a lot, Doctor, but no thanks. I really
+have a better idea."
+
+"Better?" O'Connor said.
+
+"Well, I--" Malone took a deep breath and shut his eyes.
+
+He heard Dr. O'Connor say: "Well, Mr. Malone, goodbye. And good luck."
+
+Then the office in Yucca Flats was gone, and Malone was standing in
+the bedroom of his own apartment, on the fringes of Washington, D.C.
+
+
+4
+
+He walked over to the wall control and shut off the air-conditioning
+in a hurry. He threw open a window and breathed great gulps of the
+hot, humid air from the streets. In a small corner at the back of his
+mind, he wondered why he was grateful for the air he had suffered
+under only a few minutes before. But that, he reflected, was life. And
+a very silly kind of life, too, he told himself without rancor.
+
+In a few minutes he left the window, somewhat restored, and headed for
+the shower. When it was running nicely and he was under it, he started
+to sing. But his voice didn't sound as much like the voice of Lauritz
+Melchior as it usually did, not even when he made a brave, if
+foolhardy stab at the Melchior accent. Slowly, he began to realize
+that he was bothered.
+
+He climbed out of the shower and started drying himself. Up to now, he
+thought, he had depended on Dr. Thomas O'Connor for edifying,
+trustworthy and reasonably complete information about psionics and
+_psi_ phenomena in general. He had looked on O'Connor as a sort of
+living version of an extremely good edition of the Britannica, always
+available for reference.
+
+And now O'Connor had failed him. That, Malone thought, was hardly
+fair. O'Connor had no business failing him, particularly when there
+was no place else to go.
+
+The scientist had been right, of course, Malone knew. There was no
+other scientist who knew as much about psionics as O'Connor, and if
+O'Connor said there were no books, then that was that: there were no
+books.
+
+He reached for a drawer in his dresser, opened it and pulled out some
+underclothes, humming tunelessly under his breath as he dressed. If
+there was no one to ask, he thought, and if there were no books...
+
+He stopped with a sock in his hand, and stared at it in wonder.
+O'Connor hadn't said there were no books. As a matter of fact, Malone
+realized, he'd said exactly the opposite.
+
+There were books. But they were "crackpot" books. O'Connor had never
+read them. He had, he said, probably never even heard of many of them.
+
+"Crackpot" was a fighting word to O'Connor. But to Malone it had all
+the sweetness of flattery. After all, he'd found telepaths in insane
+asylums, and teleports among the juvenile delinquents of New York.
+"Crackpot" was a word that was rapidly ceasing to have any meaning at
+all in Malone's mind.
+
+He realized that he was still staring at the sock, which was black
+with a pink clock. Hurriedly, he put it on, and finished dressing. He
+reached for the phone and made a few fast calls, and then teleported
+himself to his locked office in FBI Headquarters, on East 69th Street
+in New York. He let himself out, and strolled down the corridor. The
+agent-in-charge looked up from his desk as Malone passed, blinked, and
+said, "Hello, Malone. What's up now?"
+
+"I'm going prowling," Malone said. "But there won't be any work for
+you, as far as I can see."
+
+"Oh?"
+
+"Just relax," Malone said. "Breathe easy."
+
+"I'll try to," the agent-in-charge said, a little sadly. "But every
+time you show up, I think about that wave of red Cadillacs you
+started. I'll never feel really secure again."
+
+"Relax," Malone said. "Next time it won't be Cadillacs. But it might
+be spirits, blowing on ear-trumpets. Or whatever it is they do."
+
+"Spirits, Malone?" the agent-in-charge said.
+
+"No, thanks," Malone said sternly. "I never drink on duty." He gave
+the agent a cheery wave of his hand and went on out to the street.
+
+The Psychical Research Society had offices in the Ravell Building, a
+large structure composed mostly of plate glass and anodized aluminum
+that looked just a little like a bright blue transparent crackerbox
+that had been stood on end for purposes unknown. Having walked all the
+way down to this box on 56th Street, Malone had recovered his former
+sensitivity range to temperature and felt pathetically grateful for
+the coolish sea breeze that made New York somewhat less of an
+unbearable Summer Festival than was normal.
+
+The lobby of the building was glittering and polished, as if human
+beings could not possibly exist in it. Malone took an elevator to the
+sixth floor, stepped out into a small, equally polished hall, and
+hurriedly looked off to his right. A small door stood there, with a
+legend engraved in elegantly small letters. It said:
+
+     _The Psychical Research Society_
+                  _Push_
+
+Malone obeyed instructions. The door swung noiselessly open, and then
+closed behind him.
+
+He was in a large square-looking room which had a couch and chair set
+at one corner, and a desk at the far end. Behind the desk was a brass
+plate, on which was engraved:
+
+     _The Psychical Research Society_
+               _Main Offices_
+
+To Malone's left was a hall that angled off into invisibility, and to
+the left of the desk was another one, going straight back past doors
+and two radiators until it ran into a right-angled turn and also
+disappeared.
+
+Malone took in the details of his surroundings almost automatically,
+filing them in his memory just in case he ever needed to use them.
+
+One detail, however, required more than automatic attention. Sitting
+behind the desk, her head just below the brass plaque, was a redhead.
+She was, Malone thought, positively beautiful. Of course, he could not
+see the lower two-thirds of her body, but if they were half as
+interesting as the upper third and the face and head, he was willing
+to spend days, weeks or even months on their investigation. Some jobs,
+he told himself, feeling a strong sense of duty, were definitely worth
+taking time over.
+
+She was turned slightly away from Malone, and had obviously not heard
+him come in. Malone wondered how best to announce himself, and
+regretfully gave up the idea of tiptoeing up to the girl, placing his
+hands over her eyes, kissing the back of her neck and crying:
+"Surprise!" It was elegant, he felt, but it just wasn't _right_.
+
+He compromised at last on the old established method of
+throat-clearing to attract her attention. He was sure he could take it
+from there, to an eminently satisfying conclusion.
+
+He tiptoed on the deep-pile rug right up to her desk. He took a deep
+breath.
+
+And the expected happened.
+
+He sneezed.
+
+The sneeze was loud and long, and it echoed through the room and
+throughout the corridors. It sounded to Malone like the blast of a
+small bomb, or possibly a grenade. Startled himself by the volume of
+sound he had managed to generate, he jumped back.
+
+The girl had jumped, too, but her leap had been straight upward, about
+an inch and a half. She came down on her chair and reached up a hand.
+The hand wiped the back of her neck with a slow, lingering motion of
+complete loathing. Then, equally slowly, she turned.
+
+"That," she said in a low, sweet voice, "was a hell of a dirty trick."
+
+"It was an accident," Malone said. "The Will of God."
+
+"God has an exceedingly nasty mind," the girl said. "Something, by the
+way, which I have often suspected." She regarded Malone darkly. "Do
+you always do that to strangers? Is it some new sort of perversion?"
+
+"I have never done such a thing before," Malone said sternly.
+
+"Oh," the girl said. "An experimenter. Avid for new sensations.
+Probably a jaded scion of a rich New York family." She paused. "Tell
+me," she said, "is it fun?"
+
+Malone opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He shut it, thought for
+a second and then tried again. He got as far as: "I--" before Nemesis
+overtook him. The second sneeze was even louder and more powerful than
+the first had been.
+
+"It must be fun," the girl said acidly, producing a handkerchief from
+somewhere and going to work on her face. "You just can't seem to wait
+to do it again. Would it do any good to tell you that the fascination
+with this form of greeting is not universal? Or don't you care?"
+
+"Damn it," Malone said, goaded, "I've got a cold."
+
+"And you feel you should share it with the world," the girl said. "I
+quite understand. Tell me, is there anything I can do for you? Or has
+your mission been accomplished?"
+
+"My mission?" Malone said.
+
+"Having sneezed twice at me," the girl said, "do you feel satisfied?
+Will you vanish softly and silently away? Or do you want to sneeze at
+somebody else?"
+
+"I want the president of the Society," Malone said. "According to my
+information, his name is Sir Lewis Carter."
+
+"And if you sneeze at him," the girl said, "yours is going to be mud.
+He isn't much on novelty."
+
+"I--"
+
+"Besides which," she said, "he's extremely busy. And I don't think
+he'll see you at all. Why don't you go and sneeze at somebody else?
+There must be lots of people who would consider themselves honored to
+be noticed, especially in such a startling way. Why don't you try and
+find one somewhere? Somewhere very far away."
+
+Malone was beyond speech. He fumbled for his wallet, flipped it open
+and showed the girl his identification.
+
+"My, my," she said. "And hasn't the FBI anything better to do? I mean,
+can't you go and sneeze at counterfeiters in their lairs, or wherever
+they might be?"
+
+"I want to see Sir Lewis Carter," Malone said doggedly.
+
+The girl shrugged and picked up the phone on the desk. It was a
+blank-vision device, of course; many office intercoms were. She
+dialed, waited and then said, "Sir Lewis, please." Another second went
+by. Then she spoke again. "Sir Lewis," she said, "this is Lou, at the
+front desk. There's a man here named Malone, who wants to see you."
+
+She waited a second. "I don't know what he wants," she told the phone.
+"But he's from the FBI." A second's pause. "That's right, the FBI,"
+she said. "All right, Sir Lewis. Right away." She hung up the phone
+and turned to watch Malone warily.
+
+"Sir Lewis," she said, "will see you. I couldn't say why. But take the
+side corridor to the rear of the suite. His office has his name on it,
+and I won't tell you you can't miss it because I have every faith that
+you will. Good luck."
+
+Malone blinked. "Look," he said. "I know I startled you, but I didn't
+mean to. I--" He started to sneeze, but this time he got his own
+handkerchief out in time and muffled the explosion slightly.
+
+"Good work," the girl said approvingly. "Tell me, Mr. Malone, have you
+been toilet-trained, too?"
+
+There was nothing at all to say to that remark, Malone reflected as he
+wended his way down the side corridor. It seemed endless, and kept
+branching off unexpectedly. Once he blundered into a large open room
+filled with people at desks. A woman who seemed to have a great many
+teeth and rather bulbous eyes looked up at him. "Can I help you?" she
+said in a fervent whine.
+
+"I sincerely hope not," Malone said, backing away and managing to find
+the corridor once more. After what seemed like a long time, and two
+more sneezes, he found a small door which was labeled in capital
+letters:
+
+     THE PSYCHICAL RESEARCH SOCIETY
+             SIR LEWIS CARTER
+                PRESIDENT
+
+Malone sighed. "Well," he muttered, "they certainly aren't hiding
+anything." He pushed at the door, and it swung open.
+
+Sir Lewis was a tall, solidly-built man with a kindly expression. He
+wore grey flannel trousers and a brown tweed jacket, which made an
+interesting color contrast with his iron-grey hair. His teeth were
+clenched so firmly on the bit of a calabash pipe with a meerschaum
+bowl that Malone wondered if he could ever get loose. Malone shut the
+door behind him, and Sir Lewis rose and extended a hand.
+
+Malone went to the desk and reached across to take the hand. It was
+firm and dry. "I'm Kenneth Malone," Malone said.
+
+"Ah, yes," Sir Lewis said. "Pleased to meet you. Always happy, of
+course, to do whatever I can for your FBI. Not only a duty, so to
+speak, but a pleasure. Sit down. Please do sit down."
+
+Malone found a chair at the side of the desk, and sank into it. It was
+soft and comfortable. It provided such a contrast to O'Connor's
+furnishings that Malone began to wish it was Sir Lewis who was
+employed at Yucca Flats. Then he could tell Sir Lewis everything about
+the case.
+
+Now, of course, he could only hedge and try to make do without stating
+very many facts. "Sir Lewis," he said, "I trust you'll keep this
+conversation confidential."
+
+"Naturally," Sir Lewis said. He removed the pipe, stared at it, and
+replaced it.
+
+"I can't give you the full details," Malone went on, "but the FBI is
+presently engaged in an investigation which requires the specialized
+knowledge your organization seems to have."
+
+"FBI?" Sir Lewis said. "Specialized investigation?" He seemed pleased,
+but a trifle puzzled. "Dear boy, anything we have is at your disposal,
+of course. But I quite fail to see how you can consider us--"
+
+"It's rather an unusual problem," Malone said, feeling that that was
+the understatement of the year. "But I understand that your records go
+back nearly a century."
+
+"Quite true," Sir Lewis murmured.
+
+"During that time," Malone said, "the Society investigated a great
+many supposedly supernatural or supernormal incidents."
+
+"Many of them," Sir Lewis said, "were discovered to be fraudulent, I'm
+afraid. The great majority, in fact."
+
+"That's what I'd assume," Malone said. He fished in his pockets, found
+a cigarette and lit it. Sir Lewis went on chewing at his unlit pipe.
+"What we're interested in," Malone said, "is some description of the
+various methods by which these frauds were perpetrated."
+
+"Ah," Sir Lewis said. "The tricks of the trade, so to speak?"
+
+"Exactly," Malone said.
+
+"Well, then," Sir Lewis said. "The luminous gauze, for instance, that
+passes for ectoplasm; the various methods of table-lifting; control of
+the Ouija board--things like that?"
+
+"Not quite that elementary," Malone said. He puffed on the cigarette,
+wishing it was a cigar. "We're pretty much up to that kind of thing.
+But had it ever occurred to you that many of the methods used by phony
+mind-reading acts, for instance, might be used as communication
+methods by spies?"
+
+"Why, I believe some have been," Sir Lewis said. "Though I don't know
+much about that, of course; there was a case during the First World
+War--"
+
+"Exactly," Malone said. He took a deep breath. "It's things like that
+we're interested in," he said, and spent the next twenty minutes
+slowly approaching his subject. Sir Lewis, apparently fascinated, was
+perfectly willing to unbend in any direction, and jotted down notes on
+some of Malone's more interesting cases, murmuring: "Most unusual,
+most unusual," as he wrote.
+
+The various types of phenomena that the Society had investigated came
+into the discussion, and Malone heard quite a lot about the Beyond,
+the Great Summerland, Spirit Mediums and the hypothetical existence of
+fairies, goblins and elves.
+
+"But, Sir Lewis--" he said.
+
+"I make no claims personally," Sir Lewis said. "But I understand that
+there is a large and somewhat vocal group which does make rather
+solid-sounding claims in that direction. They say that they have seen
+fairies, talked with goblins, danced with the elves."
+
+"They must be very unusual people," Malone said, understating heavily.
+
+"Oh," Sir Lewis said, without a trace of irony, "they certainly are."
+
+Talk like this passed away nearly a half-hour, until Malone finally
+felt that it was the right time to introduce some of his real
+questions. "Tell me, Sir Lewis," he said. "Have you had many instances
+of a single man, or a small group of men, controlling the actions of a
+much larger group? And doing it in such a way that the larger group
+doesn't even know it is being manipulated?"
+
+"Of course I have," Sir Lewis said. "And so have you. They call it
+advertising."
+
+Malone flicked his cigarette into an ashtray. "I didn't mean exactly
+that," he said. "Suppose they're doing it in such a way that the
+larger group doesn't even suspect that manipulation is going on?"
+
+Sir Lewis removed his pipe and frowned at it. "I may be able to give
+you a little information," he said slowly, "but not much."
+
+"Ah?" Malone said, trying to sound only mildly interested.
+
+"Outside of mob psychology," Sir Lewis said, "and all that sort of
+thing, I really haven't seen any record of a case of such a thing
+happening. And I can't quite imagine anyone faking it."
+
+"But you have got some information?" Malone said.
+
+"Certainly," Sir Lewis said. "There is always spirit control."
+
+"Spirit control?" Malone blinked.
+
+"Demoniac intervention," Sir Lewis said. "'My name is Legion,' you
+know."
+
+Sir Lewis Legion, Malone thought confusedly, was a rather unusual
+name. He took a breath and caught hold of his revolving mind. "How
+would you go about that?" he said, a little hopelessly.
+
+"I haven't the foggiest," Sir Lewis admitted cheerfully. "But I will
+have it looked up for you." He made a note. "Anything else?"
+
+Malone tried to think. "Yes," he said at last. "Can you give me a
+condensed report on what is known--and I mean _known_--on telepathy
+and teleportation?"
+
+"What you want," Sir Lewis said, "are those cases proven genuine, not
+the ones in which we have established fraud, or those still in doubt."
+
+"Exactly," Malone said. If he got no other use out of the data, it
+would provide a measuring-stick for the Society. The general public
+didn't know that the Government was actually using psionic powers, and
+the Society's theories, checked against actual fact, would provide a
+rough index of reliability to use on the Society's other data.
+
+But spirits, somehow, didn't seem very likely. Malone sighed and stood
+up.
+
+"I'll have copies made of all the relevant material," Sir Lewis said,
+"from our library and research files. Where do you want the material
+sent? I do want to warn you of its bulk; there may be quite a lot of
+it."
+
+"FBI Headquarters, on 69th Street," Malone said. "And send a statement
+of expenses along with it. As long as the bill's within reason, don't
+worry about itemizing; I'll see that it goes through Accounting
+myself."
+
+Sir Lewis nodded. "Fine," he said. "And, if you should have any
+difficulties with the material, please let me know. I'll always be
+glad to help."
+
+"Thanks for your co-operation," Malone said. He went to the door, and
+walked on out.
+
+He blundered back into the same big room again, on his way through the
+corridors. The bulbous-eyed woman, who seemed to have inherited a full
+set of thirty-two teeth from each of her parents, gave him a friendly
+if somewhat crowded smile, but Malone pressed on without a word. After
+awhile, he found the reception room again.
+
+The girl behind the desk looked up. "How did he react?" she said.
+
+Malone blinked. "React?" he said.
+
+"When you sneezed at him," she said. "Because I've been thinking it
+over, and I've got a new theory. You're doing a survey on how people
+act when encountering sneezes. Like Kinsey."
+
+This girl--Lou something, Malone thought, and with difficulty
+refrained from adding "Gehrig"--had an unusual effect, he decided. He
+wondered if there were anyone in the world she couldn't reduce to
+paralyzed silence.
+
+"Of course," she went on, "Kinsey was dealing with sex, and you
+aren't. At least, you aren't during business hours." She smiled
+politely at Malone.
+
+"No," he said helplessly, "I'm not."
+
+"It is sneezing, then," she said. "Will I be in the book when it's
+published?"
+
+"Book?" Malone said, feeling more and more like a rather low-grade
+moron.
+
+"The book on sneezing, when you get it published," she said. "I can
+see it now: _The Case of Miss X, a Receptionist_."
+
+"There isn't going to be any book," Malone said.
+
+She shook her head. "That's a shame," she said. "I've always wanted to
+be a Miss X. It sounds exciting."
+
+"X," Malone said at random, "marks the spot."
+
+"Why, that's the sweetest thing that's been said to me all day," the
+girl said. "I thought you could hardly talk, and here you come out
+with lovely things like that. But I'll bet you say it to all the
+girls."
+
+"I have never said it to anybody before," Malone said flatly. "And I
+never will again."
+
+The girl sighed. "I'll treasure it," she said. "My one great moment.
+Goodbye, Mr.--Malone, isn't it?"
+
+"Ken," Malone said. "Just call me Ken."
+
+"And I'm Lou," the girl said. "Goodbye."
+
+An elevator arrived and Malone ducked into it. Louie? he thought.
+Louise? Luke? Of course, there was Sir Lewis Carter, who might be
+called Lou. Was he related to the girl?
+
+No, Malone thought wildly. Relations went by last names. There was no
+reason for Lou to be related to Sir Lewis. They didn't even look
+alike. For instance, he had no desire whatever to make a date with Sir
+Lewis Carter, or to take him to a glittering nightclub, or to make him
+any whispered propositions. And the very idea of Sir Lewis Carter
+sitting on the Malone lap was enough to give him indigestion and spots
+before the eyes.
+
+Sternly, he told himself to get back to business. The elevator stopped
+at the lobby and he got out and started down the street, feeling that
+consideration of the lady known as Lou was much more pleasant. After
+all, what did he have to work with, as far as his job was concerned?
+
+So far, two experts had told him that his theory was full of lovely
+little holes. Worse than that, they had told him that mass control of
+human beings was impossible, as far as they knew.
+
+And maybe it was impossible, he told himself sadly. Maybe he should
+just junk his whole theory and think up a new one. Maybe there was no
+psionics involved in the thing at all, and Boyd and O'Connor were
+right.
+
+Of course, he had a deep-seated conviction that psionics was somewhere
+at the root of everything, but that didn't necessarily mean anything.
+A lot of people had deep-seated convictions that they were beetles, or
+that the world was flat And then again, murderers often suffered as a
+result of deep-seated convictions of one sort or another.
+
+On the other hand, maybe he had invented a whole new psionic theory
+or, at least, observed some new psionic facts. Maybe they would call
+the results Malonizing, instead of O'Connorizing. He tried to picture
+a man opening a door and saying: "Come out quick, Mr. Frembits is
+Malonizing again."
+
+It didn't sound very plausible. But, after all, he did have a
+deep-seated conviction. He tried to think of a shallow-seated
+conviction, and failed. Didn't convictions ever stand up, anyhow, or
+lie down?
+
+He shook his head, discovered that he was on 69th Street, and headed
+for the FBI Headquarters. His convictions, he had found, were
+sometimes an expression of his precognitive powers; he determined to
+ride with them, at least for awhile.
+
+By the time he came to the office of the agent-in-charge, he had
+figured out the beginnings of a new line of attack.
+
+"How about the ghosts?" the agent-in-charge asked as he passed.
+
+"They'll be along," Malone said. "In a big bundle, addressed to me
+personally. And don't open the bundle."
+
+"Why not?" the agent-in-charge asked.
+
+"Because I don't want the things to get loose and run around saying
+boo to everybody," Malone said brightly, and went on.
+
+He opened the door of his private office, went inside and sat down at
+the desk there. He took his time about framing a thought, a single,
+clear, deliberate thought:
+
+_Your Majesty, I'd like to speak to you._
+
+He hardly had time to finish it. A flash of color appeared in the
+room, just a few feet from his desk. The flash resolved itself into a
+tiny, grandmotherly-looking woman with a coronal of white hair and a
+kindly, twinkling expression. She was dressed in the full court
+costume of the First Elizabethan period, and this was hardly
+surprising to Malone. The little old lady believed, quite firmly, that
+she was Queen Elizabeth I, miraculously preserved over all these
+centuries. Malone, himself, had practically forgotten that the woman's
+real name was Rose Thompson, and that she had only been alive for
+sixty-five years or so. For most of that time, she had been insane.
+
+For all of that time, however, she had been a genuine telepath. She
+had been discovered during the course of Malone's first psionic case,
+and by now she had even learned to teleport by "reading" the process
+in Malone's mind.
+
+"Good afternoon, Sir Kenneth," she said in a regal, kindly voice. She
+was mad, he knew, but her delusion was nicely kept within bounds. All
+of her bright world hinged on the single fact that she was unshakably
+certain of her royalty. As long as the FBI catered to that notion--
+which included a Royal dwelling for her in Yucca Flats, and the
+privilege of occasionally knighting FBI agents who had pleased her
+unpredictable fancy--she was perfectly rational on all other points.
+She co-operated with Dr. O'Connor and with the FBI in the
+investigation of her psionic powers, and she had given her Royal word
+not to teleport except at Malone's personal request.
+
+"I'd like to talk to you," Malone said, "Your Majesty."
+
+There was an odd note in the Queen's voice, and an odd, haunted
+expression on her face. "I've been hoping you'd ask me to come," she
+said.
+
+"I had a hunch you were following me telepathically," Malone said.
+"Can you give me any help?"
+
+"I--I really don't know," she said. "It's something new, and something
+disturbing. I've never come across anything like it before."
+
+"Like what?" Malone asked.
+
+"It's the--" She made a gesture that conveyed nothing at all to
+Malone. "The--the static," she said at last.
+
+Malone blinked. "Static?" he said.
+
+"Yes," she said. "You're not telepathic, so I can't tell you what it's
+really like. But--well, Sir Kenneth, have you ever seen disturbance on
+a TV screen, when there's some powerful electric output nearby? The
+bright, senseless snowstorms, the meaningless hash?"
+
+"Sure," Malone said.
+
+"It's like that," she said. "It's a sudden, meaningless, disturbing
+blare of telepathic energy."
+
+The telephone rang once. Malone ignored it.
+
+"What's causing these disturbances?" he asked.
+
+She shook her head. "I don't know, Sir Kenneth. I don't know," she
+said. "I can't pick up a person's mind over a distance unless I know
+him, and I can't see what's causing this at all. It's--frankly, Sir
+Kenneth, it's rather terrifying."
+
+The phone rang again.
+
+"How long have you been experiencing this disturbance?" Malone asked.
+He looked at the phone.
+
+"The telephone isn't important," Her Majesty said. "It's only Sir
+Thomas, calling to tell you he's arrested three spies, and that
+doesn't matter at all."
+
+"It doesn't?"
+
+"Not at all," Her Majesty said. "What does matter is that I've only
+been picking up these flashes since you were assigned to this new
+case, Sir Kenneth. And..." She paused.
+
+"Well?" Malone said.
+
+"And they only appear," Her Majesty said, "when I'm tuned to _your_
+mind!"
+
+
+5
+
+Malone stared. He tried to say something but he couldn't find any
+words. The telephone rang again and he pushed the switch with a sense
+of relief. The beard-fringed face of Thomas Boyd appeared on the
+screen.
+
+"You're getting hard to find," Boyd said. "I think you're letting fame
+and fortune go to your head."
+
+"I left word at the office that I was coming here," Malone said
+aggrievedly.
+
+"Sure you did," Boyd said. "How do you think I found you? Am I
+telepathic? Do I have strange powers?"
+
+"Wouldn't surprise me in the least," Malone said. "Now, about those
+spies--"
+
+"See what I mean?" Boyd said. "How did you know?"
+
+"Just lucky, I guess," Malone murmured. "But what about them?"
+
+"Well," Boyd said, "we picked up two men working in the Senate Office
+Building, and another one working for the State Department."
+
+"And they are spies?" Malone said. "Real spies?"
+
+"Oh, they're real enough," Boyd said. "We've known about 'em for
+years, and I finally decided to pick them up for questioning. God
+knows, but maybe they have something to do with all this mess that's
+bothering everybody."
+
+"You haven't the faintest idea what you mean," Malone said. "Mess is
+hardly the word."
+
+Boyd snorted. "You go on getting yourself confused," he said, "while
+some of us do the real work. After all--"
+
+"Never mind the insults," Malone said. "How about the spies?"
+
+"Well," Boyd said, a trifle reluctantly, "they've been working as
+janitors and maintenance men, and of course we've made sure they
+haven't been able to get their hands on any really valuable
+information."
+
+"So they've suddenly turned into criminal masterminds," Malone said.
+"After being under careful surveillance for years."
+
+"Well, it's possible," Boyd said defensively.
+
+"Almost anything is possible," Malone said.
+
+"Some things," Boyd said carefully, "are more possible than others."
+
+"Thank you, Charles W. Aristotle," Malone said. "I hope you realize
+what you've done, picking up those three men. We might have been able
+to get some good lines on them, if you'd left them where they were."
+
+There is an old story about a general who went on an inspection tour
+of the front during World War I, and, putting his head incautiously up
+out of a trench, was narrowly missed by a sniper's bullet. He turned
+to a nearby sergeant and bellowed: "Get that sniper!"
+
+"Oh, we've got him spotted, sir," the sergeant said. "He's been there
+for six days now."
+
+"Well, then," the general said, "why don't you blast him out of
+there?"
+
+"Well, sir, it's this way," the sergeant explained. "He's fired about
+sixty rounds since he's been out there, and he hasn't hit anything
+yet. We're afraid if we get rid of him they'll put up somebody who
+_can_ shoot."
+
+This was standard FBI policy when dealing with minor spies. A great
+many had been spotted, including four in the Department of Fisheries.
+But known spies are easier to keep track of than unknown ones. And, as
+long as they're allowed to think they haven't been spotted, they may
+lead the way to other spies or spy networks.
+
+"I thought it was worth the risk," Boyd said. "After all, if they have
+something to do with the case--"
+
+"But they don't," Malone said.
+
+"Damn it," Boyd exploded, "let me find out for myself, will you?
+You're spoiling all the fun."
+
+"Well, anyhow," Malone said, "they don't."
+
+"You can't afford to take any chances," Boyd said. "After all, when I
+think about William Logan, I tell myself we'd better take care of
+every lead."
+
+"Well," Malone said finally, "you may be right. And then again, you
+may be normally wrong."
+
+"What is that supposed to mean?" Boyd said.
+
+"How should I know?" Malone said. "I'm too busy to go around and
+around like this. But since you've picked the spies up, I suppose it
+won't do any harm to find out if they know anything."
+
+Boyd snorted again. "Thank you," he said, "for your kind permission."
+
+"I'll be right down," Malone said.
+
+"I'll be waiting," Boyd said. "In Interrogation Room 7. You'll
+recognize me by the bullet hole in my forehead and the strange South
+American poison, hitherto unknown to science, in my esophagus."
+
+"Very funny," Malone said. "Don't give up the ship."
+
+Boyd switched off without a word. Malone shrugged at the blank screen
+and pushed his own switch. Then he turned slowly back to Her Majesty,
+who was standing, waiting patiently, at the opposite side of the desk.
+Interference, he thought, located around him...
+
+"Why yes," she said. "That's exactly what I did say."
+
+Malone blinked. "Your Majesty," he said, "would you mind terribly if I
+asked you questions before you answered them? I know you can see them
+in my mind, but it's simpler for me to do things the normal way, just
+now."
+
+"I'm sorry," she said sincerely. "I do agree that matters are confused
+enough already. Please go on."
+
+"Thank you, Your Majesty," Malone said. "Well, then. Do you mean that
+_I'm_ the one causing all this mental static?"
+
+"Oh, no," she said. "Not at all. It's definitely coming from somewhere
+else, and it's beamed at you, or beamed around you."
+
+"But--"
+
+"It's just that I can only pick it up when I'm tuned to your mind,"
+she said.
+
+"Like now?" Malone said.
+
+She shook her head. "Right now," she said, "there isn't any. It only
+happens every once in awhile, every so often, and not continuously."
+
+"Does it happen at regular intervals?" Malone asked.
+
+"Not as far as I've been able to tell," Her Majesty said. "It just
+happens, that's all. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to
+it. Except that it did start when you were assigned to this case."
+
+"Lovely," Malone said. "Perfectly lovely. And what is it supposed to
+mean?"
+
+"Interference," she said. "Static. Jumble. That's all it means. I just
+don't know any more than that, Sir Kenneth; I've never experienced
+anything like it in my life. It really does disturb me."
+
+That, Malone told himself, he could believe. It must be an experience,
+he told himself, like having someone you were looking at suddenly
+dissolve into a jumble of meaningless shapes and lights.
+
+"That's a very good analogy," Her Majesty said. "If you'll pardon me
+speaking before you've voiced your thought."
+
+"Not at all," Malone said. "Go right ahead."
+
+"Well, then," Her Majesty said. "The analogy you use is a good one.
+It's just as disturbing and as meaningless as that."
+
+"And you don't know what's causing it?" Malone said.
+
+"I don't know," she said.
+
+"Nor what the purpose of it is?" he said.
+
+Her Majesty shook her head slowly. "Sir Kenneth," she said, "I don't
+even know whether or not there _is_ any purpose."
+
+Malone sighed deeply. Nothing in the case seemed to make any sense. It
+wasn't that there were no clues, or no information for him to work
+with. There were a lot of clues, and there was a lot of information.
+But nothing seemed to link up with anything else. Every new fact was a
+bright, shiny arrow pointing nowhere in particular.
+
+"Well, then--" he started.
+
+The intercom buzzed. Malone jabbed ferociously at the button. "Yes?"
+he said.
+
+"The ghosts are here," the agent-in-charge's voice said.
+
+Malone blinked. "What?" he said.
+
+"You said you were going to get some ghosts," the agent-in-charge
+said. "From the Psychical Research Society, in a couple of large
+bundles. And they're here now. Want me to exorcise 'em for you?"
+
+"No," Malone said wearily. "Just send them in to join the crowd. Got a
+messenger?"
+
+"I'll send them down," the agent-in-charge said. "About one minute."
+
+Malone nodded, realized the man couldn't see him, said: "Fine," and
+switched off. He looked at his watch. A little over half an hour had
+passed since he had left the Psychical Research Society offices. That,
+he told himself, was efficiency.
+
+Not that the books would mean anything, he thought. They would just
+take their places at the end of the long row of meaningless,
+disturbing, vicious facts that cluttered up his mind. He wasn't an FBI
+agent any more; he was a clown and a failure, and he was through. He
+was going to resign and go to South Dakota and live the life of a
+hermit. He would drink goat's milk and eat old shoes or something, and
+whenever another human being came near he would run away and hide.
+They would call him Old Kenneth, and people would write articles for
+magazines about The Twentieth Century Hermit.
+
+And that would make him famous, he thought wearily, and the whole
+circle would start all over again.
+
+"Now, now, Sir Kenneth," Queen Elizabeth said. "Things aren't quite
+that bad."
+
+"Oh, yes, they are," Malone said. "They're even worse."
+
+"I'm sure we can find an answer to all your questions," Her Majesty
+said.
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "Even I can find an answer. But it isn't the
+right one."
+
+"You can?" Her Majesty said.
+
+"That's right," Malone said. "My answer is: to hell with everything."
+
+* * * * *
+
+Malone's Washington offices didn't look any different. He sighed and
+put the two big packages from the Psychical Research Society down on
+his desk, and then turned to Her Majesty.
+
+"I wanted you to teleport along with me," he said, "because I need
+your help."
+
+"Yes," she said. "I know."
+
+He blinked. "Oh. Sure you do. But let me go over the details."
+
+Her Majesty waved a gracious hand. "If you like, Sir Kenneth," she
+said.
+
+Malone nodded. "We're going on down to Interrogation Room 7 now," he
+said. "Next door to it, there's an observation room, with a one-way
+panel in the wall. You'll be able to see us, but we won't be able to
+see you."
+
+"I really don't require an observation panel," Her Majesty said. "If I
+enter your mind, I can see through your eyes."
+
+"Oh, sure," Malone said. "But the observation room was built for more
+normal people--saving your presence, Your Majesty."
+
+"Of course," she said.
+
+"Now," Malone went on, "I want you to watch all three of the men we're
+going to bring in, and dig everything you can out of their minds."
+
+"Everything?" she said.
+
+"We don't know what might be useful," Malone said. "Anything you can
+find. And if you want any questions asked--if there's anything you
+think I ought to ask the men, or say to them--there's a non-vision
+phone in the observation room. Just lift the receiver. That
+automatically rings the one in the interrogation room and I'll pick it
+up. Understand?"
+
+"Perfectly, Sir Kenneth," she said.
+
+"Okay, then," Malone said. "Let's go." They headed for the door.
+Malone stopped as he opened it. "And by the way," he said.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"If you get any more of those disturbances, let me know."
+
+"At once," Her Majesty promised.
+
+They went on down the hall and took the elevator down to Interrogation
+Room 7, on the lowest level. There was no particular reason for
+putting the interrogation section down there, except that it tended to
+make prisoners more nervous. And a nervous prisoner, Malone knew, was
+very possibly a confessing prisoner.
+
+Malone ushered Her Majesty through the unmarked door of the
+observation chamber, made sure that the panel and phone were in
+working order, and went out. He stepped into Interrogation Room 7
+trying hard to look bored, businesslike and unbeatable. Boyd and four
+other agents were already there, all standing around and talking
+desultorily in low tones. None of them looked as if they had a
+moment's worry in their lives. It was all part of the same technique,
+of course, Malone thought. Make the prisoner feel resistance is
+useless, and you've practically got him working for you.
+
+The prisoner was a hulking, flabby fat man in work coveralls. He had
+black hair that spilled all over his forehead, and tiny button eyes.
+He was the only man in the room who was sitting down, and that was
+meant to make him feel even more inferior and insecure. His hands were
+clasped fatly in his lap, and he was staring down at them in a
+regretful manner. None of the agents paid the slightest attention to
+him. The general impression was that something really tough was coming
+up, but that they were in no hurry for it. They were willing to wait
+for the third degree, it seemed, until the blacksmith had done a
+really good job with the new spikes for the Iron Maiden.
+
+The prisoner looked up apprehensively as Malone shut the door. Malone
+paid no attention to him, and the prisoner unclasped his hands, rubbed
+them on his coveralls and then reclasped them in his lap. His eyes
+fell again.
+
+Boyd looked up too. "Hello, Ken," he said. He tapped a sheaf of papers
+on the single table in the room. Malone went over and picked them up.
+
+They were the abbreviated condensations of three dossiers. All three
+of the men covered in the dossiers were naturalized citizens, but all
+had come in as "political refugees" from Hungary, from Czechoslovakia,
+and from East Germany. Further checking had turned up the fact that
+all three were actually Russians. They had been using false names
+during their stay in the United States, but their real ones were
+appended to the dossiers.
+
+The fat one in the interrogation room was named Alexis Brubitsch. The
+other two, who were presumably waiting separately in other rooms, were
+Ivan Borbitsch and Vasili Garbitsch. The collection sounded, to
+Malone, like a seedy musical-comedy firm of lawyers: Brubitsch,
+Borbitsch and Garbitsch. He could picture them dancing gaily across a
+stage while the strains of music followed them, waving legal forms and
+telephones and singing away.
+
+Brubitsch did not, however, look very gay. Malone went over to him
+now, walking slowly, and looked down. Boyd came and stood next to him.
+
+"This is the one who won't talk, eh?" Malone said, wondering if he
+sounded as much like Dick Tracy as he thought he did. It was a
+standard opening, meant to make the prisoner think his fellows had
+already confessed.
+
+"That's him," Boyd said.
+
+"Mmm," Malone said, trying to look as if he were deciding between the
+rack and the boiling oil. Brubitsch fidgeted slightly, but he didn't
+say anything.
+
+"We didn't know whether we had to get this one to talk, too," Boyd
+said. "What with the others, and all. But we did think you ought to
+have a look at him." He sounded very bored. It was obvious from his
+tone that the FBI didn't care in the least if Alexis Brubitsch never
+opened his mouth again, in what was likely to be a very short
+lifetime.
+
+"Well," Malone said, equally bored, "we might be able to get a few
+corroborative details."
+
+Brubitsch swallowed hard. Malone ignored him.
+
+"Now, just look at him," Boyd said. "He certainly doesn't _look_ like
+the head of a spy ring, does he?"
+
+"Of course he doesn't," Malone said. "That's probably why the Russians
+used him. They figured nobody would ever look twice at a fat slob like
+this. Nobody would ever suspect him of being the head man."
+
+"I guess you're right," Boyd said. He yawned, which Malone thought was
+overacting a trifle. Brubitsch saw the yawn, and one hand came up to
+jerk at his collar.
+
+"Who'd ever think," Malone said, "that he plotted those killings in
+Redstone--all three of them?"
+
+"It is surprising," Boyd said.
+
+"But, then," Malone said, "we know he did. There isn't any doubt of
+that."
+
+Brubitsch seemed to be turning a pale green. It was a fascinating
+color, unlike any other Malone had ever seen. He watched it with
+interest.
+
+"Oh, sure," Boyd said. "We've got enough evidence from the other two
+to send this one to the chair tomorrow, if we want to."
+
+"More than enough," Malone agreed.
+
+Brubitsch opened his mouth, shut it again and closed his eyes. His
+lips moved silently.
+
+"Tell me," Boyd said conversationally, leaning down to the fat man.
+"Did your orders on that job come from Moscow, or did you mastermind
+it all by yourself?"
+
+Brubitsch's eyes stirred, then snapped open as if they'd been pulled
+by a string. "Me?" he said in a hoarse bass voice. "I know nothing
+about this murder. What murder? I know nothing about it."
+
+There were no such murders, of course. But Malone was not ready to let
+Brubitsch know anything about that. "Oh, the ones you shot in
+Redstone," he said in an offhand way.
+
+"The what?" Brubitsch said. "I shot people? Never."
+
+"Oh, sure you did," Boyd said. "The others say you did."
+
+Brubitsch's head seemed to sink into his neck. "Borbitsch and
+Garbitsch, they tell you about a murder? It is not true. Is a lie."
+
+"Really?" Malone said. "We think it's true."
+
+"Is a lie," Brubitsch said, his little eyes peering anxiously from
+side to side. "Is not true," he went on hopefully. "I have alibi."
+
+"You do?" Boyd said. "For what time?"
+
+"For time when murder happened," Brubitsch said. "I was someplace
+else."
+
+"Well, then," Malone said, "how do you know when the murders were
+done? They were kept out of the newspapers." That, he reflected, was
+quite true, since the murders had never happened. But he watched
+Brubitsch with a wary eye.
+
+"I know nothing about time," Brubitsch said, jerking at his collar. "I
+don't know when they happened."
+
+"Then how can you have an alibi?" Boyd snapped.
+
+"Because I didn't do them!" Brubitsch said tearfully. "If I didn't,
+then I _must_ have alibi!"
+
+"You'd be surprised," Malone said. "Now, about these murders--"
+
+"Was no murder, not by me," Brubitsch said firmly. "Was never any
+killing of anybody, not even by accident."
+
+"But your two friends say--" Boyd began.
+
+"My two friends are not my friends," Brubitsch said firmly. "If they
+tell you about murder and say it was me, they are no friends. I did
+not murder anybody, I have alibi. I did not even murder anybody a
+little bit. They are no friends. This is terrible."
+
+"There," Malone said reflectively, "I agree with you. It's positively
+awful. And I think we might as well give it up. After all, we don't
+need your testimony. The other two are enough; they'll get maybe ten
+years apiece, but you're going to get the chair."
+
+"I will not sit down," Brubitsch said firmly. "I am innocent. I am
+innocent like a small child. Does a small child commit a murder? It is
+ridiculous."
+
+Boyd picked up his cue with ease. "You might as well give us your side
+of the story, then," he said easily. "If you didn't commit any
+murders--"
+
+"I am a small child," Brubitsch announced.
+
+"Okay," Boyd said. "But if you didn't commit any murders, just what
+_have_ you been doing since you've been in this country as a Soviet
+agent?"
+
+"I will say nothing," Brubitsch announced. "I am a small child. It is
+enough." He paused, blinked, and went on, "I will only tell you this:
+no murders were done by our group in any of our activities."
+
+"And what were your activities?" Malone asked.
+
+"Oh, many things," Brubitsch said. "Many, many things. We--"
+
+The telephone rang loudly, and Malone scooped it up with a practiced
+hand. "Malone here," he said.
+
+Her Majesty's voice was excited. "Sir Kenneth!" she said. "I just got
+a tremendous burst of static!"
+
+Malone blinked. _Is my mind acting up again?_ he thought, knowing she
+would pick it up. _Am I being interfered with?_
+
+He didn't feel any different. But then, how was he supposed to feel?
+
+"It's not _your_ mind, Sir Kenneth," Her Majesty said. "Not this time.
+It's _his_ mind. That sneaky-thinking Brubitsch fellow."
+
+_Brubitsch?_ Malone thought. _Now what is that supposed to mean?_
+
+"I don't know, Sir Kenneth," Her Majesty said. "But get on back to
+your questioning. He's ready to talk now."
+
+"Okay," Malone said aloud. "Fine." He hung up and looked back to the
+Russian sitting on his chair. Brubitsch was ready to talk, and that
+was one good thing, anyhow. But what was all the static about?
+
+What was going on?
+
+"Now, then," Malone said. "You were telling us about your group
+activities."
+
+"True," Brubitsch said. "I did not commit any murders. It is possible
+that Borbitsch committed murders. It is maybe even possible that
+Garbitsch committed murders. But I do not think so."
+
+"Why not?" Boyd said.
+
+"They are my friends," Brubitsch said. "Even if they tell lies. They
+are also small children. Besides, I am not even the head of the
+group."
+
+"Who is?" Malone said.
+
+"Garbitsch," Brubitsch said instantly. "He worked in the State
+Department, and he told us what to look for in the Senate Office
+Building."
+
+"What were you supposed to look for?" Boyd said.
+
+"For information," Brubitsch said. "For scraps of paper, or things we
+overheard. But it was very bad, very bad."
+
+"What do you mean, bad?" Malone said.
+
+"Everything was terrible," Brubitsch said mournfully. "Sometimes
+Borbitsch heard something and forgot to tell Garbitsch about it.
+Garbitsch did not like this. He is a very inflamed person. Once he
+threatened to send Borbitsch to the island of Yap as a spy. That is a
+very bad place to go to. There are no enjoyments on the island of Yap,
+and no ones likes strangers there. Borbitsch was very sad."
+
+"What did you do with your information?" Boyd said.
+
+"We remembered it," Brubitsch said. "Or, if we had a scrap of paper,
+we saved it for Garbitsch and gave it to him. But I remember once that
+I had some paper. It had a formula on it. I do not know what the
+formula said."
+
+"What was it about?" Malone said.
+
+Brubitsch gave a massive shrug. "It was about an X and some numbers,"
+he said. "It was not very interesting, but it was a formula, and
+Garbitsch would have liked it. Unfortunately, I did not give it to
+him."
+
+"Why not?" Boyd said.
+
+"I am ashamed," Brubitsch said, looking ashamed. "I was lighting a
+cigarette in the afternoon, when I had the formula. It is a very
+relaxing thing to smoke a cigarette in the afternoon. It is soothing
+to the soul." He looked very sad. "I was holding the piece of paper in
+one hand," he said. "Unfortunately, the match and the paper came into
+contact. I burned my finger. Here." He stuck out a finger toward
+Malone and Boyd, who looked at it without much interest for a second.
+"The paper is gone," he said. "Don't tell Garbitsch. He is very
+inflamed."
+
+Malone sighed. "But you remember the formula," he said. "Don't you?"
+
+Brubitsch shook his massive head very slowly. "It was not very
+interesting," he said. "And I do not have a mathematical mind."
+
+"We know," Malone said. "You are a small child."
+
+"It was terrible," Brubitsch said. "Garbitsch was not happy about our
+activities."
+
+"What did Garbitsch do with the information?" Boyd said.
+
+"He passed it on," Brubitsch said. "Every week he would send a
+short-wave message to the homeland, in code. Some weeks he did not
+send the message."
+
+"Why not?" Malone said.
+
+"The radio did not work," Brubitsch said simply. "We received orders
+by short-wave, but sometimes we did not receive the orders. The radio
+was of very poor quality, and some weeks it refused to send any
+messages. On other weeks, it refused to receive any messages."
+
+"Who was your contact in Russia?" Boyd said.
+
+"A man named X," Brubitsch said. "Like in the formula."
+
+"But what was his real name?" Malone said.
+
+"Who knows?" Brubitsch said. "Does it matter?"
+
+"What else did you do?" Boyd said.
+
+"We met twice a week," Brubitsch said. "Sometimes in Garbitsch's home,
+sometimes in other places. Sometimes we had information. At other
+times, we were friends, having a social gathering."
+
+"Friends?" Malone said.
+
+Brubitsch nodded. "We drank together, talked, played chess. Garbitsch
+is the best chess player in the group. I am not very good. But once we
+had some trouble." He paused. "We had been drinking Russian liquors.
+They are very strong. We decided to uphold the honor of our country."
+
+"I think," Malone murmured sadly, "I know what's coming."
+
+"Ah?" Brubitsch said, interested. "At any rate, we decided to honor
+our country in song. And a policeman came and talked to us. He took us
+down to the police station."
+
+"Why?" Boyd said.
+
+"He was suspicious," Brubitsch said. "We were singing the
+_Internationale_, and he was suspicious. It is unreasonable."
+
+"Oh, I don't know," Boyd said. "What happened then?"
+
+"He took us to the police station," Brubitsch said, "and then after a
+little while he let us go. I do not understand this."
+
+"It's all right," Malone said. "I do." He drew Boyd aside for a
+second, and whispered to him: "The cops were ready to charge these
+three clowns with everything in the book. We had a hell of a time
+springing them so we could go on watching them. I remember the
+stir-up, though I never did know their names until now."
+
+Boyd nodded, and they returned to Brubitsch, who was staring up at
+them with surly eyes.
+
+"It is a secret you are telling him," Brubitsch said. "That is not
+right."
+
+"What do you mean, it's not right?" Malone said.
+
+"It is wrong," Brubitsch went on. "It is not the American way."
+
+He went on, with some prodding, to tell about the activities of the
+spy ring. It did not seem to be a very efficient spy ring; Brubitsch's
+long sad tale of forgotten messages, mixed orders, misplaced documents
+and strange mishaps was a marvel and a revelation to the listening
+officers. "I've never heard anything like it," one of them whispered
+in a tone of absolute wonder. "They're almost working on our side."
+
+Over an hour later, Malone turned wearily away from the prisoner. "All
+right, Brubitsch," he said. "I guess that pretty much covers things
+for the moment. If we want any more information, though--"
+
+"Call on me," Brubitsch said sadly. "I am not going anyplace. And I
+will give you all the information you desire. But I did not commit any
+murders."
+
+"Goodbye, small child," Malone said, as two agents led the fat man
+away. The other two left soon afterward, and Malone and Boyd were
+alone.
+
+"Think he was telling the truth?" Boyd said.
+
+Malone nodded. "Nobody," he said, "could make up a story like that."
+
+"I suppose so," Boyd said, and the phone rang. Malone picked it up.
+
+"Well?" he asked.
+
+"He was telling the truth, all right," Her Majesty said. "There are a
+few more details, of course, like the girl Brubitsch was involved
+with, Sir Kenneth. But she doesn't seem to have anything to do with
+the spy ring, and besides, she isn't a very nice person. She always
+wants money."
+
+"Sounds perfectly lovely," Malone said. "As a matter of fact, I think
+I know her. I know a lot of girls who always want money. It seems to
+be in fashion."
+
+"You don't know this one, Sir Kenneth," Her Majesty said, "and
+besides, she wouldn't be a good influence on you."
+
+Malone sighed. "How about the static explosions?" he said. "Pick up
+any more?"
+
+"No," she said. "Just that one."
+
+Malone nodded at the receiver. "All right," he said. "We're going to
+bring in the second one now. Keep up the good work."
+
+He hung up.
+
+"Who've you got in the observation room?" Boyd asked.
+
+"Queen Elizabeth I," Malone said. "Her Royal Majesty."
+
+"Oh," Boyd said without surprise. "Well, was Brubitsch telling the
+truth?"
+
+"He wasn't holding back anything important," Malone said, thinking
+about the girl. It would be nice to meet a bad influence, he thought
+mournfully. It would be nice to go somewhere with a bad influence (a
+bad influence, he amended, with a good figure) and forget all about
+his job, about the spies, about telepathy, teleportation, psionics and
+everything else. It might be restful.
+
+Unfortunately, it was impossible.
+
+"What's this business about a static explosion?" Boyd said.
+
+"Don't ask silly questions," Malone said. "A static explosion is a
+contradiction in terms. If something is static, it doesn't move--
+whoever heard of a motionless explosion?"
+
+"If it is a contradiction in terms," Boyd said, "they're your terms."
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "But I don't know what they mean. I don't even
+know what I mean."
+
+"You're in a bad way," Boyd said, looking sympathetic.
+
+"I'm in a perfectly terrible way," Malone said, "and it's going to get
+worse. You wait and see."
+
+"Of course I'll wait and see," Boyd said. "I wouldn't miss the end of
+the world for anything. It ought to be a great spectacle." He paused.
+"Want them to bring in the next one?"
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "What have we got to lose but our minds? And who
+is the next one?"
+
+"Borbitsch," Boyd said. "They're saving Garbitsch for a big finish."
+
+Malone nodded wearily. "Onward," he said, and picked up the phone. He
+punched a number, spoke a few words and hung up.
+
+A minute later, the four FBI agents came back, leading a man. This one
+was tall and thin, with the expression of a gloomy, degenerate and
+slightly nauseated bloodhound. He was led to the chair and he sat down
+in it as if he expected the worst to start happening at once.
+
+"Well," Malone said in a bored, tired voice. "So this is the one who
+won't talk."
+
+
+6
+
+Midnight.
+
+Kenneth J. Malone sat at his desk, in his Washington office,
+surrounded by piles of papers covering the desk, spilling off onto the
+floor and decorating his lap. He was staring at the papers as if he
+expected them to leap up, dance round him and shout the solution to
+all his problems at him in trained choral voices. They did nothing at
+all.
+
+Seated cross-legged on the rug in the center of the room, and looking
+like an impossible combination of the last Henry Tudor and Gautama
+Buddha, Thomas Boyd did nothing either. He was staring downward, his
+hands folded on his ample lap, wearing an expression of utter, burning
+frustration. And on a nearby chair sat the third member of the
+company, wearing the calm and patient expression of the gently-born
+under all vicissitudes: Queen Elizabeth I.
+
+"All right," Malone said into the silence. "Now let's see what we've
+got."
+
+"I think we've got cerebral paresis," Boyd said. "It's been coming on
+for years."
+
+"Don't be funny," Malone said.
+
+Boyd gave a short, mirthless bark. "Funny?" he said. "I'm absolutely
+hysterical with joy and good humor. I'm out of my mind with
+happiness." He paused. "Anyway," he finished, "I'm out of my mind.
+Which puts me in good company. The entire FBI, Brubitsch, Borbitsch,
+Garbitsch, Dr. Thomas O'Connor and Sir Lewis Carter--we're all out of
+our minds. If we weren't, we'd all move away to the moon."
+
+"And drink to forget," Malone added. "Sure. But let's try and get some
+work done."
+
+"By all means, Sir Kenneth," Her Majesty said. Boyd had not included
+her in his list of insane people, and she looked slightly miffed. It
+was hard for Malone to tell whether she was miffed by the mention of
+insanity, or at being left out.
+
+"Let's review the facts," Malone said. "This whole thing started with
+some inefficiency in Congress."
+
+"And some upheavals elsewhere," Boyd said. "Labor unions, gangster
+organizations."
+
+"Just about all over," Malone said. "And though we've found three
+spies, it seems pretty obvious that they aren't causing this."
+
+"They aren't causing much of anything," Boyd said. "Except a lot of
+unbelieving laughter further up the FBI line. I don't think anybody is
+going to believe our reports of those interviews."
+
+"But they're true," Her Majesty said.
+
+"Sure they're true," Boyd said. "That's the unbelievable part. They
+read like farce, and not very good farce at that."
+
+"Oh, I don't know," Malone said. "I think they're pretty funny."
+
+"Shall we get back to the business at hand?" Her Majesty said gently.
+
+"Ah," Malone said. "Anyhow, it isn't the spies. And what we now have
+is confusion even worse compounded."
+
+"Confounded," Boyd said. "John Milton. _Paradise Lost_, I heard it
+somewhere."
+
+"I don't mean confounded," Malone said. "I mean confusion. Anyhow, the
+Russian espionage rings in this country seem to be in as bad a state
+as the Congress, the labor unions, the syndicates, and all the rest.
+And all of them seem to have some sort of weird tie-in to these
+flashes of telepathic interference. Right, Your Majesty?"
+
+"I believe so, Sir Kenneth," she said. The old woman looked tired and
+confused. Somehow, a lot of the brightness seemed to have gone out of
+her life. "That's right," she said. "I didn't realize there was so
+much of it going on. You see, Sir Kenneth, you're the only one I can
+pick up at a distance who has been having these flashes. But now that
+I'm here in Washington, I can feel it going on all around me."
+
+"It may not have anything to do with everything else," Boyd said.
+
+Malone shook his head. "If it doesn't," he said, "it's the weirdest
+coincidence I've ever even dreamed about, and my dreams can be pretty
+strange. No, it's got to be tied in. There's some kind of mental
+static that is somehow making all these people goof up."
+
+"But why?" Boyd said. "What is it being done for? Just fun?"
+
+"God only knows," Malone said. "But we're going to have to find out."
+
+"In that case," Boyd said, "I suggest lots and lots of prayers."
+
+Her Majesty looked up. "That's a fine idea," she said.
+
+"But God helps those," Malone said, "who help themselves. And we're
+going to help ourselves. Mostly with facts."
+
+"All right," Boyd said. "So far, all the facts have been a great
+help."
+
+"Well, here's one," Malone said. "We got one flash each from
+Brubitsch, Borbitsch and Garbitsch while we were questioning them. And
+in each case, that flash occurred just before they started to blab
+everything they knew. Before the flash, they weren't talking. They
+were behaving just like good spies and keeping their mouths shut.
+After the flash, they couldn't talk fast enough."
+
+"That's true," Boyd said reflectively. "They did seem to give up
+pretty fast, even for amateurs."
+
+Malone nodded. "So the question is this," he said. "Just what happens
+during those crazy bursts of static?"
+
+He looked expectantly at Her Majesty, but she shook her head sadly. "I
+don't know," she said. "I simply don't know. It's just noise to me,
+meaningless noise." She put her hands slowly over her face. "People
+shouldn't do things like that to their Sovereign," she said in a
+muffled voice.
+
+Malone got up and went over to her. She wasn't crying, but she wasn't
+far from it. He put an arm around her thin shoulders. "Now, look, Your
+Majesty," he said in gentle tones, "this will all clear up. We'll find
+out what's going on, and we'll find a way to put a stop to it."
+
+"Sure we will," Boyd said. "After all, Your Majesty, Sir Kenneth and I
+will work hard on this."
+
+"And the Queen's own FBI," Malone said, "won't stop until we've
+finished with this whole affair, once and for all."
+
+Her Majesty brought her hands down from her face, very slowly. She was
+forcing a smile, but it didn't look too well. "I know you won't fail
+your Queen," she said. "You two have always been the most loyal of my
+subjects."
+
+"We'll work hard," Malone said. "No matter how long it takes."
+
+"Because, after all," Boyd said in a musing, thoughtful tone, "it is a
+serious crime, you know."
+
+The words seemed to have an effect on Her Majesty, like a tonic. For a
+second her face wore an expression of Royal anger and indignance, and
+the accustomed strength flowed back into her aged voice. "You're quite
+correct, Sir Thomas!" she said. "The security of the Throne and the
+Crown are at stake!"
+
+Malone blinked. "What?" he said. "Are you two talking about something?
+What crime is this?"
+
+"An extremely serious one," Boyd said in a grave voice. He rose
+unsteadily to his feet, planted them firmly on the carpet, and
+frowned.
+
+"Go on," Malone said, fascinated. Her Majesty was watching Boyd with
+an intent expression.
+
+"The crime," Boyd said, "the very serious crime involved, is that of
+Threatening the Welfare of the Queen. The criminal has committed the
+crime of Causing the Said Sovereign, Baselessly, Reasonlessly and
+Without Consent or Let, to Be in a State of Apprehension for Her Life
+or Her Well-Being. And this crime--"
+
+"Aha," Malone said. "I've got it. The crime is--"
+
+"High treason," Boyd intoned.
+
+"High treason," Her Majesty said with satisfaction and fire in her
+voice.
+
+"Very high treason," Malone said. "Extremely high."
+
+"Stratospheric," Boyd agreed. "That is, of course," he added, "if the
+perpetrators of this dastardly crime are Her Majesty's subjects."
+
+"My goodness," the Queen said. "I never thought of that. Suppose
+they're not?"
+
+"Then," Malone said in his most vibrant voice, "it is an Act of War."
+
+"Steps," Boyd said, "must be taken."
+
+"We must do our utmost," Malone said. "Sir Thomas--"
+
+"Yes, Sir Kenneth?" Boyd said.
+
+"This task requires our most fervent dedication," Malone said. "Please
+come with me."
+
+He went to the desk. Boyd followed him, walking straight-backed and
+tall. Malone bent and removed from a drawer of the desk a bottle of
+bourbon. He closed the drawer, poured some bourbon into two handy
+water-glasses from the desk, and capped the bottle. He handed one of
+the water-glasses to Boyd, and raised the other one aloft.
+
+"Sir Thomas," Malone said, "I give you Her Majesty, the Queen!"
+
+"To the Queen!" Boyd echoed.
+
+They downed their drinks and turned, as one man, to hurl the glasses
+into the wastebasket.
+
+In thinking it over later, Malone realized that he hadn't considered
+anything about that moment silly at all. Of course, an outsider might
+have been slightly surprised at the sequence of events, but Malone was
+no outsider. And, after all, it was the proper way to treat a Queen,
+wasn't it?
+
+And...
+
+When Malone had first met Her Majesty, he had wondered why, although
+she could obviously read minds, and so knew perfectly well that
+neither Malone nor Boyd believed she was Queen Elizabeth I, she
+insisted on an outward show of respect and dedication. He'd asked her
+about it at last, and her reply had been simple, reasonable and to the
+point.
+
+According to her--and Malone didn't doubt it for an instant--most
+people simply didn't think their superiors were all they claimed to
+be. But they acted as if they did, at least while in the presence of
+those superiors. It was a common fiction, a sort of handy oil on the
+wheels of social intercourse.
+
+And all Her Majesty had ever insisted on was the same sort of
+treatment.
+
+"Bless you," she'd said, "I can't help the way you _think_, but, as
+Queen, I do have some control over the way you _act_."
+
+The funny thing, as far as Malone was concerned, was that the two
+parts of his personality were becoming more and more alike. He didn't
+actually believe that Her Majesty was Queen Elizabeth I, and he hoped
+fervently that he never would. But he did have a great deal of respect
+for her, and more affection than he had believed possible at first.
+She was the grandmother Malone had never known; she was good, and
+kind, and he wanted to keep her happy and contented. There had been
+nothing at all phony in the solemn toast he had proposed, nor in the
+righteous indignation he had felt against anyone who was giving Her
+Majesty even a minute's worth of discomfort.
+
+And Boyd, surprisingly enough, seemed to feel the same way. Malone
+felt good about that; Her Majesty needed all the loyal supporters she
+could get.
+
+But all of this was later. At the time, Malone was doing nothing
+except what came naturally. Nor, apparently, was Boyd. After the
+glasses had been thrown, with a terrifying crash, into the metal
+wastebasket, and the reverberations of that second had stopped ringing
+in their ears, a moment of silence had followed.
+
+Then Boyd turned, briskly rubbing his hands. "All right," he said.
+"Let's get back to work."
+
+Malone looked at the proud, happy look on Her Majesty's face; he saw
+the glimmer of a tear in the corner of each eye. But he gave no
+indication that he had noticed anything at all out of the ordinary.
+
+"Fine," he said. "Now, getting on back to the facts, we've established
+something, anyhow. Some agency is causing flashes of telepathic static
+all over the place. And those flashes are somehow connected with the
+confusion that's going on all around us. Somehow, these flashes have
+an effect on the minds of people."
+
+"And we know at least one manifestation of that effect," Boyd said.
+"It makes spies blab all their secrets when they're exposed to it."
+
+"These three spies, anyhow," Malone said.
+
+"If spies is the right word," Boyd said.
+
+"Okay," Malone said. "And now we've got another obvious question."
+
+"It seems to me we've got about twelve," Boyd said.
+
+"I mean, who's doing it?" Malone said. "Who is causing these
+telepathic flashes?"
+
+"Maybe it's just happening," Boyd said. "Out of thin air."
+
+"Maybe," Malone said. "But let's go on the assumption that there's a
+human cause. The other way, we can't do a thing except sit back and
+watch the world go to hell."
+
+Boyd nodded. "It doesn't seem to be the Russians," he said. "Although,
+of course, it might be a Red herring."
+
+"What do you mean?" Malone said.
+
+"Well," Boyd said, "they might have known we were on to Brubitsch,
+Borbitsch and Garbitsch--" He stopped. "You know," he said, "every
+time I say that name I have to reassure myself that we're not all
+walking around in the world of Florenz Ziegfeld."
+
+"Likewise," Malone said. "But go on."
+
+"Sure," Boyd said. "Anyhow, they might have set the three of them up
+as patsies, just in case we stumbled on to this mess. We can't
+overlook this possibility."
+
+"Right," Malone said. "It's faint, but it is a possibility. In other
+words, the agency behind the flashes might be Russian, and it might
+not be Russian."
+
+"That clears that up nicely," Boyd said. "Next question?"
+
+"The next one," Malone said grimly, "is, what's behind the flashes?
+Some sort of psionic power is causing them, that much is obvious."
+
+"I'll go along with that," Boyd said. "I have to go along with it. But
+don't think I like it."
+
+"Nobody likes it," Malone said. "But let's go on. O'Connor isn't any
+help; he washes his hands of the whole business."
+
+"Lucky man," Boyd said.
+
+"He says that it can't be happening," Malone said, "and if it is we're
+all screwy. Now, right or wrong, that isn't an opinion that gives us
+any handle to work with."
+
+"No," Boyd said reflectively. "A certain amount of comfort, to be
+sure, but no handles."
+
+"Sir Lewis Carter, on the other hand--" Malone said. He fumbled
+through some of the piles of paper until he had located the ones the
+president of the Psychical Research Society had sent. "Sir Lewis
+Carter," he went on, "does seem to be doing some pretty good work. At
+least, some of the more modern stuff he sent over looks pretty solid.
+They've been doing quite a bit of research into the subject, and their
+theories seem to be all right, or nearly all right, to me. Of course,
+I'm not an expert."
+
+"Who is?" Boyd said. "Except for O'Connor, of course."
+
+"Well, somebody is," Malone said. "Whoever's doing all this, for
+instance. And the theories do seem okay. In most cases, for instance,
+they agree with O'Connor's work, though they're not in complete
+agreement."
+
+"I should think so," Boyd said. "O'Connor wouldn't recognize an astral
+plane if TWA were putting them into service."
+
+"I don't mean that sort of thing," Malone said. "There's lots about
+astral bodies and ghosts, ectoplasm, Transcendental Yoga, theosophy,
+deros, the Great Pyramid, Atlantis, Mu, norns, and other such
+ridiculous pets. That's just silly, as far as I can see. But what they
+have to say about parapsychology and psionics as such does seem to be
+reasonably accurate."
+
+"I suppose so," Boyd said tiredly.
+
+"Okay, then," Malone said. "Did anybody notice anything in that pile
+of stuff that might conceivably have any bearing whatever on our
+problems?"
+
+"I did," Boyd said. "Or I think I did."
+
+"You both did," Her Majesty said. "And so did I, when I looked through
+it. But I didn't bother with it. I dismissed it."
+
+"Why?" Malone said.
+
+"Because I don't think it's true," she said. "However, my opinion is
+really only an opinion." She smiled around at the others.
+
+Malone picked up a thick sheaf of papers from one of the piles of his
+desk. "Let's get straight what it is we're talking about," he said.
+"All right?"
+
+"Anything's all right with me," Boyd said. "I'm easy to please."
+
+Malone nodded. "Now, this writer--what's his name?" he said. He
+glanced at the copy of the cover page. _"Minds and Morons,"_ he read.
+"By Cartier Taylor."
+
+"Great title," Boyd said. "Does he say which is which?"
+
+"Let's get back to serious business," Malone said, giving Boyd a
+single look. There was silence for a second, and then Malone said, "He
+mentions something, in the book, that he calls 'telepathic
+projection.' As far as I understand what he's talking about, that's
+some method of forcing your thoughts on another person." He glanced
+over at the Queen. "Now, Your Majesty," he said, "you don't think it's
+true--and that may only be an opinion, but it's a pretty informed one.
+It seems to me as if Taylor makes a good case for this 'telepathic
+projection' of his. Why don't you think so?"
+
+"Because," Her Majesty said flatly, "it doesn't work."
+
+"You've tried it?" Boyd put in.
+
+"I have," she said. "And I have had no success with it at all. It's a
+complete failure."
+
+"Now, wait a minute," Boyd said. "Just a minute."
+
+"What's the matter?" Malone said. "Have you tried it, and made it
+work?"
+
+Boyd snorted. "Fat chance," he said. "I just want to look at the
+thing, that's all." He held out his hand, and Malone gave him the
+sheaf of papers. Boyd leafed through them slowly, stopping every now
+and again to consult a page, until he found what he was looking for.
+"There," he said.
+
+"There what?" Malone said.
+
+"Listen to this," Boyd said. "'For those who draw the line at demonic
+possession, I suggest trying telepathic projection. Apparently, it is
+possible to project one's own thoughts directly into the mind of
+another--even to the point of taking control of the other's mind.
+Hypnotism? You tell me, and we'll both know. Ever since the orthodox
+scientists have come around to accepting hypnotism, I'm been chary of
+it. Maybe there really is an astral body or a soul that a person has
+stashed about him somewhere--something that he can send out to take
+control of another human being. But I, personally, prefer the
+telepathic projection theory. All you have to do is squirt your
+thoughts across space and spray them all over the other fellow's
+brain. Presto-bingo, he does pretty much what you want him to do.'"
+
+"That's the quote I was thinking of," Malone said.
+
+"Of course it is," Her Majesty said. "But it really doesn't work. I've
+tried it."
+
+"How have you tried it?" Malone said.
+
+"There were many times, Sir Kenneth," Her Majesty said, "when I wanted
+someone to do something particular for me or for some other person.
+After all, you must remember that I was in a hospital for a long time.
+Of course, that represents only a short segment of my life-span, but
+it seemed long to me."
+
+Malone, who was trying to view the years from age fifteen to age
+sixty-odd as a short segment of anybody's lifetime, remembered with a
+shock that this was not Rose Thompson speaking. It was Queen Elizabeth
+I, who had never died.
+
+"That's right, Sir Kenneth," she said kindly. "And in that hospital,
+there were a number of times when I wanted one of the doctors or
+nurses to do what I wanted them to. I tried many times, but I never
+succeeded."
+
+Boyd nodded his head. "Well--" he began.
+
+"Oh, yes, Sir Thomas," Her Majesty said. "What you're thinking is
+certainly possible. It may even be true."
+
+"What _is_ he thinking?" Malone said.
+
+"He thinks," Her Majesty said, "that I may not have the talent for
+this particular effect--and perhaps I don't. But, talent or not, I
+know what's possible and what isn't. And the way Mr. Taylor describes
+it is simply silly, that's all. And unladylike. Imagine any
+self-respecting lady 'squirting' her thoughts about in space!"
+
+"Well," Malone said carefully, "aside from its being unladylike--"
+
+"Sir Kenneth," Her Majesty said, "you are not telepathic. Neither is
+Sir Thomas."
+
+"I'm nothing," Boyd said. "I don't even exist."
+
+"And it is very difficult to explain to the non-telepath just what Mr.
+Taylor is implying," Her Majesty went on imperturbably. "Before you
+could inject any thoughts into anyone else's mind, you'd have to be
+able to see into that mind. Is that correct?"
+
+"I guess so," Malone said.
+
+"And in order to do that, you'd have to be telepathic," Her Majesty
+said. "Am I correct?"
+
+"Correct," Malone said.
+
+"Well, then," Her Majesty said with satisfaction, and beamed at him.
+
+A second passed.
+
+"Well, then, what?" Malone said in confusion.
+
+"Telepathy," Her Majesty said patiently, "is an extremely complex
+affair. It involves a sort of meshing with the mind of this other
+person. It has nothing, absolutely nothing, in common with this simple
+'squirting' of thoughts across space, as if they were orange pips you
+were trying to put into a wastebasket. No, Sir Kenneth, I cannot
+believe in what Mr. Taylor says."
+
+"But it's still possible," Malone said.
+
+"Oh," Her Majesty said, "it's certainly possible. But I should think
+that if any telepaths were around, and if they were changing people's
+minds by 'squirting' at them, I would know it."
+
+Malone frowned. "Maybe you would at that," he said. "I guess you
+would."
+
+"Not to mention," Boyd put in, "that if you were going to control
+everything we've come across like that you'd need an awful lot of
+telepathic operators."
+
+"That's true," Malone admitted. "And the objections seem to make some
+sense. But what else is there to go on?"
+
+"I don't know," Boyd said. "I haven't the faintest idea. And I'm
+rapidly approaching the stage where I don't care."
+
+"Well," Malone said, heaving a sigh, "let's keep looking."
+
+He bent down and picked up another sheaf of copies from the Psychical
+Research Society.
+
+"After all," he said, without much hope, "you never know."
+
+* * * * *
+
+Malone looked around the office of Andrew J. Burris as if he'd never
+seen it before. He felt tired, and worn out, and depressed; it had
+been a long night, and here it was morning and the head of the FBI was
+giving him instructions. It was, Malone told himself, a hell of a
+life.
+
+"Now, Malone," Burris said, "this is a very ticklish situation. You've
+got to handle it with great care."
+
+"I can see that," Malone said apprehensively. "It certainly looks
+ticklish. And unusual."
+
+"Well, we don't want any trouble," Burris said. "We have enough
+trouble now."
+
+"Sometimes I think we have too much," Malone said.
+
+"That's our job," Burris said, looking grim.
+
+Malone blinked. "What is?" he said.
+
+"Having trouble," Burris said.
+
+There was a short silence. Malone broke it. "Anyhow," he said, "you
+feel we have enough trouble, so we're trying to make things easy for
+everybody."
+
+Burris nodded. "I've talked with the president," he said, "and he
+feels this is the best way to handle matters."
+
+Malone tried to imagine Burris explaining the incredible complexities
+of the situation to the president, and was torn between relief that he
+hadn't been there and a curious wish to have heard the scrambled
+conversation that must have taken place. "The way it seems to me," he
+said cautiously, "shipping those spies back to Russia is a worse
+punishment than sending them to the federal pen."
+
+"Maybe it is," Burris said. "Maybe it is. How would you feel if you
+were being sent to jail?"
+
+"Innocent," Malone said instantly.
+
+"But that isn't the point," Burris went on. "You see, Malone, we don't
+really have much damaging evidence against those spies, except for
+their confessions. During all the time we were watching them, we took
+care that they never did come up with anything dangerous; we weren't
+fishing for them but for their superiors, for the rest of the
+network."
+
+"There doesn't seem to be any more network," Malone said. "Not in this
+country, anyhow."
+
+"Sure," Burris said. "We know that now, thanks to the confessions, and
+to Her Majesty. But we can't prosecute on that sort of evidence. You
+know what a good defense attorney could do with unsupported
+confessions--and even if we wanted to take the lid off telepathy for
+the general public, it would be absolute hell bringing it into court."
+
+"So," Malone said, "we can't put them in prison, even if we want to."
+
+"Oh, I didn't say that," Burris said hastily. "We could probably win,
+even against a good defense. But they wouldn't get much time in
+prison, and we'd only end up deporting them in any case."
+
+Malone fished for a cigarette, lit it and blew out smoke. "So we're
+going to save the taxpayers some money," he said. "That'll be nice for
+a change."
+
+"That's right," Burris said, beaming. "We're going to save Federal
+funds by shipping them back to their motherland now. After all, they
+did take out their naturalization papers under false names, and their
+declarations are chockfull of false information. So all it takes is a
+court order to declare their citizenships null and void, and hand all
+three of them back to the Soviets."
+
+"A nice, simple housecleaning," Malone said. "All open and
+above-board. And the confessions will certainly stand up in a
+deportation hearing."
+
+"No question of it," Burris said. "But the reason I called you here,
+Malone, is that there's still one thing bothering me."
+
+Malone blew out some more smoke, thought wistfully about cigars, and
+said: "What? Everything seems simple enough to me."
+
+Burris frowned and leaned back in his chair. "It's this notion of
+yours, Malone," he said.
+
+"Notion?"
+
+"About going over there," Burris said. "Now, I can understand your
+wanting some facts on Moscow, current background and all that sort of
+thing. So far, everything makes sense."
+
+"Fine," Malone said warily.
+
+"But, after all, Malone," Burris said, "we do have such a thing as the
+Central Intelligence Agency. They send us reports. That's what they're
+for. And why you want to ignore the reports and make a trip over there
+to walk around and see for yourself--"
+
+"It's because of everything that's happening," Malone said.
+
+Burris looked puzzled. "What?" he said.
+
+"Because of all the confusion," Malone said. "Frankly, I can't trust
+the CIA, or any other branch of the government. I've got to see for
+myself."
+
+Burris considered this for a second. "It's going to look very
+peculiar," he said.
+
+Malone shrugged. "Everything looks peculiar," he said. "A little more
+won't hurt anything. And if I do turn up anything we can use, the
+whole trip will be worth it."
+
+"But sending an FBI man along with Brubitsch, Borbitsch and Garbitsch
+is a little strange," Burris said. "Not to mention Her Majesty."
+
+"There is that," Malone said. "I wonder what our Red friends are going
+to think of the Queen."
+
+"God knows," Burris said. "If they take her seriously, they're liable
+to call her some sort of capitalist deviationist."
+
+"And if they don't take her seriously?" Malone said.
+
+"Then they're going to wonder why she's _pretending_ to be a
+capitalist deviationist," Burris said.
+
+Malone flicked his cigarette at an ashtray. "You can't win," he said.
+
+"Frankly," Burris said, "I wouldn't allow Her Majesty to go along
+under any circumstances--except that there is an excuse for having an
+older woman around."
+
+"There is?" Malone said.
+
+Burris nodded. "As a chaperone," he said.
+
+"Now, wait a minute," Malone said. "Brubitsch, Borbitsch and
+what's-his-name don't need a chaperone."
+
+"I didn't say it was for them," Burris said.
+
+"Me?" Malone asked in a tone of absolute wonder. "Now, Chief, I don't
+need a chaperone. I'm a grown man. I know my way around. And the idea
+of having Her Majesty along to chaperone me is going to make
+everything look even stranger. After all, Chief--"
+
+"Malone," Burris said, in a voice of steel.
+
+"Sorry," Malone mumbled. "But, really, I'm not some young, innocent
+girl in a Victorian novel."
+
+"No," Burris said, a trifle sadly, "you're not. But there is one going
+along on the trip with the rest of you."
+
+"There is?" Malone said. "Who is she? Rebecca?"
+
+"Her name's Luba," Burris said. "Luba Garbitsch."
+
+"Garbitsch's wife?" Malone said.
+
+Burris shook his head. "His daughter," he said. "And don't tell me
+there isn't any such name as Luba. I know there isn't. But what would
+you pick to go with Garbitsch?"
+
+"Wastepaper basket," Malone said instantly. "Grapefruit rinds. Lemon
+peels. Coffee grounds."
+
+"Damn it, Malone," Burris said, "this is serious."
+
+"Well," Malone said, "it doesn't sound serious. What are we doing,
+deporting the entire family?"
+
+"I suppose we could," Burris said, "if we really wanted to get
+complicated about it. What with Garbitsch's false declaration, I
+haven't the faintest idea what his daughter's status would be--but she
+_was_ born here, Malone, and as far as we can tell she's perfectly
+loyal to the United States."
+
+"Fine," Malone said. "So you're sending her to Russia. This is making
+less and less sense, you know."
+
+Burris rubbed a hand over his face. "Malone," he said in a quiet,
+patient voice, "why don't you wait for me to finish? Then everything
+will make sense. I promise."
+
+"Well, all right," Malone said doubtfully. "Luba Garbitsch is going
+along to Russia, in spite of the fact that she's perfectly loyal."
+
+"True," Burris said. "You see, Malone, she loves her traitorous old
+daddy just the same. Family affection. Very touching."
+
+"And if he's going to Moscow--"
+
+"She wants to go along," Burris said. "That's right."
+
+"And you're going to send her along," Malone said, "out of the
+goodness of your kindly old heart. Just like Santa Claus. Or the
+Easter bunny."
+
+Burris looked acutely uncomfortable. "Now, Malone," he said. "It's not
+exactly that, and you know it."
+
+"It isn't?" Malone said, trying to look surprised.
+
+Burris shook his head. "If we send Luba Garbitsch along," he said,
+"that gives us a good excuse for Her Majesty. As a chaperone."
+
+"Are you sure," Malone asked slowly, "that anybody with a name like
+Luba Garbitsch could plausibly need a chaperone? Even in a den of
+vice? Because somehow it doesn't sound right: Luba Garbitsch,
+chaperoned by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I."
+
+"Well," Burris said, "it won't be the Queen. I mean, she won't be
+known as the Queen."
+
+"Incognito?" Malone said.
+
+Burris shrugged. "In away," he said. "What do you think would be a
+good name for her to travel under?"
+
+Malone considered. "I don't know," he said at last. "But no more
+Lubas."
+
+"I was thinking," Burris said carefully. "How about Rose Thompson?"
+
+There was a long silence.
+
+"I don't know whether she'll go for the idea," Malone said. "But I'll
+try it."
+
+"You can do it, Malone," Burris said instantly. "I know you can. I
+just know it."
+
+"Your faith," Malone said with a sigh, "is going to be too much for me
+one of these days."
+
+Burris shrugged. "Just take it easy, Malone," he said. "You said you
+wanted to have Her Majesty over there to read a few minds, and you've
+got her. But remember, don't get involved in anything complicated.
+Don't start any fireworks."
+
+"I hope not," Malone said.
+
+"Stay out of political arguments," Burris said.
+
+Malone blinked. "What do you think I'm going to do?" he said. "Bring
+along a soapbox?"
+
+"You never know," Burris said. "Just keep quiet, and don't go prowling
+around where you're not wanted."
+
+"That," Malone said decisively, "would keep me out of Russia
+entirely."
+
+"Damn it," Burris said, "you know what I mean. We don't want any
+international incidents, understand?"
+
+"Yes, sir," Malone said.
+
+Burris nodded. "All right, then," he said. "Your plane leaves from the
+airport in an hour. You'd better go and talk to Her Majesty first."
+
+"Right," Malone said.
+
+"And I hope you know what you're doing," Burris said.
+
+_So do I,_ Malone thought privately. Aloud, he said, "I just want to
+get the feel of things over there, that's all, sir. I won't cause any
+more trouble than an ordinary tourist."
+
+"Malone," Burris said, "don't be an ordinary tourist. They're
+empty-headed morons and they do make trouble. Be an invisible tourist.
+Be nice to everybody. Be polite and kind. Don't step on any toes, no
+matter whose and no matter why."
+
+"Yes, sir," Malone said.
+
+"Remember, they're going to know who you are," Burris said.
+
+"It's not as if we could keep it a secret."
+
+"Yes, sir," Malone said. "I'll remember."
+
+"All right." Burris extended his hand. "Good luck, Malone," he said,
+with a deeper feeling of sincerity than Malone had experienced from
+him in months.
+
+Malone shook the hand. "Thank you, sir," he said.
+
+* * * * *
+
+A little less than an hour later, Malone sat on the steps of the
+landing ramp that led up to the open door of the big Air Force
+transport plane on the runway. The plane was waiting, and so was
+Malone. He didn't feel confident, or even excited. He felt just a
+little bit frightened. Burris' complicated warnings had had some
+effect, and Malone was fighting down a minor case of the shakes.
+
+Next to him, her face wreathed in happy smiles, sat a smartly-dressed
+grey-haired woman in her sixties. She wore an unobtrusive tailored
+suit and a light jacket, and she looked as if she might be one of the
+elder matrons of the society set, very definitely an upper-crust type.
+In spite of the normality of her clothing, Her Majesty looked every
+inch a Queen, Malone thought.
+
+"And that, Sir Kenneth, is only natural," she said sweetly. "Even when
+traveling incognito, one must retain one's dignity. And I don't object
+at all to using the name of Rose Thompson in a good cause; it was used
+for so many years it almost feels like part of me."
+
+"I shouldn't be at all surprised," Malone said mildly.
+
+A voice from above and behind him interrupted his worried thoughts.
+"Mr. Malone!" it said. "Mr. Malone?"
+
+Malone screwed his head around and looked up. An Air Force colonel was
+standing in the doorway of the plane, looking down with a stern,
+worried expression. "Yes?" Malone said. "What is it?"
+
+"Takeoff, Mr. Malone," the colonel said. "We're due to go in fifteen
+minutes, and our clearance has been established."
+
+"Fine," Malone said.
+
+"But your passengers," the colonel said. "Where are they?"
+
+Malone tried to look calm, cool and collected. "They'll be here," he
+said. "Don't worry about a thing." Privately, he hoped he was right.
+Boyd hadn't shown up yet, and Boyd was bringing the musical-comedy spy
+trio. It wasn't, Malone thought, that Boyd was usually late. But with
+Brubitsch, Borbitsch and Garbitsch in tow, almost anything could
+happen, he thought. He hoped fervently that it wouldn't.
+
+"It won't," Her Majesty said. "At least, it hasn't so far. They're all
+in a car, and they're driving right here. Boyd is thinking that he
+ought to be here within five minutes."
+
+Malone nodded, wiping his forehead. "Five minutes, Colonel," he called
+back to the figure at the door. The colonel nodded efficiently at him,
+turned and disappeared inside the plane. Malone looked at his watch.
+The second hand was going around awfully fast, he thought. He wondered
+if it were possible for time to speed up while he waited, so that by
+the time Boyd arrived he would be an old, old man. He felt about eight
+years older already, he told himself, and a minute hadn't even passed.
+
+He forced his eyes away from the moving second hand. Looking at it, he
+knew, would only make him more nervous. Maybe there was some scenery
+around that he could stare at. He raised his eyes and looked out
+toward the gates that led to the interior of the air terminal.
+
+Scenery, he told himself in sudden wonder, was no word for it.
+
+He stared. He wanted to blink, but at the same time he felt that it
+would be a shame to close his eyes for even a tenth of a second. He
+held his eyelids apart by main force and went right on staring.
+
+The girl walking toward him across the field was absolutely beautiful.
+She seemed to make everything light up and start singing. Malone was
+sure that, somewhere, he could hear birds plugging their favorite
+numbers, and the soft rustle of the wind through pine branches. He
+could feel the soft caress of the wind on his face, and he could smell
+the odor of lilacs and honeysuckles and violets and whatever all those
+other flowers were. They had all different colors and shapes, and he
+couldn't remember many of their names, but he could tell they were all
+around him. They had to be all around him. Especially all the red
+ones.
+
+The girl had red hair that tossed gently in the wind. The bottom
+two-thirds of her figure, Malone was happy to note, was not only as
+good as the top third but a good deal better. It took him several
+seconds to reach this conclusion, because at first he was willing to
+swear that he had never seen such a beautiful girl before.
+
+But, he told himself with a shade of apprehension, he had.
+
+As she approached, he stood up. "Well, well," he said brightly. "If it
+isn't the Lady That's Known as Lou. Did the Psychical Research Society
+give you the day off, or are you here to see about a misplaced broom?"
+
+The girl beamed at him. "My, my," she said. "How are you?"
+
+"Fine," Malone said. "And--"
+
+"And how are the others?" she said.
+
+Malone blinked. "Others?" he said.
+
+She nodded. "Grumpy, Sleepy, Happy, Dopey, Bashful and Doc," she said.
+
+Malone opened his mouth, shut it again, and thought for a second.
+"Now, wait a minute," he said at last. "That's not fair. I--"
+
+"Oh," she said. "And I nearly forgot. I owe you one from last time:
+_gesundheit_."
+
+"And many happy returns," Malone said. "Seriously, what are you doing
+out here?"
+
+"Talking," the girl said. "To you. Or hadn't you noticed?"
+
+"I mean in general," Malone said desperately.
+
+"In general," she said agreeably, "I'm here to take a little trip."
+
+"Oh," Malone said. "By plane?"
+
+She smiled sweetly and shook her head. "Not at all," she said. "I'm
+waiting for the next scheduled broomstick."
+
+Malone took a deep breath. "When does your plane leave?" he said
+doggedly.
+
+"In ten minutes or so," she said.
+
+"Then you'd better hurry and get on," he said.
+
+She nodded. "That's what I thought," she said.
+
+A second passed.
+
+"Did you want to say something?" Malone said uncomfortably.
+
+She shook her head. "Not particularly," she said.
+
+"Well, then--"
+
+"The time _is_ growing short," she said.
+
+"Isn't it, though?" Malone said, feeling a little mystified. "Well,
+now. Goodbye. I'll see you soon."
+
+"Goodbye," she said.
+
+Another second passed.
+
+"Your plane--" Malone started.
+
+"How about yours?" she said.
+
+"I'm all right," Malone said nervously. "But if your plane's leaving
+in ten minutes you'd better get on it."
+
+"I intend to," she said, without moving.
+
+"Well--" Malone started.
+
+"As soon as you quit blocking the ramp," she said. "Would you mind
+terribly if I climbed over your head? Because I do have to get on
+board."
+
+"Now wait a minute," Malone said. "This isn't your plane."
+
+"How do you know?" she said. "Do you own it? Are you flying it away?"
+
+"Well," Malone said helplessly, "it's my plane, and there's nobody
+going on it but--"
+
+He paused. A great light seemed to burst in his mind, shedding a
+perfectly horrible glow over the wreck of his mental processes. "You
+know," he said in a tentative tone, "we never have been properly
+introduced. I only know your name is Lou."
+
+"That's what people call me," the girl said. "For short. I'm Luba
+Garbitsch."
+
+"And I'm Kenneth Malone," Malone said. "Kenneth J. Malone. Of the
+FBI."
+
+She nodded. "Yes," she said. "I know."
+
+"Your father--"
+
+"My father is going to Russia," she said, "and I am going along with
+him."
+
+"Oh," Malone said. "Sure. Sure. Oh."
+
+There was a longer silence.
+
+"Can I get on board now?" Luba said.
+
+"There isn't any hurry," Malone said. "We're still waiting for--for
+passengers. And this is one of them." He turned and indicated the
+Queen. "This is Her--Rose Thompson. She'll be traveling along with
+us."
+
+Her Majesty was wearing a broad, broad grin, Malone noticed nervously
+as he turned. Undoubtedly she had been tuned in to the whole
+conversation, and knew just what had gone on in both minds. But she
+only said, "I'm very pleased to meet you, my dear."
+
+Lou blinked, smiled and stretched out her hand. "Well, then," she
+said. "Hello. And let's all have a happy trip."
+
+"By all means," Malone said. "And the trip seems to be about to
+start."
+
+He could hear the tramping of a lot of feet coming across the field
+toward them. He looked and saw that the feet were all neatly attached
+to bodies, two to a body. There were Thomas Boyd's feet, the assorted
+twelve feet of six FBI agents, and three pairs that belonged to Alexis
+Brubitsch, Ivan Borbitsch and Vasili Garbitsch. Brubitsch looked even
+fatter than ever, Borbitsch even thinner. Garbitsch was of an
+indeterminate middling shape; he had grey hair and a pair of
+pince-nez, and he walked a trifle unevenly, like a duck, with his
+hands clasped low in front of him. He was looking down at the ground
+as the crowd shoved him along.
+
+When the crowd neared the steps, Luba went over to him. Garbitsch
+looked up, with a pleasant, somehow wistful smile on his face. "Hello,
+Luba, my child," he said.
+
+Luba smiled, too. "Hello, Dad," she said. "All ready to go?"
+
+"Certainly I am ready," he said. "I am all packed. We take off in a
+few minutes. And you, Luba, my child?"
+
+"Fine, Dad," she said.
+
+She looked down. "They've got handcuffs on you," she said. "Why,
+that's--"
+
+Garbitsch shrugged. He looked even more wistful. "A formality," he
+said. "It makes no difference."
+
+"Okay," Boyd said suddenly. "We've got to get out of here pretty soon,
+and you'll be taking off. Let's break it up. Miss Thompson, you and
+Luba go aboard. Malone, you follow with the others."
+
+Malone rounded up Brubitsch, Borbitsch and Garbitsch and followed the
+ladies aboard.
+
+He came back to the door then, and stuck his head out. "The keys," he
+said.
+
+Boyd stared. "What?"
+
+"The keys to the handcuffs," Malone said. "I'll need 'em."
+
+"You're going to take them off when they get to Russia?" Boyd said.
+
+Malone shook his head. "No," he said. "Now."
+
+"But--"
+
+"I think we'll have plenty of warning if they decide to try anything,
+Tom," Malone said quietly. "Her Majesty, after all, is keeping them
+under surveillance."
+
+Without another word, Boyd tossed up the keys. Malone caught and
+pocketed them. "I'll be back as soon as possible," he said.
+"Meanwhile, you can keep digging on other stuff--what we've discussed
+and anything it seems to lead into."
+
+"Right," Boyd said. "Stay out of trouble, Ken. So long."
+
+Malone nodded and ducked back into the plane. He unlocked the
+handcuffs, and Brubitsch and Borbitsch immediately went and sat down
+mournfully together at the back of the plane. Malone looked for Lou,
+but she was already seated--with Her Majesty, naturally. He sighed
+briefly and sat down, at last, next to the wistful Garbitsch.
+
+"It will be nice to see Russia again," Garbitsch said. "I hardly hoped
+to do so."
+
+The plane shuddered, roared and took off. Then it settled down to its
+normal state of unnatural quiet. Malone sat back and tried to relax.
+
+It was impossible.
+
+
+7
+
+Red Square was, somehow, disappointing. It was crowded with men and
+women, all looking very Russian in an undefined sort of way, and the
+big glass windows sparkled from every side. "I know it's silly," Luba
+said in a baffled voice, "but, somehow, I always expected Red Square
+to be red."
+
+"And why should that be?" the MVD man next to her said. He was a burly
+man with a sour expression, as if he had eaten too many onions the day
+before.
+
+"Well," Malone said, "it is Red Square, after all."
+
+"But red is symbolic only," the MVD man said surlily. "Is not color.
+Only symbol of glorious Russia."
+
+"I suppose so," Luba said. "But it's still disappointing."
+
+"You expect, perhaps, that we recruit our glorious Red Army from
+American Indian tribes?" the MVD man said sourly. "You are
+literal-minded bourgeois intellectual. This is not good thing to be."
+
+"Somehow," Malone mused, "I didn't think it was."
+
+"But this is different," Luba said. "The Red Army is made up of
+Russians. But this is just a square. You could paint it."
+
+"After all," Malone offered, "the White House is white, isn't it?"
+
+"White is cowardly color," the MVD man pointed out with satisfaction.
+
+"Never mind that," Malone said. "We call it a white house, and it is a
+white house. You call this a red square, and it isn't even pink. Not
+even a little bit pink. It's just--just--"
+
+"Just building-colored," Luba put in. Malone turned to her and
+executed a small bow.
+
+"Thank you," he said.
+
+"Think nothing of it," Luba said.
+
+"Oh, don't worry," Malone said. "I will."
+
+The MVD man hissed like a teakettle and both heads swung round to look
+at him again. Her Majesty, who had been admiring some dresses in a
+shop window, also turned. "My goodness," she said. "That's a terrible
+wheeze. Do you take something for it?"
+
+"Is not wheeze," the MVD man said. "Is noise representing impatience
+with arrogance and stupidity of capitalist warmonger conversation."
+
+"Arrogance?" Luba said.
+
+"Stupidity?" Malone said.
+
+Her Majesty drew herself to her full height. "We do not monger war,"
+she said. "Not in the least. We are not mongers."
+
+The MVD man looked at her, blinked, sighed and looked away. "This
+color discussion," he said, "it is very silly. Look at the Blue Ridge
+Mountains, in your country. Are they blue?"
+
+"Well--" Malone said.
+
+"What color, for example, is the Golden Gate Bridge?" the MVD man
+continued, with heavy sarcasm. "Is not even a gate. Is a bridge. Is
+not golden. But you say we disappoint. No. You disappoint."
+
+There seemed to be no immediate answer to that, so Malone didn't try
+for one. Instead, he went back to looking at the Square, and beyond it
+to where the inverted turnips of the Kremlin gleamed in the moonlight.
+The turnips were very pretty, if a little odd for building-tops. But
+Red Square, in spite of all its historic associations, seemed to be a
+little dull. The buildings were just buildings, and the streets were
+filled with Russians. They were not bomb-throwing Russians, bearded
+Russians or even "Volga Boatman"-singing Russians. They were just
+ordinary, dull Russians of every sort, shade, race, color and previous
+condition of servitude.
+
+It was just about what he'd expected after the trip. That hadn't been
+exciting either, he told himself. There had been no incident of any
+kind. None of the three spies seemed to be exactly overjoyed about
+being sent back to good old Mother Russia, but none seemed inclined to
+make much fuss about the matter, either. Malone had blandly told them
+that they were being deported, instead of tried, because there was no
+evidence that was worth the expense of a trial. And, besides that, he
+had particularly emphasized that the FBI did not believe any of the
+stories the three men had told.
+
+"They just don't match up," he said. "You all told different stories,
+and there's too much disagreement between them. Frankly, we don't
+believe any of them--not yet, we don't. But mark my words. We'll find
+out the truth some day."
+
+He'd thought it was a good speech, and Her Majesty had agreed with
+him. It had its desired effect, since the plane was the first place
+the three had had a chance to meet since their arrest. "Each one knows
+that he told the truth," Her Majesty said, "but nobody knows what the
+other two said."
+
+"That's what I figured," Malone said. "They didn't have a chance to
+talk to each other."
+
+"And so each one is lying his head off to the others," Her Majesty
+said, "and telling them all about how he, too, lied gloriously and
+bravely in defense of the Motherland. It's really very funny."
+
+"Well," Malone said, "it makes them happy. And why not?"
+
+Luba, too, had chatted with her father quite a lot of the time. Her
+Majesty reported that none of this conversation could possibly be
+understood as dangerous or harmful. It was just simple conversation.
+
+Of course, Luba and her father hadn't talked all the time, and Malone
+did have a chance to get a few words in edgewise. Her Majesty made no
+report on those conversations, but Malone was comfortably aware that
+they did not belong in the harmless class. His relationship with the
+girl seemed, he told himself happily, to be improving slightly. Now
+and again, he even won a round from her.
+
+As the American plane crossed the border, it was picked up by an
+escort of Russian fighter craft, which stuck with them all the way
+into Moscow. The fighters didn't do anything; they were just there,
+Malone figured, for insurance. But they made him nervous when he
+looked out the window. The trip from the border to Moscow seemed to
+take a long time.
+
+Then, at the airfield, a group of MVD men had almost elbowed the
+American Embassy delegation out of the way in greeting the
+disembarking little band. There was a lot of palaver, in Russian,
+English and various scrambled mixtures which nobody understood. The
+American delegation greeted Malone, Luba and Her Majesty formally, and
+the MVD concentrated on Brubitsch, Borbitsch and Garbitsch. The three
+spies were hustled away, apparently to MVD Headquarters, without much
+fuss. Luba said goodbye to her father calmly enough, and Vasili
+Garbitsch seemed almost entirely unaffected by his surroundings. As
+the plane touched ground, he had said: "Ah, the soil of Mother
+Russia," but, outside of a goodbye or two, those were his last words
+before leaving.
+
+One MVD man stayed behind, even after the American delegation had
+left. His name, he explained, was Vladimir Josefovitch Petkoff. "It
+will be my pleasure to show your group the many historic and
+interesting sights of Moskva," he announced to Malone.
+
+"Pleasure?" Malone said. Petkoff was tall and heavy, and wore a row of
+medals that strung out across his chest like a newspaper headline.
+
+"My duty," Petkoff said flatly, "is my pleasure. That is how we
+arrange matters in Russia."
+
+And so the tour had started, with Red Square. Malone told himself he
+didn't really mind if it weren't red, but he did think it could at
+least look sinister. Unfortunately, the Square did not seem
+particularly willing to oblige.
+
+"So this is Red Square," Malone said, after a long silence.
+
+"You do not sound interested," Petkoff said in what sounded like a
+vaguely ominous voice. "Because it is not painted in capitalistic and
+obvious colors, it bores you?"
+
+"Not exactly," Malone said. "But when you've seen one Square, you've
+seen them all, is how I feel about it. There must be somewhere else to
+sight-see."
+
+"Somewhere?" Petkoff said. "There is everywhere. This is Moskva, the
+capital and the greatest city in Mother Russia. That is what we are
+told to say." He lowered his voice. "Personally," he added, "I come
+from Leningrad. I prefer it. But in Moskva one talks only of Moskva."
+
+"I know just how you feel," Malone assured him. "I've been to San
+Francisco."
+
+"Well, then," Petkoff said, almost smiling at him. "What is there you
+would like to see?"
+
+Malone fished in his pocket for an American cigarette. He'd brought a
+carton with him, having once tried Russian makes. They seemed to be
+mostly cardboard, both the long filter and the tobacco. He lit the
+cigarette and thought for a second. "I don't suppose," he said
+cautiously, "that we could take a look around inside the Kremlin,
+could we?"
+
+"Aha," Petkoff said. "I see what is in your mind."
+
+"You do?" Malone said, startled.
+
+"Naturally," Petkoff said. "You wish to see the tomb of Lenin. It is
+famous throughout the world."
+
+Malone considered that for a minute. "Somehow," he said cautiously,
+"the coffin of Lenin doesn't exactly sound like a gay start for
+sight-seeing."
+
+Petkoff looked pleased instantly. "I understand," he said. "Truly I
+understand. You, too, feel sad over the death of the great Lenin. How
+beautiful! How cultured!"
+
+Malone wondered whether or not to disillusion the man, and decided
+against it. "Well, something like that," he said vaguely.
+
+"I'll tell you what: is there a restaurant around here where we could
+get something to eat?"
+
+"To eat?" Petkoff said, still looking pleased. "You wish to eat?"
+
+"Well," Malone said, "I'm rather hungry, and I guess the ladies must
+be, too."
+
+"What?" Luba said, returning to the group. She had joined Her Majesty
+in viewing the display of dresses. The Queen came scurrying over, too,
+through the silent and jostling Russian crowds.
+
+"I was suggesting a restaurant," Malone said.
+
+"Best idea anybody's had all day," Lou said. Her Majesty graciously
+consented to agree, and Petkoff beamed like the rising sun.
+
+"My friends," he said. "My very fine friends--although you are
+capitalistic bourgeois intellectuals, thrown aside by the path of
+progress--in Moskva we have the finest restaurants in all the world."
+
+"How about ... oh, Leningrad?" Malone said in a low voice.
+
+"In Leningrad," Petkoff admitted, "the restaurants are better. But in
+Moskva, the restaurants are very good indeed. Much better than one
+might expect, if one knows Leningrad."
+
+"Well," Malone said, "I suppose we've just got to put up with Moscow."
+
+They went back to the corner, and hailed the long, black,
+sleek-looking limousine that had brought them in from the airport. The
+two silent men in the front seat of the gleaming Volga sedan were
+waiting patiently. Malone, Her Majesty and Lou got into the back,
+Petkoff in front. The two men were as still as statues--and rather
+unpleasant-looking statues, Malone thought--until Petkoff snapped
+something in Russian. Then one of them, at the wheel, said: _"Da,
+Tovarishch."_
+
+The car started down the Moscow streets.
+
+Her Majesty was silent and somewhat abstracted during the ride, just
+as she had been during the entire trip so far. She was, Malone knew,
+prying into every mind she could touch. He smiled inwardly when he
+thought about that.
+
+The MVD, all unbeknownst to itself, was busily carrying around and
+protecting the single most dangerous spy in Moscow.
+
+Nobody else spoke, either, until the car was moving along at a good
+clip. Petkoff began some small talk then, but it wasn't very
+interesting until he finally managed to edge it around to the subject
+he really wanted to talk about.
+
+"By the way, Mr. Malone," he said, in a voice that sounded as if
+Petkoff were trying to establish an offhand manner, and not succeeding
+in the least. "It was thoughtful, very thoughtful, of American
+government, to return to us those men. Very kind."
+
+Malone's expression conveyed nothing but the sheerest good will.
+"Well, you know how it is," he said. "Anything we can do to preserve
+peace and amity between our countries--we'll do it. You know that.
+Getting along, coexistence, that sort of thing. Oh, we're glad to
+oblige."
+
+"I am sure," Petkoff said darkly. "You realize, of course, that they
+are criminals? Deserters from Red Army, embezzlers. Embezzlers of
+money."
+
+Wondering vaguely what else you could be an embezzler of, Malone
+nodded. "That's what your ambassador in Washington said, when we told
+him about the deportation order."
+
+"But Dad's not an embezzler," Luba broke in. "Or a deserter, either.
+He--"
+
+"We have the records," Petkoff said.
+
+"But--"
+
+"Ordinarily, Mr. Malone," Petkoff said pointedly, "we do not find it
+the policy of the American government to send back political
+refugees."
+
+"Now, listen," Lou said. "If you think you can shut me up--"
+
+"That is exactly what I think," Petkoff said. "Let me assure you that
+no offense has been intended."
+
+Lou opened her mouth and started to say something. Then she shut it
+again. "Well," she said, "I guess this isn't the time to argue about
+it. I'm sorry, Mr. Petkoff."
+
+The MVD man beamed back at her. "Call me Vladimir," he said.
+
+Malone broke in hastily. "You see, Major," he said, "these men are all
+embezzlers, as you've said yourself. We have the word of your
+government on that."
+
+Petkoff took his eyes off Lou with what seemed real reluctance. "Oh,"
+he said. "Yes. Of course you do."
+
+"Therefore," Malone said smoothly, "the three are criminals and not
+political refugees."
+
+"Indeed," Petkoff said blandly. "Very interesting. Your government has
+done a good deal of thinking in this matter."
+
+"Sure we have," Malone said. "After all, we don't want to cause any
+trouble."
+
+"No," Petkoff said, and frowned. "Of course not."
+
+"Naturally," Malone said.
+
+After that, there was silence for almost a full minute. Then Major
+Petkoff turned to Malone again with a frown. "Wait," he said.
+
+"Wait?" Malone said.
+
+"The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics," Petkoff said, "has no
+extradition treaty with your capitalist warmongering country."
+
+"We're not warmongers," Her Majesty put in. Both men ignored her.
+
+"True," Malone admitted.
+
+"Then there was no reason to send these men back to us," Petkoff said.
+
+"Oh, no," Malone said. "There was a very good reason. You see, we
+didn't want them in our country, either."
+
+"But--"
+
+"And when we found that they'd lied on their naturalization papers,
+why, naturally, we took immediate steps. The only steps we could take,
+as a matter of fact."
+
+"The only steps?" Petkoff said. "You could have preferred charges.
+This was not done. Why was it not done?"
+
+"That," Malone said, sidestepping neatly, "is a matter of governmental
+policy, Major Petkoff. And I can't provide any final answer."
+
+"Ah?" Petkoff said.
+
+"But, after all, a trial would not make sense," Malone said, now
+busily attacking from the side. "You see, at first we thought they
+were espionage agents."
+
+"A foolish conclusion," Petkoff said uneasily.
+
+Malone nodded. "That's what we finally realized," he said. "We
+questioned them, but their stories were nonsense, absolute nonsense.
+Of course, we had no idea of what foreign government might have
+employed them."
+
+"Of course not," Petkoff said, shifting slightly in his seat. The car
+took a wide curve and swayed slightly, and Malone found himself nearly
+in Lou's lap. The sensation was so pleasant that all conversation was
+delayed for a couple of seconds, until the car had righted itself.
+
+"So," Malone went on when he had straightened out, "we decided to save
+ourselves the expense of a trial."
+
+"Very natural," Petkoff said. The slight delay had apparently allowed
+him to recover his own mental balance. "The capitalist countries think
+only of money."
+
+"Sure," Malone said agreeably. "Well, anyhow, that's the way it was.
+There was no point, really, in putting them in prison--what for? What
+good could it do us?"
+
+"Who knows?" Petkoff said.
+
+"Exactly," Malone said. "So, since all we wanted to do was get rid of
+them, and since we had an easy way to do that, why, we took it, that's
+all, and shipped them here."
+
+"I see," Petkoff said. "And the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is
+properly grateful."
+
+"My goodness," Her Majesty put in, apparently out of an irrepressible
+sense of fun. "Maybe we'll get medals."
+
+"Medals," Petkoff said sternly, "are not given to capitalist
+agitators."
+
+"We are not agitated," Her Majesty said, and folded her hands in her
+lap, looking quite satisfied with herself.
+
+Petkoff thought for a second. "And why," he said, "did you feel that
+such elaborate precautions were necessary in returning these men to
+us?"
+
+Malone shrugged. "Well, we couldn't have them just running around all
+over the world, could we?" he said. "We felt that here they'd be
+properly housed and fed, in their own homeland, even if they didn't
+get a job."
+
+"They will be properly taken care of," Petkoff prophesied darkly.
+
+"Now, wait a minute--" Lou began, and then stopped. "Sorry," she said.
+
+Malone felt sorry for her, but there was nothing he could say to make
+things any better. "Exactly," he told Petkoff with what he hoped was a
+smile.
+
+"Ah, well," Petkoff said. "My friend and colleague, we should cease
+this shoptalk. Shoptalk?"
+
+"Quite correct," Malone said.
+
+"I have studied English a long time," Petkoff said. "It is not a
+logical language."
+
+"You're doing very well," Malone said. Petkoff gave him a military
+duck of the head.
+
+"I appreciate your compliments," he said. "But I fear we are boring
+the ladies."
+
+The major had timed his speech well. At that moment, the ornate Volga
+pulled up to a smooth stop before a large, richly decorated building
+that glowed brightly under the electric lights of a large sign. The
+sign said something incomprehensible in Cyrillic script. Under it, the
+building entrance was gilded and carved into fantastic rococo shapes.
+Malone stared at the sign, and was about to ask a question about it
+when Petkoff spoke.
+
+"Trotkin's," he said. "The finest restaurant in all the world--in
+Moskva, this is what they say of it."
+
+"I understand," Malone said.
+
+"Come," Petkoff said grandly, and got out of the car. One of the two
+silent men leaped out and opened the back door, and Her Majesty, Lou
+and Malone climbed out and stood blinking on the sidewalk under the
+sign.
+
+Petkoff leaned over and said something to the driver. The second
+silent man got back into the car, and it drove away down the street,
+turned a corner and disappeared. The party of four started toward the
+entrance of the restaurant.
+
+The door swung open before Major Petkoff reached it. A doorman was
+holding it, and bowing to each of the four as they passed. He was
+dressed in Victorian livery, complete to knee-breeches and lace, and
+Malone thought this was rather odd for the classless Russian society.
+But the doorman was only the opening note of a great symphony.
+
+Inside, there were tables and chairs--or at least, Malone told
+himself, that's what he thought they were. They were massive wood
+affairs, carved into tortuous shapes and gilded or painted in all
+sorts of colors that glittered madly under the barrage of several
+electric chandeliers.
+
+The chandeliers hung from a frescoed ceiling, and looked much too
+heavy. They swayed and tinkled in time to the music that filled the
+room, but for a second Malone looked past them at the ceiling. It
+appeared to represent some sort of Russian heaven, at the end of the
+Five-Year Plan. There were officers and ladies eating grapes,
+waltzing, strolling on white puffy clouds, singing, drinking, making
+love. There was an awful lot of activity going on up on the ceiling,
+and it wasn't until Malone lowered his gaze that he realized that none
+of this activity had been exaggerated.
+
+True, there were no white puffy clouds, and he couldn't immediately
+locate a bunch of grapes anywhere. But there were the musicians, in
+the same Victorian outfits as the doorman: three fiddlers, a cellist,
+and a man who played piano. "Just like in night-clubs in bourgeois
+Paris," Petkoff said, following Malone's gaze with every evidence of
+pride.
+
+Between the musicians and Malone were a lot of tables and chairs and
+ancient, proud-looking waiters who appeared to have been hired when
+Trotkin's had opened--and that, Malone thought, had been a long, long
+time ago. He felt like those two ladies, whose names he couldn't
+remember, who said they'd slipped back in time. Officers and their
+ladies, the men in glittering uniforms, the ladies in ball dresses of
+every imaginable shade, cut, material and degree of exposure, were
+waltzing around the room looking very polite and old-world. Others
+were sitting at the tables, where candles fluttered, completely
+useless in the electric glare. The noise was something terrific, but,
+somehow, it was all very well-bred.
+
+The headwaiter was suddenly next to them. He hadn't walked there, at
+least not noticeably; he appeared to have perfected the old-world
+manner of the silent servant. Or, of course, Malone thought, the man
+might be a teleport.
+
+"Ah, Major Petkoff," he said, in a silken voice. "It is so good to see
+you again. And your friends?"
+
+"Americans," Petkoff said. "They have come to see the glorious Soviet
+Union."
+
+"Ah," the headwaiter said. "Your usual table, Major?"
+
+Petkoff nodded. The headwaiter led the party through the dancers,
+snaking slowly along until they reached a large table near the
+musicians and at the edge of the dance floor. Her Majesty
+automatically took the seat nearest the musicians, which she imagined
+to be the head of the table. Lou sat at her left hand, and Malone at
+her right, his back against a wall. Petkoff took the foot of the
+table, called a waiter over, and ordered for the party. He did a
+massive job of it, with two waiters, at last, taking down what seemed
+to be his entire memoirs, plus the list of all soldiers in the Red
+Army below the rank of Grand Exalted Elk, or whatever it might have
+been. Malone had no idea what the major was ordering, except that it
+sounded extensive and very, very Russian.
+
+Finally the waiter went on his way. Major Petkoff turned to Malone and
+smiled. "Naturally," he said, "we will begin with vodka, _nyet_?"
+
+Malone considered saying _nyet,_ but he didn't feel that this was the
+time or the place. Besides, he told himself grimly, it would be a sad
+day when a Petkoff could drink a Malone under the table. His proudest
+heritage from his father was an immense capacity, he told himself. Now
+was his chance to test it.
+
+"And, naturally, a little caviar to go with it," Petkoff added.
+
+"Certainly," Malone said, as if caviar were the most common thing in
+the world in his usual Washington saloons.
+
+It wasn't long before the waiter reappeared, bringing four glasses and
+three bottles of vodka chilled in an ice-bucket, like a bouquet of
+champagne. Petkoff bowed him out after one bottle had been opened, set
+the glasses up and began to pour.
+
+"Oh, goodness," Her Majesty started to say.
+
+"None for me, thanks," Lou chimed in.
+
+"Oh, yes," Her Majesty said. "I don't think I'll have any either. An
+old lady has to be very careful of her system, you know."
+
+"You do not look like an old lady," Petkoff said gallantly.
+"Middle-aged, perhaps, to be cruel. But certainly not old. Not over
+... oh, perhaps forty."
+
+Her Majesty smiled politely at him. Malone began to wonder if it had
+been gallantry, after all. From what he'd seen of the Russian women,
+it was likely, after all, that Petkoff really thought Her Majesty
+wasn't much over forty at that.
+
+"You're very flattering, Major," Her Majesty said. "But I assure you
+that I'm a good deal older than I look."
+
+Malone tried to tell himself that no one else had noticed the stifled
+gulp that had followed that remark. It had been his own stifled gulp.
+And his face, he felt sure, had aged one hundred and twelve years
+within a second or so. He waited for Her Majesty to tell Major Petkoff
+just how old she really was...
+
+But she said nothing else. After a second she turned and smiled at
+Malone.
+
+"Thanks," he said.
+
+"Oh, you're quite welcome," she said.
+
+Petkoff frowned at both of them, shrugged, and readied the bottle.
+"Well, then," he said. "It seems as if the drinking will be done by
+men--and that is right. Vodka is the drink for men."
+
+He had filled his own glass full of the cold, clear liquid. Now he
+filled Malone's. He stood, glass in hand. Malone also climbed to his
+feet.
+
+"To the continued friendship of our two countries!" Petkoff said. He
+raised his glass for a second, then downed the contents. Malone
+followed suit. The vodka burned its merry way into his stomach. They
+sat.
+
+A waiter arrived with a large platter. "Ah," Petkoff said, turning.
+"Try some of this caviar, Mr. Malone. You will find it the finest in
+the world."
+
+Malone, somehow, had never managed to develop a taste for caviar. He
+was willing to admit, if pressed, that this made him an uncultured
+slob, but caviar always made him think of the joke about the country
+bumpkin who thought it was marvelous that you could soften up buckshot
+just by soaking it in fish oil.
+
+Now, though, he felt he had to be polite, and he tried some of the
+stuff. All things considered, it wasn't quite as bad as he'd thought
+it was going to be. And it did make a pretty good chaser for the
+vodka.
+
+Her Majesty also helped herself to some caviar. "My goodness," she
+said. "This reminds me of the old days."
+
+Malone waited, once again, with bated breath. But, though Her Majesty
+may have been crazy, she wasn't stupid. She said nothing more.
+
+Petkoff, meanwhile, refilled the glasses and looked expectantly at
+Malone. This time it was his turn to propose the toast. He thought for
+a second, then stood up and raised his glass.
+
+"To the most beautiful woman in all the world," he said, feeling just
+a little like a character in _War and Peace_. "Luba Vasilovna
+Garbitsch."
+
+"Ah," Petkoff said, smiling approvingly. Malone executed a little bow
+in Lou's direction and followed Petkoff in downing the drink. Two more
+glasses of vodka wended their tortuous ways into the interior.
+
+"Tell me, colleague," Petkoff said as be spooned up some more caviar,
+"how are things in the United States?"
+
+Malone shot a glance at Her Majesty, but she was concentrating on
+something else, and her eyes seemed far away. "Oh, all right," he said
+at last.
+
+"Of course, you must say so," Petkoff murmured. "But, as one colleague
+to another, tell me: how much longer do you think it will be before
+the proletarian uprising in your country?"
+
+There were a lot of answers to that, Malone told himself. But he chose
+one without too much difficulty. "Well, that's hard to judge," he
+said. "I'd hate to make any prediction. I don't have enough
+information."
+
+"Not enough information?" Petkoff said. "I don't understand."
+
+Malone shrugged. "Since our proletariat," he said, "have shown no sign
+of wanting any rebellion at all, how can I predict when they're going
+to rebel?"
+
+Petkoff gave him an unbelieving smile. "Well," he said. "We must have
+patience, eh, colleague?"
+
+"I guess so," Malone said, watching Petkoff pour more vodka.
+
+By the time the meal came, Malone was feeling a warm glow in his
+interior, but no real fogginess. The dance floor had been cleared by
+this time, and a group of six costumed professionals glided out and
+took places. The musicians broke out into a thunderous and bumpy
+piece, and the dancers began some sort of Slavic folk dance that
+looked like a combination of a _kazotska_ and a shivaree. Malone
+watched them with interest. They looked like good dancers, but they
+seemed to be plagued with clumsiness; they were always crashing into
+one another. On the other hand, Malone thought, maybe it was part of
+the dance. It was hard to tell.
+
+The dinner was as extensive as anything Malone had ever dreamed of:
+_borshcht_, beef Stroganoff, smoked fish, vegetables in gigantic
+tureens, ices and cheeses and fruits. And always, between the courses,
+during the courses and at every available moment, there was vodka.
+
+The drinking didn't bother him too much. But the food was too much.
+Unbelieving, he watched Petkoff polish off a large red apple, a pear
+and a small wedge of white, creamy-looking cheese at the end of the
+towering meal. Her Majesty was staring, too, in a very polite manner.
+Lou simply looked glassy-eyed and overstuffed. Malone felt a good deal
+of sympathy for her.
+
+Petkoff finished the wedge of cheese and ripped off a belch of
+incredible magnitude and splendor. Malone felt he should applaud, but
+managed to restrain himself. Her Majesty looked startled for a second,
+and then regained her composure. Only Lou seemed to take the event as
+a matter of course, which set Malone to wondering about her home-life.
+Somehow he couldn't picture her wistful little father ever producing a
+sound of such awesome magnitude.
+
+"My dear colleague," Petkoff was saying. Malone turned to him and
+tried to look interested. "There is one thing I have wondered for many
+years."
+
+"Really?" Malone said politely.
+
+"That is right," Petkoff said. "For years, there has never been a
+change of name in your organization of secret police."
+
+"We're not secret police," Malone said.
+
+Petkoff gave a massive shrug. "Naturally," he said, "one must say
+this. But surely, one tires of being called FBI all the time."
+
+"One does?" Malone said. "I don't know. It gives a person a sort of
+sense of security."
+
+"Ah," Petkoff said. "But take us, for instance. We pride ourselves on
+our ability to camouflage ourselves. GPU, and then OGPU--which were, I
+understand, subject for many capitalist jokes."
+
+Malone tried to look as if he couldn't imagine such a thing. "I
+suppose they might have been," he said.
+
+"Then we were NKVD," Petkoff said, "and now MVD. And I understand,
+quite between us, Mr. Malone, that there is talk of further change."
+
+There was a sudden burst of applause. Malone wondered what for, looked
+at the dance floor and realized that the six Slavic dancers were
+taking bows. As he watched, one of them slipped and nearly fell. The
+musicians obliged with a final series of chords and the dancers
+trotted away. A waltz began, and couples from the tables began
+crowding the floor.
+
+"How can you manage the proletariat," Petkoff asked, "if you do not
+keep them confused?"
+
+"We don't, exactly," Malone said. "They more or less manage us."
+
+"Ha," Petkoff said, dismissing this with a wave of his hand.
+"Propaganda." And then he, too, turned to watch the dancers. The waltz
+was finishing, and a fox-trot had begun. "With your permission, Mr.
+Malone," he said, rising, "I should like to ask so-lovely Miss
+Garbitsch to dance with me."
+
+Malone glanced at the girl. She gave him a quick smile, with just a
+hint of nervousness or strain in it, and turned to Petkoff. "I'd be
+delighted, Major," she said. Malone shut his own mouth. As the girl
+rose, he got to his feet and gave the couple a small, Victorian bow.
+Petkoff and Lou walked to the floor, and Malone, sitting down again,
+watched enviously as he took her in his arms and began to guide her
+expertly across the floor in time to the music.
+
+Malone sighed. Some men, he told himself, had all the luck. But, of
+course, Lou had to be polite, too. She didn't really like Petkoff, he
+told himself; she was just being diplomatic. And he had made some
+progress with her on the plane, he thought.
+
+He looked over at Her Majesty, but the Queen was staring abstractedly
+at a crystal chandelier. Malone sighed again, took a little caviar and
+washed it down with vodka. The vodka felt nice and warm, he thought
+vaguely. Vodka was good. It was too bad that the people who made such
+good vodka had to be enemies. But that was the way things were, he
+told himself philosophically.
+
+Terrible. That's how things were.
+
+The fox-trot went to its conclusion. Malone saw Petkoff, chatting
+animatedly with Lou, lead her off to a small bar at the opposite side
+of the room. "Some people," he muttered, "have too much luck. Or too
+much diplomacy."
+
+Her Majesty was tugging at his arm. That, Malone thought, was going to
+be more bad news.
+
+It was.
+
+"Sir Kenneth," she said softly, "do you realize that this place is
+full of MVD men? Of course you don't; I haven't told you yet."
+
+Malone opened his mouth, shut it again, and thought in a hurry. If the
+place were full of MVD men, that meant they probably had it bugged.
+And that meant several things, all of them unpleasant. Her Majesty
+shouldn't have said anything--she shouldn't have shown any nervousness
+or anxiety in the first place, she shouldn't have known there were so
+many MVD men in the second place--because there was no way for her to
+know, except through her telepathy, a little secret Malone did not
+want the Russians to find out about. And she should definitely, most
+definitely, not have called him "Sir Kenneth."
+
+"Oh," Her Majesty said. "I am sorry, Sir--er--Mr. Malone. You're quite
+right, you know."
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "Well. My goodness." He thought of something to
+say, and said it at once. "Of course there are MVD men here. This is
+just the place for good old MVD men to come when they go off duty. A
+nice, relaxing place full of fun and dancing and food and vodka..."
+And he was thinking, at the same time: _Are they doing anything odd?_
+
+"Russian, you know," Her Majesty said, almost conversationally, "is an
+extremely difficult language. It takes a great deal of practice to
+learn to think in it really fluently."
+
+"Yes, I should think it would," Malone said absently. _You mean you
+haven't been able to pick up what these people are thinking?_
+
+"Oh, one can get the main outlines," Her Majesty went on, "but a
+really full knowledge is nearly impossible. Though, of course, it
+isn't quite as bad as all that. A man who speaks both languages, like
+our dear Major Petkoff, for instance--so charming, so full of _joie de
+vivre_--could be an invaluable assistant to anyone interested in
+learning exactly how Russians really think." She smiled nervously. Her
+face was suddenly set and strained. "I find that--"
+
+She stopped then, very suddenly. Her eyes widened, and her right hand
+reached out to grasp Malone's arm more strongly than he had thought
+she ever could. "Sir Kenneth!" Her voice, all restraint gone, was a
+hissing whisper. Malone started to say something, but Her Majesty went
+on, her eyes wide. "Do something quickly!" she said.
+
+"What?" Malone said.
+
+"They've put something in Lou's drink!" Her Majesty hissed.
+
+Malone was on his feet before she'd finished, and he took a step
+across the room.
+
+"She's already swallowed it!" the Queen said. "Do something! Quickly!"
+
+The dancers on the floor were no concern of his, Malone told himself
+grimly. He didn't decide to move; he was on his way before any thought
+filtered through into his mind. Officers and their ladies looked after
+him with shocked stupor as he plowed his way across the dance floor,
+using legs, elbows, shoulders and anything else that allowed him free
+passage. Sometimes the dancers managed to get out of his way.
+Sometimes they didn't. It was all the same to Kenneth J. Malone.
+
+Her Majesty followed in his wake, silent and stricken, scurrying after
+him like a small destroyer following a battleship, or like a
+ball-carrying grandmother following up her interference.
+
+Malone caught sight of Lou, standing at the bar. In that second, she
+seemed to realize for the first time that something was wrong. She
+pushed herself violently away from the bar, and looked frantically
+around, her mouth opening to call. Petkoff was a blur next to her;
+Malone didn't look at him clearly. Lou took a step...
+
+And two men with broken, lumpy faces came through a door somewhere in
+the rear of the restaurant, closer to her than Malone. Petkoff
+suddenly swam into sight; he was standing very still and looking
+entirely baffled.
+
+Malone pushed through a pair of dancers, ignored their glares and the
+man's hissed insult, which he didn't understand anyhow, and found his
+view suddenly blocked by a large expanse of dark grey.
+
+It was somebody's chest, in a uniform. Malone shifted his gaze half an
+inch and saw a row of gold buttons. He looked upward.
+
+There, towering above him, was a face. It stared down, looking heavy
+and cruel and stupid. Malone, his legs still carrying him forward,
+bounced off the chest and staggered back a step or two. He heard a
+hissed curse behind him, and realized without thinking about it that
+he had managed to collide with the same pair of dancers again. He
+didn't look around to see them. Instead, he looked ahead, at the giant
+who blocked his path.
+
+The man was about six feet six inches tall, a great Mongol who weighed
+about a sixth of a ton. But he didn't look fat; he looked strong
+instead, and enormously massive. Malone sidestepped, and the Mongol
+moved slightly to block him. To one side, Malone saw Her Majesty
+scurrying by. The Mongol was apparently more interested in Malone than
+in trying to stop sweet little old ladies. Malone saw Her Majesty
+heading for the bar, and forgot about her for the second.
+
+The Mongol shifted again to block Malone's forward progress.
+
+"What seems to be such great hurry, _Tovarishch_?" he said in a voice
+that sounded like an earthquake warning. "Have you no culture? Why you
+run across floor in such impolite manner?"
+
+The man might have been blocking his way because of Lou, or might
+simply want to teach an uncultured _Amerikanski_ a lesson. Malone
+couldn't tell which, and it didn't seem to matter. He whirled and
+reached for a glass of vodka standing momentarily unattended on a
+nearby table.
+
+He tossed the vodka at the giant's eyes, and scooted around the
+mountain of flesh before it erupted with a volcanic succession of
+Russian curses that shook the room with their volume and sincerity.
+
+But Lou and Her Majesty were nowhere in sight. Major Petkoff was
+staring, and Malone followed his line of sight.
+
+A door in the rear of the restaurant was just closing. Behind it
+Malone saw Her Majesty and Lou, disappearing from sight.
+
+Malone knocked over a waiter and headed for Petkoff. "What's going on
+here?" he bellowed over the crash of dishes and the rising wave of
+Russian profanity.
+
+Petkoff shrugged magnificently. "I have no ideas, colleague," he said.
+"I have no ideas."
+
+"But she--"
+
+"Miss Garbitsch was taken suddenly ill," Petkoff said.
+
+"Damn sudden," Malone growled.
+
+"Her friend, Miss Thompson, has taken her to the ladies' room,"
+Petkoff said. He gestured, narrowly missing a broken, lumpy face
+Malone had seen before.
+
+"You are under arrest," the face said. Its partner peered over
+Petkoff's shoulder.
+
+"I?" Petkoff said.
+
+"Not you," the face said. "Him." He started for Malone and Petkoff
+threw out both arms.
+
+"Hold!" he said. "My orders are to see that this man is not molested."
+
+The guests had suddenly and silently melted away. Malone backed off a
+step, looking for something to stage a fight with.
+
+"On the other hand, Comrade," one of the lumpy-faced men said, "we
+have orders also."
+
+"My orders--" Petkoff began.
+
+"Your orders do not exist," the other lumpy man said. "We are to
+arrest this man. Our orders say so."
+
+"You are fools," Petkoff said. He spread his arms wider, blocking both
+of them. Malone edged back against the bar, feeling behind him for a
+bottle or maybe a bungstarter. Instead, his hand touched a sleeve.
+
+A voice behind him bellowed: "Cease!"
+
+The two lumpy-faced men goggled. Petkoff did not move.
+
+Malone turned, and saw a tall, thin civilian with dark glasses.
+"Cease," the civilian repeated. "It is the girl we are to arrest! The
+girl!"
+
+"This is not a girl," one of the lumpy men said. "Sir. We are to
+arrest this man. Our orders say distinctly--"
+
+"Never mind your orders!" Petkoff said. "Go and reduce your orders to
+shreds and stuff them up your nostrils and die of suffocation! My
+orders say--"
+
+"The girl!" the civilian said. "Where is the girl?"
+
+Malone darted forward. Petkoff caught him neatly with one arm as he
+went by. "Until we decide what to do," the MVD man said, "you stay
+here." Malone bucked against him, but could get nowhere. "Meanwhile,"
+Petkoff said, "I am for letting you go."
+
+"I appreciate it," Malone said through his teeth. "How about proving
+it?"
+
+"If you let him go," a lumpy man said, "you will answer to our group
+head."
+
+Petkoff tightened his hold protectively. Meanwhile, the civilian was
+climbing up into a stratospheric rage.
+
+"You are dolts, imbeciles, worms without brains and walking bellies
+filled with carrion!" he said magnificently. "I have orders which I am
+sworn to carry out!"
+
+"You are not alone," Petkoff said.
+
+Malone took another try at a getaway, and failed.
+
+"We take precedence," a lumpy man said. "We can talk later. Arrest
+comes first."
+
+"But who?" the civilian snapped. "I insist--"
+
+"There shall be no arrest!" Petkoff screamed. "No one is to be
+arrested at all!"
+
+"I swear by the bones of Stalin that my orders state--" the tall man
+began.
+
+"The bones of Stalin are with us!" a lumpy man said. "Go and die in a
+kennel filled with fleas and old newspaper! Go and freeze to the
+likeness of an obscene statue of a bourgeois deity! Go and hang by the
+ears from a monument four thousand feet high in the center of the
+great desert!"
+
+Inspired, the other lumpy man screamed "Charge!" and came for Petkoff
+and the civilian. Petkoff whirled, letting go of Malone in order to
+beat back this wave of maddened attackers, and Malone took the
+advantage. He ducked free under Petkoff's left arm and started around
+the gesticulating, screaming, fighting group for the door at the back
+of the restaurant. He took exactly four steps.
+
+Then he stopped. The Mongol, his eyes red with a combination of vodka
+and bull-roaring rage, was charging toward him, his hands outflung and
+his fingers grasping at the air. "Warmonger!" he was shouting.
+"Capitalist slave-owner! Leprous and ancient cannibal without culture!
+You have begun a war you can not finish!"
+
+"Ha!" Malone said, feeling inadequate to the occasion. As the Mongol
+charged, he felt a wave of intense pragmatism come over him. He
+reached back toward the bar, grabbed a bottle of vodka and tossed
+several glassfuls into the giant's face. The Mongol, deluged and
+screaming, clawed wildly at his eyes and spun round several times,
+cursing Malone and all his kin for the next twenty-seven generations,
+and grabbing thin air in his attempt to reach the _Amerikanski_.
+
+All of the customers appeared to have discovered urgent engagements
+elsewhere. There was little for the Mongol to collide with except
+empty tables and chairs. But he did manage to swipe one of the
+lumpy-faced men on the side of the head with one flail of his arms.
+The lumpy-faced man said "Yoop!" and went staggering away into
+Petkoff, who spun him around and threw him away in the general
+direction of the bandstand. The diversion provided Malone with just
+enough time to start moving again.
+
+Four uniformed men were making their way toward the ladies' room from
+the opposite side of the restaurant. They were carrying a stretcher,
+which seemed pitifully inadequate for the carnage Malone had just
+left.
+
+He blocked their path. "Where are you going?" he said.
+
+"You are American?" one of them said. "I speak English good, no?"
+
+Behind him, Malone heard a yowl and a crunch, as of a body striking
+wood. It sounded as if somebody had fetched up against the bar. "You
+speak English fine," he said, feeling wildly out of place. "Have you
+been taking lessons?"
+
+"Me?" the man said. "It is no time for talk. We got to get lady for
+hospital."
+
+"Lady?" Malone said. "For hospital?"
+
+"Miss Garbitsch her name is," the stretcher-man said, trying to get
+past Malone. The FBI agent shifted slightly, blocking the path. "We
+wait outside one revolution--"
+
+"One what?"
+
+"When hands revolve once," the man said. "One hour. Now we get call so
+we take her to hospital."
+
+It sounded suspicious to Malone. He heard more yells behind him, and
+they sounded a little closer. The sound of running men came to his
+ears. "Well," he said happily, "goodbye all."
+
+The stretcher-bearer said, "Vot?" Malone shoved him backward into the
+approaching mob, grabbed the stretcher away from the other three men,
+who were acting a little dazed, and swung it in a wide arc. He caught
+an MVD man in the stomach, and the man doubled up with a weird
+whistling groan, turned slightly in agony, and hit another MVD man
+with his bowed head. The second man fell; Malone heard more crashes
+and screaming, but he didn't find out any details. Instead, he threw
+the stretcher at the milling mob and turned, already in motion, racing
+for the ladies' room.
+
+He had no notion of what he was going to do when he got there, or what
+he was going to find. Her Majesty and Lou were in there, all right,
+but how were they going to get out without being arrested, clubbed,
+disemboweled or taken to a Russian hospital for God alone knew what
+novel purposes?
+
+His mind was still a little foggy from the vast amounts of vodka he
+had poured down, and he wasn't in the least sure that teleportation
+would even work. He tried to figure out whether Her Majesty had
+already carried Lou off that way--but he doubted it. Lou was quite a
+burden for the old woman. And besides, he wasn't at all sure whether
+it was possible to teleport a human being. A lump of inanimate matter
+is one thing; an intelligent woman with a mind of her own is
+definitely something else.
+
+It seemed to take forever for him to reach the door, and he was
+panting heavily when he reached for it. Suddenly, another hand shot in
+front of his, turning the doorknob. Malone looked up.
+
+It was impossible to figure out where she had come from, or what she
+thought she was doing, but a bulging, slightly intoxicated Russian
+matron with bluish hair piled high on her head, a rusty orange dress
+and altogether too many jewels scattered here and there about her
+ample person, stood regarding him with a mixture of scorn, surprise
+and shock.
+
+Malone crowded her aside without a thought and jerked the door open.
+Behind her he could see the melee still continuing, though it looked
+by now as if the Russians weren't very sure who they were supposed to
+be fighting. The Mongol's great head rose for a second above the
+storm, shouting something unintelligible, and dropped again into the
+crowd.
+
+Malone focused on the matron, who was standing with her mouth open
+staring at him.
+
+"Madam," he said with stern dignity, "wait your turn!"
+
+He ducked inside and slammed the door behind him. There was a small
+knob to bolt the door with, and he used it. But it wasn't going to
+hold long, he knew. If the mob outside ever got straightened out, the
+door would go down like a piece of cardboard, bolt or no bolt.
+Undoubtedly the gigantic Mongol could do the job with one hand tied
+behind his back.
+
+Malone turned around and put his own back to the door. Women were
+looking up and making up their minds whether or not to scream. Time
+stood absolutely still, and nobody seemed to be moving--not even the
+two directly before him: a frightened-looking little old lady, who was
+trying to hold up a semiconscious redhead.
+
+And, somewhere behind him, he knew, was a howling mob of thoroughly
+maddened Russians.
+
+
+8
+
+The door rattled against Malone's back as a hand twisted the knob and
+shook it. He braced himself for the next assault, and it came: the
+shudder of a heavy body slamming up against it. Miraculously, the door
+held, at least for the moment. But the roars outside were growing
+louder and louder as the second team came up.
+
+Where was the Mongol? he wondered. But there was no time for idle
+contemplation. The scene inside the room demanded his immediate
+attention.
+
+He was in the anteroom, a gilded and decorated parlor filled with
+overstuffed chairs and couches. There was a door at the far side of
+the room, and a woman suddenly came out of it holding a pocketbook in
+one hand and a large powder-puff in the other. She saw Malone and
+reacted instantly.
+
+Her scream seemed to be a signal. The two other women sitting on
+couches screamed, too, and jumped up with their hands to their faces.
+Malone shouted something unintelligible but very loud at them and
+brandished a fist menacingly. They shrieked again and ran for the
+interior room.
+
+Malone heard the roaring outside, and pressed his back tighter against
+the door. Then, suddenly, he broke away from it and ran over to Her
+Majesty and Lou. He looked down. Lou was apparently completely
+unconscious by this time, and there was a peaceful look on her face.
+The Queen looked down at her, then up at Malone.
+
+"I'm sorry, Sir Kenneth," she said, "but we really haven't time for
+romantic thoughts just now."
+
+Malone passed a hand over his brow. "We haven't got time for
+anything," he said. "You can see what's going on outside."
+
+"My goodness," Her Majesty said. "Oh, yes. My goodness, yes."
+
+"Okay," Malone said. "We've got to teleport out, if we can--and if we
+can take Lou with us."
+
+"I don't know, Sir Kenneth," the Queen said.
+
+"We've got to try," Malone said grimly, looking down. There was a
+crash as something hit the door. It shuddered, creaked, and held.
+Malone took a breath. Lou was too beautiful to leave behind, no matter
+what.
+
+"I'll mesh my mind with yours," Her Majesty said, "so we'll be
+synchronized."
+
+"Right," Malone said. "The plane. Let's go."
+
+There was another crash, but he hardly heard it. He closed his eyes
+and tried to visualize the interior of the plane that was waiting for
+them at the airfield. He wasn't sure he could do it; the vodka might
+have clouded his mental processes just enough to make teleporting
+impossible. He concentrated. The crash came again, and a shout. He
+almost had it ... he almost had it...
+
+The last sound he heard was the splintering of the door, and a great
+shout that was cut off in the middle.
+
+Malone opened his eyes.
+
+"We made it," he said softly. "And I wonder what the MVD is going to
+think."
+
+Her Majesty took a deep breath. "My goodness," she said. "That _was_
+exciting, wasn't it?"
+
+"Not half as exciting as it's going to be if we don't hurry now,"
+Malone said. "If you know what I mean."
+
+"I do," Her Majesty said.
+
+"That's good," Malone said at random. "I don't." He helped the Queen
+ease the unconscious body of Luba Garbitsch into one of the padded
+seats, and Malone pushed a switch. The seat gave a tiny squeak of
+protest, and then folded back into a flat bedlike arrangement. Lou was
+arranged on this comfortable surface, and Malone took a deep breath.
+"Take care of her for a minute, Your Majesty," he said.
+
+"Of course," the Queen said.
+
+Malone nodded. "I'm going to see who's up front," he said. He walked
+through the corridors of the plane and rapped authoritatively on the
+door of the pilot's cabin. A second passed, and he raised his hand to
+knock again.
+
+It never reached the door, which opened very suddenly. Malone found
+himself facing a small black hole.
+
+It was the muzzle and the bore of the barrel of an M-2 .45 revolver,
+and it was pointing somewhere in the space between Malone's eyes.
+Behind the gun was a hard-eyed air force colonel with a grim
+expression.
+
+"You know," Malone said pleasantly, "they're good guns, but they
+really can't compare to the .44 Magnum."
+
+The pilot blinked, and his gun wavered just a little. "What?" he said.
+
+"Well," Malone said, "if you'd only join the FBI, like me, you'd have
+a .44 Magnum, and you could compare the guns."
+
+The pilot blinked again. "You're--"
+
+"Malone," Malone said. "Kenneth J. Malone, FBI. My friends call me
+Snookums, but don't try it. Why not let's put the gun away and be
+friends?"
+
+"Oh," the colonel said weakly. "Mr.--sure. I'm sorry, Mr. Malone.
+Didn't recognize you for a second there."
+
+"Perfectly all right," Malone said. The gun was still pointing at him,
+and in spite of the fact that he felt pleasantly like Philip Marlowe,
+or maybe the Saint, he was beginning to get a little nervous. "The
+gun," he said.
+
+The colonel stared at it for a second, then reholstered it in a hurry.
+"I am sorry," he said. "But we've been worried about Russians coming
+aboard. I've got my copilot and navigator outside, guarding the plane,
+and they were supposed to let me know if anybody came in. When they
+didn't let me know, and you knocked, I assumed you were Russians. But,
+of course, you--"
+
+Conversation came to a sudden dead stop.
+
+"About these Russians--" Malone said desperately. But the pilot's eyes
+got a little glazed. He wasn't listening.
+
+"Now, wait a minute," he said. "Why _didn't_ they notify me?"
+
+"Maybe they didn't see me," Malone said. "I mean us."
+
+"But--"
+
+"I'm not very noticeable," Malone said hopefully, trying to look small
+and undistinguished. "They could just have ... not noticed me. Okay?"
+He gave the pilot his most friendly smile.
+
+"They'd have noticed you," the pilot said. "If they're still out
+there. If nothing's happened to them." He leaned forward. "Did you see
+them, Malone?"
+
+Malone shrugged. "How would I know?" he said.
+
+"How would you--" The pilot seemed at a loss for words. Malone waited
+patiently, trying to look as if everything were completely and
+perfectly normal. "Mr. Malone," the pilot said at last, "how _did_ you
+get aboard this aircraft?"
+
+He didn't wait for an answer, and Malone was grateful for that.
+Instead, he stepped over to a viewport and looked out. On the field,
+two air force officers were making lonely rounds about the plane.
+Fifty yards farther away, a squad of Russian guards also patrolled the
+brightly-lit area. There was nothing else in sight.
+
+"There isn't any way you could have done it," the pilot said without
+turning.
+
+"That's the FBI for you," Malone said. "We've got our little trade
+secrets, you know." Somehow, the pilot's back looked unconvinced.
+"Disguise," Malone added. "We're masters of disguise."
+
+The pilot turned very slowly. "Now what the hell would you disguise
+yourself as?" he said. "A Piper Cub?"
+
+"It's a military secret," Malone said hurriedly.
+
+The pilot didn't say anything for what seemed a long time. "A military
+secret?" he asked at last, in a hushed voice. "And you can't tell me?
+You're a civilian, and I'm a colonel in the United States Air Force,
+and you can't tell me a military secret?"
+
+Malone didn't hesitate a second. "Well, Colonel," he said cheerfully,
+"that's the way things are."
+
+The pilot threw up his hands. "It's none of my business," he said
+loudly. "I'm not even going to think about it. Because if I do, you'll
+have a mad pilot on your hands, and you wouldn't like that, would
+you?"
+
+"I would hate it," Malone said sincerely, "like hell. Particularly
+since I've got a sick woman aboard."
+
+"Disguised," the pilot offered, "as Lenin, I suppose."
+
+Malone shook his head. "I'm not kidding now," he said. "She is sick,
+and I want a doctor for her."
+
+"Why didn't you bring one with you?" the pilot said. "Or wasn't the
+disguise big enough for three?"
+
+"Four," Malone said. "We've got three now; me and Miss Garbitsch and
+Miss Thompson. Lou--Miss Garbitsch is the one who's sick. But I want a
+doctor from the American Embassy."
+
+"I think we could all use one," the pilot said judiciously. "But you'd
+better tell me what's the matter with the girl."
+
+Malone gave him a brief and highly censored version of the melee at
+Trotkin's, particularly omitting the details of the final escape from
+the MVD men.
+
+When he had finished, the pilot gave a long, low whistle. "You have
+been having fun," he said. "Can I go on your next adventure, or is it
+only for accredited Rover Boys?"
+
+"You have to buy a pin and a special compass that works in the dark,"
+Malone said. "I don't think you'd like it. How about that doctor?"
+
+The pilot nodded wearily. "I'll send my navigator over to the airfield
+phone," he said. "As a matter of fact, I'll tell him to tell the
+doctor I'm the one who's sick, so the Russians don't get suspicious.
+It may even be true."
+
+"Just so he gets here," Malone said. The pilot was flagging his
+navigator through the viewport as Malone went out, closing the door
+gently behind him. He went back down the plane corridor to Her Majesty
+and Lou.
+
+Lou was still lying on the makeshift bed, her eyes closed. She looked
+more beautiful and defenseless than ever, and Malone wanted to do
+something big and terrible to all the Russians who had tried to take
+her away or dope her. With difficulty, he restrained himself. "How is
+she?" he asked.
+
+"She seems to be all right," the Queen said. "The substance they put
+in her drink doesn't appear to have had any other effect than putting
+her to sleep and making her a little sick--and that was a good thing."
+
+"Oh, sure," Malone said. "That was fine."
+
+"Well," Her Majesty said, "she did get rid of quite a bit of the drug
+in the ladies' room." She smiled, just a trifle primly. "I think
+she'll be all right," she said.
+
+"There's a doctor on the way, anyhow," Malone said, staring down at
+her. He tried to think of something he could do for her--fan her, or
+bring her water, or cool her fevered brow. But she didn't look very
+fevered. She just looked helpless and beautiful. He felt sorry for all
+the nasty things he had said to her, and all the nasty things she had
+said to him. If she got well--and of course she was going to get well,
+he told himself firmly--things would be different. They'd be sweet and
+kind to each other all the time, and do nice things for each other.
+
+And she was definitely going to get well. He wouldn't even think about
+anything else. She was going to be fine again, and very soon. Why, she
+was hardly hurt at all, he told himself, hardly hurt at all.
+
+"Sir Kenneth," Her Majesty said. "I've been thinking: while we were
+about it, why didn't we just teleport all the way back home?"
+
+Malone turned. "Because," he said, "we'd have had the devil of a time
+explaining just how we managed to do it."
+
+"Oh," she said. "I see. Of course."
+
+"This teleportation gimmick is supposed to be a secret," Malone went
+on. "We don't want to let out anything more about it than we have to.
+As it is, there's going to be some fierce wondering among the Russians
+about how we got out of that restaurant."
+
+"Obviously," the Queen said, entirely unexpectedly, "a bourgeois
+capitalistic trick."
+
+"Obviously," Malone agreed. "But we don't want to start up any more
+questions than we have to."
+
+"And how about the plane itself?" Her Majesty went on. "Do you think
+they'll let us take off?"
+
+"I don't know how they can stop us," Malone said.
+
+"You don't?"
+
+"Well, they don't want to cause any incidents now," Malone said. "At
+least, I don't think they do. If they could have captured us--me, or
+Lou, or both of us, depending on which side of the argument you want
+to take--anyhow, if they could have grabbed us on their own home
+grounds, they'd have had an excuse. Lou got sick, they'd say, and they
+just took her to the hospital. They wouldn't have to call it an arrest
+at all."
+
+"Oh, I see," Her Majesty said. "But now we're not on their home
+grounds."
+
+"Not so long as we stay in this plane, we're not," Malone said. "And
+we're going to stay here until we take off."
+
+Her Majesty nodded.
+
+"I wish I knew what they thought they were doing, though," Malone
+mused. "They certainly couldn't have held us for very long, no matter
+how they worked things."
+
+"I know what was on their minds," Her Majesty said. "At least partly.
+It was all so confused it was difficult to get anything really
+detailed or complete."
+
+"There," Malone said fervently, "I agree with you."
+
+"The whole trouble was," the Queen said, "that nobody knew about
+anybody else."
+
+"I'd gathered something like that," Malone said. "But what exactly was
+it all about?"
+
+"Well," the Queen said, "Major Petkoff was supposed to tell Lou, in
+effect, that if she didn't agree to do espionage work for the Soviet
+Union, things would go hard with her father."
+
+"Nice," Malone said. "Very friendly gentleman."
+
+"Well," the Queen continued, "he was supposed to tell her about that
+at the bar, when he had her alone. But she got that drugged drink
+before he could begin to say anything."
+
+"Then who drugged it?" Malone said. "Lou?"
+
+The Queen shrugged. "Someone else," she said. "Major Petkoff didn't
+know anything about the drugged drink."
+
+"A nice surprise for him, anyhow," Malone said.
+
+"It was a surprise for everybody," the Queen said. "You see, the
+drugged drink was meant to get her to the hospital, where they'd have
+her alone for a long time and could really put some pressure on her."
+
+"And then," Malone said, "there were the men who wanted to arrest me.
+And the ones who wanted to take Lou to jail. And the mad Mongol who
+just wanted to fight, I guess."
+
+"There were so many different things, all going on at once," the Queen
+said.
+
+Malone nodded. "There seems to be quite a lot of confusion in the
+Soviet Union, too," he said. "That does not sound to me like an
+efficient operation."
+
+"It wasn't, very," the Queen said. "You see, they have Garbitsch now,
+but they can't do anything to him because they can't get to Lou. And
+it doesn't do them any good to do anything to her father, unless she
+knows about it first."
+
+"It sounds," Malone said, "as if the USSR is going along the same
+confused road as the good old United States."
+
+The Queen nodded agreement. "It's terrible," she said. "I get those
+same flashes of telepathic static, too."
+
+"You do?" Malone said, leaning forward.
+
+"Just the same," the Queen said. "Whatever is operating in the United
+States is operating over here, too."
+
+Malone sat down in a seat on the aisle. "Everything," he announced,
+"is now perfectly lovely. The United States is being confused and
+mixed up by somebody, and the Somebody looked like a Russian spy. But
+now Russia is being confused, too."
+
+"Do you think there are some American spies working here?" the Queen
+said.
+
+"If they're using psionics," Malone said, "as they obviously are--and
+I don't know about them, Burris doesn't know about them, O'Connor
+doesn't know about them and nobody else I can find knows about them--
+then they don't exist. That's flat."
+
+"How about outer space?" the Queen said. "I mean, spies from outer
+space trying to take over the Earth."
+
+"It's a nice idea," Malone said sourly. "I wish they'd hurry up and do
+it."
+
+"Then you don't think--"
+
+"I don't know what to think," Malone said. "There's some perfectly
+simple explanation for all this. And somewhere, in all the running
+around and looking here and there I've been doing, I've got all the
+facts I need to come up with that answer."
+
+"Oh, my," the Queen said. "That's wonderful."
+
+"Sure it is," Malone said. "There's only one trouble, as a matter of
+fact. I don't know what the explanation is, and I don't know which
+facts are important and which ones aren't."
+
+There was a short silence.
+
+"I wish Tom Boyd were here," Malone said wistfully.
+
+"Really?" the Queen said. "Why?"
+
+"Because," Malone said, "I feel like hearing some really professional
+cursing."
+
+* * * * *
+
+Three-quarters of an hour passed, each and every minute draped in some
+black and gloomy material. Malone sat in his seat, his head supported
+by both hands, and stared at the back of the seat ahead of him. No
+great messages were written on it. The Queen, respecting his need for
+silent contemplation, sat and watched Lou and said nothing at all.
+
+It was always possible, of course, Malone thought, that he would fall
+asleep and dream of an answer. That kind of thing kept happening to
+detectives in books. Or else a strange man in a black trenchcoat would
+sidle up to him and hand him a slip of paper. The words: "Five
+o'clock, watch out, the red snake, doom," would be written on the
+paper and these words would provide him with just the clues he needed
+to solve the whole case. Or else he would go and beat somebody up, and
+the exercise would stimulate his brain and he would suddenly arrive at
+the answer in a blinding flash.
+
+Wondering vaguely if a blinding flash were anything like a dungeon,
+because people kept being in them and never seemed to come out, Malone
+sighed. Detectives in books were great, wonderful people who never had
+any doubts or worries. Particularly if they were with the FBI. Only
+Kenneth J. Malone was different.
+
+Maybe someday, he thought, he would be a real detective, instead of
+just having a few special gifts that he hadn't really worked for,
+anyhow. Maybe someday, in the distant future, he would be the equal of
+Nick Carter.
+
+Right now, though, he had a case to solve. Nick Carter wasn't around
+to help.
+
+And Kenneth J. Malone, FBI, was getting absolutely nowhere.
+
+Finally, his reverie was broken by the sounds of argument outside the
+plane door. There were voices speaking both English and Russian, very
+loudly. Malone went to the door and opened it. A short, round,
+grey-haired man who looked just a little like an over-tired bear who
+had forgotten to sleep all winter almost fell into his arms. The man
+was wearing a grey overcoat that went nicely with his hair, and
+carrying a small black bag.
+
+Malone said: "Oog," replaced the man on his own feet and looked past
+him at the group on the landing ramp outside. The navigator was there,
+arguing earnestly with two men in the uniform of the MVD.
+
+"Damn it," the navigator said, "you can't come in here. Nobody comes
+in but the doctor. This is United States territory."
+
+The MVD men said something in Russian.
+
+"No," the navigator said. "Definitely no."
+
+One of the MVD men spat something that sounded like an insult.
+
+The navigator shrugged. "I don't understand Russian," he told them.
+"All I know is one word. No. _Nyet_ Definitely, absolutely irrevocably
+_nyet_."
+
+_"Sikin sin Amerikanyets!"_
+
+The MVD men turned, as if they'd been a sister act, and went down the
+steps. The navigator followed them, wiping his forehead and breathing
+deeply. Malone shut the door.
+
+"Well, well, well," the doctor said, in a burbling sort of voice.
+"Somehow, we thought it might be you. Anyhow, the ambassador did."
+
+"Really?" Malone said, trying to sound surprised.
+
+"Oh, yes," the doctor assured him. "You have raised something of a
+stench in and around good old Moscow, you know."
+
+"I'm innocent," Malone said.
+
+The doctor nodded. "Undoubtedly," he said judiciously. "Who isn't? And
+where, by the way, is the girl?"
+
+"Over there." Malone pointed. News apparently traveled with great
+speed in Moscow, MVD and censorship notwithstanding. At any rate, he
+thought, it traveled with great speed to the ears of the Embassy
+staff.
+
+The doctor lifted Lou's limp wrist to time her pulse, his lips pursed
+and his eyes focused on a far wall.
+
+"What have you heard?" Malone said.
+
+"The MVD boys are extremely worried," the doctor said. "Extremely." He
+didn't let go of the wrist, a marvel of which Malone had never grown
+tired. Doctors always seemed to be able, somehow, to examine a patient
+and carry on a conversation about totally different things, without
+even showing the strain. This one was no exception. Malone watched in
+awe.
+
+"According to the reports we got from them," the doctor said, "you
+wandered off from _Trotkin's_ without your escort."
+
+"Well," Malone said at random, "I didn't think to leave them a
+farewell note. I hope they don't think I disliked their company."
+
+"Officially," the doctor said, lifting Lou's left eyelid and gazing
+thoughtfully into the blue iris thus exposed, "they're afraid you're
+lost, and they were apologetic as all hell about it to the
+ambassador." The iris appeared to lose its fascination; the doctor
+dropped the eyelid and fished in his black bag, which he had put on
+the seat next to Lou.
+
+"And unofficially?" Malone asked.
+
+"Unofficially," the doctor said, "we've got news of a riot at
+_Trotkin's_ tonight, in which you seem to have been involved. Mr.
+Malone, you must be quite a barroom brawler when you're at home."
+
+"Frankly," Malone said, "I'm a little out of practice. And I hope I
+never have the chance to get back _into_ practice."
+
+The doctor nodded, removing a stethoscope from the bag and applying it
+to Lou's chest. He waited a second, frowned and then took the plugs
+out of his ears. "I know just what you mean," he said. "You might be
+interested to know the first unofficial score of that little match."
+
+"Score?" Malone said.
+
+The doctor nodded again. "Three concussions," he said, "one possible
+skull fracture, a broken arm, two bitten hands, and a large and varied
+assortment of dental difficulties and plain hysteria. No dead,
+however. I really don't understand why not."
+
+"Well," Malone said, "nobody wanted to create an international
+incident."
+
+"Hmf," the doctor said. "I see. Or I think I do, which is as far as I
+care to go in the matter. The Russians suspect, by the way, that
+you've managed to get aboard the plane. They do know, of course, about
+the girl, and when the pilot called for me they put two and two
+together. In spite of his story about being sick. What they can't
+figure out is how you managed to _get_ aboard the plane."
+
+"Neither can I," Malone said at random. The doctor gave him a single
+bright stare.
+
+"Well," he said at last, "I suppose you know your own business best.
+By the way, my examination accords pretty well with our unofficial
+information about the girl--that she was given some sort of drug in a
+drink. Is that what happened?"
+
+Malone nodded. "As far as we know," he said. "She did get rid of a lot
+of it within a few minutes, though."
+
+"Good," the doctor said. "Very sensible."
+
+"Sense had nothing to do with it," Malone said.
+
+"In any case," the doctor went on doggedly, "there can't be too much
+left in her system. Her pulse is good, she's breathing easily and
+there don't seem to be any complications, so I should doubt strongly
+that there's been much damage done. Besides all which, of course, the
+Russians would hardly have wanted to hurt her; what they gave her
+would probably have done little more harm even if she'd ingested it
+all, and kept it down."
+
+"Good," Malone said sincerely.
+
+"I'll give you some pills," the doctor said, fishing in his bag again,
+"and you can give them to her when she wakes up."
+
+"Is that all?" Malone said, vaguely disappointed.
+
+The doctor eyed him keenly. "Well," he said, "I could give her an
+injection, but I'd be a little afraid to. If it had a synergistic
+action with the drug, she might be worse off than before."
+
+"Oh," Malone said. "By all means. Just the pills."
+
+"I'm glad you agree," the doctor said. "Oh, and about leaving--"
+
+"Yes?" Malone said. "We want to get out of here in a hurry, if we
+can."
+
+"I think you can," the doctor said. "The ambassador mentioned that
+he'd try to arrange it with the Russians. I don't know what he'll tell
+them--but then, that's why he's an ambassador, and I'm a doctor." He
+straightened up and handed Malone an envelope containing three green
+capsules. "Give her these if she wakes up with a headache," he said.
+"If she feels all right, just forget all about them."
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "And thanks, Doctor. Tell the ambassador we'd
+appreciate it if he got us out of here as soon as possible."
+
+"Certainly," the doctor said. "After all, I might as well take on the
+job of a diplomatic courier."
+
+Malone nodded. "Well," he said, "goodbye, Mr. Courier."
+
+The doctor went to the door, opened it and turned.
+
+"Absolutely," he said, "Mr. Ives."
+
+
+9
+
+Lou didn't wake up until the plane was dropping toward the Washington
+airfield, and when she did awaken it was as if she had merely come out
+of an especially deep sleep. Malone was standing over her, which was
+far from a coincidence; he had been waiting and watching virtually
+every minute since takeoff.
+
+During his brief periods of rest, Her Majesty had taken over, and she
+was now peacefully asleep at the back of the plane, looking a little
+more careworn, but just as regal as ever. She looked to Malone as if
+she had weathered a small revolution against her rule, but had managed
+to persuade the populace (by passing out cookies to the children,
+probably) that all was, in the last analysis, for the best in this
+best of all possible worlds. She looked, he thought, absolutely
+wonderful.
+
+So did Lou. She blinked her eyes open and moved one hand at her side,
+and then she came fully awake. "Well," she said. "And a bright hello
+to you, Sleuth. If it's not being too banal, where am I?"
+
+"It is," Malone said, "but you're in an airplane, coming into
+Washington. We ought to be there in a few minutes."
+
+Lou shook her head slowly from side to side. "I have never heard any
+news that sounded better in my entire life," she said. "How long ago
+did we leave Moscow?"
+
+"Our trip to Beautiful Moskva," Malone said, "ended right after they
+tried to get you to the hospital, by giving you a drugged drink. Do
+you remember that?"
+
+"I remember it, all right," she said. "I'm never going to forget that
+moment."
+
+"How do you feel?" Malone said.
+
+"Fine," Lou said. "And how are _you_?"
+
+"Me?" Malone said. "I'm all right. I've _been_ all right. Don't worry
+about _me_."
+
+"Well, one never knows," Lou said. "With your cold and all."
+
+"I think that's better," Malone said hastily. "But you're sure you
+feel fine?"
+
+Lou nodded. "A little tired, maybe, but that's all." She paused. "I
+remember Miss Thompson taking me to the ladies' room. I got pretty
+sick. But from there on, I'm not sure what happened."
+
+"I came in," Malone said, "and got you out."
+
+"How brave!" Lou said.
+
+"Not very," Malone said casually. "After all, what could happen to me
+in a ladies' room?"
+
+"You'd be surprised," Lou murmured. "And you came and got me, and took
+me to the plane and all. And I--" She hesitated, and for a second she
+looked very small and wistful. "Do you--do you think they'll do
+anything to Dad?" she said.
+
+"I don't see why," Malone said confidently. "After all, the only thing
+he did wrong was to get caught, and that's an occupational risk if
+you're in the spy business. Lots of people get caught. Happens all the
+time. Don't worry about it."
+
+"I--all right," she said. "I won't, then."
+
+"Good," Malone said. He fished in his pocket. "I've got some pills
+here," he said, "in case you have a headache. The doctor said I could
+give them to you if you had a headache, but otherwise I should just
+forget about them."
+
+Lou smiled. "I think you'd better just forget about them," she said.
+
+Malone's hand came out of his pocket empty. "I just want to make sure
+you're okay," he said. "Probably very silly. Of course you're okay."
+
+"Of course I am," she said. "But I don't think you're silly." She
+smiled again, a very warm smile. Malone took a deep breath and
+discovered that he hadn't been breathing at all regularly for several
+minutes. Lou's smile increased a trifle in intensity and he stopped
+breathing all over again. "All things considered," she said, "I think
+you're pretty wonderful, Ken."
+
+Malone's voice sounded to him as if it were coming from a great
+distance. He wondered if the strange feeling in his stomach were the
+pangs of love, or the descent of the plane. Then he realized that he
+didn't care. "Well, well," he said airily. "Well, well, well. Frankly,
+Lou, I'm inclined to agree with you. Though I'm not sure about the
+qualification."
+
+"Fine thing," she said. "Tell a man he's wonderful and he just nods
+his head as if he knew it all along."
+
+Malone swallowed hard. "Maybe I did," he said. "And how did you come
+to this startling conclusion?"
+
+It was Lou who broke the light mood of their speech first. "Look,
+Ken," she said seriously, "I'm the daughter of an enemy spy. You know
+that. You're an FBI agent."
+
+"So what?" he said.
+
+"So," she said, "you don't treat me like the daughter of a spy. You
+treat me just like anybody else."
+
+"I do not," Malone said instantly.
+
+"All right," she said, and shrugged. "But I'm sure none of this is in
+the FBI manual for daughters of convicted spies."
+
+"Now, you look," Malone said. "Just what do you think this is? The
+McCarthy era? Any way I treat you, it has nothing to do with your
+father. He's a spy, and we caught him and we sent him back to Moscow.
+That's our job. But all this about the sins of the fathers being
+visited on the heads of the children, even unto the seventh
+generation--this is just plain silly. You're you; you're not your
+father. You haven't done anything--why should I treat you as if you
+have?"
+
+"How do you know I'm not a spy, too?" she said.
+
+"Because," Malone said flatly, "I know."
+
+"Really?" she said softly. "Do you really?"
+
+Malone opened his mouth, shut it and then started again. "Strictly
+speaking," he said carefully, "I don't know. But we're in the United
+States now, where a person is considered innocent until proven
+guilty."
+
+"And that," Lou said, "is all you're going on, I suppose."
+
+"Not all," Malone said.
+
+"I didn't think so," Lou said, still smiling.
+
+"Don't ask me how," Malone said, "but we're pretty sure you knew
+nothing about your father's activities. Forget it."
+
+Lou looked suddenly slightly disappointed. Malone wondered why. Of
+course, there was one more reason, and maybe she'd thought of that.
+"It does make it easier," he said, "that you happen to be a beautiful
+girl."
+
+She smiled again, and started to say something, but she never got the
+chance. The landing gear of the aircraft bumped gently against the
+runway, and the ship rolled slowly in to a stop.
+
+A second passed. From the back of the plane a voice said: "Are we back
+in Washington, S--Mr. Malone?"
+
+"That's right, Miss Thompson," Malone told the Queen.
+
+"And Miss Garbitsch--"
+
+"I'm fine, Miss Thompson," Luba said. She swung her feet around to the
+deck.
+
+"Wait a minute," Malone said. "Do you think you ought to get up?"
+
+Lou's smile seemed to reduce him to small, very hot ashes. "Ken," she
+said, "the doctor said I was fine, so what are you worrying about? I
+can get up. I'll be all right."
+
+"Oh, okay," he said, and stepped back. Her Majesty had already left
+the plane. Lou got up, and wavered just a little. Malone held out his
+arms, and found her in them before he had thought about it.
+
+A long time seemed to pass. Malone wasn't sure whether he was standing
+still because he wanted to, or because he was absolutely incapable of
+motion. Lou didn't seem in any hurry to break away, either.
+
+Then she put her arms around his neck.
+
+"Sleuth," she said, "don't you ever follow up a hint?"
+
+"Hint?" Malone said.
+
+"Damn it," Lou said in a soft, sweet voice, "kiss me, Ken."
+
+Malone had no answer to that--at least, no verbal answer.
+
+One didn't seem to be needed.
+
+When he finally came up for air, he said: "Lou..."
+
+"Yes, Ken?"
+
+"Lou, where are you going from here?"
+
+Lou stepped back a pace. "What?" she said.
+
+"I mean, back to New York?" Malone said. "Or someplace else? I mean--
+well, what are you going to do?"
+
+"Oh," Lou said. "Oh, yes. I'll be going back to New York. After all,
+Ken, I do have a living to make, such as it is, and Sir Lewis is
+expecting me."
+
+"I don't know," Malone said, "but it still sounds funny. A girl like
+you working for--well, for the Psychical Research people. Ghosts and
+ectoplasm and all that."
+
+Lou stepped back another pace. "Now, wait a minute," she said. "You
+seemed to need their information, all right."
+
+"But that was--oh, well," Malone said. "Never mind. Maybe I'm silly.
+It really doesn't matter."
+
+"I guess it doesn't, now," she said. "Except that it does mean I've
+got to leave for New York almost at once."
+
+"Can you cut out that 'almost'?" Malone said. "Because I've got to be
+there myself, and right away. If you hurry, we can get the same
+plane."
+
+"That would be great," she said.
+
+"Okay, then," Malone said. "Don't you worry about a thing, I'll take
+care of reservations and everything."
+
+"My, my," Lou said. "What it must be like to have all that pull and
+influence."
+
+"What?" Malone said.
+
+Lou grinned. "Nothing," she said. "Nothing."
+
+"Then it's all settled. I'll take care of the reservations, and we'll
+go in together," Malone said.
+
+"Fair enough," Lou said, "my fine feathered Fed."
+
+* * * * *
+
+Actually, it took Malone nearly three hours to get everything set in
+Washington for his New York departure. He had to make a verbal report
+to Andrew J. Burris first, and that consumed quite a lot of time,
+since Burris was alternately shocked, horrified, gleeful and confused
+about the whole trip, and spent most of his time interrupting Malone
+and crying out for God's vengeance, mercy, justice or understanding.
+
+Then Malone had to dictate a longer report for the written record.
+This didn't take quite as long, since there were no interruptions, but
+by the time it was over he felt as if he were going out to become a
+Carthusian monk. He felt, as he rubbed his raw throat, that it
+wouldn't be a bad idea at all to take a nice vow of silence for
+awhile. He could write people little notes, and they would all treat
+him kindly and gently. He would be pointed out to strangers, and
+people would try to do him favors.
+
+Unfortunately, he couldn't take the vow at once. During his absence,
+his desk log showed, several calls had come in, all of which had to be
+taken care of at once. Some of them dealt with evidence or statements
+from old cases, some were just nuisances. The most urgent was from Dr.
+O'Connor at Yucca Flats.
+
+"If you're not too busy," O'Connor said in his icily polite tone, "I
+would like to have Miss Thompson back as soon as possible." He sounded
+as if Malone had borrowed his scalpel.
+
+"I'll see what I can do," Malone said carefully.
+
+"There is a new series of tests," O'Connor said, "on which I am now at
+work; the assistance of Miss Thompson would be invaluable to me at
+this time."
+
+After he'd hung up, Malone called Her Majesty at her Washington hotel.
+She was very glad of the chance to return to Yucca Flats, she said.
+There, Malone knew, she would be able to return to her accustomed
+dignity as Queen of the Greater English Commonwealth, a district
+which, in her mind, seemed to include the greater part of the Western
+world. On her present mission, she was plain Miss Thompson and, though
+the idea of going about incognito had its charms, it became a little
+dull after awhile. The adventuring was fine, although a little rougher
+than she'd thought it would be; the sight of the Queen's Own FBI in
+action was still a powerful attraction for Her Majesty. But the peace
+and quiet and dignity of Her Own Royal Palace won out without too much
+trouble.
+
+"Of course," Malone said, "you'll be on call in case I need you."
+
+"I am always in touch with my subjects," Her Majesty said with
+dignity, "and most especially with you, Sir Kenneth. I shall so
+remain."
+
+And then there was a little paperwork to take care of. By the time
+Malone had finished, he would have been glad to teleport to New York
+on his own. But on reflection he decided that he would much rather
+travel with Lou, and hurried down to the airport.
+
+By the time the plane landed at La Guardia, and they'd taken
+a 'copter to the East Side Terminal and a taxi to the big
+blue-aluminum-and-glass Ravell Building, Malone had reached a new
+decision. It would be nothing short of wonderful, he felt, if he
+could spend the rest of his life traveling around with Luba Garbitsch.
+
+Of course, that name was something of a handicap. It was hardly a
+romantic one. He wondered, very briefly, whether or not "Luba Malone"
+were an improvement. But he buried the thought before it got any
+further. Enough, he told himself firmly, was enough.
+
+"It's been a nice trip," Lou said. She, too, sounded subdued, as if
+she were thinking about something terribly serious.
+
+"Great," Malone said happily. "A wonderful trip."
+
+"I enjoyed being with you," Lou said.
+
+"Me, too," Malone said. He paid off the taxi-driver and they got out
+at the corner. Malone went to the newsstand there and picked up a copy
+of the _Post_.
+
+"That," Lou said over his shoulder, "is one whole hell of a headline."
+
+It filled the entire page, four lines of thick black capitals:
+
+     JUDGE
+     DROPS
+     UNION
+     SUIT!
+
+"Well, well," Malone said. "Let's see what this is all about." He
+flipped to page three. Lou craned her neck over his shoulder and they
+read the start of the story together.
+
+     DISTRICT COURT RULES UNION HAS NO CASE
+
+     New York [AP], August 23. Judge James Lefkowitz
+     of the New York Supreme Court ruled today that
+     the International Truckers' Brotherhood had no
+     grounds for their suit against the United Transport
+     Corp. and its officers. The action, a bitterly
+     fought contest, involved a complaint by the
+     Brotherhood that UTC had violated their contract
+     with the Brotherhood by hiring "unqualified drivers"
+     to work for the corporation.
+
+     In a statement made immediately after the ruling,
+     Judge Lefkowitz said: "It is obvious that a man with
+     a state-certified chauffeur's license is not an
+     'unqualified driver.'"
+
+     Effects of this ruling are thought to be
+     far-reaching. Comment from the international
+     Truckers' Brotherhood...
+
+There was more to it, a lot more, but Malone didn't feel like reading
+it. It sounded just as confused as he expected news to sound these
+days, but it also sounded a little dull. He could feel Lou's breathing
+against his ear as he read, and he lost interest in the paper almost
+at once.
+
+"My, my," she said. "And I expected a real expose of a story, after
+that headline."
+
+"This is an expose," Malone said. "But I'm not sure what of."
+
+"It sounds pretty confused," Lou said.
+
+"Everything seems to, these days," Malone said. "Including any story
+of what's been happening during the last little while."
+
+"Agreed," Lou said. "Without argument."
+
+"Listen," Malone said suddenly. "Would it help if I went up and told
+Sir Lewis that there's no mark against your record?"
+
+"Mark?" Lou said. "Against my record?"
+
+"Well," Malone said, "I mean--well, he isn't the sort of man who'd
+fire somebody, because of--because of something like this?"
+
+"You mean because I know an FBI man?" Lou said.
+
+"I--"
+
+"Never mind," she said. "I know what you mean. And he won't. He'll
+understand." She came round to face him, and patted his cheek.
+"Thanks," she said. "Thanks a lot, anyway."
+
+"If there's anything I can do--"
+
+"There won't be," Lou said. "You'll call me, though, about tonight?"
+
+"Sure I will," Malone said. He hoped that the tentative date he'd made
+with her for that evening wouldn't be broken up because of a sudden
+onslaught of work. "I'll let you know before five, for sure."
+
+"Fine," Lou said. "I'll wait to hear from you."
+
+She turned to walk away.
+
+"Hey," Malone said. "Wait a minute."
+
+"What?" she said, turning again.
+
+Malone looked judicious. "I think," he said weightily, "that,
+considering all the fun we've had, and all the adventuring and
+everything else, the least you could do would be to kiss me goodbye."
+
+"On Fifth Avenue?"
+
+"No," Malone said. He tapped his lips. "Here."
+
+She laughed, bent closer and pecked him on the cheek. Then, before he
+could say anything else, she was gone.
+
+
+10
+
+On the way to FBI Headquarters on 69th Street, he read the _Post_ a
+little more carefully. The judge and his union suit weren't the only
+things that were fouled up, he saw. Things were getting pretty bad all
+over.
+
+One story dealt with the recent factional fights inside the American
+Association for the Advancement of Medicine. A new group, the United
+States Medical-Professional Society, appeared to be forming as a
+competitor to the AAAM, and Malone wasn't quite so sure, when he
+thought about it, that this news was as bad as it appeared on the
+surface. Fights between doctors, of course, were reasonably rare, at
+least on the high hysterical level the story appeared to pinpoint. But
+the AAAM had held a monopoly in the medical field for a long time;
+maybe it was about time some competition showed itself. From what he
+could find out in the story, the USMPS seemed like a group of fairly
+sensible people.
+
+But that was one of the few rays of light Malone could discern amid
+the encircling bloom of the news. The gang wars had reached a new
+high; the _Post_ was now publishing what it called a Daily Scoreboard,
+which consisted in this particular paper of six deaths, two
+disappearances and ten hospitalizations. The six deaths were evenly
+scattered throughout the country: two in New York, one each in Chicago
+and Detroit, and two more in San Francisco. The disappearances were in
+Los Angeles and in Miami, and the hospitalizations were pretty much
+all over.
+
+The unions had been having trouble, too. Traditional forms of
+controversy appeared to have gone out the window, in favor of
+startling disclosures, beatings, wild cries of foul and great masses
+of puzzling evidence. How, for instance, Malone wondered, had the
+president of Local 7574 of the Fishermen's Fraternal Brotherhood
+managed to mislay a pile of secret records, showing exactly how the
+membership was being bilked of dues, on a Boston subway train? But,
+somehow, he had, and the records were now causing shakeups, denials
+and trouble among the fishermen.
+
+Of course, the news was not all bad. There were always the comic
+strips. Pogo was busily staving off an approaching wedding between
+Albert Alligator and a new character named Tranquil Portly, who
+appeared to be a brown bear. He was running into some resistance,
+though, from a wolflike character who planned to abscond with Albert's
+cigars while Albert was honeymooning. This character, Don Coyote by
+name, looked like a trouble-maker, and Malone vowed to keep a careful
+eye on him.
+
+And then there were other headlines:
+
+     FUSION POWER SOON COMMERCIALLY
+     AVAILABLE SAYS AEC HEAD
+     Sees Drastic Cut in Power Rates
+
+     UN POLICE CONTINGENT OKAYED:
+     MILLION MEN TO FORM 1ST GROUP
+     Member Countries Pledge $20
+     Billion in Support Moneys
+
+     OFFICIAL STATES: "WE'RE AHEAD AFTER 17 YEARS!"
+     US Space Program Tops Russian Achievements
+
+     ARMED FORCES TO TOUGHEN TRAINING PROGRAM IN 1974
+     Gen. Foote: "Our aim is to train fighting men,
+     not to run a country club."
+
+     GOVERNMENT TO SAVE $1 BILLION ANNUALLY?
+     Senator Hits Duplication of Effort in Government,
+     Vows Immediate Reform
+
+Malone read that one a little more carefully, because it looked, at
+first sight, like one of the bad-news items. There had been
+government-spending reforms before, almost all of which had resulted
+in confusion, panic, loss of essential services--and twice as many men
+on the payroll, since the government now had to hire useless
+efficiency experts, accountants and other such supernumerary workers.
+
+But this time, the reform looked as if it might do some good. Of
+course, he told himself sadly, it was still too early to tell.
+
+The senator involved was Deeks, of Massachusetts, who was also in the
+news because of a peculiar battle he had had with Senator Furbisher of
+Vermont. Congress, Malone noted, was still acting up. Furbisher
+claimed that the moneys appropriated for a new Vermont dam were really
+being used for the dam. But Deeks had somehow come into possession of
+several letters written by a cousin of Furbisher's, detailing some of
+the graft that was going on in the senator's home state. Furbisher was
+busily denying everything, but his cousin was just as busy confessing
+all to anybody who would listen. It was building up into an extremely
+interesting fracas, and, Malone thought, it would have been even
+funnier than Pogo except that it was happening in the Congress of the
+United States.
+
+He heaved a sigh, folded up the paper and entered the building that
+housed the New York contingent of the FBI.
+
+Boyd was waiting in his office when he arrived.
+
+"Well, there, Kenneth," he said. "And how are all our little Slavic
+brothers?"
+
+"Unreasonable," Malone said, "and highly unpleasant."
+
+"You refer, no doubt," Boyd said, "to the _Meeneestyerstvoh
+Vnootrenikh Dyehl_?"
+
+_"Gesundheit,"_ Malone said kindly.
+
+"The MVD," Boyd said. "I've been studying for days to pull it on you
+when you got back."
+
+Malone nodded. "Very well, then," he said in a stately, orotund tone.
+"Say it again."
+
+"Damn it," Boyd said, "I _can't_ say it again."
+
+"Cheer up," Malone said. "Maybe some day you'll learn. Meantime,
+Thomas, did you get the stuff we talked about?"
+
+Boyd nodded. "I think I got enough of it," he said. "Anyhow, there is
+a definite trend developing. Come on into the private office, and I'll
+show you."
+
+There, on Boyd's massive desk, were several neat piles of paper.
+
+"It looks like enough," Malone said. "As a matter of fact, it looks
+like too much. Haven't we been through all this before?"
+
+"Not like this, we haven't," Boyd said. "Information from all over,
+out of the everywhere, into the here." He picked up a stack of papers
+and handed them to Malone.
+
+"What's this?" Malone said.
+
+"That," Boyd said, "is a report on the Pacific Merchant Sailors'
+Brotherhood."
+
+"Goody," Malone said doubtfully.
+
+Boyd came over, pulling at his beard thoughtfully, and took the top
+few sheets out of Malone's hands. "The report," he said, looking down
+at the sheets, "includes the checks we made on the office of the
+president of the Brotherhood, as well as the Los Angeles local and the
+San Francisco local."
+
+"Only two?" Malone said. "That seems as if you've been lying down on
+the job."
+
+"They're the top two in membership," Boyd said. "But listen to this:
+the president and three of his underlings resigned day before
+yesterday, and not quite in time. The law--by which I mean us, and a
+good many other people--is hot on their tails. It seems somebody
+accidentally mixed up a couple of envelopes."
+
+"Sounds like a case for the Post Office," Malone said brightly.
+
+"Not these envelopes," Boyd said. "There was a letter that was
+supposed to go to the head of the San Francisco local, dealing with a
+second set of books--not the ones used for tax purposes, but the real
+McCoy. The letter didn't get to the San Francisco man. Instead, it
+went to the attorney general of the state of California."
+
+"Lovely," Malone said. "Meanwhile, what was San Francisco doing?"
+
+Boyd smiled. "San Francisco was getting confused," he said. "Like
+everybody else. The San Francisco man got a copy of an affidavit
+dealing with merchant-ship tonnage. That was supposed to go to the
+attorney general."
+
+"Good work," Malone said. "So when the Frisco boys woke up to what was
+happening--"
+
+"They called the head man, and he put two and two together, resigned
+and went into hiding. Right now, he's probably living an undercover
+life as a shoe salesman in Paris, Kentucky."
+
+"And, after all," Malone added, "why not? It's a peaceful life."
+
+"The attorney general, of course, impounded the second set of books,"
+Boyd went on. "A grand jury is hearing charges now."
+
+"You know," Malone said reflectively, "I almost feel sorry for the
+man. Almost, but not quite."
+
+"I see what you mean," Boyd said. "It is a hell of a thing to happen."
+
+"On the other hand--" Malone leafed through the papers in a hurry,
+then put them back on Boyd's desk with a sigh of relief. "I've got the
+main details now," he said. "I can go through the thing more
+thoroughly later. Anything else?"
+
+"Oh, lots," Boyd said. "And all in the same pattern. The FPM, for
+instance, literally dropped one in our laps."
+
+"Literally?" Malone said. "What was the Federation of Professional
+Musicians doing in your lap?"
+
+"Not mine," Boyd said hastily. "Not mine. But it seems that some
+secretary put a bunch of file folders on the windowsill of their
+second-floor offices, and they fell off. At the same time, an agent
+was passing underneath, slipped on a banana peel and sat down on the
+sidewalk. Bingo, folders in lap."
+
+"Wonderful," Malone said. "The hand of God."
+
+"The hand of something, for sure," Boyd said. "Those folders contain
+all the ammunition we've ever needed to get after the FPM. Kickbacks,
+illegal arrangements with nightclubs, the whole works. We're putting
+it together now, but it looks like a long, long term ahead for our
+friends from the FPM."
+
+And Boyd went to his desk, picked up a particularly large stack of
+papers. "This," he said, "is really hot stuff."
+
+"What do you call the others?" Malone said. "Crime on ice?"
+
+"The new show at the Winter Garden," Boyd said blithely. "Don't miss
+it if you can."
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "So what's so hot?"
+
+Boyd smiled. "The police departments of seven major cities," he said.
+"They're all under attack either by the local prosecuting attorney or
+the state's attorney general. It seems there's a little graft and
+corruption going on."
+
+"This," Malone said, "is not news."
+
+"It is to the people concerned," Boyd said. "Four police chiefs have
+resigned, along with great handfuls of inspectors, captains and
+lieutenants. It's making a lovely wingding all over the country, Ken."
+
+"I'll bet," Malone said.
+
+"And I checked back on every one," Boyd went on. "Your hunch was
+absolutely right, Ken. The prosecuting attorneys and the attorneys
+general are all new men--all the ones involved in this stuff. Each one
+replaced a previous incumbent in a recent election. In two cases, the
+governor was new, too--elected last year."
+
+"That figures," Malone said. "What about the rest?"
+
+Boyd's grandiose wave of a hand took in all the papers on the desk.
+"It's all the same," he said. "They all follow a pattern, Ken, _the_
+pattern. The one you were looking for."
+
+Malone blinked. "I'll be damned," he said. "I'll be doubly damned."
+
+"And how about the Russians?" Boyd said.
+
+"You mean the _Meeneestyerstvoh Vnootrenikh Dyehl_?" Malone said.
+
+"Now," Boyd said, "I'll be damned. And after I practiced for days."
+
+"Ah," Malone said. "But I was _there_. The Russians are about as mixed
+up as a group of Transylvanian villagers with two vampires to track
+down and not enough flambeaux for all. Here, for instance, is just one
+example: the conflicting sets of orders that were given about me and
+Her Majesty and L--Miss Garbitsch."
+
+Briefly, he outlined what had happened.
+
+"Sounds like fun," Boyd said.
+
+"They were so busy arguing with each other," Malone finished, "that I
+have a feeling we hardly needed the teleportation to escape. It would
+just have taken longer, that's all." He paused. "By the way, Tom,
+about the stakeout--"
+
+"Luba Garbitsch is being protected as if she were Fort Knox," Boyd
+said. "If any Soviet agent tries to approach her with a threat of any
+kind, we'll have him nabbed before he can say Ivan Robinovitch."
+
+"Or," Malone suggested, "_Meeneestyerstvoh_--"
+
+"If we waited for that one," Boyd said, "we might have to wait all
+day." He paused. "But who's doing it?" he went on. "That's still the
+question. Martians? Venerians? Or is that last one Venusians?"
+
+"Aphrodisiacs," Malone suggested diplomatically.
+
+"Thank you, no," Boyd said politely. "I never indulge while on duty."
+
+"Thomas," Malone said, "you are a Rover Boy First-Class."
+
+"Good," Boyd said. "But, meanwhile, who is doing all this? Would you
+prefer Evil Beings from the Planet Ploor?"
+
+"I would not," Malone said firmly.
+
+"But I have a strange feeling," Boyd said, "that, in spite of all the
+evidence to the contrary, you do not hold with the Interplanetary
+Alien Theory."
+
+"Frankly," Malone said, "I'm not sure of anything. Not really. But I
+do want to know why, if it's interplanetary aliens doing this stuff,
+they're picking such a strange way of going about it."
+
+"Strange?" Boyd said. "What's strange about it? You wouldn't expect
+Things from Ploor to come right out and _tell_ us what they want,
+would you? It's against custom. It may even be against the law."
+
+"Well, maybe," Malone said. "But it is pretty strange. The difference
+between what's happening in Russia and what's happening here--"
+
+"What difference?" Boyd said. "Everybody's confused. Here, and over
+there. It all looks the same to me."
+
+"Well, it isn't," Malone said. "Take a look at the paper, for
+instance." He tossed the _Post_ at Boyd, who caught it with a
+spasmodic clutching motion and reassembled it slowly.
+
+"Why throw things?" Boyd said. "You sore or something?"
+
+"I guess I am," Malone said. "But not at you. It's--somebody or
+something. Person or persons unknown."
+
+"Or Ploorians," Boyd said.
+
+"Whatever," Malone said. "But take a look at the paper and see if you
+see what I see." He paused. "Does that mean anything?" he said.
+
+"Probably," Boyd said. "We'll figure it out later." He leafed through
+the newspaper slowly, pulling thoughtfully at his beard from time to
+time. Malone watched him in breathless silence.
+
+"See it?" he said at last.
+
+Boyd looked up and, very slowly, nodded. "You're right, Ken," he said
+in a quiet voice. "You're absolutely right. It's as plain as the nose
+on your face."
+
+"And that," Malone said, "sounds like an insult. It's much plainer
+than that. Suppose you tell me."
+
+Boyd considered. "Over here," he said at last, "there are a lot of
+confused jerks and idiots. Right?"
+
+"Correct," Malone said.
+
+"And in Russia," Boyd went on, "there's a lot of confusion. Right?"
+
+"Sure," Boyd said. "It's perfectly clear. I wonder why I didn't see it
+before."
+
+"That's it!" Malone cried. "That's the difference!"
+
+"Sure," Boyd said. "It's perfectly clear. I wonder why I didn't see it
+before."
+
+"Because you weren't looking for it," Malone said. "Because nobody
+was. But there's one more check I want to make. There's one area I'm
+not sure of, simply because I don't have enough to go on."
+
+"What area is that?" Boyd said. "It seems to me we did a pretty good
+job--"
+
+"The Mafia," Malone said. "We know they're having trouble, but--"
+
+"But we don't know what kind of trouble," Boyd finished. "Right you
+are."
+
+Malone nodded. "I want to talk to Manelli," he said. "Can we set it
+up?"
+
+"I don't see why not," Boyd said. "The A-in-C can give us the latest
+on him. You want me with you?"
+
+"No," Malone said after some thought. "No. You go and see Mike Sand,
+heading up the International Truckers' Union. We know he's tied up
+with the Syndicate, and maybe you can get some information from him.
+You know what to dig for?"
+
+"I do now," Boyd said. He reached for the intercom phone.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Cesare Antonio Manelli was a second-generation Prohibition mobster,
+whose history can most easily be described by reference to the various
+affairs of State which coincided with his development. Thus:
+
+When Cesare was a small toddler of uncertain gait and chubby visage,
+the Twenty-First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States
+canceled out not only the Eighteenth Amendment, but the thriving
+enterprises conducted by Manelli, Sr., and many of his friends.
+
+When Cesare was a young schoolboy, poring over the multiplication
+tables, his father and his father's friends were busy dividing. They
+were dividing, to put it more fully, husbands from families as a means
+of requesting ransom, and money from banks as a means of getting the
+same cash without use of the middleman, or victim. This was the period
+of the Great Readjustment, and the frenzied search among gangland's
+higher echelons for a substitute for bootlegging.
+
+And when Cesare was an innocent high-schooler, sporting a Paleolithic
+switchblade knife and black leather jacket, his father and his
+father's friends had reached a new plateau. They consolidated into a
+Syndicate, and began to concentrate on gambling and the whole,
+complex, profitable network of unions.
+
+And then World War II had come along, and it was time for Cesare to do
+his part. Bidding a fond farewell to his father and such of his
+father's friends as had survived the disagreements of Prohibition, the
+painful legal processes of the early Thirties and the even more
+painful consolidations of the years immediately before the war, young
+Cesare went off to foreign lands, where he distinguished himself by
+creating and running the largest single black-market ring in all of
+Southern Europe.
+
+Cesare had followed in his father's footsteps. And, before his sudden
+death during a disagreement in Miami, Giacomo "Jack the Ripper"
+Manelli was proud of his son.
+
+"Geez," he often said. "Whattakid, huh? Whattakid!"
+
+At the war's end, young Cesare, having proven himself a man, took unto
+himself a nickname and a shotgun. He did not have to use the shotgun
+very much, after the first few lessons; soon he was on his way to the
+top.
+
+There was nowhere for Cesare "Big Cheese" Antonio Manelli to go,
+except up.
+
+Straight up.
+
+Now, in 1973, he occupied a modestly opulent office on Madison Avenue,
+where he did his modest best to pretend to the world at large that he
+was only a small cog--indeed, an almost invisible cog--in a large
+advertising machine. His best was, for all practical purposes, good
+enough.
+
+Though it was common knowledge among the spoil-sport law enforcement
+officers who cared to look into the matter that Manelli was the real
+owner of the agency, there was no way to prove this. He didn't even
+have a phone under his own name. The only way to reach him was by
+going through his front man in the agency, a blank-faced, truculent
+Arab named Atif Abdullah Aoud.
+
+According to the agent-in-charge of the New York office, Malone had
+his choice of two separate methods of getting to Manelli. One, more
+direct, was to walk in, announce that he was an agent of the FBI, and
+insist on seeing Manelli. If he had a search warrant, the A-in-C told
+him, he might even get in. But, even if he did, he would probably not
+get anything out of Manelli.
+
+The second and more diplomatic way was to call up Atif Abdullah Aoud
+and arrange for an appointment.
+
+Malone made his decision in a flash. He flipped on the phone and
+punched for a PLaza exchange.
+
+The face that appeared on the screen was that of a fairly pretty, if
+somewhat vapid, brunette. "Rodger, Willcoe, O'Vurr and Aoud, good
+afternoon," she said.
+
+Malone blinked.
+
+"Who is calling, please?" the girl said. She snapped gum at the screen
+and Malone winced and drew away.
+
+"This is Kenneth J. Malone," he said from what he considered a safe
+distance. "I want to talk to Mr. Aoud."
+
+"Mr. Aoud?" she said in a high, unhelpful whine.
+
+"That's right," Malone said patiently. "You can tell him that there
+may be some government business coming his way."
+
+"Oh," she said. "But Mr. Aoud isn't in."
+
+Mr. Aoud wasn't in. Mr. Aoud was out. Malone turned that over in his
+mind a few times, and decided to try and forget it just as quickly as
+possible. "Then," he said, "let me talk to one of the other partners."
+
+"Partners?" the girl said. She popped her gum again. Malone moved back
+another inch.
+
+"You know," he said. "The other people he works with. Rodger, or
+Willcoe, or O'Vurr."
+
+"Oh," the girl said. "Them."
+
+"That's right," Malone said patiently.
+
+"How about Mr. Willcoe?" the girl said after a second of deep and
+earnest thought. "Would he do?"
+
+"Why not let's try him and see?" Malone said.
+
+"Okay," the girl said brightly. "Let's." She flashed Malone a dazzling
+smile, only slightly impeded by the gum, and flipped off. Malone
+stared at the blank screen for a few seconds, and then the girl's
+voice said, invisibly: "Mr. Willcoe will speak to you now, Mr. Melon.
+Thank you for waiting."
+
+"I'm not--" Malone started to say, and then the face of Frederick
+Willcoe appeared on the screen.
+
+Willcoe was a thin, wrinkle-faced man with very pale skin. He seemed
+to be in his sixties, and he looked as if he had just lost an
+all-night bout with Count Dracula. Malone looked interestedly for
+puncture marks, but failed to find any.
+
+"Ah," Willcoe said, in a voice that sounded like crinkled paper. "Mr.
+Melon. Good afternoon."
+
+"I'm not Mr. Melon," Malone said testily.
+
+Willcoe looked gently surprised, like a man who has discovered that
+his evening sherry contains cholesterol. "Really?" he said. "Then I
+must be on the wrong line. I beg your pardon."
+
+"You're not on the wrong line," Malone said. "I am Mr. Melon in a
+way." That didn't sound very clear when he got it out, so he added:
+"Your secretary got my name wrong. She thinks I'm Mr. Melon--Kenneth
+J. Melon."
+
+"But you're not," Willcoe said.
+
+Malone resisted an impulse to announce that he was really Lamont
+Cranston. "I'm Kenneth J. Malone," he said.
+
+"Ah," Willcoe said. "Quite amusing. Imagine my mistaking you for a Mr.
+Melon, when you're really Mr. Malone." He paused, and his face got
+even more wrinkled. "But I don't know you under either name," he said.
+"What do you want?"
+
+"I want to talk to Mr. Manelli," Malone said.
+
+"But Mr. Aoud--"
+
+"Mr. Aoud," Malone said, wondering if it sounded as silly to Willcoe
+as it did to him, "isn't in. So I thought you might be able to arrange
+an appointment for this afternoon."
+
+Willcoe bit his lip. "Mr. Manelli isn't in just now," he said.
+
+"Yes," Malone said. "I didn't think he would be. That's why I want to
+arrange an appointment for later, when he _will_ be in."
+
+"Does Mr. Manelli know you?" Willcoe said suspiciously, the wrinkles
+deepening again.
+
+"He knows my boss," Malone said carefully. "You just tell him that
+this is something that ought to be worth time and money to him. His
+time, and his money."
+
+"Hmm," Willcoe said. "I see. Would you wait a moment, Mr. Mel--Mr.
+Malone?"
+
+The screen blanked out immediately. The wait this time was slightly
+longer.
+
+And the next face that appeared on the screen was that of Cesare "Big
+Cheese" Antonio Manelli, the nearly invisible cog.
+
+For a cog, the face was not a bad one. It was strong and well-muscled,
+and it had dark, wavy hair running along the top. At the sides of the
+face, the hair was greying slightly, and behind the grey two large
+ears stuck out. Manelli's nose was a long, faintly aquiline affair and
+his eyes were very pleasant and candid. They were light grey.
+
+"Aha," Manelli said. "You are Mr. Malone, right?" His voice was
+guttural, but it was obvious that he was trying for control. "I regret
+announcing that I was out, Mr. Malone," he said. "But a man in my
+position--I like privacy, Mr. Malone, and I try to keep privacy for
+myself. Let me request you to answer a question, Mr. Malone: do I know
+you, Mr. Malone?"
+
+"Not personally," Malone said. "I--"
+
+"But I'm supposed to know your boss," Manelli said. "I don't know him,
+either, so far."
+
+Malone shrugged. "I'm sure you do," he said, and dropped the name
+almost casually: "Andrew J. Burris."
+
+Manelli raised his eyebrows. "So that's who you are," he said. "I
+ought to have known, Mr. Malone. And you want to talk to me a little
+bit, right?"
+
+"That's right," Malone said.
+
+"But this is no way to act, Mr. Malone," Manelli said reproachfully.
+"After all, we understand each other, you and me. What you should do,
+you should come in through channels, in the correct way, so everything
+it would be open and above the board."
+
+"Through channels?" Malone said.
+
+Manelli regarded him with a pitying glance. "You must be new on your
+job, Mr. Malone," he said. "Because there is an entire system built
+up, and you don't know about it. The way things work, we sit around
+and we don't see people. And then somebody comes and presents his
+credentials, you might say--search warrants, for instance, or
+subpoenas. And then we know where we are."
+
+Malone shook his head. "This isn't that kind of call," he said. "It's
+more a friendly type of call."
+
+"Mr. Malone," Manelli said. The reproach was stronger in his voice.
+"You must be very new at your job."
+
+"Nevertheless," Malone said.
+
+Manelli hesitated only a second. "Because I like you," he said, "and
+to teach you how things operate around here, I could do you a favor."
+
+"Good," Malone said patiently.
+
+"In an hour," Manelli said. "My place. Here."
+
+The screen blanked out before Malone could even say goodbye.
+
+Malone got up, went out to the corridor, and decided that, since he
+had time to kill, he might as well walk on down to Manelli's office.
+That, he told himself, would give him time to decide what he wanted to
+say.
+
+He toyed at first with the idea of a nice bourbon and soda in a
+Madison Avenue bar, but he discarded that idea in a hurry. It was
+always possible for him to get into a tight spot and have to teleport
+his way out, and he didn't want to be fuzzy around the edges in case
+that happened. _Trotkin's_ had showed him that, under enough stress,
+he could manage the job with quite a lot of vodka in him. But there
+was absolutely no sense, he told himself sadly, in taking chances.
+
+He started off downtown along Fifth. Soon he was standing in front of
+the blue-and-crystal tower of the Ravell Building.
+
+That made up his mind for him. He checked his watch, mentally flipped
+a coin and then cheated a little to make the answer come out right. He
+went inside and stepped into an elevator.
+
+"Six," he said with decision.
+
+Lou was sitting at the Psychical Research Society desk, talking to the
+tweedy Sir Lewis Carter. Malone waved at Carter, decided that
+conversation with Lou was out, and started to walk away. Then he
+realized that he couldn't have Carter thinking he was crazy. He had to
+figure out something to tell the man--and in a hurry, too.
+
+Carter smiled and gestured to him. "Ah, Mr. Malone," he said. "I'm
+glad you brought our Lou home safely. I've heard a little about your--
+ah--escapade. Astounding, really."
+
+"Not for the FBI," Malone said modestly. "We've been through too
+much."
+
+"But--"
+
+"No, really," Malone said. "We never call anything astounding any
+more."
+
+"I can well imagine," Carter said. "Is there anything I can do for
+you?"
+
+Malone thought fast. He had to have something, and he didn't have much
+time. "Why--uh--" he said, and then it came to him. "Yes, as a matter
+of fact you can," he said.
+
+"Glad to be of service," Carter said. "I'm sure we can do anything you
+request."
+
+"Have you got any more data on telepathic projection?" Malone said.
+
+Sir Lewis Carter frowned. "Telepathic projection?" he said.
+
+"The stuff--the phenomenon Cartier Taylor mentioned," Malone said, "in
+_Minds and Morons_. I think it was page eighty-four."
+
+"Oh," Carter said. "Oh, yes. Of course. Well, Mr. Malone, we'll see
+what we can do for you."
+
+Malone sighed. "Thanks," he said mournfully. "I guess--I guess that's
+all, then." He smiled at Lou, and turned the smile into a terrifying
+scowl when his eye caught Carter's. "Oh," Malone said. "So long. So
+long, everybody."
+
+"Ken--"
+
+This was not, he told himself sadly, either the time or the place.
+"Goodbye, Sir Lewis," he said. "Goodbye, Lou."
+
+The elevator opened its doors and received him.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Exactly fifty-nine minutes after Cesare Manelli had hung up on him,
+Malone showed up in the stately and sumptuous suite that belonged, for
+a stiff fee every month, to the firm of Rodger, Willcoe, O'Vurr and
+Aoud. The girl at the desk was his old Spearmint friend.
+
+"Mr. Manelli," Malone said. "I've got an appointment. My name is
+Malone and his is Manelli. He works here." That, he told himself, was
+an understatement; but at least he had a chance of getting his point
+across.
+
+"Oh," the girl said. Her gum popped. "Certainly. Right away, Mr.
+Maloney."
+
+Malone opened his mouth, then shut it again. It just wasn't worth the
+trouble, he thought.
+
+The girl did things with a switchboard, then turned to him again. "Mr.
+Manelli's office is right down there in back," she said, pointing
+vaguely. "Think you can find it, Mr. Maloney?"
+
+"I'll try," Malone promised. He went down the long corridor and
+stopped at an unmarked door. It was at least an even chance, he told
+himself, and opened the door.
+
+The room inside appeared to be mostly desk. The gigantic slab of wood
+sat against the far wall of the room, in the right-hand corner and
+spreading over toward the center. It appeared, in the soft half-light
+of the room, to be waiting for somebody to walk into its lair. Malone
+was sure, at first sight, that this desk ate people; it was just the
+type: big and dark and glowering and massive.
+
+There wasn't anybody seated behind it, which reinforced his belief.
+The desk had eaten its master. Now it was out of control and they
+would have to have it shot. Malone took a deep breath and tried not to
+veer.
+
+Then he heard a voice.
+
+"Sit down, Mr. Malone," the voice said. "How about you having a drink
+while we talk? If this is going to be so friendly."
+
+The voice didn't belong to the desk. It belonged, unmistakably, to Big
+Cheese himself. Malone turned and saw him, sitting in the left-hand
+corner of the room behind a low table. There was another empty chair
+facing Manelli, and Malone went over and sat in it.
+
+"A drink?" he said. "Okay. Sure."
+
+"Bourbon and soda, isn't it?" Manelli said. He stood up.
+
+"Your research department gets fast answers," Malone said. "Bourbon
+and soda it is."
+
+"After all," Manelli said, shrugging slightly, "a person in my
+position, he has to make sure he knows what is what, and all the time.
+It's routine, what you call S. O. P. Standard Operating Procedure,
+they call it."
+
+"I'm sure they do," Malone murmured politely.
+
+"And besides," Manelli said, "you are a well-known type. I thought I
+knew the name when old Fred mentioned it, or I would never talk to
+you. You know how it is."
+
+Malone nodded. "Well," he said, as Manelli went over to a small
+portable bar at the back of the room and got busy, "we're being frank,
+anyway."
+
+"And why shouldn't we be frank, Mr. Malone?" Manelli said. "It's a
+nice, friendly conversation, and what have we got on our minds?"
+
+For the first time, as he turned, Malone got a glimpse of something
+behind the structured and muscular face. There was panic there, just a
+tiny seed under iron control, but it showed in the eyes and in the
+muscles of the cheek.
+
+"Just a nice, friendly conversation," Malone said. Manelli brought the
+drinks over and set them on the table.
+
+"Take your pick," he said. "That's not what a good host should do, ask
+the guest to pick one, like a game; but I got into the habit. People
+get nervous about arsenic in the drinks. Which is silly."
+
+"Sure it is," Malone agreed. He picked up the left-hand glass and
+regarded it carefully. "If you wanted to kill me, you'd need a motive
+and an opportunity, and you don't have either at the moment. Besides,
+you'd make sure to be far away when it happened." He hoped he sounded
+confident. He took a sip of the drink, but it tasted like bourbon and
+soda.
+
+"Mr. Malone," Manelli said, "you say these things about me, and it
+hurts. It hurts me, right here." He pressed a hand over the checkbook
+side of his jacket. "I'm a legitimate businessman, and no different
+from any other legitimate businessman. You can't prove anything else."
+
+"I know I can't," Malone said. "But I want to talk to you about your
+real business."
+
+"This is my real business," Manelli said. "The advertising agency. I
+work here. Advertising is in my blood. And I don't understand the
+least little bit why you have to do things to me all the time."
+
+"Do things?" Malone said. "What did I do?"
+
+"Now, Mr. Malone," Manelli said. He took a swallow of his drink. "You
+said let's be frank, so I'm frank. Why not you?"
+
+"I don't know what you're talking about," Malone said, telling part of
+the truth.
+
+Manelli took another swallow of his drink, fished in a jacket pocket
+and brought out two cigars. "Smoke, Mr. Malone?" he said. "The very
+best, from Havana, Cuba. Cost me a dollar and a half each."
+
+Malone looked with longing at the cigar. But it was okay for Manelli
+to smoke cigars, he thought bitterly. Manelli was a gangster, and who
+cared how he looked? Malone was an FBI man, and FBI men didn't smoke
+cigars. Particularly Havana cigars. That, he told himself with
+regretful firmness, was that.
+
+"No, thanks," he said. "I never smoke on duty."
+
+Manelli shrugged and put one cigar away. He lit the other one and
+dense clouds of smoke began to rise in the room. Malone breathed
+deeply.
+
+"I understand you've been having troubles," he said.
+
+Manelli nodded. "Now, you see, Mr. Malone?" he said. "You tell me you
+don't know what's happening, but you know I got troubles. How come,
+Mr. Malone? How come?"
+
+"Because you have got troubles," Malone said. "But I have nothing to
+do with them." He hesitated, thought of adding: "Yet," and decided
+against it.
+
+"Now, Mr. Malone," Manelli said. "You know better than that."
+
+"I do?" Malone said.
+
+Manelli sighed, took another swallow of his drink and dragged deeply
+on the cigar. "Let's take a for-instance," he said. "Now, you
+understand my business is advertising, Mr. Malone?"
+
+"It's in your blood," Malone said, involuntarily.
+
+"Right," Manelli said. "But I think about things. I like to figure
+things out. In a sort of a theoretical way, like a for-instance.
+Understand?"
+
+"What sort of theoretical story are you going to tell me?" Malone
+said.
+
+Manelli leaned back in his chair. "Let's take, for instance, some
+numbers runners who had some trouble the other day, got beat up and
+money taken from them. Maybe you read about it in the papers."
+
+"I haven't been following the papers much," Malone said.
+
+"That's all right," Manelli said grandly. "Maybe it wasn't _in_ the
+papers. But anyhow, I figured out maybe that happened. I had nothing
+to do with this, Mr. Malone; you understand that? But I figured out
+how maybe it happened."
+
+"How?" Malone said.
+
+Manelli took another puff on his cigar. "Maybe there was an error at a
+racetrack--we could say Jamaica, for instance, just for laughs. And
+maybe two different totals were published for the pari-mutuel numbers,
+and both got given out. So the numbers runners got all fouled up, so
+they got beat up and money taken from them."
+
+"It could have happened that way," Malone said.
+
+"I figure maybe the FBI had something to do with this," Manelli said.
+
+"We didn't," Malone said. "Frankly."
+
+"And that's not all," Manelli said. "Let's say at Jamaica one day
+there was a race."
+
+"All right," Malone said agreeably. "That doesn't require a whole lot
+of imagination."
+
+"And let's say," Manelli went on, "that the bookies--if there are any
+bookies in this town; who knows?--that they got the word about who
+came in, win, place and show."
+
+"Sounds natural," Malone said.
+
+"Sure it does," Manelli said. "But there was a foul-up someplace,
+because the win animal was disqualified and nobody heard about it
+until after a lot of payoffs were made. That costs money." He stopped.
+"I mean it would cost money, if it happened," he finished.
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "Certainly would."
+
+"And you tell me it's not the FBI?" Manelli said.
+
+"That's right," Malone said. "As a matter of fact, we're investigating
+things like these confusions and inefficiencies all over."
+
+Manelli finished his drink in one long, amazed swallow. "Now, wait a
+minute," he said. "Let's say for a joke, like, for laughs, that I am
+some kind of a wheel in these things, in bookies and numbers boys and
+like that."
+
+"Let's call it a syndicate," Malone said. "Just for laughs."
+
+"Okay, then," Manelli said, with a suspicious gaze at Malone.
+"Whatever you call it, a man like me today, he wouldn't be some
+two-bit chiseler without brains. He would be a businessman, a
+smooth-operating smart businessman. Right?"
+
+"Right," Malone said. "And what I want to know is: how's business?"
+
+"You're kidding?" Manelli said.
+
+"I'm not kidding," Malone said. "I mean it. The FBI's investigating
+mix-ups just like the ones you're telling me about. We want to stop
+them."
+
+Manelli blinked. "You know, Mr. Malone," he said softly, "I heard
+about government interference in private enterprise, but don't you
+think this is a little too far out?"
+
+Malone shrugged. "That's what I'm here for," he said. "Take it or
+leave it."
+
+"Just so it's understood," Manelli said, "that we're talking about
+imaginary things. Theoretical."
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "Imagine away."
+
+"Well," Manelli said slowly, "you heard about this wrecked night-club
+in Florida? It happened maybe a month ago, in Miami?"
+
+"I heard about it," Malone said.
+
+"This is just a for-instance, you know," Manelli said. "But suppose
+there was a roulette wheel in that club. Just a wheel."
+
+"Okay," Malone said.
+
+"And suppose the wheel was rigged a little bit," Manelli said. "Not
+seriously, just a little bit."
+
+"Fine," Malone said. "This is going to explain a wrecked club?"
+
+"Well, sure," Manelli said. "Because something went wrong with the
+machinery, or maybe the operator goofed up. And number seven came up
+eight times in a row."
+
+"Good old lucky seven," Malone said.
+
+"So there was a riot," Manelli said. "Because some people had money on
+the number, and some people got suspicious, and like that. And there
+was a riot."
+
+"And the club got wrecked," Malone said. "That's what I call bad
+luck."
+
+"Luck?" Manelli said. "What does luck have to do with roulette?
+Somebody goofed, that's all."
+
+"Oh," Malone said. "Sure."
+
+"And that's the way it's been going," Manelli said. He puffed on his
+cigar, put it in a nearby ashtray, and blew out a great Vesuvian spout
+of smoke.
+
+"Too bad," Malone said sympathetically.
+
+"It's all over," Manelli said. "Mistakes and people making the
+mistakes, goofing up here and there and everyplace. There have been
+guys killed because they made mistakes, and nobody can afford guys
+being killed all the time."
+
+"It does run into expense," Malone said.
+
+"And time, and hiring guys to do the killing, and then they goof up,
+too," Manelli said. "It's terrible. Some guys have even been killed
+without they made any mistakes at all. Just by accident, sort of."
+
+"Well," Malone said carefully, "you can depend on the government to do
+everything in its power to straighten things out."
+
+Manelli frowned. "You mean that, Mr. Malone?"
+
+"Of course I do," Malone said honestly. He hadn't, he reminded
+himself, promised to help Manelli. He had only promised to straighten
+things out. And he could figure out what that might mean later, when
+he had the time.
+
+"All I say is, it's funny," Manelli said. "It's crazy."
+
+"That's the way it is," Malone said.
+
+Manelli looked at him narrowly. "Mr. Malone," he said at last, "maybe
+you mean it at that. Maybe you do."
+
+"Sure I do," Malone said. "After all, the government is supposed to
+help its citizens."
+
+Manelli shook his head. "Mr. Malone," he said, "you can call me
+Cesare. Everybody does."
+
+"No, they don't," Malone said. "They call you Cheese. I've got a
+research staff too."
+
+"So call me Cheese," Manelli said. "I don't mind."
+
+"There's only one little trouble," Malone said. "If I called you
+Cheese, you'd call me Ken. And word would get around."
+
+"I see what you mean," Manelli said.
+
+"I don't think either one of us wants his associates to think we're
+friends," Malone said.
+
+"I guess not," Manelli said. "It would cause uneasiness."
+
+"And a certain lack of confidence," Malone said. "So suppose I go on
+calling you Mr. Manelli?"
+
+"Fine," Manelli said. "And I'll call you Mr. Malone, like always."
+
+Malone smiled and stood up. "Well, then," he said, "good-bye, Mr.
+Manelli."
+
+Manelli rose, too. "Goodbye, Mr. Malone," he said. "And good luck, if
+you really mean what you said."
+
+"Oh, I do," Malone said.
+
+"Because things are terrible," Manelli said. "And they're getting
+worse every day. You should only know."
+
+"Don't worry," Malone said. "Things will be straightened out pretty
+soon." He hoped, as he went out the door and down the corridor, that
+he was telling the truth there, at least. He'd sounded fairly
+confident, he thought, but he didn't feel quite so confident. The
+secretary was busy on the switchboard when he came out into the
+anteroom, and he went by without a greeting, his mind busy, churning
+and confused.
+
+He felt as if his head were on just a little crooked. Or as if, maybe,
+he had a small hole in it somewhere and facts were leaking out onto
+the sidewalk.
+
+If he only looked at the problem in the right way, he told himself, he
+would see just what was going on.
+
+But what was the right way?
+
+"That," Malone murmured as he hailed a cab for the ride back to 69th
+Street, "is the big, sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. And how much
+time do I have for an answer?"
+
+
+11
+
+"Boyd?" the agent-in-charge said. "He went out to talk to Mike Sand
+down at the ITU a while ago, and he hasn't come back yet."
+
+"Fine," Malone said. "I'll be in my office if he wants me."
+
+The agent-in-charge picked up a small package. "A messenger brought
+this," he said. "It's from the Psychical Research Society, and if it's
+ghosts, they're much smaller than last time."
+
+"Dehydrated," Malone said. "Just add ectoplasm and out they come,
+shouting _boo_ at everybody and dancing all over the world."
+
+"Sounds wonderful," the agent-in-charge said. "Can I come to the
+party?"
+
+"First," Malone said judiciously, "you'd have to be dead. Of course, I
+can arrange that--"
+
+"Thanks," the agent-in-charge said, leaving in a hurry. Malone went on
+down to his office and opened the package. It contained more
+facsimiles from Sir Lewis Carter, all dealing with telepathic
+projection. He spent a few minutes looking them over and trying to
+make some connected sense out of them, and then he just sat and
+thought for awhile.
+
+Finally he picked up the phone. In a few minutes he was talking to Dr.
+Thomas O'Connor, at Yucca Flats.
+
+"Telepathic projection?" O'Connor said when Malone asked him the
+question he'd thought of. "Well, now. I should say that--no. First,
+Mr. Malone, tell me what evidence you have for this phenomenon."
+
+Malone felt almost happy, as if he had done all his homework before
+the instructor called on him. "According to what I've been able to get
+from the PRS," he said, "ordinary people--people who aren't
+telepaths--occasionally receive some sort of messages from other
+people."
+
+"I assume," O'Connor said frostily, "that you are speaking of
+telepathic messages?"
+
+Malone nodded guiltily. "I didn't mean the phone," he said, "or
+letters or things like that. Telepathic messages, or something very
+like it."
+
+"Indeed," O'Connor said. "Mr. Malone, I believe you will find that
+such occurrences, when accurately reported, are confined to close
+relatives or loved ones of the person projecting the message."
+
+Malone thought back. "That's right," he said.
+
+"And, further," O'Connor went on, "I think you'll find that the--ah--
+message so received is one indicating that the projector of such a
+message is in dire peril. He has, for instance, been badly injured, or
+is rapidly approaching death, or else he has narrowly escaped death."
+
+"True," Malone said.
+
+"Under such circumstances," O'Connor said coldly, "it is possible that
+the mind of the person projecting the communication might be capable
+of generating immense psionic power, thereby forcing even a
+non-telepath to recognize the content of the message."
+
+"Good," Malone said. "That's wonderful, Doctor, and I--"
+
+"But," O'Connor said sharply, "the amount of psionic energy necessary
+for such a feat is tremendous. Usually, it is the final burst of
+energy, the outpouring of all the remaining psionic force immediately
+before death. And if death does not occur, the person is at the least
+greatly weakened; his mind, if it ever does recover, needs time and
+rest to do so."
+
+Malone let that sink in slowly. "Then a person couldn't do it very
+often," he said.
+
+"Hardly," O'Connor said.
+
+Malone nodded. "It's like--like giving blood to a blood bank. Giving,
+say, three quarts of blood. It might not kill you. But if it didn't,
+you'd be weak for a long time."
+
+"Exactly," O'Connor said. "A good analogy, Mr. Malone."
+
+Malone hated himself for it, but he felt pleased when O'Connor praised
+him. "Well," he said, "that winds up Cartier Taylor's theory pretty
+thoroughly."
+
+"I should think so," O'Connor said. "I am surprised, Mr. Malone, that
+you would put any credence whatever in that man's theories. His
+factual data, I will admit, is fairly reliable. But his theories are--
+well, they are hardly worth the time it takes to read them."
+
+"I see," Malone said. "It did seem like a good answer, though."
+
+"It undoubtedly is a good one," O'Connor said. "It is clever and has
+the advantage of being simple. It is contradicted, Mr. Malone, only by
+the facts."
+
+"Sure," Malone said sadly. "But--hey. Wait a minute."
+
+"Yes?" O'Connor said.
+
+"One person couldn't do this alone, at least, not very often and not
+without serious harm to himself. Right?"
+
+"That is what I said," O'Connor agreed. "Yes, Mr. Malone."
+
+"But how about several people?" Malone said. "I mean, well, let's look
+at that blood bank again. You need three quarts of blood. But one
+person doesn't have to give it. Suppose twelve people gave half a pint
+each. Suppose twenty-four people gave a quarter of a pint each.
+Suppose--"
+
+"There is," O'Connor said, "a point of diminishing returns. But I do
+see your point, Mr. Malone." He thought for a second. "It might just
+be possible," he said. "At least theoretically. But it would take a
+great deal of mental co-ordination among the participants. They would
+have to be telepathic themselves, for one thing."
+
+"Why?" Malone said, feeling stupid.
+
+"Because they would have to mesh their thoughts closely enough to
+direct them properly and at the correct time." O'Connor nodded. "But,
+given that, I imagine that it could be done."
+
+"Wonderful," Malone said.
+
+"However," O'Connor said, apparently glad to throw even a little cold
+water on the notion, "it could not be done for very long periods of
+time, you realize."
+
+"Sure," Malone said happily.
+
+"By the way, Mr. Malone," O'Connor said. "Does this have anything to
+do with the hypothesis you presented to me some time ago? Mass
+hypnotism, as I recall--"
+
+"No," Malone said. "I've given that idea up for good. I think this is
+being done on an individual basis--working on one person at a time."
+Then another idea hit him. "You say these people would have to be
+telepaths?"
+
+"That's right," O'Connor said.
+
+"Then wouldn't Her Majesty know about them? If they're telepaths? Or
+is there some kind of a mind shield or something that a telepath could
+work out?"
+
+"Mind shield?" O'Connor said. "Ah, yes. Miss Thompson might be fooled
+by such a shield. It would have to be an exceptional one, but such
+things do seem to be possible. They belong to the realm of mental
+disciplines, of course, rather than psionics."
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "But there could be that kind of shield?"
+
+"There could," O'Connor said. "The mind which created the shield for
+itself would have to be of tremendous power and a really high order of
+control. A strong, sane mind might conceivably create such a block
+that even Miss Thompson, let us say, might believe that she was
+picking up a real mind, when she was only picking up surface thoughts,
+with the real thought hidden behind the telepathic block."
+
+"Fine," Malone said. "Thanks. Thanks a lot, Dr. O'Connor."
+
+"I am always happy to put my extensive knowledge of science at your
+disposal, Mr. Malone," O'Connor said.
+
+Malone watched the image collapse without really seeing it. Instead,
+he was busily talking to himself, or rather to his other self.
+
+"Well, now, Sir Kenneth," he said. "Let's pull all the facts together
+and see what happens."
+
+"Indeed, Mr. Malone," said Sir Kenneth Malone, "it is time that we
+did. Proceed, Sirrah. I shall attend."
+
+* * * * *
+
+"Let's start from the beginning," Malone said. "We know there's
+confusion in all parts of the country, in all parts of the world, I
+guess. And we know that confusion is being caused by carefully timed
+accidents and errors. We also know that these errors appear to be
+accompanied by violent bursts of psionic static--violent energy. And
+we know, further, that on three specific occasions, these bursts of
+energy were immediately followed by a reversal of policy in the mind
+of the person on the receiving end."
+
+"You mean," Sir Kenneth put in, "that they changed their minds."
+
+"Correct," Malone said. "I refer, of course, to the firm of Brubitsch,
+Borbitsch and Garbitsch, Spying Done Cheap."
+
+"Indeed," Sir Kenneth said. "Then the operators of this force,
+whatever it may be, have some interest in allowing these spies to
+confess?"
+
+"Maybe," Malone said. "Let's leave that for later. To get back to the
+beginning of all this: it seems to me to follow that the accidents and
+errors which have caused all the confusion through the United States
+and Russia are caused by somebody's mind being changed at exactly the
+right moment. A man does something just a little differently than he
+decided to--or else he forgets to do it at all."
+
+"Correct," Sir Kenneth said. "And you feel, Mr. Malone, that a
+telepathic command is the cause of this confusion?"
+
+"A series of them," Malone said. "But we also know, from Dr. O'Connor,
+that it takes a great deal of psychic energy to perform this
+particular trick--more than a person can normally afford to expend."
+
+"Marry, now," Sir Kenneth exclaimed, "such a statement does not seem
+to have reason in it. Changing the mind of a man seems a small thing
+in comparison to teleportation, or psychokinesis, or levitation. And
+yet it takes more power than any of these?"
+
+Malone thought for a second. "Sure it does," he said. "I'd say it was
+a matter of resistance. Moving an inanimate object is pretty simple--
+comparatively, anyhow--because inert matter has no mental resistance."
+
+"And moving yourself?" Sir Kenneth said.
+
+"There is some resistance there, probably," Malone said. "But you'll
+remember that part of the Fueyo training system for teleportation
+involved overcoming your own mental resistance to the idea."
+
+"True," Sir Kenneth said. "Quite true. Then let us say that it
+requires enormous power to effect these changes. What is our next
+step, Mr. Malone?"
+
+"Next, Sir Kenneth," Malone said, "We have to do a little supposing.
+This project must be handled by a fairly large group, since no
+individual can work it. This large group has to be telepathic, and not
+only for the precise timing O'Connor specified."
+
+"There is another reason?" Sir Kenneth said.
+
+"There is," Malone said. "They've also got to know exactly when to
+make their victim change his mind. Right?"
+
+"Absolutely," said Sir Kenneth. "Now, Sirrah, where does all this
+leave us? We have had the orderly presentation of the case; where,
+Sirrah, is your summation?"
+
+"Coming up," Malone said. "We've got to look for a widespread
+organization of telepaths, with enough mental discipline to hold a
+mental shield that Her Majesty can't crack, and can't even recognize
+the existence of. We thought she'd found all the telepaths. She said
+so, and she obviously thought so. But she didn't. These are strong,
+trained--and sane."
+
+"Aha," said Sir Kenneth.
+
+"Her Majesty," Malone said, "found us only the crazy telepaths, the
+weak ones, the nuts."
+
+"Fine," said Sir Kenneth. "And this, Mr. Malone, leaves us with only
+one question. Her Majesty--may God bless her--stated that she first
+spotted these flashes of telepathic static by listening in on our
+minds."
+
+"Our mind," Malone said. "I hope."
+
+"Very well," Sir Kenneth said. "This means that some force is being
+directed in this way, toward us. And how do we know that all the
+deduction, all the careful case-building we have done, hasn't been
+influenced by this group? That might mean, of course, that we are
+miles, or even light-years, from the solution."
+
+Malone said: "Yeep." The sound was echoed by Sir Kenneth, and the two
+halves of the coruscating mind of Kenneth J. Malone were once more
+one.
+
+_Your Majesty,_ the minds thought, _I'd like to talk to you._
+
+Nothing happened. Evidently, Her Majesty was temporarily out of mental
+contact with him.
+
+"Hell," Malone said. "Not to mention od's blood." He flipped on the
+visiphone and dialed Yucca Flats.
+
+The figure that appeared on the screen was that of a tall,
+solidly-built man with a red face and the uniform of a Beefeater. This
+Tower Warder had the British royal crest embroidered on his chest, and
+the letters: "E. R."
+
+"Good evening, Sir Kenneth," he said politely.
+
+Malone had sometimes wondered what it would be like to be on the
+Queen's permanent, personal staff. Evidently, it soaked in so
+thoroughly that one began to stay in character all the time. The
+little old lady's delusion was such a pleasant one that it was
+painlessly infectious.
+
+"I'd like to speak to Her Majesty, Colonel Fairfax," Malone said.
+
+"Her Majesty," Colonel Fairfax said with regret, "is asleep, sir. I
+understand that she has had rather a trying time, of late."
+
+"Then I must ask you to wake her," Malone said. "I don't want to
+disturb her any more than you do, Colonel, but this is important."
+
+"Her Majesty's rest," Colonel Fairfax said gently, "is also important,
+Sir Kenneth."
+
+"This is more important," Malone said. "I know how you feel, but it's
+necessary to wake her."
+
+The screen blanked out.
+
+Malone sighed and began to sing softly to himself while he waited:
+
+"The soldiers of the Queen are linked in friendly tether--
+And if she's off her bean, we'll all go nuts together..."
+
+Her Majesty appeared at this point, dressed in a silken robe bearing
+her crest and initials (E. R., rather than R. T., of course), and
+wearing a silken Mother Hubbard cap on her head. "Oh, dear," she said
+instantly. "Are you still worried about them?"
+
+"The flashes?" Malone said. "That's right. You tuned in on my mind
+right away, didn't you?"
+
+"As soon as I got your message," she said. "I like your little song,
+at least, I think I do."
+
+Malone blushed faintly. "Sorry," he said.
+
+"Oh, don't be, Sir Kenneth," Her Majesty said. "After all, I do allow
+my subjects a good deal of liberty; it is theirs to make use of." She
+smiled at him. "Actually, I should have told you, Sir Kenneth. But it
+seemed so natural that I--that I forgot it."
+
+_Oh, no,_ Malone thought.
+
+"I'm afraid so," Her Majesty said. "When I told you about the
+interference, your mind quite automatically began to build what I
+think of as a--as a defense against it. A shield, so to speak."
+
+_Me?_ Malone thought.
+
+"Most certainly," Her Majesty said. "You know, Sir Kenneth, you have a
+very strong mind."
+
+"Oh, I don't know," Malone said aloud. "Sometimes I don't feel so
+bright."
+
+"I'm not talking about intelligence," Her Majesty said. "The two
+properties are interconnected, of course, but they are not identical.
+After all ... well, never mind. But you have strength of will, Sir
+Kenneth, and strength of purpose. As a matter of fact, you have been
+building your strength in the last few days."
+
+"Really?" Malone said, surprised.
+
+"It's become more and more difficult," Her Majesty said, "to see into
+the depths of your mind, during the past few days. The surface of your
+mind is as easy to read as ever, but it's hard to see what's going on
+in the depths."
+
+"I'm not doing it deliberately," Malone said.
+
+"In any case," Her Majesty said, "this process has been going on ever
+since you knew that telepathy was possible, two years ago. But in the
+past forty-eight hours matters have accelerated tremendously."
+
+"That sounds good," Malone said. "Does it mean these mind-changers
+I've been thinking about can't get through to me?"
+
+"What mind-changers?" the Queen said. "Oh. I see." She paused. "Well,
+I can't be positive about this, Sir Kenneth; it's all so new, you
+know. All I can tell you is that there haven't been any flashes of
+telepathic energy in your mind in the last forty-eight hours."
+
+"Well," Malone said doubtfully, "that's something. And I am sorry I
+had to wake you, Your Majesty."
+
+"Oh, that's perfectly all right," she said. "I know you're working
+hard to restore order to the realm, and it is the duty of any
+Sovereign to give such aid as she can to her Royal subjects."
+
+Malone cleared his throat. "I trust," he said, "Your Majesty will ever
+find me a faithful servant."
+
+Her Majesty smiled. "I'm sure I shall," she said. "Good night, Sir
+Kenneth."
+
+"Good night," he said, and flipped off. At once, the phone chimed
+again.
+
+He flipped the switch on. "Malone here," he said.
+
+Boyd's face appeared on the screen. "Ken," he said fervently, "I am
+very glad you're still in town."
+
+"Thanks," Malone said politely. "But what about Mike Sand? Any
+information?"
+
+"Plenty," Boyd said. "I damn near didn't believe it."
+
+"What do you mean, you didn't believe it?" Malone said. "Isn't the
+information any good?"
+
+"It's good, all right," Boyd said. "It's great. He practically talked
+his head off to me. Gave me all his books, including secret sets. And
+I've put him under arrest as a material witness--at his own request."
+
+"It sounds," Malone said, "as if Mike Sand has had a sudden and
+surprising change of heart."
+
+"Doesn't it, though," Boyd said. "We can crack the ITU wide open now,
+and I mean really wide open."
+
+"Same pattern?" Malone said.
+
+"Of course it is," Boyd said. "What does it sound like? Same pattern."
+
+"Good," Malone said. "Get on up here. I'll talk to you later."
+
+He cut off in a hurry, leaned back in his chair and started to think.
+At first, he thought of a cigar. Boyd, he figured, couldn't be back in
+the office for some time, and nobody else would come in. He locked the
+door, drew out the cigar-laden box he kept in his desk in New York,
+and lit up with great satisfaction.
+
+When the cloud of smoke around his head was dense enough to cut with a
+knife, he went back to more serious subjects. He didn't have to worry
+too much about his mind being spied on; if Her Majesty couldn't read
+his deepest thoughts, and the mind-changers weren't throwing any bolts
+of static in his direction, he was safe.
+
+Now, then, he told himself--and sneezed.
+
+He shook his head, cursed slightly, and went on.
+
+Now, then...
+
+There was an organization, spread all over the Western world, and with
+secret branches, evidently, in the Soviet Union. The organization had
+to be an old one, because it had to have trained telepaths of such a
+high degree of efficiency that they could evade Her Majesty's probing
+without her even being aware of the evasion. And training took time.
+
+There was something else to consider, too. In order to organize to
+such a degree that they could wreak the efficient, complete havoc they
+were wreaking, the organization couldn't be completely secret; there
+are always leaks, always suspicious events, and a secret society that
+covered all of those up would have no time for anything else.
+
+So the organization had to be a known one, a known group, masquerading
+as something else.
+
+So far, everything made sense. Malone took another deep, grateful puff
+on the cigar, and frowned. Where, he wondered, did he go from here?
+
+He reached for a pencil and a piece of paper. He headed the paper:
+_Organization._ Then he started putting down what he knew about it,
+and what he'd figured out.
+
+     1. Large
+     2. Old
+     3. Disguised
+
+It sounded just a little like Frankenstein's Monster, so far. But what
+else did he know about it?
+
+After a second's thought, he murmured: "Nothing," and took another
+puff.
+
+But that wasn't quite true.
+
+He knew one more thing about the organization. He knew they'd probably
+be immune to the confusion everybody else was suffering from. The
+organization would be--had to be--efficient. It would be composed of
+intelligent, superbly cooperative people, who could work together as a
+unit without in the least impairing their own individuality.
+
+He reached for the list again, put down:
+
+     4. Efficient
+
+And looked at it. Now it didn't remind him quite so much of the
+Monster. But it didn't look familiar, either. Who did he know, he
+thought, who was large, old, disguised and efficient?
+
+It sounded like an improbable combination. He set the list down again,
+clearing off some of the papers the PRS had sent him to make room for
+it.
+
+Then he stopped.
+
+The papers the PRS had sent him...
+
+And he'd gotten them so quickly, so efficiently...
+
+They were a large organization...
+
+And an old one...
+
+He tossed the cigar in the general direction of the ashtray, grabbed
+the phone and jabbed at buttons.
+
+The girl who answered the phone looked familiar. She did not look very
+old, but she was large and she had to be disguised, Malone thought.
+Nobody could naturally have that many teeth.
+
+"Psychical Research Society," she said. "Oh, Mr. Malone, good
+evening."
+
+"Sir Lewis," Malone said. "Sir Lewis Carter. President. I want to talk
+to him. Hurry."
+
+"Sir Lewis?" the girl said slowly. "Oh, I'm sorry, Mr. Malone, but the
+office is closed now for the day. And Sir Lewis has gone already. It's
+after six o'clock, Mr. Malone, and the office is closed."
+
+"Home number," Malone said desperately. "I've got to."
+
+"Well, I can do that, Mr. Malone," she said, "but it wouldn't do you
+any good, really. Because he went away on his vacation, and when he
+goes on his vacation he never tells us where. You know? He won't be
+back for two or three weeks."
+
+"Oog," Malone said, and thought for less than a second. "Miss
+Garbitsch," he said. "Lou. Got to talk to her. Now."
+
+"Oh, I can't do that, either, Mr. Malone," the toothy girl said. "All
+of the executive officers, they left already on their vacation. And
+that includes Miss Garbitsch, too. They just left a skeleton force
+here at the office."
+
+"They're all gone?" Malone said hollowly.
+
+"That's right," she said cheerfully. "As a matter of fact, I'm in
+charge now, and that's why I'm staying so late. To sort of catch up on
+things. You know?"
+
+"It's very important," Malone said tensely. "You don't know where any
+of them went? You don't have any address?"
+
+"None at all," she said. "I'm sorry, but that's how it is. Maybe it's
+strange, and maybe you'd ask questions, but I obey orders, and
+those're my orders. To take over until they get back. They didn't tell
+me where they went, and I didn't ask."
+
+"Great," Malone said. He wanted to shoot himself.
+
+Lou was one of them. Of course she was; that was obvious now, when he
+thought about it. Lou was one of the secret group that was sabotaging
+practically everything.
+
+And now they'd all gone. For two weeks--or for good.
+
+The girl's voice broke in on his thoughts.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Malone," she said, "I'm sorry, but I just remembered. They
+left a note for you."
+
+"A note?" Malone said.
+
+"Sir Lewis said you might call," the girl said, "and he left a
+message. If you'll hold on a minute I'll read it to you."
+
+Malone waited tensely. The girl found a slip of paper, blinked at it
+and read:
+
+"My dear Malone, I'm afraid you are perfectly correct in your
+deductions; and, as you can see, that leaves us no alternative. Sorry.
+Miss G. sends her apologies to you, as do I." The girl looked up.
+"It's signed by Sir Lewis," she said. "Does that mean anything to you,
+Mr. Malone?"
+
+"I'm afraid it does," Malone said bleakly. "It means entirely too
+much."
+
+
+12
+
+After the great mass of teeth, vaguely surrounded by a face, had faded
+from Malone's screen, he just sat there, looking at the dead, grey
+screen of the visiphone and feeling about twice as dead and at least
+three times as grey.
+
+Things, he told himself, were terrible. But even that sentence, which
+was a good deal more cheerful than what he actually felt, didn't do
+anything to improve his mood. All of the evidence, after all, had been
+practically living on the tip of his nose for nearly twenty-four
+hours, and not only had he done nothing about it, but he hadn't even
+seen it.
+
+Two or three times, for instance, he'd doubted the possibility of
+teleporting another human being. All his logic had told him it wasn't
+so. But, he'd thought, he and Her Majesty had teleported Lou, and so,
+obviously, his logic was wrong.
+
+No, it wasn't, he thought now. There _would_ be too much mental
+resistance, even if the person were unconscious. Teleportation of
+another human being _would_ be impossible.
+
+Unless, of course, the other human being was able to teleport on her
+own.
+
+True, she had been no more than semiconscious. She probably couldn't
+have teleported on her own. But Malone and Her Majesty had, ever so
+kindly and ever so mistakenly, helped her, and Lou had managed to
+teleport to the plane.
+
+And that wasn't all, he thought dismally. That was far from all.
+
+"Let's take another for-instance," he said savagely, in what he
+thought was a caricature of the Manelli voice. In order for all three
+to teleport, there had to be perfect synchronization.
+
+Otherwise, they'd have arrived either at different places, or at the
+same place but at different times.
+
+And perfect synchronization on a psionic level meant telepathy. At
+least two of the three had to be telepathic. Her Majesty was, of
+course. Malone wasn't.
+
+So Lou had to be telepathic, too.
+
+Malone told himself bitterly to quit calling the girl Lou. After the
+way she'd deceived him, she didn't deserve it. Her name was Luba
+Garbitsch, and from now on he was going to call her Luba Garbitsch. In
+his own mind, anyway.
+
+Facts came tumbling in on him like the side of a mountain, falling on
+a hapless traveler during a landslide. And, Malone told himself, he
+had never had less help in all of his ill-starred life.
+
+Her Majesty had never, never suspected that Luba Garbitsch was
+anything other than the girl she pretended to be. That was negative
+evidence, true, and taken alone it meant nothing at all. But when you
+added the other facts to it, it showed, with perfect plainness, that
+Luba Garbitsch was the fortunate possessor of a mind shield as tough,
+as strong and as perfect as any Malone, O'Connor or good old Cartier
+Taylor had ever even thought of dreaming up.
+
+And then, very suddenly, another fact arrived, and pushed the rest out
+into the black night of Malone's bitter mind. He punched hard on the
+intercom button and got the desk of the agent-in-charge.
+
+"Now what's wrong?" the A-in-C said. "Ghosts got loose? Or do you want
+some help with a beautiful blonde heiress?"
+
+"What would I be doing," Malone snapped, "with a beautiful blonde
+heiress?"
+
+The agent-in-charge looked thoughtful. It was obvious that he had been
+saving his one joke up for several hours. "You might be holding her,"
+he suggested, "for ransom, of course."
+
+"That's not funny," Malone said. "Nothing is funny any more."
+
+"Oh, all right," the A-in-C said. "You Washington boys are just too
+good for the rest of us. What's on your mind?"
+
+"You've got a twenty-four-hour watch on Luba Garbitsch, haven't you?"
+Malone said.
+
+"Sure we have," the A-in-C said. "Boyd said--"
+
+"Yes, I know what he said," Malone cut in. "Give me a check on those
+men. I want to find out where she is right now. Right this minute."
+
+The agent-in-charge shrugged. "Sure," he said. "It's none of my
+business. Hang on a second."
+
+The screen went blank, but it didn't go silent. Each of the agents, on
+a stakeout job like the Garbitsch one, would be carrying personal
+communicators, and Malone could hear the voice of the agent-in-charge
+as he spoke to them.
+
+He couldn't make out all the words, and it wasn't important anyhow.
+He'd know soon enough, he kept telling himself; just as soon as the
+A-in-C came back and reported.
+
+It seemed like about twelve years before he did.
+
+"She's all right," he said. "Nothing to worry about; she's probably
+working late at her office, that's all. She hasn't gone home yet."
+
+"Want to bet?" Malone snapped.
+
+"Don't tempt me," the A-in-C said. "I wouldn't take your money--it's
+probably counterfeit, printed in Washington."
+
+"I'll give you ten to one," Malone said.
+
+"Ten to one, I'll take," the A-in-C said rapidly. "Ten to one is like
+taking candy from a traffic cop. I'm no amateur, even if I am stuck
+away in dull little old New York--and I know the boys I've got on
+stakeout. I'll check, and--"
+
+"Let me know when you do," Malone said. "I've got some long-distance
+calls to make."
+
+* * * * *
+
+Forty-five minutes later, he had all the news he needed. Spot checks
+on PRS offices on the West Coast, where it wasn't closing time yet,
+showed that all the executive officers had suddenly felt the need of
+extended vacations to parts unknown.
+
+That, if not exactly cheering news, was still welcome; Malone had more
+backing for his theory.
+
+An overseas call to New Scotland Yard in London took a little more
+time, and several arguments with bored overseas operators who,
+apparently, had nothing better to do than to confuse the customers.
+But Malone finally managed to get Assistant Commissioner C. E. Teal,
+who promised to check on Malone's inquiry at once.
+
+It seemed like years before he called back, and Malone leaped to the
+phone.
+
+"Yes?" he said.
+
+Teal, red-faced and apparently masticating a stick of gum, said: "I
+got C. I. D. Commander Gideon to follow up on that matter, Mr. Malone.
+It is rather late here, as you must realize--"
+
+"Yes?" Malone said. "And they've all gone?"
+
+"Why, no," Teal said, surprised. "A spot check shows that most of the
+executives of the London branch of the Psychical Research Society are
+spending quiet evenings in their homes. Our Inspector Ottermole
+actually spoke to Dr. Carnacki, the head of the office here."
+
+"Oh," Malone said.
+
+"They haven't skipped," Teal went on. "Is this in connection with
+anything serious, Mr. Malone?"
+
+"Not yet," Malone said. "But I'll let you know at once if there are
+any further developments. Thanks very much, Mr. Teal."
+
+"A pleasure, Mr. Malone," Teal said. "A pleasure." And then, still
+masticating, he switched off.
+
+And that, Malone told himself, was definitely that. Of course the
+British PRS hadn't gone underground; why should they? The British
+police weren't on to them, as Scotland Yard showed. And, no matter
+what opinions Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I might hold in the matter,
+the FBI had absolutely no jurisdiction in the British Isles.
+
+Malone buried his face in his hands, thought about a cigar and decided
+that even a cigar might make him feel worse. Where were they? What
+were they doing now? What did they plan to do?
+
+Where had they gone?
+
+"Out of the everywhere," he said in a hollow, sepulchral voice, "into
+the here."
+
+But where was the here?
+
+He tried to make up his mind whether or not that made sense.
+Superficially, it sounded like plain bad English, but he wasn't sure
+of anything any more. Things were getting much too confused.
+
+There was a knock at the door.
+
+Malone, without any hope at all, called: "Come in," and the door
+opened.
+
+The agent-in-charge came in, and dropped a dollar on Malone's desk.
+
+"So you checked," Malone said.
+
+"I checked," the A-in-C said sadly. "The boys went through the entire
+damned building. Not a sign of her. Not even a trace."
+
+"There wouldn't be one," Malone said, shoving the dollar back to
+waiting hands. "Take the money; I knew what would happen. It was a
+sucker bet."
+
+"Well, I feel like the sucker, all right," the A-in-C said. "I don't
+know how she did it."
+
+"I do," Malone said quietly. "Teleportation."
+
+The A-in-C whistled. "Well," he said, "it was a great secret as long
+as it was FBI property. But now, friend, all hell is going to bust
+loose."
+
+"It already has," Malone said hollowly.
+
+"Great," the A-in-C said. "What now?"
+
+"Now," Malone said, "I am going to go back to Washington. Take care of
+poor little old New York for me."
+
+He closed his eyes, and vanished.
+
+When he opened them, he was in his Washington apartment. He went over
+to the big couch and sat down, feeling that if he were going to curse
+he might as well be comfortable while he did it. But when the air was
+bright blue, some minutes later, he didn't feel any better. Cursing
+was not the answer.
+
+Nothing seemed to be.
+
+What was his next move?
+
+Where did he go from here?
+
+The more he thought about it, the more his mind spun. He was, he
+realized, at an absolute, total, dead end.
+
+Oh, there were things he could do. Malone knew that very well. He
+could make a lot of noise and go through a lot of waste motion--that
+was what it would amount to. He could have all the homes of all the
+missing PRS members checked. That would result, undoubtedly, in the
+discovery that the PRS members involved weren't in their homes. He
+could have their files impounded, which would clutter everything with
+a great many more pieces of paper, and none of the pieces of paper
+would do any good to him. In general, he could have the entire FBI
+chasing all over hell and gone--and finding nothing whatever.
+
+No, it would be a waste of time, he told himself. That much was
+certain.
+
+And, though he probably had enough evidence to get the FBI in motion,
+he had nowhere near enough to carry the case into court, much less
+make a try at getting the case to stand up in court. That was one
+thing he couldn't do, even if he wanted to: issue warrants for arrest
+on any basis whatever.
+
+But Malone was an FBI agent, and his motto was: "There's always a
+way." No normal method of tracking down the PRS members, and finding
+their present whereabouts, was going to work. They'd been covering
+themselves for such an emergency, undoubtedly, for a good many years
+and, due to telepathy, they certainly knew enough not to leave any
+clues around, of any kind.
+
+But nobody, Malone told himself, was perfect. There were clues lying
+around somewhere, he was sure of that; there had to be. The problem
+was, simply, to figure out where to look, and what to look for.
+
+Somewhere, the clues were sitting quietly and waiting for him to find
+them. The thought cheered him slightly, but not very much. Instead, he
+went into the kitchen and started heating water for coffee. He thought
+there might be a long night ahead of him, and sighed gently. But there
+was no help for it. The work had to be done, and done quickly.
+
+But when eight cigars had been reduced to ash, and what seemed like
+several gallons of coffee had sloshed their way into Malone's interior
+workings, his mind was as blank as a baby's. The lovely, opalescent
+dawn began to show in the East, and Malone swore at it. Then, haggard,
+red-eyed, confused, violently angry, and not one inch closer to a
+solution, he fell into a fitful doze on his couch.
+
+* * * * *
+
+When he awoke the sun was high in the sky, and outside his window the
+cheerful sound of traffic floated in the air. Downstairs somebody was
+playing a television set too loudly, and the voice reached Malone's
+semi-aware mind in a great tinny shout:
+
+"And now, the makers of Bon-Ton B-Complex Bolsters--the blanket of
+health--present Mother Kohler's Chit-Chat Hour!"
+
+The invisible audience screamed and howled. Malone ripped out a
+particularly foul oath and sat up on the couch. "That," he muttered,
+"is a fine thing to wake up to." He focused his eyes, with only
+slight difficulty, on his watch. The time was exactly noon.
+
+"But first," the announcer burbled downstairs, "a word from Mother
+Kohler herself, about the brand new special B-Complex _Irradiated_
+Bolster you can get at your neighborhood stores..."
+
+"Shut up," Malone said. He had wasted a lot of time doing nothing but
+sleeping, he told himself. This was no time to be listening to
+television. He got up and found, to his vague surprise, that he felt a
+lot better and more clear-headed than he'd been feeling. Maybe the
+sleep had done him some good.
+
+He yawned, blinked and stretched, and then he padded into the
+bathroom, showered and shaved and put on fresh clothes. He thought
+about having a morning cup of coffee, but last night's dregs appeared
+to have taken up permanent residence in his digestive tract, and he
+decided against it at last. He swallowed some orange juice and toast
+and then, heaving a great sigh of resignation and brushing crumbs off
+his shirt, he teleported himself over to his office.
+
+He was going to have to face Burris eventually, he knew.
+
+And now was just as good, or as bad, a time as any.
+
+Malone didn't hesitate. He punched the button on his intercom for
+Burris' office and then sat back, with his eyes closed, for the
+well-known voice.
+
+It didn't come.
+
+Instead, Wolf, the director's secretary, spoke up.
+
+"Burris isn't in, Malone," he said. "He had to fly to Miami. I can get
+a call through to him on the plane, if it's urgent, but he'll be
+landing in about fifteen minutes. And he did say he'd call this
+afternoon."
+
+"Oh," Malone said. "Sure. Okay. It isn't urgent." He was just as glad
+of the reprieve; it gave him one more chance to work matters through
+to a solution, and report success instead of failure. "But what's
+going on in Miami?" he added.
+
+"Don't you read the papers?" Wolf asked.
+
+Everybody, Malone reflected, seemed to be asking him that lately. "I
+haven't had time," he said.
+
+"The governor of Mississippi was assassinated yesterday, at Miami
+Beach," Wolf said.
+
+"Ah," Malone said. He thought about it for a second. "Frankly," he
+said, "this does not strike me as an irreparable loss to the nation.
+Not even to Mississippi."
+
+"You express my views precisely," Wolf said.
+
+"How about the killer?" Malone said. "I gather they haven't got him
+yet, or Burris wouldn't be on his way down."
+
+"No," Wolf said. "The killer would be on his way here instead. They
+haven't got him, Malone. It seems Governor Flarion was walking along
+Collins Avenue when somebody fired at him, using a high-powered rifle
+with, I guess, a scope sight."
+
+"Professional," Malone commented.
+
+"It looks like it," Wolf said. "Nobody even heard the sniper's shot;
+the governor just fell over, right there in the street. And by the
+time his bodyguards found out what had happened, it was impossible
+even to be sure just which way he was facing when the shot had been
+fired."
+
+"And, as I remember Collins Avenue--" Malone started.
+
+"Right," Wolf said. "Out where Governor Flarion was taking his stroll,
+there's an awful lot of it to search. The boys are trying to find
+somebody who might have seen a man acting suspicious in any of the
+nearby buildings, or heard a shot, or seen anybody at all lurking or
+loitering anywhere remotely close to the scene."
+
+"Lovely," Malone said. "Sounds like a nice complicated job."
+
+"You don't know the half of it," Wolf said. "There's also the Miami
+Beach Chamber of Commerce. According to them, Flarion died of a heart
+attack, and not even in Miami Beach. The bullet and the body are
+supposed to be written off as just coincidences, to keep the fair name
+of Miami Beach unsullied."
+
+"All I can say," Malone offered, "is good luck. This is the saddest
+day in American history since the assassination of Huey P. Long."
+
+"Agreed," Wolf said. "Want me to tell Burris you called?"
+
+"Right," Malone said. He flicked off.
+
+Now, he asked himself, how did the assassination of Governor Nemours
+P. Flarion fit in with anything? Granted, good old Nemours P. had been
+a horrible mistake, a paranoid, self-centered, would-be dictator whose
+talents as a rabble-rouser and a fearmonger had somehow managed to get
+him elected to a governorship. Certainly nobody felt particularly
+unhappy about his death. But he wouldn't fit into the pattern. Malone
+reminded himself that that was one more thing he had to find out when
+he got the chance.
+
+The trouble lay in finding an opportunity, he thought--and then he
+corrected himself.
+
+Not _finding_ it--_making_ it. Nobody was going to hand him anything
+on a silver serving salver.
+
+He punched the intercom again and got the Records office.
+
+"Yes, sir?" a familiar voice said.
+
+"Potter?" Malone said. "This is Malone. I want facsimiles of
+everything we have on the Psychical Research Society, on Sir Lewis
+Carter, and on Luba Vasilovna Garbitsch. Both of those last are
+connected with the Society."
+
+"Right," Potter said. "They'll be up at once."
+
+Then he punched again, and asked for the latest copy of the Washington
+_Post_. He gave the article on Governor Flarion one quick glance, but
+it didn't contain anything in the way of facts that he hadn't already
+had from Wolf. After that, he left it and concentrated on the more
+prosaic, human-interest news, the smaller stories.
+
+     FIFTH SPLINTER GROUP FORMS IN DCA BATTLE
+
+That was an interesting one, he thought. The Daughters of Colonial
+Americans had about reached the point of diminishing returns in their
+battle over the claims of Rose Carswell Elder, a descendant of a Negro
+freedman named William Elder who had lived in Boston in 1776 and
+fought on the side of the Colonies during the Revolution. One more
+splinter group, Malone thought, and there'd be as many splinters as
+members. Rose Carswell Elder was pressing her claim for membership,
+and the ladies were replying by throwing crockery and hard words at
+each other.
+
+Then there was the Legion of American War Veterans. The headline on
+this one read:
+
+     LAWV OUSTS 'ROWDIES': AID MEETING CONTINUES
+
+The "rowdies," Malone discovered, were a large minority group that
+wanted the good old days of electric canes, paper hats, whistles and
+pretty girls. "The Legion has grown up," a spokesman told them. "This
+convention is being held to discuss the possibility of increased
+technological aid to India and Africa. There is no place for
+tomfoolery or high jinks."
+
+The expulsion order had been carried by a record majority.
+
+And then there were two items, on different pages, that seemed to
+contradict each other. The first was a small headline on page
+fourteen:
+
+     RESIGNATIONS REACH NEW HIGH IN U.S. COLLEGE FACULTIES
+
+Teachers were apparently resigning all over the place, in virtually
+every department of virtually every college. That made sense. And the
+other item, on page three, made just as much sense:
+
+     HIGHER TAXES VOTED THROUGHOUT U.S.
+     FOR TEACHER INCOME RISE
+     State and Federal Aid Also Promised
+     in Drive to Raise Salaries Now
+
+Apparently, teachers were resigning just as they were about to get
+more money than they'd ever seen before. But Malone could fit that
+into the pattern easily enough; it was perfectly obvious, once he
+thought about it.
+
+Malone didn't have time to go through much more of the paper; the
+facsimile records he'd been waiting for arrived, and he put the _Post_
+aside and concentrated on them instead. Maybe somewhere in the records
+was the clue he desperately needed.
+
+The PRS was widely spread, all right. It had branches in almost every
+major city in the United States, in Europe, South Africa, South
+America and Australia. There was even a small branch society in
+Greenland. True, the Communist disapproval of such non-materialistic,
+un-Marxian objectives as Psychical Research showed up in the fact that
+there were no registered branches in the Sino-Soviet bloc. But that,
+Malone thought, didn't really matter. Maybe in Russia they called
+themselves the Lenin Study Group, or the Better Borshcht League. He
+was fairly sure, from what he'd experienced, that the PRS had some
+kind of organization even behind the Iron Curtain.
+
+Money didn't seem to be much of a problem, either. Malone checked for
+the supporters of the organization and found a microfilmed list that
+ran into the hundreds of thousands of names, most of them ordinary
+people who seemed to be interested in spiritualism and the like, and
+who donated a few dollars apiece each year to the PRS. Besides this
+mass of small donations, of course, there were a few large ones, from
+independently wealthy men who gave support to the organization and
+seemed actively interested in its aims.
+
+It wasn't an unusual picture; it was just an exceptionally big one.
+
+Malone sighed and went on to the personal dossiers.
+
+Sir Lewis Carter himself was a well-known astronomer and
+mathematician. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal
+Astronomical Society and the Royal Mathematical Society. He had been
+knighted for his contributions in higher mathematics only two years
+before he had come to live in the United States. Malone went over the
+papers dealing with his entry into the country carefully, but they
+were all in order and they contained absolutely no clues he could use.
+
+Sir Lewis' books on political and historical philosophy had been
+well-received, and he had also written a novel, _But Some Are More
+Equal,_ which, for a few weeks after publication, had managed to reach
+the bottom of the best-seller list.
+
+And that was that. Malone tried to figure out whether all this
+information did him any good at all, and he didn't have to think for
+very long. The answer was no. He opened the next dossier.
+
+Luba Vasilovna Garbitsch had been born in New York. Her mother had
+been a woman of Irish descent named Mary O'Keefe, and had died in '68.
+Her father, of course, had now been revealed as a Russian agent, and
+was at present making his home, such as it probably was, in good old
+Moscow.
+
+Malone sighed. Somewhere in the dossiers, he was sure, there was a
+clue, the basic clue that would tell him everything he needed to know.
+His prescience had never been so strong; he knew perfectly well that
+he was staring at the biggest, most startling and most complete
+disclosure of all. And he couldn't see it.
+
+He stared at the folders for a long minute. What did they tell him?
+What was the clue?
+
+And then, very slowly, the soft light of a prodigal sun illuminated
+his mind.
+
+"Mr. Malone," Malone said gently, "you are a damned fool. There are
+times when it is necessary to discard the impossible after you have
+seen that the obscure is the obvious."
+
+He wasn't sure whether that meant anything, or even whether he knew
+what he was saying. He was sure of only one thing: the final answer.
+
+And it _was_ obvious. Obvious as all hell.
+
+
+13
+
+There was, of course, only one thing to do, and only one place to go.
+Malone went downstairs without even stopping to wave farewell to the
+agent-in-charge, and climbed into the big, specially-built FBI Lincoln
+that waited for him.
+
+"Want a driver?" one of the mechanics asked.
+
+"No, thanks," Malone said. "This one's a solo job."
+
+That was for sure. He drove out onto the streets and into the heavy
+late afternoon traffic of Washington, D. C. The Lincoln handled
+smoothly, but Malone didn't press his luck among the rushing cars. He
+wasn't in any hurry. He had all the time in the world, and he knew it.
+They--and, for once, Malone knew just who "they" were--would still be
+waiting for him when he got there.
+
+_If_ he got there, he thought suddenly, dodging a combination
+roadblock consisting of a green Plymouth making an illegal turn, a
+fourteen-year-old boy on a bicycle and a sweet young girl pushing a
+baby carriage. He managed to get past and wiped his forehead with one
+hand. He continued driving, even more carefully, until he was out of
+the city.
+
+It took quite a lot of time. Washington traffic was getting worse and
+worse with every passing month, and the pedestrians were as nonchalant
+as ever. As Malone turned a corner, a familiar face popped into view,
+practically in front of his car. He swerved and got by without
+committing homicide, and a cheerful voice said: "Thanks, sorry."
+
+"It's okay, Chester," Malone said. The big man skipped back to the
+sidewalk and watched the car go by. Malone knew him slightly, a
+private eye who did some work on the fringes of Washington crime;
+basically a nice guy, but a little too active for Malone's taste.
+
+For a second he thought of asking the man to accompany him, but the
+last thing Malone needed was muscle. What he wanted was brains, and he
+even thought he might be developing some of those.
+
+He was nearly sure of it by the time he finally did leave the city and
+get out onto the highway that went south into the depths of Virginia.
+And, while he drove, he began to use that brain, letting his reflexes
+take over most of the driving problems now that the Washington traffic
+tangle was behind him.
+
+He took all his thoughts from behind the shield that had sheltered
+them and arrayed them neatly before him. Everything was perfectly
+clear; all he had to do now was explain it.
+
+Malone had wondered, over the years, about the detectives in books.
+They always managed to wrap everything up in the last chapter--and
+that was all right. But they always had a whole crowd of suspects
+listening to them, too. And Malone knew perfectly well that he could
+never manage a set-up like that. People would be interrupting him.
+Things would happen. Dogs would rush in and start a fight on the
+floor. There would be earthquakes, or else somebody would suddenly
+faint and interrupt him.
+
+But now, at long last, he realized, he had his chance.
+
+Nobody, he thought happily, could interrupt him. And he could explain
+to his heart's content.
+
+Because the members of the PRS were telepathic. And Malone, he thought
+cheerfully, was not.
+
+Somebody, he was sure, would be tuned in on him as he drove toward
+their Virginia hiding place. And he hoped that that somebody would
+alert everybody else, so they could all tune in and hear his grand
+final explanation of everything.
+
+_And a hearty good afternoon to everybody,_ he thought. _A very hearty
+and happy and sunny good afternoon to all--and most especially to Miss
+Luba Garbitsch. I hope she's the one who's tuned in--or that somebody
+has alerted her by now, because I'd rather talk to her than to anyone
+else I can think of out there._
+
+_Nothing personal, you understand. It's just that I'd like to show off
+a little. I don't need to hide anything from you--as a matter of
+plain, simple fact, I can't. Not with my shield down._
+
+He paused then, and, in his imagination, he could almost hear Lou's
+voice.
+
+"I'm listening, Kenneth," the voice said. "Go on."
+
+_Well, then,_ he thought. He fished around in his mind for a second,
+wondering exactly where to start. Then he decided, in the best
+traditions of the detective story, not to mention _Alice in
+Wonderland,_ to start at the beginning.
+
+_The dear old Psychical Research Society,_ he thought, _had been going
+along for a good many years now--since the 1880's, as a matter of
+fact, or somewhere near there. That's a long time and a lot of
+research. A lot of famous and intelligent men and women have belonged
+to the Society. And in all that time, they've worked hard, and worked
+sincerely, in testing every kind of psychic phenomenon. They've worked
+impartially and scientifically to find out whether a given unusual
+incident was explicable in terms of known natural laws, or was the
+result of some unknown force._
+
+_And it's hardly surprising that, after about a hundred years of work,
+something finally came of it._
+
+"Not surprising at all," he imagined Lou's voice saying. "You're
+making things very clear, Kenneth."
+
+Or had that been "Sir Kenneth"? Malone wasn't sure, but it didn't
+really matter. He spun the car around a curve in the highway, smiled
+gently to himself, and went on.
+
+_Naturally, to the average man in the street, the Society was just a
+bunch of crackpots, and the more respected and famous the people who
+belonged to it, the happier he was; it just proved his superiority to
+them. He didn't deal with crackpot notions, did he?_
+
+_No, the Society did. And nobody except the members paid much
+attention to what was going on._
+
+_I remember one of the book facsimiles you gave me, for instance. Some
+man, whose name I can't recall, wrote a great "expose" of the Society,
+in which he tried to prove that Sir Lewis Carter and certain other
+members were trying to take over the world and run it to suit
+themselves, making a sort of horrible dictatorship out of their power
+and position. At that, he wasn't really far from the truth, though he
+had it turned around a little. But the book shows that he has no
+knowledge whatever of what psionics is, or how it works. He seems to
+me to be just a little afraid of it, which probably adds to his
+ignorance. And, as a result, he got a twisted idea of what the PRS is
+actually doing._
+
+He could almost hear Lou's voice again. "Yes," she was saying. "I
+remember the book. It was put in our reference library for its
+humorous aspects."
+
+_That's right,_ Malone thought. _It would be only funny to you. But it
+would be frightening and terrible to an awful lot of people simply
+because they wouldn't understand what the Society was all about._
+
+"All right," Lou's voice said helpfully. "And what _is_ it all about?"
+
+Malone settled back in the driver's seat as the car continued to spin
+along the road. _It seems to me,_ he thought carefully, _that any
+telepath has to go one of two ways. Either, like Her Majesty or the
+others we found when we discovered her two years ago, the telepath
+ends up insane--or perhaps commits suicide, which is simply one step
+further in retreat--or else he learns to understand and control his
+own powers, and to understand other human beings so well that, if he
+actually did control the world, everyone would benefit in the long
+run._
+
+_The difference between the two kinds is the difference between Her
+Majesty and the PRS._
+
+"That's good thinking," he could hear Lou say.
+
+_No, it isn't,_ he thought; _it's no more than guessing, and it could
+be just as wild as you please. But there is one thing I do know: the
+way to get a better world, or anyhow the first step, is to clear the
+road ahead. And that means getting rid of the fools, idiots, maniacs,
+blockheads, morons, psychopaths, paranoids, timidity-ridden,
+fear-worshipers, fanatics, thieves, criminals and a whole lot more._
+
+"Get rid of them?" Lou's voice said.
+
+_Well,_ Malone thought, _I don't mean they've got to be killed or
+driven out of the civilized world. You've just got to get them out of
+any place where their influence is heavily felt on society as a
+whole._
+
+"All right," Lou's voice said pleasantly. "And how could we go about
+that? Do we write nasty letters to the editor?"
+
+_There's a much more effective way,_ Malone thought. _There's no
+trouble in getting rid of a man if you can make him expose himself.
+And you've managed that pretty well. You've thwarted their idiotic
+plans, made them stumble over their own fumble-mindedness, played on
+their neuroses, concocted errors for them to fight and, in general,
+rigged things in any possible way so that they'd quit, or get fired,
+or lose elections, or get arrested, or just generally get put out of
+circulation somehow._
+
+_It's extremely effective--and it works very well._
+
+_Sometimes, you've only had to put the blocks to individuals.
+Sometimes whole nations have had to go. And sometimes it's been
+in-between, and you've managed to foul up whole organizations with
+misplaced papers missent messages, error, and changed minds and
+everything else you can think of._
+
+_As a matter of fact, it sounds like fun._
+
+"Well," he imagined Lou saying, "it is fun, in away. But it's a deadly
+serious business, too."
+
+_Sure it is,_ Malone thought. _I think the first time that came home
+to me was when I saw what was happening in Russia, and compared it to
+what had been going on over here. Tom Boyd saw that, too, when I
+pointed it out to him--as you probably know if you were spying on my
+mind at the time._
+
+_Not that I mind that in the least._
+
+_Come more often, by all means._
+
+_But Tom, in case you weren't listening, said: "Over here there are a
+lot of confused jerks and idiots... And in Russia there's a lot of
+confusion."_
+
+_Now, that's perfectly true, and it spells out the difference. Over
+here, you've been confusing the jerks and the idiots, getting rid of
+them so the system can work properly. Over in Russia, on the other
+hand, you've left the jerks and the idiots all alone to do their dirty
+work, and you've just added to the confusion where necessary, so that
+the system will break down of its own weight._
+
+"But, after all," Lou said, "things look pretty bad over here, too.
+Look at the papers."
+
+_Everybody,_ Malone thought, _has been telling me to go and look at
+the newspapers. And when I do look at them I find all sorts of
+evidence of confusion. Teachers resigning, senators and
+representatives goofing up bills on Congress, gang wars cluttering up
+the streets with cadavers and making things tough for the Sanitation
+Department, factional fights in various organizations. Now, all of
+that looks pretty horrible in the papers, but do you know something?
+It isn't horrible at all._
+
+_It's pretty damn good, as a matter of fact._
+
+_The teachers who are resigning, for instance, are the nincompoops
+who've got to be pruned out so that competent teachers can come in.
+And, with the higher salaries, more and more competent men and women
+are going to be attracted to the job. The universities are going to be
+freer and better places to work in; they won't be monopolies any
+more._
+
+"Monopolies?" Lou said.
+
+_In restraint of knowledge,_ Malone thought. _The old monopoly was in
+restraint of trade, and legal action helped to kill that kind. The
+monopoly in restraint of knowledge took a little more killing, but
+you're doing the job quite nicely. And not only in the schools._
+
+_The factional fights are having the same result. Look at the AAAM,
+for instance. That organization is a monopoly, pure and simple.
+Simple, anyhow. And what the factional fights are doing to it is just
+breaking up the monopoly and letting knowledge free again._
+
+_And then we come to Congress. Senators and representatives are having
+a terrible time, some of them. There's a fight going on between
+Furbisher and Deeks because Deeks has discovered some evidence against
+Furbisher. Who's having the terrible time?_
+
+_All of them?_
+
+_Nope. Furbisher is. Deeks isn't._
+
+_And that's the way it's going all over. The useful, necessary
+legislation is going through Congress now without being cluttered up
+by stupid dam bills and water bills and other idiocies that simply
+clog the works._
+
+_And then, of course, there are the gang wars. Now, I feel as sorry
+for the Sanitation Department as anybody, but at least they're
+cleaning the streets for good now. The boys who are dying off and
+getting sent to hospitals and jails are just the ones who should have
+been sent away long ago. Everybody knows that, but nobody can prove
+it._
+
+_Except the PRS._
+
+_And the PRS is busy doing just what it can about that proof._
+
+_And all it takes is a few of you. I don't know how many--I don't know
+how many of you there really are, for that matter. But it must be a
+fair number to stock all your branches with "top-level" executives and
+the lower-level men and women who really believe in the PRS blind, and
+do their best to keep it working._
+
+_There are probably a lot of ways it might work, but the simplest and
+best way I can think of is this one: there's a clearing-house sort of
+set-up, and information comes in from various telepathic spies working
+for the PRS, about various projected activities of the imbecile
+contingent._
+
+_And, from this information, you figure out the best time and place
+for lightning to strike, and you select the kind of lightning it's
+going to be. Here it's a misplaced letter, there some "facts" that
+aren't facts, and somewhere else a dropped package of secret records.
+Somebody goofs--and is exposed._
+
+_Maybe it works on the local-organization level. Maybe there are teams
+all over the country, all ready to synchronize their minds and jab
+somebody in the thought processes at just the right time, in just the
+right way, as soon as they get the word. That's one way of doing it,
+maybe the best way._
+
+_There are others, but it doesn't really matter how that end of it
+works. The important thing is that it does work._
+
+_And, when it works, it can certainly create quite a mess. Yes-sirree,
+Bob. Or Lou, as the case may be._
+
+_I sure hope somebody's picking all this up, because I'd hate to have
+to explain it again when I get there._
+
+_Are you there, anybody?_
+
+Malone imagined he heard Lou's voice. "Yes, Ken," she said. "Yes, I'm
+here."
+
+But, of course, there was no way for them to get through to him. They
+were telepathic, but Kenneth J. Malone wasn't he told himself sadly.
+
+_Hello, out there,_ he thought. _I hope you've been listening so far,
+because there isn't going to be too much more. But there are a couple
+of things that still need to be cleared up. I've got some answers, but
+there are others I'm going to need._
+
+_There's Russia, for instance. It does seem to me as if your teams in
+Russia, whatever they're calling themselves, are having a lot more fun
+than the U. S. teams. For one thing they've got an easier job._
+
+_In this country, the teams are looking for ways to get rid of the
+blockheads, and there are a lot of them. In Russia, you don't have to
+get rid of the blockheads. All you have to do is clear the road for
+them. And you can do that by fouling up the more intelligent people._
+
+"Intelligent people?" he could hear Lou say.
+
+_Intelligence doesn't mean good sense,_ Malone thought. _I don't doubt
+that the men who are maintaining Russia's power are intelligent men--
+but what they're doing is bad for the world as a whole, in the long
+run._
+
+_So you foul them up, and leave the blockheads a clear field to run
+the country into the ground. And that's easier than fouling up the
+blockheads._
+
+_Sure it is._
+
+_There are fewer intelligent, active people around than there are
+blockheads._
+
+_Always were._
+
+_And maybe there always will be--but not if the PRS can help it._
+
+_Oh, and by the way,_ Malone thought. _You do know how I spotted you,
+don't you? You were tuned in then, weren't you?_
+
+_And I don't mean just Lou. I mean all of you._
+
+_In a world of blind men, the man who can see stands out. In a world
+of the insane, the sane man stands out._
+
+_And in a world where organizations are regularly being confused and
+fouled up--either as whole organizations, or through your attempts to
+get rid of individual members--a smooth-running, efficient
+organization stands out like a sore thumb._
+
+_Frankly, it took me longer to see it than it should have._
+
+_But I've got the answer at last--the main answer. Though, as I say,
+there are some others I'd like to have._
+
+_Like, for instance, Russia. And exactly what did happen that night in
+Moscow._
+
+
+14
+
+At this point Malone suddenly became aware of a sound that was not
+coming from his own mind. It was coming from somewhere behind his car,
+and it was a very loud sound. It was, he discovered when he looked
+back, the siren of a highway patrolman on a motorcycle, coming toward
+him at imminent risk of life and limb and waving frantically with an
+unbelievably free hand.
+
+Malone glanced down at the speedometer. With a sigh, he realized that
+his reflexes had allowed him a little leeway, and that he was going
+slightly over the legal speed limit for this Virginia highway. He
+shook his head, eased up on the accelerator, and began to apply the
+brakes.
+
+By the time he had pulled over to the side of the road, the highway
+patrolman was coming to a halt behind the big Lincoln. Malone watched
+him check the number on the rear plate and then walk slowly around to
+the window on the driver's side. "Can't you hurry?" Malone muttered
+under his breath. "All this Virginian ease is okay in its place,
+but--" In the meanwhile he was getting out his identification, and by
+the time the patrolman reached him he had it in his hand.
+
+"I'm sorry," he said.
+
+"Sorry?" the patrolman said, frowning. He had an open, boyish face
+with freckles and a pug nose. He looked like somebody's kid brother,
+very dependable but just a little cute. "What for?" he said.
+
+Malone shrugged. "What else?" he said. "Speeding."
+
+"Oh, that," the patrolman said. "Why, don't you worry about that."
+
+"Don't worry about it?" Malone said. This particular kid brother was
+obviously a little nuts, and should have been put away years ago. He
+ground his teeth silently, but he didn't make any complaints. It was
+never wise, he knew, to irritate a traffic cop of any sort.
+
+"Sure not," the patrolman said. "Why, we don't pay any attention out
+here until a fella hits ten miles over the posted limit. That's okay."
+
+"Fine," Malone said cheerily. "Then I can drive on?"
+
+"Now, just hold it a second there," the patrolman said. "Let's see
+your identification if you don't mind."
+
+Malone held it out wordlessly. The patrolman, obviously intent on
+finding out just what kind of paper the card was made of, who had
+printed it and whether there were any germs on it, gave it a long,
+careful scrutiny. Malone shifted slightly in his seat, counted to ten
+and managed to say nothing.
+
+Then the patrolman started reading the card aloud. "Kenneth J.
+Malone," he said in a tone of some surprise. "Special Agent of the
+FBI." He looked up. "That right?" he said. "What it says here?"
+
+"That's right," Malone said. "And you can have my autograph later." He
+regretted the last sentence as soon as it was out of his mouth, but
+the patrolman didn't seem to notice.
+
+"Then you're the man, all right," he said happily. "I caught your
+plate number as you went on by me, back there."
+
+"Plate number?" Malone said. "What am I supposed to have done?" He'd
+overslept, he knew, but that was the only violation of even his
+personal code that he could think of. And it didn't seem likely that
+the Virginia Highway Patrol was sending out its men to arrest people
+who overslept.
+
+"Why, Mr. Malone," the patrolman said with honest surprise written all
+over his Norman Rockwell face, "as far as I know you didn't do a thing
+wrong."
+
+"But--"
+
+"They just told us to be on the watch for a black 1973 Lincoln with
+your number, and see if you were driving it. They did say you'd
+probably be driving it."
+
+"Good," Malone said. "And I am. And I'd like to continue doing so." He
+paused and then added, "But what happened?"
+
+"Well," the patrolman said, in exactly the manner of a man starting
+out to tell a long, interesting story about the Wars of the Spanish
+Succession, "well, sir, it seems FBI Headquarters in Washington, they
+got in touch with the Highway Patrol Headquarters, down in Richmond,
+and Highway Patrol Headquarters--"
+
+"Down in Richmond," Malone muttered resignedly.
+
+"That's right," the patrolman said in a pleased voice. "Well, they
+called all the local barracks, and then we got the message on our
+radios." He stopped, exactly as if he thought he had finished.
+
+Malone counted to ten again, made it twenty and then found that he was
+capable of speech. "What?" he said in a calm, patient voice, "was the
+message about?"
+
+"Well," the patrolman said, "it seems some fella down in Washington,
+fella name of Thomas Boyd, they said it was, wants to talk to you
+pretty bad."
+
+"He could have called me on the car phone," Malone said in what he
+thought was a reasonable tone of voice. "He didn't have to--"
+
+"There's no call for yelling at me, Mr. Malone," the patrolman said
+reproachfully. "I only obeyed my orders, which were to locate your
+black 1973 Lincoln and see if you were driving it, and give you a
+message. That's all."
+
+"It's enough," Malone muttered. "He didn't have to send out the
+militia to round me up."
+
+"Oh, no, Mr. Malone," the patrolman said. "Not the militia. Highway
+Patrol. We don't rightly have any connection with the militia at all."
+
+"Glad to hear it," Malone said. He picked up the receiver of the car
+phone and waited for the buzz that would show that he was connected
+with Communications Central in Washington.
+
+It didn't come.
+
+"Oh, yes," the patrolman said suddenly. "I suppose that's why this Mr.
+Boyd, he couldn't call you on the car telephone, Mr. Malone. The
+message we got, it also says that the fella at the FBI garage in
+Washington just forgot to plug in that phone there."
+
+"Oh," Malone said. "Well, thanks for telling me."
+
+"You're right welcome, Mr. Malone," the patrolman said "You can plug
+it in now."
+
+"I intend to," Malone said through his teeth. He closed his eyes for a
+long second, and then opened them again. He saw the interested face of
+the patrolman looking down at him. Hurriedly, he turned away, felt
+underneath the dashboard until he found the dangling plug, and
+inserted it into its socket.
+
+The buzz now arrived.
+
+Malone heaved a great sigh and punched for Boyd's office. Then he
+looked around.
+
+The patrolman was still standing at the car window. He was looking
+down at Malone with an interested, slightly blank expression.
+
+Malone thought of several things to say, and chose the most harmless.
+"Thanks a lot," he told the patrolman. "I appreciate your stopping off
+to let me know."
+
+"Oh, that's all right, Mr. Malone," the patrolman said. "That was my
+orders, to do that. And even if they weren't, it was no trouble at
+all. Any time. I'd always be glad to do anything for the FBI."
+
+"Boyd here," a tinny voice from the phone said.
+
+Malone eyed the patrolman sourly. "Malone here," he said. "What's the
+trouble, Tom? I--No, wait a minute."
+
+"Ken!" Boyd's voice said. "I've been trying to--"
+
+"Hold it a second," Malone said. He opened his mouth, and then he saw
+a car go by. The patrolman hadn't seen it. Malone felt sorry for the
+driver, but not too sorry. "Say!" he said to the patrolman.
+
+"Yes, sir?" the patrolman said.
+
+"That boy was really going, wasn't he?" Malone said. "He must have
+been doing at least ninety."
+
+The patrolman jerked his head around to stare at the disappearing car.
+"Well--" he said, and then: "Yes, sir. Thank you, Mr. Malone. Thanks.
+I'll see you later." He raced for his machine, swung aboard and roared
+down the road, guiding with one hand and manipulating the controls of
+his radar set with the other.
+
+Malone waved him a cheery farewell, and got back to the phone.
+
+"Okay, Tom," he said. "Go ahead."
+
+"Who was that you were talking to?" Boyd asked.
+
+"Oh, just a motorcycle patrolman," Malone said. "He wanted to be
+helpful, so I told him to go chase a Buick."
+
+"Why a Buick?" Boyd said, interestedly.
+
+"Why not?" Malone said. "There happened to be one handy at the time.
+Now, what's on your mind?"
+
+"I've been searching all over hell for you," Boyd said. "I wish you'd
+just leave some word where you were going, and then I wouldn't have
+to--"
+
+"Damn it," Malone cut in. "Tom, just tell me what you want. In
+straightforward, simple language. It just took me ten minutes to pry a
+few idiotic facts out of a highway patrolman. Don't make me go through
+it all over again with you."
+
+"Okay, okay," Boyd said. "Keep your pants on. But here's the dope: I
+just flew in from New York, and I brought all the files on the case--
+the stuff you left in your office in New York, remember?"
+
+"Right," Malone said. "Thanks."
+
+"And I think we may be able to get the Big Cheese," Boyd went on.
+
+"Manelli?" Malone said.
+
+"None other than the famous Cesare Antonio," Boyd said. "It seems two
+of his most valued lieutenants were found in a garage in Queens,
+practically weighted down with machine-gun bullets."
+
+Malone thought of Manelli, complaining sadly about the high overhead
+of murder. "And where does that get us?" he said.
+
+"Well," Boyd said, "whoever did the job forgot to search the bodies."
+
+"Oh-oh," Malone said.
+
+"Very much oh-oh," Boyd said. "They're loaded down, not only with
+lead, but with paper. There are documents linking Manelli right up to
+the International Truckers' Union--a direct tie-in with Mike Sand. And
+Sand now says he's tied in with the Great Lakes Transport Union in
+Chicago."
+
+"This sounds like a big one," Malone said.
+
+"You have no idea," Boyd said. "And in the middle of all this, Burris
+called."
+
+"Burris?" Malone said.
+
+"That's right," Boyd said. "He wants me to go on down to Florida and
+take over the investigation of the Flarion assassination. So it looks
+as if I'm going to miss most of the fun."
+
+"Too bad," Malone said.
+
+"But maybe not all," Boyd said. "It may tie in with the case we're
+working on. At least, that's what Burris thinks."
+
+"Yes," Malone said. "I can see why he thinks so. Did he have any
+message for me, by the way?"
+
+"Not exactly," Boyd said.
+
+Malone blinked. "Not exactly?" he said. "What's that supposed to
+mean?"
+
+"Well," Boyd said, "he says he does have something to tell you, but
+it'll wait until he sees you. Then, he says, he'll tell you
+personally."
+
+"Great," Malone said.
+
+"Maybe it's a surprise," Boyd said. "Maybe you're fired."
+
+"I wouldn't have the luck," Malone said. "But if I get any leads on
+the Flarion job, I'll let you know right away."
+
+"Sure," Boyd said. "Thanks. And--by the way, what are you doing now?"
+
+"Me?" Malone said. "I'm driving."
+
+"Yes, I know," Boyd said patiently. "To where, and why? Or is this
+another secret? Sometimes I think nobody loves me any more."
+
+"Oh, don't be silly," Malone said. "The entire city of Miami Beach is
+awaiting your arrival with bated breath."
+
+"But what are you doing?" Boyd said.
+
+Malone chose his words carefully. "I'm just checking a lead," he said
+at last. "I don't know if it's going to pan out or not, but I thought
+I'd drive down to Richmond and check on a name I've got. I'll call you
+about it in the morning, Tom, and let you know what the result is."
+
+"Oh," Boyd said. "Okay. Sure. So long, Ken."
+
+"So long," Malone said. He hung up the phone, put the car into gear
+again and roared off down U. S. Highway Number One. He didn't feel
+entirely happy about the way things had gone; he'd been forced to lie
+to Tom Boyd, and that just wasn't right.
+
+However, there was no help for it. It was actually better this way, he
+told himself hopefully. After all, the less Tom knew from now on, the
+better off he was going to be. The better off everyone would be.
+
+He went on through Fredericksburg without incident, but he didn't
+continue on to Richmond. Instead, he turned off U. S. 1 when he
+reached a little town called Thornburg, which was smaller than he had
+believed a town could be and live. He began following a secondary road
+out into the countryside.
+
+The countryside, of course, was filled with country, in the shape of
+hills, birds, trees, flowers, grass and other distractions to the
+passing motorist. It took Malone quite a bit longer than he expected
+to find the place he was looking for, and he finally came to the sad
+conclusion that country estates are just as difficult to find as
+houses in Brooklyn. In both cases, he thought, there was the same
+frantic search down what seemed to be a likely route, the same
+disappointment when the route turned out to lead nowhere, and the same
+discovery that no one had ever heard of the place and, in fact,
+doubted very strongly whether it even existed.
+
+But he found it at last, rounding a curve in a narrow black-top road
+and spotting the house beyond a grove of trees. He recognized it
+instantly.
+
+He had seen it so often that he felt as if he knew it intimately.
+
+It was a big, rambling, Colonial-type mansion, painted a blinding and
+beautiful white, with a broad, pillared porch and a great carved front
+door. The front windows were curtained in rich purples, and before the
+house was a great front garden, and tall old trees. Malone
+half-expected Scarlett O'Hara to come tripping out of the house at any
+moment.
+
+Inside it, however, if Malone were right, was not the magnetic
+Scarlett. Inside the house were some of the most important members of
+the Psychical Research Society.
+
+But it was impossible to tell from the outside. Nothing moved on the
+well-kept grounds, and the windows didn't show so much as the flutter
+of a purple curtain. There was no sound. No cars were parked around
+the house, nor, Malone thought as he remembered _Gone With the Wind,_
+were there any horses or carriages.
+
+The place looked deserted.
+
+Malone thought he knew better, but it took a few minutes for him to
+get up enough courage to go up the long driveway. He stared at the
+house. It was an old one, he knew, built long before the Civil War and
+originally commanding a huge plantation. Now, all that remained of
+that vast parcel of land was the few acres that surrounded the house.
+
+But the original family still inhabited it, proud of the house and of
+their part in its past. Over the years, Malone knew, they had kept it
+up scrupulously, and the place had been both restored and modernized
+on the inside without harming the classic outlines of the
+hundred-and-fifty-year-old structure.
+
+A fence surrounded the estate, but the front gate was swinging open.
+Malone saw it and took a deep breath. Now, he told himself, or never.
+He drove the Lincoln through the opening slowly, alert for almost
+anything.
+
+There was no disturbance. Thirty yards from the front door he pulled
+the car to a cautious stop and got out. He started to walk toward the
+building. Each step seemed to take whole minutes, and everything he
+had thought raced through his mind again.
+
+Nothing seemed to move anywhere, except Malone himself.
+
+Was he right? Were the PRS people really here? Or had he been led
+astray by them? Had he been manipulated as easily as they had
+manipulated so many others?
+
+That was possible. But it wasn't the only possibility.
+
+Suppose, he thought, that he was perfectly right, and that the PRS
+members were waiting inside. And suppose, too, that he'd misunderstood
+their motives.
+
+Suppose they were just waiting for him to get a little closer.
+
+Malone kept walking.
+
+In just a few steps, he would be close enough so that a bullet aimed
+at him from the house hadn't a real chance of missing him.
+
+And it didn't have to be bullets, either. They might have set a trap,
+he thought, and were waiting for him to walk right into it. Then they
+would hold him prisoner while they devised ways to...
+
+To what? He didn't know. And that was even worse; it called up
+horrible terrors from the darkest depths of Malone's mind. He
+continued to walk forward, feeling about as exposed as a restaurant
+lamb chop caught with its panty down.
+
+He reached the steps that led up to the porch, and took them one at a
+time.
+
+He stood on the porch. A long second passed.
+
+He took a step toward the high, wide and handsome oaken door. Then he
+took another step, and another.
+
+What was waiting for him inside?
+
+He took a deep breath, and pressed the doorbell button.
+
+The door swung open immediately, and Malone involuntarily stepped
+back.
+
+The owner of the house smiled at him from the doorway. Malone let out
+his breath in one long sigh of relief.
+
+"I was hoping it would be you," he said weakly. "May I come in?"
+
+"Why, certainly, Malone. Come on in. We've been expecting you, you
+know," said Andrew J. Burris, director of the FBI.
+
+
+15
+
+Malone sat, quietly relaxed and almost completely at ease, in the
+depths of a huge, comfortable, old-fashioned Morris chair. Three
+similar chairs were clustered with his, around a squat, massive coffee
+table made of a single slab of dark wood set on short, curved legs.
+Malone looked around at the other three with a relaxed feeling of
+recognition: Andrew J. Burris, Sir Lewis Carter, and Luba Vasilovna
+Garbitsch.
+
+"That mind shield of yours," Burris was saying, "is functioning very
+well. We weren't entirely sure you had actually located us until you
+pulled into that driveway."
+
+"I wasn't entirely sure what I was locating," Malone said.
+
+"And so it's over," Burris said with a satisfied air. "Everything's
+over."
+
+"And just beginning," Sir Lewis put in. He drew a pipe from an inside
+pocket and began to fill it.
+
+"And, of course," Burris said, "just beginning. Things do that; they
+go round and round in circles. It's what makes everything so
+confusing."
+
+"And so much fun," Lou said, leaning back in her chair. She didn't
+look hostile now, Malone thought; she looked like a cat, wary but
+content. He decided that he liked this Lou even better than the old
+one. Lou, at home among her psionic colleagues, was even more than
+he'd ever thought she could be.
+
+"More what?" she said suddenly. Burris jerked upright a trifle.
+
+"What's more what?" he said. "Damn it, let's stick to one thing or the
+other. As soon as this thing starts mixing talk and thought it
+confuses me."
+
+"Never mind," Lou said. She smiled across the table at Malone.
+
+Malone jerked a finger under his collar.
+
+"What made you decide to come here?" Sir Lewis said. He had the pipe
+lit now, and blew a cloud of fragrant smoke over the table.
+
+Malone wondered where to start. "One of the clues," he said at last,
+"was the efficiency of the FBI. It hit me the same way the efficiency
+of the PRS had hit me, while I was looking at the batch of reports
+that had been run off so rapidly."
+
+"Ah," Sir Lewis said. "The dossiers."
+
+"Dossiers?" Burris said.
+
+Sir Lewis puffed at his pipe. "Sorry," he said. "I thought you had
+been tuned in for that."
+
+"I was busy," Burris said. "I can't tune into everything. After all,
+I've only got one mind."
+
+"And two hands," Malone said at random.
+
+"At least," Lou said. Their eyes met in a glance of perfect
+understanding.
+
+"What the hell do hands have to do with it?" Burris said.
+
+Sir Lewis shrugged. "Tune in and see," he said. "It's an old joke; but
+you'll never really adjust to telepathy unless you practice."
+
+"Damn it," Burris said, "I practice. I'm always practicing. This and
+that and the other thing--after all, I am the director of the FBI.
+There's a lot to be done."
+
+Sir Lewis puffed at his pipe again. "At any rate," he said smoothly,
+"Mr. Malone had requested some dossiers on us. On the PRS, myself, and
+Luba. They arrived very quickly. The efficiency of that arrival, and
+the efficiency he'd been noting about the FBI ever since he began work
+on this case, finally struck home to him."
+
+"Ah," Burris said. "You see? The FBI's a full-time job. It's got to be
+efficient."
+
+"Of course," Sir Lewis said soothingly.
+
+"Anyhow," Malone said, "Sir Lewis is right. While every other branch
+of the government was having its troubles with the Great Confusion,
+the FBI was ticking along like a transistorized computer."
+
+"A good start," Sir Lewis said.
+
+"Darn good," Burris said. "Malone, I knew I could depend on you.
+You're a good man."
+
+Malone swallowed hard. "Well, anyway," he said after a pause, "when I
+saw that I began to remember a few other things. Starting with a
+couple of years ago, when we first found Her Majesty, remember?"
+
+"I'll never forget it," Burris said fervently. "She knighted me.
+Knight Commander of the Queen's Own FBI. What a moment."
+
+"Thrilling," Malone said. "But you got to Yucca Flats for your
+knighting awfully quickly, a little too fast even for a modern plane."
+
+"It had to be done," Burris said. "Anyhow, I've never really liked
+planes. Basically unsafe. People crash in them."
+
+"But you wouldn't," Malone said. "You could always teleport yourself
+out."
+
+"Sure," Burris said. "But that's troublesome. Why bother? Anyhow, I'd
+been to Yucca Flats before, so I could teleport there--a little way
+down the road, where I could meet my car--without any trouble."
+
+"Anyhow, that was one thing," Malone said. "And then there was Her
+Majesty, when she pointed at that visiphone screen and accused you of
+being the telepathic spy. Remember?"
+
+"She wasn't pointing at me," Burris said. "She was pointing at the man
+in the next room. How about you doing some remembering?"
+
+"Sure she was," Malone said. "But it was just a little coincidence.
+And I have a hunch she felt, subconsciously, that there was something
+not quite right about you."
+
+"Maybe," Burris conceded. "But that doesn't answer my question."
+
+"It doesn't?" Malone said.
+
+"Now look, Malone," Burris said. "None of this is proof. Not real
+proof. Not the kind the FBI has trained you to look for."
+
+"But--"
+
+"What I want to know," Burris said, "is why you came here, to my home?
+And in spite of everything you've said, that hasn't been tied down."
+
+Malone frowned. After a second's thought he said, "Well...  All I know
+is that it just seemed obvious. That's all."
+
+"Indeed it is," Sir Lewis said. "But one of the things we'll have to
+teach you, my boy, is how to distinguish between a deduction from
+observed fact and a psionic intuition. You've been confusing them for
+some years now."
+
+"I have?" Malone said.
+
+"Sure you have," Burris said. "And, what's more--"
+
+"Well, he's no worse than you are, Andrew," Lou said.
+
+Burris turned. "Me?" he said in a voice of withering scorn.
+
+"Certainly," Lou said. "After all, you've never really become used to
+mixtures of thought and speech. And, what's more, you've been using
+telepathy so long that when you try to communicate with nothing but
+words you only confuse yourself."
+
+"And everybody else," Sir Lewis added.
+
+"Hmpf," Burris said. "I'm busy all the time. I haven't got any extra
+time for practice."
+
+Malone nodded, comparatively unsurprised. He'd wondered for years how
+a man so obviously unable to express himself clearly could run an
+organization like the FBI as well as he did. Having psionic abilities
+evidently led to drawbacks as well as advantages.
+
+"Actually," he said, "my prescience made one mistake."
+
+"Really?" Burris said, looking both worried and pleased about it.
+
+"I expected the place to be full of people," Malone said. "I thought
+the elite corps of the PRS would be here."
+
+"Oh," Burris said, looking crestfallen.
+
+"Why, that was no mistake," Sir Lewis said. "As a matter of fact, they
+are all here. But they're quite busy at the moment; things are coning
+to a head, you know, and they must work quite undisturbed."
+
+"And this," Burris added, "is a good place for it. There are sixty
+rooms in this house. Sixty."
+
+"That's a lot of rooms," Malone said politely.
+
+"A mansion," Burris said. "A positive mansion. And my family has lived
+here ever since--"
+
+"I'm sure Ken isn't very interested in your family just now," Lou
+broke in.
+
+"My family," Burris said with dignity, "is a very interesting family."
+
+"I'm sure it must be," Lou said demurely. Sir Lewis choked with
+laughter suddenly and began waving his pipe. After a minute, Malone
+joined in.
+
+"Damn it," Burris said. "Let's stick to one thing or the other. Did I
+say that?"
+
+"Twice," Malone said.
+
+"Sixty rooms," Burris said. "All built by my family. And local
+contractors, of course. That's enough to house sixty rooms full of
+people. And that number of people is a large houseful, I should
+think."
+
+"It sounds like a lot," Malone said.
+
+"It is a lot," Burris said. "All in my house. The house my family
+built."
+
+"And we're grateful for it," Sir Lewis said soothingly. "We truly
+are."
+
+"Good," Burris said.
+
+"You must have had a large family," Lou said.
+
+"A large family," Burris said, "and many guests. Many, many guests.
+From all over. Including famous people. General Hood slept in this
+house, and he slept very well indeed."
+
+"As a matter of fact," Lou added, "he's still sleeping. They call it
+being dead."
+
+"That's not funny," Burris snapped.
+
+"Sorry," Lou said. "It was meant to be."
+
+"I--" Burris shut his mouth and glared.
+
+Malone was far away, thinking of the sixty rooms full of people,
+sitting quietly, their minds ranging into the distance, meshed
+together in small units. It was a picture that frightened and
+comforted him at the same time. He wasn't sure he liked it, but he
+certainly didn't dislike it, either.
+
+After all, he told himself confusedly, too many cooks save a stitch in
+time.
+
+He veered away from that sentence quickly. "Tell me," he said, "were
+you receiving my broadcast on the way here?"
+
+Burris and Sir Lewis nodded. Lou started to nod, too, but stopped and
+looked surprised. "You mean you didn't know we were?" she said.
+
+"How could I know?" Malone said. "After all, I was just tossing it out
+and hoping that somebody was on the listening end."
+
+"But of course somebody was," Lou said. "I was."
+
+"Good," Malone said. "But I still don't see how I was supposed to know
+that you--"
+
+"I answered you, silly," Lou said. "I kept on answering you.
+Remember?"
+
+Malone blinked, focused and then said, very slowly, "That was my
+imagination. Please tell me it was my imagination before I go nuts."
+
+"Sorry," Lou said. "It wasn't."
+
+"But that kind of thing," Malone said, "it takes a tremendous amount
+of power, doesn't it?"
+
+"Not when the receiver is a telepath," Lou said sweetly.
+
+Malone nodded slowly. "That," he said, "is exactly what I'm afraid of.
+Don't tell me--"
+
+There was silence.
+
+"Well?" Malone said.
+
+"You said not to tell you," Lou said instantly.
+
+"All right," Malone said. "I rescind the order. Am I a telepath, or am
+I not?"
+
+Lou's lips didn't move. But then, they didn't have to.
+
+The message came, unbidden, into Malone's mind.
+
+_Of course you are. That was the whole reason for Andrew's assigning
+you to this type of case._
+
+"My God," Malone said softly.
+
+Sir Lewis laid down his pipe in a handy ashtray. "Of course," he said,
+"you will find it difficult to pick up anyone but Lou, at first. The
+rapport between you two is really quite strong."
+
+"Very strong indeed," Lou murmured. Malone found himself beginning to
+blush.
+
+"It will be some time yet," Sir Lewis went on, "before you can really
+call yourself a telepath, my boy."
+
+"I'll bet it will," Malone said. "Before I can call myself a telepath
+I'm going to have to get thoroughly used to the idea. And that's going
+to take a long, long time indeed."
+
+"You only think that," Sir Lewis said. "Actually, you're used to the
+idea now. That was Andrew's big job."
+
+"His big job?" Malone said. "Now, wait a minute--"
+
+"You don't think I picked you for our first psionics case out of thin
+air, do you?" Burris said. "Before anything else, you had to be forced
+to accept the fact that such things as telepaths really existed."
+
+"Oh, they do," Malone said. "They certainly do."
+
+"There's me, for instance," Burris said. "But you had to be convinced.
+So I ordered you to go out and find one."
+
+"Like the Bluebird of Happiness," Malone said.
+
+Burris frowned. "What's like the Bluebird of Happiness?" he said.
+
+"You are," Malone said.
+
+"I am not," Burris said indignantly. "Bluebirds eat worms. My God,
+Malone."
+
+"But the Bluebird," Malone said doggedly, "was right at home all the
+time, while everyone searched for it far away. And I had to go far
+away to find a telepath, when you were the one who ordered me to do
+it."
+
+"Right," Burris said. "So you went and found Her Majesty. And, when
+you did find her, she forced acceptance on you simply by being Her
+Majesty and proving to you, once and for all, that she could read
+minds."
+
+"Great," Malone said. "Of course, I could have got myself killed
+taking these lessons--"
+
+"We were watching you," Burris said. "If anything had happened, we'd
+have been right on the spot."
+
+"In time to bury the body," Malone said. "I think that's very
+thoughtful of you."
+
+"We would have arrived in time to save you," Burris said. "Don't
+quibble. You're alive, aren't you?"
+
+"Well," Malone said slowly, "if you're not sure, I don't know how I
+can convince you."
+
+"There," Burris said triumphantly. "You see?"
+
+Malone sighed wearily. "Okay," he said. "So you sent me out to find a
+telepath and to prove to me that there were such things. And I did.
+And then what happened?"
+
+"You had a year," Burris said, "to get used to the idea of somebody
+reading your mind."
+
+"Thanks," Malone said. "Of course, I didn't know it was you."
+
+"It was Her Majesty too," Burris said. "Everybody."
+
+"Good old Malone," Malone said. "The human peep-show."
+
+"Now, that's what we mean," Sir Lewis broke in. "Subconsciously, you
+disliked the idea of leaving your thoughts bare to anyone, even a
+sweet little old lady. To some extent, you still do. But that will
+pass."
+
+"Goody," Malone said.
+
+"The residue is simply not important," Sir Lewis went on. "Your
+telepathic talents prove that."
+
+"Oh, fine," Malone said. "Here I am reading minds and teleporting and
+all sorts of things. What will the boys back at Headquarters think
+now?"
+
+"We'll get to that," Burris said. "But that first case did one more
+thing for you. Because you didn't like the idea of leaving your mind
+open, you began to develop a shield. That allowed you some sort of
+mental privacy."
+
+"And then," Malone said, "I met Mike Fueyo and his little gang of
+teleporting juvenile delinquents."
+
+"So that you could develop a psionic ability of your own," Burris
+said. "That completed your acceptance. But it took a threat to
+solidify that shield. That was step three. When you discovered your
+mind was being tampered with--"
+
+"The shield started growing stronger," Malone said. "Sure. Her Majesty
+told me that, though she didn't know why."
+
+"Right," Burris said.
+
+"But, wait a minute," Malone said. "How could I do all that without
+knowing it? How would I know that some of my thoughts were safe behind
+a shield if I didn't know the shield existed and couldn't even tell if
+my mind were being read?" He paused. "Does that make sense?" he asked.
+
+"It does," Burris said, "but it shouldn't."
+
+"What?" Malone said.
+
+"Two years ago, you had the answer to that one," Burris said. "Dr.
+O'Connor's machine. Remember why it did detect when a person's mind
+was being read?"
+
+"Oh," Malone said. "Oh, sure. He said that any human being would know,
+subconsciously, whether his mind was being read."
+
+"He did, indeed," Burris said. "And then we came to the fourth step:
+to put you in rapport with some psionicist who could teach you how to
+control the shield, how to raise and lower it, you might say. To learn
+to accept other thoughts, as well as reject them. To learn to accept
+your full telepathic talent. That was Lou's job."
+
+"Lou's ... job?" Malone said. He felt his own shield go up. The
+thoughts behind it weren't pleasant. Lou had been ... well, hired to
+stay with him. She had pretended to like him; it was part of her job.
+
+That was perfectly clear now.
+
+Horribly clear.
+
+"You are now on your way," Sir Lewis said, "to being a real
+psionicist."
+
+"Fine," Malone said dully. "But why me? Why not, oh, Wolfe Wolf? I'd
+think he'd have a better chance than I would."
+
+"My secretary," Burris said, "has talents enough of his own. But you,
+you're something brand-new. It's wonderful, Malone. It's exciting."
+
+"It's a new taste thrill," Malone murmured. "Try Bon-Ton B-Complex
+Bolsters. Learn to eat your blanket as well as sleep with it."
+
+"What?" Burris said.
+
+"Never mind," Malone said. "You wouldn't understand."
+
+"But I--"
+
+"I know you wouldn't," Malone said, "because I don't."
+
+Sir Lewis cleared his throat "My dear boy," he said, "you represent a
+breakthrough. You are an adult."
+
+"That," Malone said testily, "is not news."
+
+"But you are a telepathic adult," Sir Lewis said. "Many of them are
+capable of developing it into a useful ability. Children who have the
+talent may accidentally develop the ability to use it, but that almost
+invariably results in insanity. Without proper guidance, a child is no
+more capable of handling the variety of impressions it receives from
+adult minds than it is capable of understanding a complex piece of
+modern music. The effort to make a coherent whole out of the
+impression overstrains the mind, so to speak, and the damage is
+permanent."
+
+"So here I am," Malone said, "and I'm not nuts. At least I don't think
+I'm nuts."
+
+"Because you are an adult," Sir Lewis went on. "Telepathy seems to be
+almost impossible to develop in an adult, even difficult to test for
+it. A child may be tested comparatively simply; an adult, seldom or
+never."
+
+He paused to relight his pipe.
+
+"However," he went on, "the Psychical Research Society's executive
+board discovered a method of bringing out the ability in a talented
+child as far back as 1931. All of us who are sane telepaths today owe
+our ability to that process, which was applied to us, in each case,
+before the age of sixteen."
+
+"How about me?" Malone said.
+
+"You," Sir Lewis said, "are the first adult ever to learn the use of
+psionic powers from scratch."
+
+"Oh," Malone said. "And that's why Mike Fueyo, for instance, could
+learn to teleport, though his older sister couldn't."
+
+"Mike was an experiment," Sir Lewis said. "We decided to teach him
+teleportation without teaching him telepathy. You saw what happened."
+
+"Sure I did," Malone said. "I had to stop it."
+
+"We were forced to make you stop him," Sir Lewis said. "But we also
+let him teach you his abilities."
+
+"So I'm an experiment," Malone said.
+
+"A successful experiment," Sir Lewis added.
+
+"Well," Malone said dully, "bully for me."
+
+"Don't feel that way," Sir Lewis said. "We have--"
+
+He stopped suddenly, and glanced at the others. Burris and Lou stood
+up, and Sir Lewis followed them.
+
+"Sorry," Sir Lewis said in a different tone. "There's something
+important that we must take care of. Something quite urgent, I'm
+afraid."
+
+"You can go on home, Malone," Burris said. "We'll talk later, but
+right now there's a crisis coming and we've got to help. Leave the
+car. I'll take care of it."
+
+"Sure," Malone said, without moving.
+
+Lou said, "Ken--" and stopped. Then the three of them turned and
+started up the long, curving staircase that led to the upstairs rooms.
+
+Malone sat in the Morris chair for several long minutes, wishing that
+he were dead. Nobody made a sound. He rubbed his hands over the soft
+leather and tried to tell himself that he was lucky, and talented, and
+successful.
+
+But he didn't care.
+
+He closed his eyes at last, and took a deep breath.
+
+Then he vanished.
+
+
+16
+
+Two hours passed, somehow. Bourbon and soda helped them pass, Malone
+discovered; he drank two highballs slowly, trying not to think about
+anything, and kept staring around at the walls of his apartment
+without really seeing anything. He felt terrible.
+
+He made himself a third bourbon and soda and started in on it. Maybe
+this one would make him feel better. Maybe, he thought, he ought to
+break out the cigars and celebrate.
+
+But there didn't seem to be very much to celebrate, somehow.
+
+He felt like a guinea pig being congratulated on having successfully
+resisted a germ during an experiment.
+
+He drank some more of the bourbon and soda. Guinea pigs didn't drink
+bourbon and soda, he told himself. He was better off than a guinea
+pig. He was happier than a guinea pig. But he couldn't imagine any
+guinea pig in the world, no matter how heartbroken, feeling any worse
+than Kenneth J. Malone.
+
+He looked up. There was another guinea pig in the room.
+
+Then he frowned. She wasn't a guinea pig. She was one off the
+experimenters. She was the one the guinea pig was supposed to fall in
+love with, so the guinea pig could be nice and telepathic and all the
+other experimenters could congratulate themselves. But whoever heard
+of a scientist falling in love with a guinea pig? It was fate. And
+fate was awful. Malone had often suspected it, but now he was sure.
+Now he saw things from the guinea pig's side, and fate was terrible.
+
+"But Ken," the experimenter said. "It isn't like that at all."
+
+"It is, too," Malone said. "It's even worse, but that'll have to wait.
+When I have some more to drink it will get worse. Watch and see."
+
+"But Ken--" Lou hesitated, and then went on. "Don't feel sad about
+being an experiment. We're all experiments."
+
+"I'm the guinea pig," Malone said. "I'm the only guinea pig. You said
+so."
+
+"No, Ken," she said. "Remember, all of us in the PRS got early
+training when it was new and untried. Some of those methods weren't as
+good as we now have them; that's why a man like your boss sometimes
+tends to have a little trouble."
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "But I'm your guinea pig. You made me dance
+through hoops and do tricks and everything just for an experiment.
+That's what." He took another swallow of his drink. "See?" he said.
+"It's getting worse already."
+
+"No, it's not," Lou said. "It's getting better, if you'll only listen.
+I wasn't given this job, Ken. I volunteered for it."
+
+"That isn't any better," Malone said morosely.
+
+"I volunteered because I--because I liked you," Lou said. "Because I
+wanted to work with you, wanted to be with you."
+
+"It's more experimenting," Malone said flatly. "More guinea-pigging
+around."
+
+"It isn't, Ken," Lou said. "Believe me. Look into my mind. Believe
+me."
+
+Malone tried. A second passed...
+
+And then a long time passed, without any words at all.
+
+"Well, well," Malone said at last. "If this is the life of a guinea
+pig, I'm all for it."
+
+"I'm all for guinea pigs' rights," Lou said. "Life, Liberty and the
+Pursuit of Me."
+
+"Agreed," Malone said. "How about that crisis, by the way? Are you
+going to have to leave suddenly again?"
+
+Lou stretched lazily on the couch. "That's all over with, thank God,"
+she said. "We had to get our agent out of Miami Beach, and cover his
+tracks at the same time."
+
+"Tricky," Malone said.
+
+"Very," Lou said.
+
+"But--" Malone blinked. "Wait a minute," he said. "Your agent? You
+mean you had Governor Flarion killed?"
+
+Lou nodded soberly. "We had to," she said. "That paranoid mind of his
+had built up a shield we simply couldn't get through. He had plans for
+making himself president, you know--and all the terrifying
+potentialities of an embryonic Hitler." She grimaced. "We don't like
+being forced to kill," she said, "but sometimes we've got to."
+
+Malone thought of his own .44 Magnum, and the times he had used it,
+and nodded very slowly.
+
+"There are still a couple of questions, though," he said. "For
+instance, there's that trip to Russia. Why _did_ you make it? Was it
+your father?"
+
+"Of course it was," Lou said. "We had to get him back in and make sure
+he was safe."
+
+"You mean that Vasili Garbitsch is a PSR member?" Malone said,
+stunned.
+
+"Well, really," Lou said. "Did you think my father would really be a
+spy? We had to get him back to Russia; he was needed for work in the
+Kremlin. That's why we nudged Boyd into making the arrest."
+
+"And the others?" Malone said. "Brubitsch and Borbitsch?"
+
+"Real spies," Lou said. "Bad ones, but real. Any more questions?"
+
+"Some," Malone said. "Were you kidding about that drink in Moscow?"
+
+She shook her head. "I wish I had been," she said. "But I was
+concentrating on Petkoff, who didn't know a thing about the drugged
+drink. I didn't catch anything else until after I'd swallowed it. And
+then it was too late."
+
+"Good old Petkoff," Malone said. "Always helpful. But he was right
+about one thing, anyway."
+
+"What?" Lou said.
+
+"The FBI," Malone said. "He told us it was a secret police
+organization. And, by God, in a way it is!"
+
+Lou grinned. Malone started to laugh outright. They found themselves
+very close and the laughter stopped, and there was some more time
+without words. When Malone broke free, he had a suddenly sobered
+expression on his face.
+
+"Hey," he said. "What about Tom Boyd? He knows a lot but he hasn't got
+any talents, as far as I know, and--"
+
+"He'll be all right," Lou said. "Andrew and the others have thought of
+that."
+
+"But he knows an awful lot about the evidence I dug up."
+
+"Andrew will give him a cover-up explanation they're working out," Lou
+said. "That will convince Boyd there's nothing more to worry about. Of
+course, we may have to change his mind about a few things, but we can
+do that, probably through you, since you know him best. There's
+nothing for you to worry over, Ken. Nothing at all."
+
+"Good," Malone said. He leaned over and kissed her. "Because I'm not
+in the least worried."
+
+Lou sighed deeply, looking off into space.
+
+"Luba Malone," she said. "It sounds nice. And, after all, my mother
+was Irish. At least it sounds better than Garbitsch."
+
+"What doesn't?" Malone said automatically. Then he blinked. "Hey,
+_I'm_ Malone!" he said. "How could you be Malone?"
+
+"Me?" Lou said. She caroled happily. "I'm Malone because I love you,
+love you with all my heart."
+
+"That," Malone said, "does it. A woman after my own heart."
+
+Lou made a low curtsy.
+
+"And a woman of grace and breeding," Malone said. "Eftsoons, if that
+means anything."
+
+"You know," Lou said, "I like you even better when you're being Sir
+Kenneth. Especially when you're talking to yourself."
+
+"My innate gallantry and all my good qualities come out," Malone said.
+
+"Yes," Lou said. "Indeed they do. All over the place. It's nice to go
+back to Elizabethan times, anyhow, in the middle of all these
+troubles."
+
+"Oh, I don't know," Malone said. "There's always been trouble. In the
+Middle Ages, it was witches. In the Seventeenth Century, it was
+demons. In the Nineteenth it was revolutions. In--"
+
+Lou cut him off with a kiss. When she broke away Malone raised his
+eyebrows.
+
+"I prithee," he said, "interrupt me not. I am developing a scheme of
+philosophy. There have always been troubles. In the 1890's there was a
+Depression and panic, and the Spanish-American War--"
+
+"All right, Sirrah," Lou said. "And then what?"
+
+"Let's see," Malone said, reverting to 1973 for a second. "In 1903
+there was the airplane, and troubles abroad."
+
+"Yes?" Lou said. "Do go on, Sirrah. Your liege awaits your slightest
+word."
+
+"Hmm," Malone said.
+
+"That, Milord, was a very slight word indeed," Lou said. "What's after
+1903?"
+
+Malone smiled and went back to the days of the First Elizabeth
+happily.
+
+"In 1914, it was enemy aliens," said Sir Kenneth Malone.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Supermind, by
+Gordon Randall Garrett and Laurence Mark Janifer
+
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diff --git a/old/22342 2007-10-02.zip b/old/22342 2007-10-02.zip
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Supermind, by
+Gordon Randall Garrett and Laurence Mark Janifer
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Supermind
+
+Author: Gordon Randall Garrett
+        Laurence Mark Janifer
+
+Release Date: August 16, 2007 [eBook #22342]
+[Most recently updated: January 16, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Revised by: Richard Tonsing.
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUPERMIND ***
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber’s Note:
+
+This etext was produced from the 1963 book publication of the story.
+Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the copyright on
+this publication was renewed.
+
+Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without
+note.
+
+The word “PLaza” (two capital letters) was correct usage to designate
+a telephone exchange at the time the story was written. It has been
+left as printed.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+
+
+Supermind
+
+
+Mark Phillips
+
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+In 1914, it was enemy aliens.
+
+In 1930, it was Wobblies.
+
+In 1957, it was fellow travelers.
+
+In 1971, it was insane telepaths.
+
+And, in 1973:
+
+“We don’t know _what_ the hell it is,” said Andrew J. Burris, Director
+of the FBI. He threw his hands in the air and looked baffled and
+confused.
+
+Kenneth J. Malone tried to appear sympathetic. “What what is?” he
+asked.
+
+Burris frowned and drummed his fingers on his big desk. “Malone,” he
+said, “make sense. And don’t stutter.”
+
+“Stutter?” Malone said. “You said you didn’t know what it was. What
+the hell it was. And I wanted to know what it was.”
+
+“That’s just it,” Burris said. “I don’t know.”
+
+Malone sighed and repressed an impulse to scream. “Now wait a minute,
+Chief—” he started.
+
+Burris frowned again. “Don’t call me Chief,” he said.
+
+Malone nodded. “Okay,” he said. “But if you don’t know what it is, you
+must have some idea of what you don’t know. I mean, is it larger than
+a breadbox? Does it perform helpful tasks? Is it self-employed?”
+
+“Malone,” Burris sighed, “you ought to be on television.”
+
+“But—”
+
+“Let me explain,” Burris said. His voice was calmer now, and he spoke
+as if he were enunciating nothing but the most obvious and eternal
+truths. “The country,” he said, “is going to hell in a handbasket.”
+
+Malone nodded again. “Well, after all, Chief—”
+
+“Don’t call me Chief,” Burris said wearily.
+
+“Anything you say,” Malone agreed peacefully. He eyed the Director of
+the FBI warily. “After all, it isn’t anything new,” he went on. “The
+country’s always been going to hell in a handbasket, one way or
+another. Look at Rome.”
+
+“Rome?” Burris said.
+
+“Sure,” Malone said. “Rome was always going to hell in a handbasket,
+and finally it—” He paused. “Finally it did, I guess,” he said.
+
+“Exactly,” Burris said. “And so are we. Finally.” He passed a hand
+over his forehead and stared past Malone at a spot on the wall. Malone
+turned and looked at the spot, but saw nothing of interest. “Malone,”
+Burris said, and the FBI agent whirled around again.
+
+“Yes, Ch—Yes?” he said.
+
+“This time,” Burris said, “it isn’t the same old story at all. This
+time it’s different.”
+
+“Different?” Malone said.
+
+Burris nodded. “Look at it this way,” he said. His eyes returned to
+the agent. “Suppose you’re a congressman,” he went on, “and you find
+evidence of inefficiency in the government.”
+
+“All right,” Malone said agreeably. He had the feeling that if he
+waited around a little while everything would make sense, and he was
+willing to wait. After all, he wasn’t on assignment at the moment, and
+there was nothing pressing waiting for him. He was even between
+romances.
+
+If he waited long enough, he told himself, Andrew J. Burris might say
+something worth hearing. He looked attentive and eager. He considered
+leaning over the desk a little, to look even more eager, but decided
+against it; Burris might think he looked threatening. There was no
+telling.
+
+“You’re a congressman,” Burris said, “and the government is
+inefficient. You find evidence of it. What do you do?”
+
+Malone blinked and thought for a second. It didn’t take any longer
+than that to come up with the old, old answer. “I start an
+investigation,” he said. “I get a committee and I talk to a lot of
+newspaper editors and magazine editors and maybe I go on television
+and talk some more, and my committee has a lot of meetings—”
+
+“Exactly,” Burris said.
+
+“And we talk a lot at the meetings,” Malone went on, carried away,
+“and get a lot of publicity, and we subpoena famous people, just as
+famous as we can get, except governors or presidents, because you
+can’t—they tried that back in the Fifties, and it didn’t work very
+well—and that gives us some more publicity, and then when we have all
+the publicity we can possibly get—”
+
+“You stop,” Burris said hurriedly.
+
+“That’s right,” Malone said. “We stop. And that’s what I’d do.”
+
+“Of course, the problem of inefficiency is left exactly where it
+always was,” Burris said. “Nothing’s been done about it.”
+
+“Naturally,” Malone said. “But think of all the lovely publicity. And
+all the nice talk. And the subpoenas and committees and everything.”
+
+“Sure,” Burris said wearily. “It’s happened a thousand times. But,
+Malone, that’s the difference. It isn’t happening this time.”
+
+There was a short pause. “What do you mean?” Malone said at last.
+
+“This time,” Burris said, in a tone that sounded almost awed, “they
+want to keep it a secret.”
+
+“A secret?” Malone said, blinking. “But that’s—that’s not the
+American way.”
+
+Burris shrugged. “It’s un-congressman-like, anyhow,” he said. “But
+that’s what they’ve done. Tiptoed over to me and whispered softly that
+the thing has to be investigated quietly. Naturally, they didn’t give
+me any orders—but only because they know they can’t make one stick.
+They suggested it pretty strongly.”
+
+“Any reasons?” Malone said. The whole idea interested him strangely.
+It was odd—and he found himself almost liking odd cases, lately. That
+is, he amended hurriedly, if they didn’t get _too_ odd.
+
+“Oh, they had reasons, all right,” Burris said. “It took a little
+coaxing, but I managed to pry some loose. You see, every one of them
+found inefficiency in his own department. And every one knows that
+other men are investigating inefficiency.”
+
+“Oh,” Malone said.
+
+“That’s right,” Burris said. “Every one of them came to me to get me
+to prove that the goof-ups in his particular department weren’t his
+fault. That covers them in case one of the others happens to light
+into the department.”
+
+“Well, it must be _somebody’s_ fault,” Malone said.
+
+“It isn’t theirs,” Burris said wearily, “I ought to know. They told
+me. At great length, Malone.”
+
+Malone felt a stab of honest pity. “How many so far?” he asked.
+
+“Six,” Burris said. “Four representatives, and two senators.”
+
+“Only two?” Malone said.
+
+“Well,” Burris said, “the Senate is so much smaller. And, besides, we
+may get more. As a matter of fact, Senator Lefferts is worth any six
+representatives all by himself.”
+
+“He is?” Malone said, puzzled. Senator Lefferts was not one of his
+favorite people. Nor, as far as he knew, did the somewhat excitable
+senator hold any place of honor in the heart of Andrew J. Burris.
+
+“I mean his story,” Burris said. “I’ve never heard anything like it—
+at least, not since the Bilbo days. And I’ve only heard about those,”
+he added hurriedly.
+
+“What story?” Malone said. “He talked about inefficiency—”
+
+“Not exactly,” Burris said carefully. “He said that somebody was out
+to get him—him, personally. He said somebody was trying to discredit
+him by sabotaging all his legislative plans.”
+
+“Well,” Malone said, feeling that some comment was called for, “three
+cheers.”
+
+“That isn’t the point,” Burris snapped. “No matter how we feel about
+Senator Lefferts or his legislative plans, we’re sworn to protect him.
+And he says ‘they’ are out to get him.”
+
+“They?” Malone said.
+
+“You know,” Burris said, shrugging. “The great ‘they.’ The invisible
+enemies all around, working against him.”
+
+“Oh,” Malone said. “Paranoid?” He had always thought Senator Lefferts
+was slightly on the batty side, and the idea of real paranoia didn’t
+come as too much of a surprise. After all, when a man was batty to
+start out with ... and he even _looked_ like a vampire, Malone thought
+confusedly.
+
+“As far as paranoia is concerned,” Burris said, “I checked with one of
+our own psych men, and he’ll back it up. Lefferts has definite
+paranoid tendencies, he says.”
+
+“Well, then,” Malone said, “that’s that.”
+
+Burris shook his head. “It isn’t that simple,” he said. “You see,
+Malone, there’s some evidence that somebody _is_ working against him.”
+
+“The American public, with any luck at all,” Malone said.
+
+“No,” Burris said. “An enemy. Somebody sabotaging his plans. Really.”
+
+Malone shook his head. “You’re crazy,” he said.
+
+Burris looked shocked. “Malone, I’m the Director of the FBI,” he said.
+“And if you insist on being disrespectful—”
+
+“Sorry,” Malone murmured. “But—”
+
+“I am perfectly sane,” Burris said slowly. “It’s Senator Lefferts
+who’s crazy. The only trouble is, he has evidence to show he’s not.”
+
+Malone thought about odd cases, and suddenly wished he were somewhere
+else. Anywhere else. This one showed sudden signs of developing into
+something positively bizarre. “I see,” he said, wondering if he did.
+
+“After all,” Burris said, in a voice that attempted to sound
+reasonable, “a paranoid has just as much right to be persecuted as
+anybody else, doesn’t he?”
+
+“Sure,” Malone said. “Everybody has rights. But what do you want me to
+do about that?”
+
+“About their rights?” Burris said. “Nothing, Malone. Nothing.”
+
+“I mean,” Malone said patiently, “about whatever it is that’s going
+on.”
+
+Burris took a deep breath. His hands clasped behind his head, and he
+looked up at the ceiling. He seemed perfectly relaxed. That, Malone
+knew, was a bad sign. It meant that there was a dirty job coming, a
+job nobody wanted to do, and one Burris was determined to pass off on
+him. He sighed and tried to get resigned.
+
+“Well,” the FBI director said, “the only actual trouble we can
+pinpoint is that there seem to be a great many errors occurring in the
+paperwork. More than usual.”
+
+“People get tired,” Malone said tentatively.
+
+“But computer-secretary calculating machines don’t,” Burris said. “And
+that’s where the errors are, in the computer-secretaries down in the
+Senate Office Building. I think you’d better start out there.”
+
+“Sure,” Malone said sadly.
+
+“See if there’s any mechanical or electrical defect in any of those
+computers,” Burris said. “Talk to the computer technicians. Find out
+what’s causing all these errors.”
+
+“Yes, sir,” Malone said. He was still trying to feel resigned, but he
+wasn’t succeeding very well.
+
+“And if you don’t find anything—” Burris began.
+
+“I’ll come right back,” Malone said instantly.
+
+“No,” Burris said. “You keep on looking.”
+
+“I do?”
+
+“You do,” Burris said. “After all, there has to be _something_ wrong.”
+
+“Sure,” Malone said, “if you say so. But—”
+
+“There are the interview tapes,” Burris said, “and the reports the
+Congressmen brought in. You can go through those.”
+
+Malone sighed. “I guess so,” he said.
+
+“And there must be thousands of other things to do,” Burris said.
+
+“Well—” Malone began cautiously.
+
+“You’ll be able to think of them,” Burris said heartily. “I know you
+will. I have confidence in you, Malone. Confidence.”
+
+“Thanks,” Malone said sadly.
+
+“You just keep me posted from time to time on what you’re doing, and
+what ideas you get,” Burris said. “I’m leaving the whole thing in your
+hands, Malone, and I’m sure you won’t disappoint me.”
+
+“I’ll try,” Malone said.
+
+“I know you will,” Burris said warmly. “And no matter how long it
+takes, I know you’ll succeed.”
+
+“No matter how long it takes?” Malone said hesitantly.
+
+“That’s right!” Burris said. “You can do it, Malone! You can do it.”
+
+Malone nodded slowly. “I hope so,” he said. “Well, I—Well, I’ll start
+out right away, then.”
+
+He turned. Before he could make another move Burris said, “Wait!”
+
+Malone turned again, hope in his eyes. “Yes, sir?” he said.
+
+“When you leave—” Burris began, and the hope disappeared. “When you
+leave,” he went on, “please do one little favor for me. Just one
+little favor, because I’m an old, tired man and I’m not used to things
+any more.”
+
+“Sure,” Malone said. “Anything, Chief.”
+
+“Don’t call me—”
+
+“Sorry,” Malone said.
+
+Burris breathed heavily. “When you leave,” he said, “please, please
+use the door.”
+
+“But—”
+
+“Malone,” Burris said, “I’ve tried. I’ve really tried. Believe me.
+I’ve tried to get used to the fact that you can teleport. But—”
+
+“It’s useful,” Malone said, “in my work.”
+
+“I can see that,” Burris said. “And I don’t want you to, well, to stop
+doing it. By no means. It’s just that it sort of unnerves me, if you
+see what I mean. No matter how useful it is for the FBI to have an
+agent who can go instantaneously from one place to another, it
+unnerves me.” He sighed. “I can’t get used to seeing you disappear
+like an overdried soap bubble, Malone. It does something to me, here.”
+He placed a hand directly over his sternum and sighed again.
+
+“I can understand that,” Malone said. “It unnerved me, too, the first
+time I saw it. I thought I was going crazy, when that kid—Mike
+Fueyo—winked out like a light. But then we got him, and some FBI
+agents besides me have learned the trick.” He stopped there, wondering
+if he’d been tactful. After all, it took a latent ability to learn
+teleportation, and some people had it, while others didn’t. Malone,
+along with a few other agents, did. Burris evidently didn’t, so he
+couldn’t teleport, no matter how hard he tried or how many lessons he
+took.
+
+“Well,” Burris said, “I’m still unnerved. So please, Malone, when you
+come in here, or go out, use the door. All right?”
+
+“Yes, sir,” Malone said. He turned and went out. As he opened the
+door, he could almost hear Burris’ sigh of relief. Then he banged it
+shut behind him and, feeling that he might as well continue with his
+space-bound existence, walked all the way to the elevator, and rode it
+downstairs to the FBI laboratories.
+
+The labs, highly efficient and divided into dozens of departments,
+covered several floors. Malone passed through the Fingerprint section,
+filled with technicians doing strange things to great charts and
+slides, and frowning over tiny pieces of material and photographs.
+Then came Forgery Detection, involving many more technicians, many
+more slides and charts and tiny pieces of things and photographs, and
+even a witness or two sitting on the white bench at one side and
+looking lost and somehow civilian. Identification Classified was next,
+a great barn of a room filled with index files. The real indexes were
+in the sub-basement; here, on microfilm, were only the basic
+divisions. A man was standing in front of one of the files, frowning
+at it. Malone went on by without stopping.
+
+Cosmetic Surgery Classification came next. Here there were more
+indexes, and there were also charts and slides. There was an agent
+sitting on a bench looking bored while two female technicians—
+classified as O&U for Old and Ugly in Malone’s mind—fluttered around
+him, deciding what disguises were possible, and which of those was
+indicated for the particular job on hand. Malone waved to the agent,
+whom he knew very slightly, and went on. He felt vaguely regretful
+that the FBI couldn’t hire prettier girls for Cosmetic Surgery, but
+the trouble was that pretty girls fell for the Agents, and vice versa,
+and this led to an unfortunate tendency toward only handsome and
+virile-looking disguises. The O&U division was unfortunate, he
+decided, but a necessity.
+
+Chemical Analysis (III) was next. The Chemical Analysis Section was
+scattered over several floors, with the first stages up above.
+Division III, Malone remembered, was devoted to nonpoisonous
+substances, like clay or sand found in boots or trouser cuffs, cigar
+ashes and such. They were placed on the same floor as Fingerprints to
+allow free and frequent passage between the sections on the problems
+of plastic prints, made in putty or like substances, and visible
+prints, made when the hand is covered with a visible substance like
+blood, ketchup or glue.
+
+Malone found what he was looking for at the very end of the floor. It
+was the Computer Section, a large room filled with humming, clacking
+and buzzing machines of an ancient vintage, muttering to themselves as
+they worked, and newer machines which were smaller and more silent.
+Lights were lighting and bells were ringing softly, relays were
+relaying and the whole room was a gigantic maze of calculating and
+control machines. What space wasn’t filled by the machines themselves
+was filled by workbenches, all littered with an assortment of gears,
+tubes, spare relays, transistors, wires, rods, bolts, resistors and
+all the other paraphernalia used in building the machines and
+repairing them. Beyond the basic room were other, smaller rooms, each
+assigned to a particular kind of computer work.
+
+The narrow aisles were choked here and there with men who looked up as
+Malone passed by, but most of them gave him one quick glance and went
+back to work. A few didn’t even do that, but went right on
+concentrating on their jobs. Malone headed for a man working all alone
+in front of a workbench, frowning down at a complicated-looking
+mechanism that seemed to have neither head nor tail, and prodding at
+it with a long, thin screwdriver. The man was thin, too, but not very
+long; he was a little under average height, and he had straight black
+hair, thick-lensed glasses and a studious expression, even when he was
+frowning. He looked as if the mechanism were a student who had cut too
+many classes, and he was being kind but firm with it.
+
+Malone managed to get to the man’s side, and coughed discreetly. There
+was no response.
+
+“Fred?” he said.
+
+The screwdriver waggled a little. Malone wasn’t quite sure that the
+man was breathing.
+
+“Fred Mitchell,” he said.
+
+Mitchell didn’t look up. Another second passed.
+
+“Hey,” Malone said. Then he closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
+“Fred,” he said in a loud, reasonable-sounding voice, “the State
+Department’s translator has started to talk pig-Latin.”
+
+Mitchell straightened up as if somebody had jabbed him with a pin. The
+screwdriver waved wildly in the air for a second, and then pointed at
+Malone. “That’s impossible,” Mitchell said in a flat, precise voice.
+“Simply impossible. It doesn’t have a pig-Latin circuit. It can’t
+possibly—” He blinked and seemed to see Malone for the first time.
+“Oh,” he said. “Hello, Malone. What can I do for you?”
+
+Malone smiled, feeling a little victorious at having got through the
+Mitchell armor, which was almost impregnable when there was a job in
+hand. “I’ve been standing here talking to you for some time.”
+
+“Oh, have you?” Mitchell said. “I was busy.” That, obviously,
+explained that. Malone shrugged.
+
+“I want you to help me check over some calculators, Fred,” he said.
+“We’ve had some reports that some of the government machines are out
+of kilter, and I’d like you to go over them for me.”
+
+“Out of kilter?” Fred Mitchell said. “No, you can forget about it.
+It’s absolutely unnecessary to make a check, believe me. Absolutely.
+Forget it.” He smiled suddenly. “I suppose it’s some kind of a joke,
+isn’t it?” he said, just a trifle uncertainly. Fred Mitchell’s world,
+while pleasant, did not include much humor, Malone knew. “It’s
+supposed to be funny,” he said in the same flat, precise voice.
+
+“It isn’t funny,” Malone said.
+
+Fred sighed. “Then they’re obviously lying,” he said, “and that’s all
+there is to it. Why bother me with it?”
+
+“Lying, Fred?” Malone said.
+
+“Certainly,” Fred said. He looked at the machinery with longing.
+
+Malone took a breath. “How do you know?” he said.
+
+Fred sighed. “It’s perfectly obvious,” he said in a patient tone.
+“Since the State Department translator has no pig-Latin circuit, it
+can’t possibly be talking pig-Latin. I will admit that such a circuit
+would be relatively easy to build, though it would have no utility as
+far as I can see. Except, of course, for a joke.” He paused. “Joke?”
+he said, in a slightly uneasy tone.
+
+“Sure,” Malone said. “Joke.”
+
+Mitchell looked relieved. “Very well, then,” he began. “Since—”
+
+“Wait a minute,” Malone said. “The pig-Latin is a joke. That’s right.
+But I’m not talking about the pig-Latin.”
+
+“You’re not?” Mitchell asked, surprised.
+
+“No,” Malone said.
+
+Mitchell frowned. “But you said—” he began.
+
+“A joke,” Malone said. “You were perfectly right. The pig-Latin is a
+joke.” He waited for Fred’s expression to clear, and then added: “But
+what I want to talk to you about isn’t.”
+
+“It sounds very confused,” Fred said after a pause. “Not at all the
+sort of thing that—that usually goes on.”
+
+“You have no idea,” Malone said. “It’s about the political machines,
+all right, but it isn’t anything as simple as pig-Latin.” He
+explained, taking his time over it.
+
+When he had finished, Fred was nodding his head slowly. “I see,” he
+said. “I understand just what you want me to do.”
+
+“Good,” Malone said.
+
+“I’ll take a team over to the Senate Office Building,” Fred said, “and
+check the computer-secretaries there. That way, you see, I’ll be able
+to do a full running check on them without taking any one machine out
+of operation for too long.”
+
+“Sure,” Malone said.
+
+“And it shouldn’t take long,” Fred went on, “to find out just what the
+trouble is.” He looked very confident.
+
+“How long?” Malone asked.
+
+Fred shrugged. “Oh,” he said, “five or six days.”
+
+Malone repressed an impulse to scream. “Days?” he said. “I mean—well,
+look, Fred, it’s important. Very important. Can’t you do the job any
+faster?”
+
+Fred gave a little sigh. “Checking and repairing all those machines,”
+he said, “is an extremely complex job. Sometimes, Malone, I don’t
+think you realize quite how complex and how delicate a job it is to
+deal with such a high-order machine. Why—”
+
+“Wait a minute,” Malone said. “Check and repair them?”
+
+“Of course,” Fred said.
+
+“But I don’t want them repaired,” Malone said. Seeing the look of
+horror on Fred’s face, he added hastily, “I only want a report from
+you on what’s wrong, whether they are actually making errors or not.
+And if they are making errors, just what’s making them do it. And just
+what kind of errors. See?”
+
+Fred nodded very slowly. “But I can’t just leave them there,” he said
+piteously. “In pieces and everything. It isn’t right, Malone. It just
+isn’t right.”
+
+“Well, then,” Malone said with energy, “you go right ahead and repair
+them, if you want to. Fix ’em all up. But you can do that after you
+make the report to me, can’t you?”
+
+“I—” Fred hesitated. “I had planned to check and repair each machine
+on an individual basis.”
+
+“The Congress can allow for a short suspension,” Malone said. “Anyhow,
+they can now, or as soon as I get the word to them. Suppose you check
+all the machines first, and then get around to the repair work.”
+
+“It’s not the best way,” Fred demurred.
+
+Malone discovered that it was his turn to sigh. “Is it the fastest?”
+he said.
+
+Fred nodded.
+
+“Then it’s the best,” Malone said. “How long?”
+
+Fred rolled his eyes to the ceiling and calculated silently for a
+second. “Tomorrow morning,” he announced, returning his gaze to
+Malone.
+
+“Fine,” Malone said. “Fine.”
+
+“But—”
+
+“Never mind the buts,” Malone said hurriedly. “I’ll count on hearing
+from you tomorrow morning.”
+
+“All right.”
+
+“And if it looks like sabotage,” Malone added, “if the errors aren’t
+caused by normal wear and tear on the machines, you let me know right
+away. Phone me. Don’t waste an instant.”
+
+“I’ll—I’ll start right away,” Fred said heavily. He looked sadly at
+the mechanism he had been working on, and put his screwdriver down
+next to it. It looked to Malone as if he were putting flowers on the
+grave of a dear departed. “I’ll get a team together,” Fred added. He
+gave the mechanism and screwdriver one last fond parting look, and
+tore himself away.
+
+Malone looked after him for a second, thinking of nothing in
+particular, and then turned in the opposite direction and headed back
+toward the elevator. As he walked, he began to feel more and more
+pleased with himself. After all, he’d gotten the investigation
+started, hadn’t he?
+
+And now all he had to do was go back to his office and read some
+reports and listen to some interview tapes, and then he could go home.
+
+The reports and the interview tapes didn’t exactly sound like fun,
+Malone thought, but at the same time they seemed fairly innocent. He
+would work his way through them grimly, and maybe he would even
+indulge his most secret vice and smoke a cigar or two to make the work
+pass more pleasantly. Soon enough, he told himself, they would be
+finished.
+
+Sometimes, though, he regretted the reputation he’d gotten. It had
+been bad enough in the old days, the pre-1971 days when Malone had
+thought he was just lucky. Burris had called him a Boy Wonder then,
+when he’d cracked three difficult cases in a row. Being just lucky had
+made it a little tough to live with the Boy Wonder label. After all,
+Malone thought, it wasn’t actually as if he’d done anything.
+
+But since 1971 and the case of the Telepathic Spy, things had gotten
+worse. Much worse. Now Malone wasn’t just lucky any more. Instead, he
+could teleport and he could even foretell the future a little, in a
+dim sort of way. He’d caught the Telepathic Spy that way, and when the
+case of the Teleporting Juvenile Delinquents had come up he’d been
+assigned to that one too, and he’d cracked it. Now Burris seemed to
+think of him as a kind of God, and gave him all the tough dirty jobs.
+
+And if he wasn’t just lucky any more, Malone couldn’t think of himself
+as a fearless, heroic FBI agent, either. He just wasn’t the type. He
+was ... well, talented. That was the word, he told himself: talented.
+He had all these talents and they made him look like something
+spectacular to Burris and the other FBI men. But he wasn’t, really. He
+hadn’t done anything really tough to get his talents; they’d just
+happened to him.
+
+Nobody, though, seemed to believe that. He heaved a little sigh and
+stepped into the waiting elevator.
+
+There were, after all, he thought, compensations. He’d had some good
+times, and the talents did come in handy. And he did have his pick of
+the vacation schedule lately. And he’d met some lovely girls....
+
+And besides, he told himself savagely as the elevator shot upward, he
+wasn’t going to do anything except return to his office and read some
+reports and listen to some tapes. And then he was going to go home and
+sleep all night, peacefully. And in the morning Mitchell was going to
+call him up and tell him that the computer-secretaries needed nothing
+more than a little repair. He’d say they were getting old, and he’d be
+a little pathetic about it; but it wouldn’t be anything serious.
+Malone would send out orders to get the machines repaired, and that
+would be that. And then the next case would be something both normal
+and exciting, like a bank robbery or a kidnapping involving a gorgeous
+blonde who would be so grateful to Malone that....
+
+He had stepped out of the elevator and gone down the corridor without
+noticing it. He pushed at his own office door and walked into the
+outer room. The train of thought he had been following was very nice,
+and sounded very attractive indeed, he told himself.
+
+Unfortunately, he didn’t believe it. His prescient ability,
+functioning with its usual efficient aplomb, told Malone that things
+would not be better, or simpler, in the morning. They would be worse,
+and more complicated.
+
+They would be quite a lot worse.
+
+And, as usual, that prescience was perfectly accurate.
+
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+The telephone, Malone realized belatedly, had had a particularly
+nasty-sounding ring. He might have known it would be bad news.
+
+As a matter of fact, he told himself sadly, he had known.
+
+“Nothing at all wrong?” he said into the mouthpiece. “Not with any of
+the computers?” He blinked. “Not even one of them?”
+
+“Not a thing,” Mitchell said. “I’ll be sending a report up to you in a
+little while. You read it; we put them through every test, and it’s
+all detailed there.”
+
+“I’m sure you were very thorough,” Malone said helplessly.
+
+“Of course we were,” Mitchell said. “Of course. And the machines
+passed every single test. Every one. Malone, it was beautiful.”
+
+“Goody,” Malone said at random. “But there’s got to be something—”
+
+“There is, Malone,” Fred said. “There is. I think there’s definitely
+something odd going on. Something funny. I mean peculiar, not
+humorous.”
+
+“I thought so,” Malone put in.
+
+“Right,” Fred said. “Malone, try and relax. This is a hard thing to
+say, and it must be even harder to hear, but—”
+
+“Tell me,” Malone said. “Who’s dead? Who’s been killed?”
+
+“I know it’s tough, Malone,” Fred went on.
+
+“Is everybody dead?” Malone said. “It can’t be just one person, not
+from that tone in your voice. Has somebody assassinated the entire
+senate? Or the president and his cabinet? Or—”
+
+“It’s nothing like that, Malone,” Fred said, in a tone that implied
+that such occurrences were really rather minor. “It’s the machines.”
+
+“The machines?”
+
+“That’s right,” Fred said grimly. “After we checked them over and
+found they were in good shape, I asked for samples of both the input
+and the output of each machine. I wanted to do a thorough job.”
+
+“Congratulations,” Malone said. “What happened?”
+
+Fred took a deep breath. “They don’t agree,” he said.
+
+“They don’t?” Malone said. The phrase sounded as if it meant something
+momentous, but he couldn’t quite figure out what. In a minute, he
+thought confusedly, it would come to him. But did he want it to?
+
+“They definitely do not agree,” Fred was saying. “The correlation is
+erratic; it makes no statistical sense. Malone, there are two
+possibilities.”
+
+“Tell me about them,” Malone said. He was beginning to feel relieved.
+To Fred, the malfunction of a machine was more serious than the murder
+of the entire Congress. But Malone couldn’t quite bring himself to
+feel that way about things.
+
+“First,” Fred said in a tense tone, “it’s possible that the
+technicians feeding information to the machines are making all kinds
+of mistakes.”
+
+Malone nodded at the phone. “That sounds possible,” he said. “Which
+ones?”
+
+“All of them,” Fred said. “They’re all making errors—and they’re all
+making about the same number of errors. There don’t seem to be any
+real peaks or valleys, Malone; everybody’s doing it.”
+
+Malone thought of the Varsity Drag and repressed the thought. “A bunch
+of fumblebums,” he said. “All fumbling alike. It does sound unlikely,
+but I guess it’s possible. We’ll get after them right away, and—”
+
+“Wait,” Fred said. “There is a second possibility.”
+
+“Oh,” Malone said.
+
+“Maybe they aren’t mistakes,” Fred said. “Maybe the technicians are
+deliberately feeding the machine with wrong answers.”
+
+Malone hated to admit it, even to himself, but that answer sounded a
+lot more probable. Machine technicians weren’t exactly picked off the
+streets at random; they were highly trained for their work, and the
+idea of a whole crew of them starting to fumble at once, in a big way,
+was a little hard to swallow.
+
+The idea of all of them sabotaging the machines they worked on, Malone
+thought, was a tough one to take, too. But it had the advantage of
+making some sense. People, he told himself dully, will do nutty things
+deliberately. It’s harder to think of them doing the same nutty things
+without knowing it.
+
+“Well,” he said at last, “however it turns out, we’ll get to the
+bottom of it. Frankly, I think it’s being done on purpose.”
+
+“So do I,” Fred said. “And when you find out just who’s making the
+technicians do such things—when you find out who gives them their
+orders—you let me know.”
+
+“Let you know?” Malone said. “But—”
+
+“Any man who would give false data to a perfectly innocent computer,”
+Fred said savagely, “would—would—” For a second he was apparently
+lost for comparisons. Then he finished: “Would kill his own mother.”
+He paused a second and added, in an even more savage voice, “And then
+lie about it!”
+
+The image on the screen snapped off, and Malone sat back in his chair
+and sighed. He spent a few minutes regretting that he hadn’t chosen,
+early in life, to be a missionary to the Fiji Islands, or possibly
+simply a drunken bum without any troubles, but then the report
+Mitchell had mentioned arrived. Malone picked it up without much
+eagerness, and began going through it carefully.
+
+It was beautifully typed and arranged; somebody on Mitchell’s team had
+obviously been up all night at the job. Malone admired the work,
+without being able to get enthusiastic about the contents. Like all
+technical reports, it tended to be boring and just a trifle obscure to
+someone who wasn’t completely familiar with the field involved. Malone
+and cybernetics were not exactly bosom buddies, and by the time he
+finished reading through the report he was suffering from an extreme
+case of ennui.
+
+There were no new clues in the report, either; Mitchell’s phone
+conversation had covered all of the main points. Malone put the sheaf
+of papers down on his desk and looked at them for a minute as if he
+expected an answer to leap out from the pile and greet him with a glad
+cry. But nothing happened. Unfortunately, he had to do some more work.
+
+The obvious next step was to start checking on the technicians who
+were working on the machines. Malone determined privately that he
+would give none of his reports to Fred Mitchell; he didn’t like the
+idea of being responsible for murder, and that was the least Fred
+would do to someone who confused his precious calculators.
+
+He picked up the phone, punched for the Records Division, and waited
+until a bald, middle-aged face appeared. He asked the face to send up
+the dossiers of the technicians concerned to his office. The face
+nodded.
+
+“You want them right away?” it said in a mild, slightly scratchy
+voice.
+
+“Sooner than right away,” Malone said.
+
+“They’re coming up by messenger,” the voice said.
+
+Malone nodded and broke the connection. The technicians had, of
+course, been investigated by the FBI before they’d been hired, but it
+wouldn’t do any harm to check them out again. He felt grateful that he
+wouldn’t have to do all that work himself; he would just go through
+the dossiers and assign field agents to the actual checking when he
+had a picture of what might need to be checked.
+
+He sighed again and leaned back in his chair. He put his feet up on
+the desk, remembered that he was entirely alone, and swung them down
+again. He fished in a private compartment in his top desk drawer, drew
+out a cigar and unwrapped it. Putting his feet back on the desk, he
+lit the cigar, drew in a cloud of smoke, and lapsed into deep thought.
+
+Cigar smoke billowed around him, making strange, fantastic shapes in
+the air of the office. Malone puffed away, frowning slightly and
+trying to force the puzzle he was working on to make some sense.
+
+It certainly looked as though something were going on, he thought.
+But, for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out just what it was.
+After all, what could be anybody’s purpose in goofing up a bunch of
+calculators the way they had? Of course, the whole thing could be a
+series of accidents, but the series was a pretty long one, and made
+Malone suspicious to start with. It was easier to assume that the
+goof-ups were being done deliberately.
+
+Unfortunately, they didn’t make much sense as sabotage, either.
+
+Senator Deeds, for instance, had sent out a ten-thousand-copy form
+letter to his constituents, blasting an Administration power bill in
+extremely strong language, and asking for some comments on the
+Deeds-Hartshorn Air Ownership Bill, a pending piece of legislation
+that provided for private, personal ownership, based on land title, to
+the upper stratosphere, with a strong hint that rights of passage no
+longer applied without some recompense to the owner of the air.
+Naturally, Deeds had filed the original with a computer-secretary to
+turn out ten thousand duplicate copies, and the machine had done so,
+folding the copies, slipping them into addressed envelopes and sending
+them out under the Senator’s franking stamp.
+
+The addresses on the envelopes, however, had not been those of the
+Senator’s supporters. The letter had been sent to ten thousand
+stockholders in major airline companies, and the Senator’s head was
+still ringing from the force of the denunciatory letters, telegrams
+and telephone calls he’d been getting.
+
+And then there was Representative Follansbee of South Dakota. A set of
+news releases on the proposed Follansbee Waterworks Bill contained the
+statement that the artificial lake which Follansbee proposed in the
+Black Hills country “be formed by controlled atomic power blasts, and
+filled with water obtained from collecting the tears of widows and
+orphans.”
+
+Newsmen who saw this release immediately checked the bill. The wording
+was exactly the same. Follansbee claimed that the “widows and orphans”
+phrase had appeared in his speech on the bill, and not in the proposed
+bill itself. “It’s completely absurd,” he said, with commendable calm,
+“to consider this method of filling an artificial lake.”
+Unfortunately, the absurdity was now contained in the bill, which
+would have to go back to committee for redefinition, and probably
+wouldn’t come up again in the present session of Congress. Judging
+from the amount of laughter that had greeted the error when it had
+come to light, Malone privately doubted whether any amount of
+redefinition was going to save it from a landslide defeat.
+
+Representative Keller of Idaho had made a speech which contained so
+many errors of fact that newspaper editorials, and his enemies on the
+floor of Congress, cut him to pieces with ease and pleasure. Keller
+complained of his innocence and said he’d gotten his facts from a
+computer-secretary, but this didn’t save him. His re-election was a
+matter for grave concern in his own party, and the opposition was,
+naturally, tickled. They would not, Malone thought, dare to be tickled
+pink.
+
+And these were not the only casualties. They were the most blatant
+foul-ups, but there were others, such as the mistake in numbering of a
+House Bill that resulted in a two-month delay during which the
+opposition to the bill raised enough votes to defeat it on the floor.
+Communications were diverted or lost or scrambled in small ways that
+made for confusion—including, Malone recalled, the perfectly horrible
+mixup that resulted when a freshman senator, thinking he was talking
+to his girlfriend on a blanked-vision circuit, discovered he was
+talking to his wife.
+
+The flow of information was being blocked by bottlenecks that suddenly
+existed where there had never been bottlenecks before.
+
+And it wasn’t only the computers, Malone knew. He remembered the
+reports the senators and representatives had made. Someone forgot to
+send an important message here, or sent one too soon over there. Both
+courses were equally disturbing, and both resulted in more snarl-ups.
+Reports that should have been sent in weeks before arrived too late;
+reports meant for the eyes of only one man were turned out in
+triplicate and passed all over the offices of Congress.
+
+Each snarl-up was a little one. But, together, they added up to
+inefficiency of a kind and extent that hadn’t been seen, Malone told
+himself with some wonder, since the Harding administration fifty years
+before.
+
+And there didn’t seem to be anyone to blame anything on.
+
+Malone thought hopefully of sabotage, infiltration and mass treason,
+but it didn’t make him feel much better. He puffed out some more smoke
+and frowned at nothing.
+
+There was a knock at the door of his office.
+
+Speedily and guiltily, he swung his feet off the desk and snatched the
+cigar out of his mouth. He jammed it into a deep ashtray and put the
+ashtray back into his desk drawer. He locked the drawer, waved
+ineffectively at the clouds of smoke that surrounded him, and said in
+a resigned voice: “Come in.”
+
+The door opened. A tall, solidly-built man stood there, wearing a
+fringe of beard and a cheerful expression. The man had an enormous
+amount of muscle distributed more or less evenly over his chunky body,
+and a pot-belly that looked as if he had swallowed a globe of the
+world. In addition, he was smoking a cigarette and letting out little
+puffs of smoke, rather like a toy locomotive.
+
+“Well, well,” Malone said, brushing feebly at the smoke that still
+wreathed him faintly. “If it isn’t Thomas Boyd, the FBI’s answer to
+Nero Wolfe.”
+
+“And if the physique holds true, you’re Sherlock Holmes, I suppose,”
+Boyd said.
+
+Malone shook his head, thinking sadly of his father and the cigar.
+“Not exactly,” he said. “Not ex—” And then it came to him. It wasn’t
+that he was ashamed of smoking cigars like his father, exactly, but
+cigars just weren’t right for a fearless, dedicated FBI agent. And he
+had just thought of a way to keep Boyd from knowing what he’d been
+doing. “That’s a hell of a cigarette you’re smoking, by the way,” he
+said.
+
+Boyd looked at it. “It is?” he said.
+
+“Sure is,” Malone said, hoping he sounded sufficiently innocent.
+“Smells like a cigar or something.”
+
+Boyd sniffed the air for a second, his face wrinkled. Then he looked
+down at his cigarette again. “By God,” he said, “you’re right, Ken. It
+_does_ smell like a cigar.” He came over to Malone’s desk, looked
+around for an ashtray and didn’t find one, and finally went to the
+window and tossed the cigarette out into the Washington breeze. “How
+are things, anyhow, Ken?” he said.
+
+“Things are confused,” Malone said. “Aren’t they always?”
+
+Boyd came back to the desk and sat down in a chair at one side of it.
+He put his elbow on the desk. “Sure they are,” he said. “I’m confused
+myself, as a matter of fact. Only I think I know where I can get some
+help.”
+
+“Really?” Malone said.
+
+Boyd nodded. “Burris told me I might be able to get some information
+from a certain famous and highly respected person,” he said.
+
+“Well, well,” Malone said. “Who?”
+
+“You,” Boyd said.
+
+“Oh,” Malone said, trying to look disappointed, flattered and modest
+all at the same time. “Well,” he went on after a second, “anything I
+can do—”
+
+“Burris thought you might have some answers,” Boyd said.
+
+“Burris is getting optimistic in his old age,” Malone said. “I don’t
+even have many questions.”
+
+Boyd nodded. “Well,” he said, “you know this California thing?”
+
+“Sure I do,” Malone said. “You’re looking into the resignation out
+there, aren’t you?”
+
+“Senator Burley,” Boyd said. “That’s right. But Senator Burley’s
+resignation isn’t all of it, by any means.”
+
+“It isn’t?” Malone said, trying to sound interested.
+
+“Not at all,” Boyd said. “It goes a lot deeper than it looks on the
+surface. In the past year, Ken, five senators have announced their
+resignations from the Senate of the United States. It isn’t exactly a
+record—”
+
+“It sounds like a record,” Malone said.
+
+“Well,” Boyd said, “there was 1860 and the Civil War, when a whole lot
+of senators and representatives resigned all at once.”
+
+“Oh,” Malone said. “But there isn’t any Civil War going on now. At
+least,” he added, “I haven’t heard of any.”
+
+“That’s what makes it so funny,” Boyd said. “Of course, Senator Burley
+said it was ill health, and so did two others, while Senator Davidson
+said it was old age.”
+
+“Well,” Malone said, “people do get old. And sick.”
+
+“Sure,” Boyd said. “The only trouble is—” He paused. “Ken,” he said,
+“do you mind if I smoke? I mean, do you mind the smell of cigars?”
+
+“Mind?” Malone said. “Not at all.” He blinked. “Besides,” he added,
+“maybe this one won’t smell like a cigar.”
+
+“Well, the last one did,” Boyd said. He took a cigarette out of a pack
+in his pocket, and lit it. He sniffed. “You know,” he said, “you’re
+right. This one doesn’t.”
+
+“I told you,” Malone said. “Must have been a bad cigarette. Spoiled or
+something.”
+
+“I guess so,” Boyd said vaguely. “But about these retirements—the FBI
+wanted me to look into it because of Burley’s being mixed up with the
+space program scandal last year. Remember?”
+
+“Vaguely,” Malone said. “I was busy last year.”
+
+“Sure you were,” Boyd said. “We were both busy getting famous and well
+known.”
+
+Malone grinned. “Go on with the story,” he said.
+
+Boyd puffed at his cigarette. “Anyhow, we couldn’t find anything
+really wrong,” he said. “Three senators retiring because of ill
+health, one because of old age. And Farnsworth, the youngest, had a
+nervous breakdown.”
+
+“I didn’t hear about it,” Malone said.
+
+Boyd shrugged “We hushed it up,” he said. “But Farnsworth’s got
+delusions of persecution. He apparently thinks somebody’s out to get
+him. As a matter of fact, he thinks _everybody’s_ out to get him.”
+
+“Now that,” Malone said, “sounds familiar.”
+
+Boyd leaned back a little more in his chair. “Here’s the funny thing,
+though,” he said. “The others all act as if they’re suspicious of
+everybody who talks to them. Not anything obvious, you understand.
+Just worried, apprehensive. Always looking at you out of the corners
+of their eyes. That kind of thing.”
+
+Malone thought of Senator Lefferts, who was also suffering from
+delusions of persecution, delusions that had real evidence to back
+them up. “It does sound funny,” he said cautiously.
+
+“Well, I reported everything to Burris,” Boyd went on. “And he said
+you were working on something similar, and we might as well pool our
+resources.”
+
+“Here we go again,” Malone said. He took a deep breath, filling his
+nostrils with what remained of the cigar odor in the room, and felt
+more peaceful. Quickly, he told Boyd about what had been happening in
+Congress. “It seems pretty obvious,” he finished, “that there is some
+kind of a tie-up between the two cases.”
+
+“Maybe it’s obvious,” Boyd said, “but it is just a little bit odd. Fun
+and games. You know, Ken, Burris was right.”
+
+“How?” Malone said.
+
+“He said everything was all mixed up,” Boyd went on. “He told me the
+country was going to Rome in a handbasket, or something like that.”
+
+Wondering vaguely if Burris had really been predicting mass religious
+conversions, Malone nodded silently.
+
+“And he’s right,” Boyd said. “Look at the newspapers. Everything’s
+screwy lately.”
+
+“Everything always is screwy,” Malone said.
+
+“Not like now,” Boyd said. “So many big-shot gangsters have been
+killed lately we might as well bring back Prohibition. And the labor
+unions are so busy with internal battles that they haven’t had time to
+go on strike for over a year.”
+
+“Is that bad?” Malone said.
+
+Boyd shrugged. “God knows,” he said. “But it’s sure confusing as all
+hell.”
+
+“And now,” Malone said, “with all that going on—”
+
+“The Congress of the United States decides to go off its collective
+rocker,” Boyd finished. “Exactly.” He stared down at his cigarette for
+a minute with a morose and pensive expression on his face. He looked,
+Malone thought, like Henry VIII trying to decide what to do about all
+these here wives.
+
+Then he looked up at Malone. “Ken,” he said in a strained voice,
+“there seem to be a lot of nutty cases lately.”
+
+Malone considered. “No,” he said at last. “It’s just that when a nutty
+one comes along, we get it.”
+
+“That’s what I mean,” Boyd said. “I wonder why that is.”
+
+Malone shrugged. “It takes a thief to catch a thief,” he said.
+
+“But these aren’t thieves,” Boyd said. “I mean, they’re just nutty.”
+He paused. “Oh,” he said.
+
+“And two thieves are better than one,” Malone said.
+
+“Anyhow,” Boyd said with a small, gusty sigh, “it’s company.”
+
+“Sure,” Malone said.
+
+Boyd looked for an ashtray, failed again to find one, and walked over
+to flip a second cigarette out onto Washington. He came back to his
+chair, sat down, and said, “What’s our next step, Ken?”
+
+Malone considered carefully. “First,” he said finally, “we’ll start
+assuming something. We’ll start assuming that there is some kind of
+organization behind all this, behind all the senators’ resignations
+and everything like that.”
+
+“It sounds like a big assumption,” Boyd said.
+
+Malone shook his head. “It isn’t really,” he said. “After all, we
+can’t figure it’s the work of one person: it’s too widespread for
+that. And it’s silly to assume that everything’s accidental.”
+
+“All right,” Boyd said equably. “It’s an organization.”
+
+“Trying to subvert the United States,” Malone went on. “Reducing
+everything to chaos. And that brings in everything else, Tom. That
+brings in the unions and the gang wars and everything.”
+
+Boyd blinked. “How?” he said.
+
+“Obvious,” Malone said. “Strife brought on by internal confusion,
+that’s what’s going on all over. It’s the same pattern. And if we
+assume an organization trying to jam up the United States, it even
+makes sense.” He leaned back and beamed.
+
+“Sure it makes sense,” Boyd said. “But who’s the organization?”
+
+Malone shrugged.
+
+“If I were doing the picking,” Boyd said, “I’d pick the Russians. Or
+the Chinese. Or both. Probably both.”
+
+“It’s a possibility,” Malone said. “Anyhow, if it’s sabotage, who else
+would be interested in sabotaging the United States? There’s some
+Russian or Chinese organization fouling up Congress, and the unions,
+and the gangs. Come to think of it, why the gangs? It seems to me that
+if you left the professional gangsters strong, it would do even more
+to foul things up.”
+
+“Who knows?” Boyd said. “Maybe they’re trying to get rid of American
+gangsters so they can import some of their own.”
+
+“That doesn’t make any sense,” Malone said, “but I’ll think about it.
+In the meantime, we have one more interesting question.”
+
+“We do?” Boyd said.
+
+“Sure we do,” Malone said. “The question is: how?”
+
+Boyd said: “Mmm.” Then there was silence for a little while.
+
+“How are the saboteurs doing all this?” Malone said. “It just doesn’t
+seem very probable that _all_ the technicians in the Senate Office
+Building, for instance, are spies. It makes even less sense that the
+labor unions are composed mostly of spies. Or, for that matter, the
+Mafia and the organizations like it. What would spies be doing in the
+Mafia?”
+
+“Learning Italian,” Boyd said instantly.
+
+“Don’t be silly,” Malone said. “If there were that many spies in this
+country, the Russians wouldn’t have to fight at all. They could _vote_
+the Communists into power, and by a nice big landslide, too.”
+
+“Wait a minute,” Boyd said. “If there aren’t so many spies, then how
+is all this getting done?”
+
+Malone beamed. “That’s the question,” he said. “And I think I have an
+answer.”
+
+“You do?” Boyd said. After a second he said: “Oh, no.”
+
+“Suppose you tell me,” Malone said.
+
+Boyd opened his mouth. Nothing emerged. He shut it. A second passed
+and he opened it again. “Magic?” he said weakly.
+
+“Not exactly,” Malone said cheerfully. “But you’re getting warm.”
+
+Boyd shut his eyes. “I’m not going to stand for it,” he announced.
+“I’m not going to take any more.”
+
+“Any more what?” Malone said. “Tell me what you have in mind.”
+
+“I won’t even consider it,” Boyd said. “It haunts me. It gets into my
+dreams. Now, look, Ken, I can’t even see a pitchfork any more without
+thinking of Greek letters.”
+
+Malone took a breath. “Which Greek letter?” he said.
+
+“You know very well,” Boyd said. “What a pitchfork looks like. _Psi._
+And I’m not even going to think about it.”
+
+“Well,” Malone said equably, “you won’t have to. If you’d rather start
+with the Russian-spy end of things, you can do that.”
+
+“What I’d rather do,” Boyd said, “is resign.”
+
+“Next year,” Malone said instantly. “For now, you can wait around
+until the dossiers come up—they’re for the Senate Office Building
+technicians, and they’re on the way. You can go over them, and start
+checking on any known Russian agents in the country for contacts. You
+can also start checking on the dossiers, and in general for any
+hanky-panky.”
+
+Boyd blinked. “Hanky-panky?” he said.
+
+“It’s a perfectly good word,” Malone said, offended. “Or two words.
+Anyhow, you can start on that end, and not worry about anything else.”
+
+“It’s going to haunt me,” Boyd said.
+
+“Well,” Malone said, “eat lots of ectoplasm and get enough sleep, and
+everything will be fine. After all, I’m going to have to do the real
+end of the work, the psionics end. I may be wrong, but—”
+
+He was interrupted by the phone. He flicked the switch and Andrew J.
+Burris’ face appeared on the screen.
+
+“Malone,” Burris said instantly, “I just got a complaint from the
+State Department that ties in with your work. Their translator has
+been acting up.”
+
+Malone couldn’t say anything for a minute.
+
+“Malone,” Burris went on. “I said—”
+
+“I heard you,” Malone said. “And it doesn’t have one.”
+
+“It doesn’t have one what?” Burris said.
+
+“A pig-Latin circuit,” Malone said. “What else?”
+
+Burris’ voice was very calm. “Malone,” he said, “what does pig-Latin
+have to do with anything?”
+
+“You said—”
+
+“I said one of the State Department translators was acting up,” Burris
+said. “If you want details—”
+
+“I don’t think I can stand them,” Malone said.
+
+“Some of the Russian and Chinese releases have come through with the
+meaning slightly altered,” Burris went on doggedly. “And I want you to
+check on it right away. I—”
+
+“Thank God,” Malone said.
+
+Burris blinked. “What?”
+
+“Never mind,” Malone said. “Never mind. I’m glad you told me, Chief.
+I’ll get to work on it right away, and—”
+
+“You do that, Malone,” Burris said. “And for God’s sake stop calling
+me Chief! Do I look like an Indian? Do I have feathers in my hair?”
+
+“Anything,” Malone said grandly, “is possible.” He broke the
+connection in a hurry.
+
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+The summer sun beat down on the white city of Washington, D. C, as if
+it had mistaken its instructions slightly and was convinced that the
+city had been put down somewhere in the Sahara. The sun seemed
+confused, Malone thought. If this were the Sahara, obviously there was
+no reason whatever for the Potomac to be running through it. The sun
+was doing its best to correct this small error, however, by exerting
+even more heat in a valiant attempt to dry up the river.
+
+Its attempt was succeeding, at least partially. The Potomac was still
+there, but quite a lot of it was not in the river bed any more.
+Instead, it had gone into the air, which was so humid by now that
+Malone was willing to swear that it was splashing into his lungs at
+every inhalation. Resisting an impulse to try the breaststroke, he
+stood in the full glare of the straining sun, just outside the Senate
+Office Building. He looked across at the Capitol, just opposite,
+squinting his eyes manfully against the glare of its dome in the
+brightness.
+
+The Capitol was, at any rate, some relief from the sight of Thomas
+Boyd and a group of agents busily grilling two technicians. That was
+going on in the Senate Office Building, and Malone had come over to
+watch the proceedings. Everything had been set up in what Malone
+considered the most complicated fashion possible. A big room had been
+turned into a projection chamber, and films were being run off over
+and over. The films, taken by hidden cameras watching the
+computer-secretaries, had caught two technicians red-handed punching
+errors into the machines. Boyd had leaped on this evidence, and he and
+his crew were showing the movies to the technicians and questioning
+them under bright lights in an effort to break down their resistance.
+
+But it didn’t look as though they were going to have any more success
+than the sun was having, turning Washington into the Sahara. After
+all, Malone told himself, wiping his streaming brow, there were no
+Pyramids in Washington. He tried to discover whether that made any
+sense, but it was too much work. He went back to thinking about Boyd.
+
+The technicians were sticking to their original stories that the
+mistakes had been honest ones. It sounded like a sensible idea to
+Malone; after all, people did make mistakes. And the FBI didn’t have a
+single shred of evidence to prove that the technicians were engaged in
+deliberate sabotage. But Boyd wasn’t giving up. Over and over he got
+the technicians to repeat their stories, looking for discrepancies or
+slips. Over and over he ran off the films of their mistakes, looking
+for some clue, some shred of evidence.
+
+Even the sight of the Capitol, Malone told himself sadly, was better
+than any more of Boyd’s massive investigation techniques.
+
+He had come out to do some thinking. He believed, in spite of a good
+deal of evidence to the contrary, that his best ideas came to him
+while walking. At any rate, it was a way of getting away from four
+walls and from the prying eyes and anxious looks of superiors. He
+sighed gently, crammed his hat onto his head and started out.
+
+Only a maniac, he reflected, would wear a hat on a day like the one he
+was swimming through. But the people who passed him as he trudged
+onward to no particular destination didn’t seem to notice; they gave
+him a fairly wide berth, and seemed very polite, but that wasn’t
+because they thought he was nuts, Malone knew. It was because they
+knew he was an FBI man.
+
+That was the result of an FBI regulation. All agents had to wear hats.
+Malone wasn’t sure why, and his thinking on the matter had only
+dredged up the idea that you had to have a hat in case somebody asked
+you to keep something under it. But the FBI was firm about its
+rulings. No matter what the weather, an agent wore a hat. Malone
+thought bitterly that he might just as well wear a red, white and blue
+luminous sign that said _FBI_ in great winking letters, and maybe a
+hooting siren too. Still, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was not
+supposed to be a secret organization, no matter what occasional
+critics might say. And the hats, at least as long as the weather
+remained broiling, were enough proof of that for anybody.
+
+Malone could feel water collecting under his hat and soaking his head.
+He removed the hat quickly, wiped his head with a handkerchief and
+replaced the hat, feeling as if he had become incognito for a few
+seconds. The hat was back on now, feeling official but terrible, and
+about the same was true of the fully-loaded Smith & Wesson .44
+Magnum revolver which hung in his shoulder holster. The harness chafed
+at his shoulder and chest and the weight of the gun itself was an
+added and unwelcome burden.
+
+But even without the gun and the hat, Malone did not feel exactly
+chipper. His shirt and undershirt were no longer two garments, but
+one, welded together by seamless sweat and plastered heavily and not
+too skillfully to his skin. His trouser legs clung damply to calves
+and thighs, rubbing as he walked, and at the knees each trouser leg
+attached and detached itself with the unpleasant regularity of a wet
+bastinado. Inside Malone’s shoes, his socks were completely awash, and
+he seemed to squish as he walked. It was hard to tell, but there
+seemed to be a small fish in his left shoe. It might, he told himself,
+be no more than a pebble or a wrinkle in his sock. But he was willing
+to swear that it was swimming upstream.
+
+And the forecast, he told himself bitterly, was for continued warm.
+
+He forced himself to take his mind off his own troubles and get back
+to the troubles of the FBI in general, such as the problem at hand. It
+was an effort, but he frowned and kept walking, and within a block he
+was concentrating again on the _psi_ powers.
+
+_Psi_, he told himself, was behind the whole mess. In spite of Boyd’s
+horrified refusal to believe such a thing, Malone was sure of it.
+Three years ago, of course, he wouldn’t have considered the notion
+either. But since then a great many things had happened, and his
+horizons had widened. After all, capturing a double handful of totally
+insane, if perfectly genuine telepaths, from asylums all over the
+country, was enough by itself to widen quite a few stunned horizons.
+And then, later, there had been the gang of juvenile delinquents. They
+had been perfectly normal juvenile delinquents, stealing cars and
+bopping a stray policeman or two. It happened, though, that they had
+solved the secret of instantaneous teleportation, too. This made them
+just a trifle unusual.
+
+In capturing them, Malone, too, had learned the teleportation secret.
+Unlike Boyd, he thought, or Burris, the idea of psionic power didn’t
+bother him much. After all, the psionic spectrum (if it was a spectrum
+at all) was just as much a natural phenomenon as gravity or magnetism.
+
+It was just a little hard for some people to get used to.
+
+And, of course, he didn’t fully understand _how_ it worked, or _why_.
+This put him in the position, he told himself, of an Australian
+aborigine. He tried to imagine an Australian aborigine in a hat on a
+hot day, decided the aborigine would have too much sense, and got back
+off the subject again.
+
+However, he thought grimly, there was this Australian aborigine. And
+he had a magnifying glass, which he’d picked up from the wreck of some
+ship. Using that—assuming that experience, or a friendly missionary,
+taught him how—he could manage to light a fire, using the sun’s
+thermonuclear processes to do the job. Malone doubted that the
+aborigine knew anything about thermonuclear processes, but he could
+start a fire with them.
+
+As a matter of fact, he told himself, the aborigine didn’t understand
+oxidation, either. But he could use that fire, when he got it going.
+In spite of his lack of knowledge, the aborigine could use that nice,
+hot, burning fire....
+
+Hurriedly, Malone pried his thoughts away from aborigines and heat,
+and tried to focus his mind elsewhere. He didn’t understand psionic
+processes, he thought; but then, nobody did, really, as far as he
+knew. But he could use them.
+
+And, obviously, somebody else could use them too.
+
+Only what kind of force was being used? What kind of psionic force
+would it take to make so many people in the United States goof up the
+way they were doing?
+
+That, Malone told himself, was a good question, a basic and an
+important question. He was proud of himself for thinking of it.
+
+Unfortunately, he didn’t have the answer.
+
+But he thought he knew a way of getting one.
+
+It was perfectly true that nobody knew much about how psionics worked.
+For that matter, nobody knew very much about how gravity worked. But
+there was still some information, and, in the case of psionics, Malone
+knew where it was to be found.
+
+It was to be found in Yucca Flats, Nevada.
+
+It was, of course, true that Nevada would probably be even hotter than
+Washington, D. C. But there was no help for that, Malone told himself
+sadly; and, besides, the cold chill of the expert himself would
+probably cool things off quite rapidly. Malone thought of Dr. Thomas
+O’Connor, the Westinghouse psionics expert and frowned. O’Connor was
+not exactly what might be called a friendly man.
+
+But he did know more about psionics than anyone else Malone could
+think of. And his help had been invaluable in solving the two previous
+psionic cases Malone had worked on.
+
+For a second he thought of calling O’Connor, but he brushed that
+thought aside bravely. In spite of the heat of Yucca Flats, he would
+have to talk to the man personally. He thought again of O’Connor’s
+congealed personality, and wondered if it would really be effective in
+combating the heat. If it were, he told himself, he would take the man
+right back to Washington with him, and plug him into the
+air-conditioning lines.
+
+He sighed deeply, thought about a cigar and decided regretfully
+against it, here on the public street where he would be visible to
+anyone. Instead, he looked around him, discovered that he was only a
+block from a large, neon-lit drugstore and headed for it. Less than a
+minute later he was in a phone booth.
+
+The operators throughout the country seemed to suffer from heat
+prostration, and Malone was hardly inclined to blame them. But, all
+the same, it took several minutes for him to get through to Dr.
+O’Connor’s office, and a minute or so more before he could convince a
+security-addled secretary that, after all, he would hardly blow
+O’Connor to bits over the long-distance phone.
+
+Finally the secretary, with a sigh of reluctance, said she would see
+if Dr. O’Connor were available. Malone waited in the phone booth,
+opening the door every few seconds to breathe. The booth was
+air-conditioned, but remained for some mystical reason an even ten
+degrees above the boiling point of Malone’s temper.
+
+Finally Dr. O’Connor’s lean, pallid face appeared on the screen. He
+had not changed since Malone had last seen him. He still looked, and
+acted, like one of Malone’s more disliked law professors.
+
+“Ah,” the scientist said in a cold, precise voice. “Mr. Malone. I am
+sorry for our precautions, but you understand that security must be
+served.”
+
+“Sure,” Malone said.
+
+“Being an FBI man, of course you would,” Dr. O’Connor went on, his
+face changing slightly and his voice warming almost to the boiling
+point of nitrogen. It was obvious that the phrase was Dr. O’Connor’s
+idea of a little joke, and Malone smiled politely and nodded. The
+scientist seemed to feel some friendliness toward Malone, though it
+was hard to tell for sure. But Malone had brought him some fine
+specimens to work with—telepaths and teleports, though human, being
+no more than specimens to such a very precise scientific mind—and he
+seemed grateful for Malone’s diligence and effort in finding such
+fascinating objects of study.
+
+That Malone certainly hadn’t started out to find them made, it
+appeared, very little difference.
+
+“Well, then,” O’Connor said, returning to his normal, serious tone.
+“What can I do for you, Mr. Malone?”
+
+“If you have the time, Doctor,” Malone said respectfully, “I’d like to
+talk to you for a few minutes.” He had the absurd feeling that
+O’Connor was going to tell him to stop by after class, but the
+scientist only nodded.
+
+“Your call is timed very well,” he said. “As it happens, Mr. Malone, I
+do have a few seconds to spare just now.”
+
+“Fine,” Malone said.
+
+“I should be glad to talk with you,” O’Connor said, without looking
+any more glad than ever.
+
+“I’ll be right there,” Malone said. O’Connor nodded again, and blanked
+out. Malone switched off and took a deep, superheated breath of phone
+booth air. For a second he considered starting his trip from outside
+the phone booth, but that was dangerous—if not to Malone, then to
+innocent spectators. Psionics was by no means a household word, and
+the sight of Malone leaving for Nevada might send several citizens
+straight to the wagon. Which was not a place, he thought judiciously,
+for anybody to be on such a hot day.
+
+He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second. In that time he
+reconstructed from memory a detailed, three-dimensional, full-color
+image of Dr. O’Connor’s office in his mind. It was perfect in detail;
+he checked it over mentally and then, by a special effort of will, he
+gave himself the psychic push that made the transition possible.
+
+When he opened his eyes, he was in O’Connor’s office, standing in
+front of the scientist’s wide desk. He hoped nobody had been looking
+into the phone booth at the instant he had disappeared, but he was
+reasonably sure he’d been unobserved. People didn’t go around peering
+into phone booths, after all, and he had seen no one.
+
+O’Connor looked up without surprise. “Ah,” he said. “Sit down, Mr.
+Malone.” Malone looked around for the chair, which was an
+uncomfortably straight-backed affair, and sat down in it gingerly.
+Remembering past visits to O’Connor, he was grateful for even the
+small amount of relaxation the hard wood afforded him. O’Connor had
+only recently unbent to the point of supplying a spare chair in his
+office for visitors, and, apparently, especially for Malone. Perhaps,
+Malone thought, it was more gratitude for the lovely specimens.
+
+Malone still felt uncomfortable, but tried bravely not to show it. He
+felt slightly guilty, too, as he always did when he popped into
+O’Connor’s office without bothering to stay space-bound. By law, after
+all, he knew he should check in and out at the main gate of the huge,
+ultra-top-secret Government reservation whenever he visited Yucca
+Flats. But that meant wasting a lot of time and going through a lot of
+trouble. Malone had rationalized it out for himself that way, and had
+gotten just far enough to do things the quick and easy way and not
+quite far enough to feel undisturbed about it. After all, he told
+himself grimly, anything that saved time and trouble increased the
+efficiency of the FBI, so it was all to the good.
+
+He swallowed hard. “Dr. O’Connor—” he began.
+
+O’Connor looked up again. “Yes?” he said. He’d had plenty of practice
+in watching people appear and disappear, between Malone and the
+specimens Malone had brought him; he was beyond surprise or shock by
+now.
+
+“I came here to talk to you,” Malone began again.
+
+O’Connor nodded, a trifle impatiently. “Yes,” he said. “I know that.”
+
+“Well—” Malone thought fast. Presenting the case to O’Connor was
+impossible; it was too complicated, and it might violate governmental
+secrecy somewhere along the line. He decided to wrap it up in a
+hypothetical situation. “Doctor,” he said, “I know that all the
+various manifestations of the _psi_ powers were investigated and named
+long before responsible scientists became interested in the subject.”
+
+“That,” O’Connor said with some reluctance, “is true.” He looked sad,
+as if he wished they’d waited on naming some of the psionic
+manifestations until he’d been born and started investigating them.
+Malone tried to imagine a person doing something called O’Connorizing,
+and decided he was grateful for history.
+
+“Well, then—” he said.
+
+“At least,” O’Connor cut in, “it is true in a rather vague and general
+way. You see, Mr. Malone, any precise description of a psionic
+manifestation must wait until a metalanguage has grown up to encompass
+it; that is, until understanding and knowledge have reached the point
+where careful and accurate description can take place.”
+
+“Oh,” Malone said helplessly. “Sure.” He wondered if what O’Connor had
+said meant anything, and decided that it probably did, but he didn’t
+want to know about it.
+
+“While we have not yet reached that point,” O’Connor said, “we are
+approaching it in our experiments. I am hopeful that, in the near
+future—”
+
+“Well,” Malone cut in desperately, “sure. Of course. Naturally.”
+
+Dr. O’Connor looked miffed. The temperature of the room seemed to drop
+several degrees, and Malone swallowed hard and tried to look
+ingratiating and helpful, like a student with nothing but A’s on his
+record.
+
+Before O’Connor could pick up the thread of his sentence, Malone went
+on: “What I mean is something like this. Picking up the mental
+activity of another person is called telepathy. Floating in the air is
+called levitation. Moving objects around is psychokinesis. Going from
+one place to another instantaneously is teleportation. And so on.”
+
+“The language you use,” O’Connor said, still miffed, “is extremely
+loose. I might go so far as to say that the statements you have made
+are, essentially, meaningless as a result of their lack of rigor.”
+
+Malone took a deep breath. “Dr. O’Connor,” he said, “you know what I
+mean, don’t you?”
+
+“I believe so,” O’Connor said, with the air of a king granting a
+pardon to a particularly repulsive-looking subject in the lowest
+income brackets.
+
+“Well, then,” Malone said. “Yes or no?”
+
+O’Connor frowned. “Yes or no what?” he said.
+
+“I—” Malone blinked. “I mean, the things have names,” he said at
+last. “All the various psionic manifestations have names.”
+
+“Ah,” O’Connor said. “Well. I should say—” He put his fingertips
+together and stared at a point on the white ceiling for a second.
+“Yes,” he said at last.
+
+Malone breathed a sigh of relief. “Good,” he said. “That’s what I
+wanted to know.” He leaned forward. “And if they all do have names,”
+he went on, “what is it called when a large group of people are forced
+to act in a certain manner?”
+
+O’Connor shrugged. “Forced?” he said.
+
+“Forced by mental power,” Malone said.
+
+There was a second of silence.
+
+“At first,” O’Connor said, “I might think of various examples: the
+actions of a mob, for example, or the demonstrations of the Indian
+Rope Trick, or perhaps the sale of a useless product through
+television or through other advertising.” Again his face moved, ever
+so slightly, in what he obviously believed to be a smile. “The usual
+name for such a phenomenon is ‘mass hypnotism,’ Mr. Malone,” he said.
+“But that is not, strictly speaking, a _psi_ phenomenon at all.
+Studies in that area belong to the field of mob psychology; they are
+not properly in my scope.” He looked vastly superior to anything and
+everything that was outside his scope. Malone concentrated on looking
+receptive and understanding.
+
+“Yes?” he said.
+
+O’Connor gave him a look that made Malone feel he’d been caught
+cribbing during an exam, but the scientist said nothing to back up the
+look. Instead he went on: “I will grant that there may be an
+amplification of the telepathic faculty in the normal individual in
+such cases.”
+
+“Good,” Malone said doubtfully.
+
+“Such an amplification,” O’Connor went on, as if he hadn’t heard,
+“would account for the apparent—ah—mental linkage that makes a mob
+appear to act as a single organism during certain periods of—ah—
+stress.” He looked judicious for a second, and then nodded. “However,”
+he said, “other than that, I would doubt that there is any psionic
+force involved.”
+
+Malone spent a second or two digesting O’Connor’s reply.
+
+“Well,” he said at last, “I’m not sure that’s what I meant. I mean,
+I’m not sure I meant to ask that question.” He took a breath and
+decided to start all over. “It’s not like a mob,” he said, “with
+everybody all doing the same thing at the same time. It’s more like a
+group of men, all separated, without any apparent connections between
+any of the men. And they’re all working toward a common goal. All
+doing different things, but all with the same objective. See?”
+
+“Of course I do,” O’Connor said flatly. “But what you’re suggesting—”
+He looked straight at Malone. “Have you had any experience of this ...
+phenomenon?”
+
+“Experience?” Malone said.
+
+“I believe you have had,” O’Connor said. “Such a concept could not
+have come to you in a theoretical manner. You must be involved with an
+actual situation very much like the one you describe.”
+
+Malone swallowed. “Me?” he said.
+
+“Mr. Malone,” O’Connor said. “May I remind you that this is Yucca
+Flats? That the security checks here are as careful as anywhere in the
+world? That I, myself, have top-security clearance for many special
+projects? You do not need to watch your words here.”
+
+“It’s not security,” Malone said. “Anyhow, it’s not only security. But
+things are pretty complicated.”
+
+“I assure you,” O’Connor said, “that I will be able to understand even
+events which you feel are complex.”
+
+Malone swallowed again, hard. “I didn’t mean—” he started.
+
+“Please, Mr. Malone,” O’Connor said. His voice was colder than usual.
+Malone had the feeling that he was about to take the extra chair away.
+“Go on,” O’Connor said. “Explain yourself.”
+
+Malone took a deep breath. He started with the facts he’d been told by
+Burris, and went straight through to the interviews of the two
+computer-secretary technicians by Boyd and Company.
+
+It took quite awhile. By the time he had finished, O’Connor wasn’t
+looking frozen any more; he’d apparently forgotten to keep the freezer
+coils running. Instead, his face showed frank bewilderment, and great
+interest. “I never heard of such a thing,” he said. “Never. Not at any
+time.”
+
+“But—”
+
+O’Connor shook his head. “I have never heard of a psionic
+manifestation on that order,” he said. It seemed to be a painful
+admission. “Something that would make a random group of men co-operate
+in that manner—why, it’s completely new.”
+
+“It is?” Malone said, wondering if, when it was all investigated and
+described, it might be called O’Connorizing. Then he wondered how
+anybody was going to go about investigating it and describing it, and
+sank even deeper into gloom.
+
+“Completely new,” O’Connor said. “You may take my word.” Then, slowly,
+he began to brighten again, with all the glitter of newly-formed ice.
+“As a matter of fact,” he said, in a tone more like his usual one, “as
+a matter of fact, Mr. Malone, I don’t think it’s possible.”
+
+“But it happened,” Malone said. “It’s still happening. All over.”
+
+O’Connor’s lips tightened. “I have given my opinion,” he said. “I do
+not believe that such a thing is possible. There must be some other
+explanation.”
+
+“All right,” Malone said agreeably. “I’ll bite. What is it?”
+
+O’Connor frowned. “Your levity,” he said, “is uncalled-for.”
+
+Malone shrugged. “I didn’t mean to be—” He paused. “Anyhow, I didn’t
+mean to be funny,” he went on. “But I would like to have another idea
+of what’s causing all this.”
+
+“Scientific theories,” O’Connor said sternly, “are not invented on the
+spur of the moment. Only after long, careful thought.”
+
+“You mean you can’t think of anything,” Malone said.
+
+“There must be some other explanation,” O’Connor said. “Naturally,
+since the facts have only now been presented to me, it is impossible
+for me to display at once a fully-constructed theory.”
+
+Malone nodded slowly. “Okay,” he said. “Have you got any hints, then?
+Any ideas at all?”
+
+O’Connor shook his head. “I have not,” he said. “But I strongly
+suggest, Mr. Malone, that you recheck your data. The fault may very
+well lie in your own interpretations of the actual facts.”
+
+“I don’t think so,” Malone said.
+
+O’Connor grimaced. “I do,” he said firmly.
+
+Malone sighed, very faintly. He shifted in the chair and began to
+realize, for the first time, just how uncomfortable it really was. He
+also felt a little chilly, and the chill was growing. That, he told
+himself, was the effect of Dr. O’Connor. He no longer regretted
+wearing his hat. As a matter of fact, he thought wistfully for a
+second of a small, light overcoat.
+
+O’Connor, he told himself, was definitely not the warm, friendly type.
+
+“Well, then,” he said, conquering the chilly feeling for a second,
+“maybe there’s somebody else. Somebody who knows something more about
+psionics, and who might have some other ideas about—”
+
+“Please, Mr. Malone,” O’Connor said. “The United States Government
+would hardly have chosen me had I not been uniquely qualified in my
+field.”
+
+Malone sighed again. “I mean, maybe there are some books on the
+subject,” he said quietly, hoping he sounded tactful. “Maybe there’s
+something I could look up.”
+
+“Mr. Malone.” The temperature of the office, Malone realized, was
+definitely lowering. O’Connor’s built-in freezer coils were working
+overtime, he told himself. “The field of psionics is so young that I
+can say, without qualification, that I am acquainted with everything
+written on the subject. By that, of course, I mean scientific works. I
+do not doubt that the American Society for Psychical Research, for
+instance, has hundreds of crackpot books which I have never read, or
+even heard of. But in the strictly scientific field, I must say
+that—”
+
+He broke off, looking narrowly at Malone with what might have been
+concern, but looked more like discouragement and boredom.
+
+“Mr. Malone,” he said, “are you ill?”
+
+Malone thought about it. He wasn’t quite sure, he discovered. The
+chill in the office was bothering him more and more, and as it grew he
+began to doubt that it was all due to the O’Connor influence. Suddenly
+a distinct shudder started somewhere in the vicinity of his shoulders
+and rippled its way down his body.
+
+Another one followed it, and then a third.
+
+“Mr. Malone,” O’Connor said.
+
+“Me?” Malone said. “I’m—I’m all right.”
+
+“You seem to have contracted a chill,” O’Connor said.
+
+A fourth shudder followed the other three.
+
+“I—guess so,” Malone said. “I d-d—I do s-seem to be r-r-rather
+chilly.”
+
+O’Connor nodded. “Ah,” he said. “I thought so. Although a chill is
+certainly odd at seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit.” He looked at the
+thermometer just outside the window of his office, then turned back to
+Malone. “Pardon me,” he said. “Seventy-one point six.”
+
+“Is—is that all it is?” Malone said. Seventy-one point six degrees,
+or even seventy-two, hardly sounded like the broiling Nevada desert
+he’d expected.
+
+“Of course,” O’Connor said. “At nine o’clock in the morning, one would
+hardly expect great temperatures. The desert becomes quite hot during
+the day, but cools off rapidly; I assume you are familiar with the
+laws covering the system.”
+
+“Sure,” Malone said. “S-sure.”
+
+The chills were not getting any better. They continued to travel up
+and down his body with the dignified regularity of Pennsylvania
+Railroad commuter trains.
+
+O’Connor frowned for a second. It was obvious that his keen scientific
+eye was sizing up the phenomenon, and reporting events to his keen
+scientific brain. In a second or less, the keen scientific brain had
+come up with an answer, and Dr. O’Connor spoke in his very keenest
+scientific voice.
+
+“I should have warned you,” he said, without an audible trace of
+regret. “The answer is childishly simple, Mr. Malone. You left
+Washington at noon.”
+
+“Just a little before noon,” Malone said. Remembering the burning sun,
+he added: “High noon. Very high.”
+
+“Just so,” O’Connor said. “And not only the heat was intense; the
+humidity, I assume, was also high.”
+
+“Very,” Malone said, thinking back. He shivered again.
+
+“In Washington,” O’Connor said, “it was noon. Here it is nine o’clock,
+and hardly as warm. The atmosphere is quite arid, and about twenty
+degrees below that obtaining in Washington.”
+
+Malone thought about it, trying to ignore the chills. “Oh,” he said at
+last. “And all the time I thought it was you.”
+
+“What?” O’Connor leaned forward.
+
+“Nothing,” Malone said hastily. “Nothing at all.”
+
+“My suggestion,” O’Connor said, putting his fingertips together again,
+“is that you take off your clothes, which are undoubtedly damp, and—”
+
+Naturally, Malone had not brought any clothes to Yucca Flats to change
+into. And when he tried to picture himself in a spare suit of Dr.
+O’Connor’s, the picture just wouldn’t come. Besides, the idea of doing
+a modified striptease in, or near, the O’Connor office was thoroughly
+unattractive.
+
+“Well,” he said slowly, “thanks a lot, Doctor, but no thanks. I really
+have a better idea.”
+
+“Better?” O’Connor said.
+
+“Well, I—” Malone took a deep breath and shut his eyes.
+
+He heard Dr. O’Connor say: “Well, Mr. Malone, goodbye. And good luck.”
+
+Then the office in Yucca Flats was gone, and Malone was standing in
+the bedroom of his own apartment, on the fringes of Washington, D.C.
+
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+He walked over to the wall control and shut off the air-conditioning
+in a hurry. He threw open a window and breathed great gulps of the
+hot, humid air from the streets. In a small corner at the back of his
+mind, he wondered why he was grateful for the air he had suffered
+under only a few minutes before. But that, he reflected, was life. And
+a very silly kind of life, too, he told himself without rancor.
+
+In a few minutes he left the window, somewhat restored, and headed for
+the shower. When it was running nicely and he was under it, he started
+to sing. But his voice didn’t sound as much like the voice of Lauritz
+Melchior as it usually did, not even when he made a brave, if
+foolhardy stab at the Melchior accent. Slowly, he began to realize
+that he was bothered.
+
+He climbed out of the shower and started drying himself. Up to now, he
+thought, he had depended on Dr. Thomas O’Connor for edifying,
+trustworthy and reasonably complete information about psionics and
+_psi_ phenomena in general. He had looked on O’Connor as a sort of
+living version of an extremely good edition of the Britannica, always
+available for reference.
+
+And now O’Connor had failed him. That, Malone thought, was hardly
+fair. O’Connor had no business failing him, particularly when there
+was no place else to go.
+
+The scientist had been right, of course, Malone knew. There was no
+other scientist who knew as much about psionics as O’Connor, and if
+O’Connor said there were no books, then that was that: there were no
+books.
+
+He reached for a drawer in his dresser, opened it and pulled out some
+underclothes, humming tunelessly under his breath as he dressed. If
+there was no one to ask, he thought, and if there were no books....
+
+He stopped with a sock in his hand, and stared at it in wonder.
+O’Connor hadn’t said there were no books. As a matter of fact, Malone
+realized, he’d said exactly the opposite.
+
+There were books. But they were “crackpot” books. O’Connor had never
+read them. He had, he said, probably never even heard of many of them.
+
+“Crackpot” was a fighting word to O’Connor. But to Malone it had all
+the sweetness of flattery. After all, he’d found telepaths in insane
+asylums, and teleports among the juvenile delinquents of New York.
+“Crackpot” was a word that was rapidly ceasing to have any meaning at
+all in Malone’s mind.
+
+He realized that he was still staring at the sock, which was black
+with a pink clock. Hurriedly, he put it on, and finished dressing. He
+reached for the phone and made a few fast calls, and then teleported
+himself to his locked office in FBI Headquarters, on East 69th Street
+in New York. He let himself out, and strolled down the corridor. The
+agent-in-charge looked up from his desk as Malone passed, blinked, and
+said, “Hello, Malone. What’s up now?”
+
+“I’m going prowling,” Malone said. “But there won’t be any work for
+you, as far as I can see.”
+
+“Oh?”
+
+“Just relax,” Malone said. “Breathe easy.”
+
+“I’ll try to,” the agent-in-charge said, a little sadly. “But every
+time you show up, I think about that wave of red Cadillacs you
+started. I’ll never feel really secure again.”
+
+“Relax,” Malone said. “Next time it won’t be Cadillacs. But it might
+be spirits, blowing on ear-trumpets. Or whatever it is they do.”
+
+“Spirits, Malone?” the agent-in-charge said.
+
+“No, thanks,” Malone said sternly. “I never drink on duty.” He gave
+the agent a cheery wave of his hand and went on out to the street.
+
+The Psychical Research Society had offices in the Ravell Building, a
+large structure composed mostly of plate glass and anodized aluminum
+that looked just a little like a bright blue transparent crackerbox
+that had been stood on end for purposes unknown. Having walked all the
+way down to this box on 56th Street, Malone had recovered his former
+sensitivity range to temperature and felt pathetically grateful for
+the coolish sea breeze that made New York somewhat less of an
+unbearable Summer Festival than was normal.
+
+The lobby of the building was glittering and polished, as if human
+beings could not possibly exist in it. Malone took an elevator to the
+sixth floor, stepped out into a small, equally polished hall, and
+hurriedly looked off to his right. A small door stood there, with a
+legend engraved in elegantly small letters. It said:
+
+     _The Psychical Research Society_
+                  _Push_
+
+Malone obeyed instructions. The door swung noiselessly open, and then
+closed behind him.
+
+He was in a large square-looking room which had a couch and chair set
+at one corner, and a desk at the far end. Behind the desk was a brass
+plate, on which was engraved:
+
+     _The Psychical Research Society_
+               _Main Offices_
+
+To Malone’s left was a hall that angled off into invisibility, and to
+the left of the desk was another one, going straight back past doors
+and two radiators until it ran into a right-angled turn and also
+disappeared.
+
+Malone took in the details of his surroundings almost automatically,
+filing them in his memory just in case he ever needed to use them.
+
+One detail, however, required more than automatic attention. Sitting
+behind the desk, her head just below the brass plaque, was a redhead.
+She was, Malone thought, positively beautiful. Of course, he could not
+see the lower two-thirds of her body, but if they were half as
+interesting as the upper third and the face and head, he was willing
+to spend days, weeks or even months on their investigation. Some jobs,
+he told himself, feeling a strong sense of duty, were definitely worth
+taking time over.
+
+She was turned slightly away from Malone, and had obviously not heard
+him come in. Malone wondered how best to announce himself, and
+regretfully gave up the idea of tiptoeing up to the girl, placing his
+hands over her eyes, kissing the back of her neck and crying:
+“Surprise!” It was elegant, he felt, but it just wasn’t _right_.
+
+He compromised at last on the old established method of throat-clearing
+to attract her attention. He was sure he could take it from there, to
+an eminently satisfying conclusion.
+
+He tiptoed on the deep-pile rug right up to her desk. He took a deep
+breath.
+
+And the expected happened.
+
+He sneezed.
+
+The sneeze was loud and long, and it echoed through the room and
+throughout the corridors. It sounded to Malone like the blast of a
+small bomb, or possibly a grenade. Startled himself by the volume of
+sound he had managed to generate, he jumped back.
+
+The girl had jumped, too, but her leap had been straight upward, about
+an inch and a half. She came down on her chair and reached up a hand.
+The hand wiped the back of her neck with a slow, lingering motion of
+complete loathing. Then, equally slowly, she turned.
+
+“That,” she said in a low, sweet voice, “was a hell of a dirty trick.”
+
+“It was an accident,” Malone said. “The Will of God.”
+
+“God has an exceedingly nasty mind,” the girl said. “Something, by the
+way, which I have often suspected.” She regarded Malone darkly. “Do
+you always do that to strangers? Is it some new sort of perversion?”
+
+“I have never done such a thing before,” Malone said sternly.
+
+“Oh,” the girl said. “An experimenter. Avid for new sensations.
+Probably a jaded scion of a rich New York family.” She paused. “Tell
+me,” she said, “is it fun?”
+
+Malone opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He shut it, thought for
+a second and then tried again. He got as far as: “I—” before Nemesis
+overtook him. The second sneeze was even louder and more powerful than
+the first had been.
+
+“It must be fun,” the girl said acidly, producing a handkerchief from
+somewhere and going to work on her face. “You just can’t seem to wait
+to do it again. Would it do any good to tell you that the fascination
+with this form of greeting is not universal? Or don’t you care?”
+
+“Damn it,” Malone said, goaded, “I’ve got a cold.”
+
+“And you feel you should share it with the world,” the girl said. “I
+quite understand. Tell me, is there anything I can do for you? Or has
+your mission been accomplished?”
+
+“My mission?” Malone said.
+
+“Having sneezed twice at me,” the girl said, “do you feel satisfied?
+Will you vanish softly and silently away? Or do you want to sneeze at
+somebody else?”
+
+“I want the president of the Society,” Malone said. “According to my
+information, his name is Sir Lewis Carter.”
+
+“And if you sneeze at him,” the girl said, “yours is going to be mud.
+He isn’t much on novelty.”
+
+“I—”
+
+“Besides which,” she said, “he’s extremely busy. And I don’t think
+he’ll see you at all. Why don’t you go and sneeze at somebody else?
+There must be lots of people who would consider themselves honored to
+be noticed, especially in such a startling way. Why don’t you try and
+find one somewhere? Somewhere very far away.”
+
+Malone was beyond speech. He fumbled for his wallet, flipped it open
+and showed the girl his identification.
+
+“My, my,” she said. “And hasn’t the FBI anything better to do? I mean,
+can’t you go and sneeze at counterfeiters in their lairs, or wherever
+they might be?”
+
+“I want to see Sir Lewis Carter,” Malone said doggedly.
+
+The girl shrugged and picked up the phone on the desk. It was a
+blank-vision device, of course; many office intercoms were. She
+dialed, waited and then said, “Sir Lewis, please.” Another second went
+by. Then she spoke again. “Sir Lewis,” she said, “this is Lou, at the
+front desk. There’s a man here named Malone, who wants to see you.”
+
+She waited a second. “I don’t know what he wants,” she told the phone.
+“But he’s from the FBI.” A second’s pause. “That’s right, the FBI,”
+she said. “All right, Sir Lewis. Right away.” She hung up the phone
+and turned to watch Malone warily.
+
+“Sir Lewis,” she said, “will see you. I couldn’t say why. But take the
+side corridor to the rear of the suite. His office has his name on it,
+and I won’t tell you you can’t miss it because I have every faith that
+you will. Good luck.”
+
+Malone blinked. “Look,” he said. “I know I startled you, but I didn’t
+mean to. I—” He started to sneeze, but this time he got his own
+handkerchief out in time and muffled the explosion slightly.
+
+“Good work,” the girl said approvingly. “Tell me, Mr. Malone, have you
+been toilet-trained, too?”
+
+There was nothing at all to say to that remark, Malone reflected as he
+wended his way down the side corridor. It seemed endless, and kept
+branching off unexpectedly. Once he blundered into a large open room
+filled with people at desks. A woman who seemed to have a great many
+teeth and rather bulbous eyes looked up at him. “Can I help you?” she
+said in a fervent whine.
+
+“I sincerely hope not,” Malone said, backing away and managing to find
+the corridor once more. After what seemed like a long time, and two
+more sneezes, he found a small door which was labeled in capital
+letters:
+
+     THE PSYCHICAL RESEARCH SOCIETY
+             SIR LEWIS CARTER
+                PRESIDENT
+
+Malone sighed. “Well,” he muttered, “they certainly aren’t hiding
+anything.” He pushed at the door, and it swung open.
+
+Sir Lewis was a tall, solidly-built man with a kindly expression. He
+wore grey flannel trousers and a brown tweed jacket, which made an
+interesting color contrast with his iron-grey hair. His teeth were
+clenched so firmly on the bit of a calabash pipe with a meerschaum
+bowl that Malone wondered if he could ever get loose. Malone shut the
+door behind him, and Sir Lewis rose and extended a hand.
+
+Malone went to the desk and reached across to take the hand. It was
+firm and dry. “I’m Kenneth Malone,” Malone said.
+
+“Ah, yes,” Sir Lewis said. “Pleased to meet you. Always happy, of
+course, to do whatever I can for your FBI. Not only a duty, so to
+speak, but a pleasure. Sit down. Please do sit down.”
+
+Malone found a chair at the side of the desk, and sank into it. It was
+soft and comfortable. It provided such a contrast to O’Connor’s
+furnishings that Malone began to wish it was Sir Lewis who was
+employed at Yucca Flats. Then he could tell Sir Lewis everything about
+the case.
+
+Now, of course, he could only hedge and try to make do without stating
+very many facts. “Sir Lewis,” he said, “I trust you’ll keep this
+conversation confidential.”
+
+“Naturally,” Sir Lewis said. He removed the pipe, stared at it, and
+replaced it.
+
+“I can’t give you the full details,” Malone went on, “but the FBI is
+presently engaged in an investigation which requires the specialized
+knowledge your organization seems to have.”
+
+“FBI?” Sir Lewis said. “Specialized investigation?” He seemed pleased,
+but a trifle puzzled. “Dear boy, anything we have is at your disposal,
+of course. But I quite fail to see how you can consider us—”
+
+“It’s rather an unusual problem,” Malone said, feeling that that was
+the understatement of the year. “But I understand that your records go
+back nearly a century.”
+
+“Quite true,” Sir Lewis murmured.
+
+“During that time,” Malone said, “the Society investigated a great
+many supposedly supernatural or supernormal incidents.”
+
+“Many of them,” Sir Lewis said, “were discovered to be fraudulent, I’m
+afraid. The great majority, in fact.”
+
+“That’s what I’d assume,” Malone said. He fished in his pockets, found
+a cigarette and lit it. Sir Lewis went on chewing at his unlit pipe.
+“What we’re interested in,” Malone said, “is some description of the
+various methods by which these frauds were perpetrated.”
+
+“Ah,” Sir Lewis said. “The tricks of the trade, so to speak?”
+
+“Exactly,” Malone said.
+
+“Well, then,” Sir Lewis said. “The luminous gauze, for instance, that
+passes for ectoplasm; the various methods of table-lifting; control of
+the Ouija board—things like that?”
+
+“Not quite that elementary,” Malone said. He puffed on the cigarette,
+wishing it was a cigar. “We’re pretty much up to that kind of thing.
+But had it ever occurred to you that many of the methods used by phony
+mind-reading acts, for instance, might be used as communication
+methods by spies?”
+
+“Why, I believe some have been,” Sir Lewis said. “Though I don’t know
+much about that, of course; there was a case during the First World
+War—”
+
+“Exactly,” Malone said. He took a deep breath. “It’s things like that
+we’re interested in,” he said, and spent the next twenty minutes
+slowly approaching his subject. Sir Lewis, apparently fascinated, was
+perfectly willing to unbend in any direction, and jotted down notes on
+some of Malone’s more interesting cases, murmuring: “Most unusual,
+most unusual,” as he wrote.
+
+The various types of phenomena that the Society had investigated came
+into the discussion, and Malone heard quite a lot about the Beyond,
+the Great Summerland, Spirit Mediums and the hypothetical existence of
+fairies, goblins and elves.
+
+“But, Sir Lewis—” he said.
+
+“I make no claims personally,” Sir Lewis said. “But I understand that
+there is a large and somewhat vocal group which does make rather
+solid-sounding claims in that direction. They say that they have seen
+fairies, talked with goblins, danced with the elves.”
+
+“They must be very unusual people,” Malone said, understating heavily.
+
+“Oh,” Sir Lewis said, without a trace of irony, “they certainly are.”
+
+Talk like this passed away nearly a half-hour, until Malone finally
+felt that it was the right time to introduce some of his real
+questions. “Tell me, Sir Lewis,” he said. “Have you had many instances
+of a single man, or a small group of men, controlling the actions of a
+much larger group? And doing it in such a way that the larger group
+doesn’t even know it is being manipulated?”
+
+“Of course I have,” Sir Lewis said. “And so have you. They call it
+advertising.”
+
+Malone flicked his cigarette into an ashtray. “I didn’t mean exactly
+that,” he said. “Suppose they’re doing it in such a way that the
+larger group doesn’t even suspect that manipulation is going on?”
+
+Sir Lewis removed his pipe and frowned at it. “I may be able to give
+you a little information,” he said slowly, “but not much.”
+
+“Ah?” Malone said, trying to sound only mildly interested.
+
+“Outside of mob psychology,” Sir Lewis said, “and all that sort of
+thing, I really haven’t seen any record of a case of such a thing
+happening. And I can’t quite imagine anyone faking it.”
+
+“But you have got some information?” Malone said.
+
+“Certainly,” Sir Lewis said. “There is always spirit control.”
+
+“Spirit control?” Malone blinked.
+
+“Demoniac intervention,” Sir Lewis said. “‘My name is Legion,’ you
+know.”
+
+Sir Lewis Legion, Malone thought confusedly, was a rather unusual
+name. He took a breath and caught hold of his revolving mind. “How
+would you go about that?” he said, a little hopelessly.
+
+“I haven’t the foggiest,” Sir Lewis admitted cheerfully. “But I will
+have it looked up for you.” He made a note. “Anything else?”
+
+Malone tried to think. “Yes,” he said at last. “Can you give me a
+condensed report on what is known—and I mean _known_—on telepathy
+and teleportation?”
+
+“What you want,” Sir Lewis said, “are those cases proven genuine, not
+the ones in which we have established fraud, or those still in doubt.”
+
+“Exactly,” Malone said. If he got no other use out of the data, it
+would provide a measuring-stick for the Society. The general public
+didn’t know that the Government was actually using psionic powers, and
+the Society’s theories, checked against actual fact, would provide a
+rough index of reliability to use on the Society’s other data.
+
+But spirits, somehow, didn’t seem very likely. Malone sighed and stood
+up.
+
+“I’ll have copies made of all the relevant material,” Sir Lewis said,
+“from our library and research files. Where do you want the material
+sent? I do want to warn you of its bulk; there may be quite a lot of
+it.”
+
+“FBI Headquarters, on 69th Street,” Malone said. “And send a statement
+of expenses along with it. As long as the bill’s within reason, don’t
+worry about itemizing; I’ll see that it goes through Accounting
+myself.”
+
+Sir Lewis nodded. “Fine,” he said. “And, if you should have any
+difficulties with the material, please let me know. I’ll always be
+glad to help.”
+
+“Thanks for your co-operation,” Malone said. He went to the door, and
+walked on out.
+
+He blundered back into the same big room again, on his way through the
+corridors. The bulbous-eyed woman, who seemed to have inherited a full
+set of thirty-two teeth from each of her parents, gave him a friendly
+if somewhat crowded smile, but Malone pressed on without a word. After
+awhile, he found the reception room again.
+
+The girl behind the desk looked up. “How did he react?” she said.
+
+Malone blinked. “React?” he said.
+
+“When you sneezed at him,” she said. “Because I’ve been thinking it
+over, and I’ve got a new theory. You’re doing a survey on how people
+act when encountering sneezes. Like Kinsey.”
+
+This girl—Lou something, Malone thought, and with difficulty
+refrained from adding “Gehrig”—had an unusual effect, he decided. He
+wondered if there were anyone in the world she couldn’t reduce to
+paralyzed silence.
+
+“Of course,” she went on, “Kinsey was dealing with sex, and you
+aren’t. At least, you aren’t during business hours.” She smiled
+politely at Malone.
+
+“No,” he said helplessly, “I’m not.”
+
+“It is sneezing, then,” she said. “Will I be in the book when it’s
+published?”
+
+“Book?” Malone said, feeling more and more like a rather low-grade
+moron.
+
+“The book on sneezing, when you get it published,” she said. “I can
+see it now: _The Case of Miss X, a Receptionist_.”
+
+“There isn’t going to be any book,” Malone said.
+
+She shook her head. “That’s a shame,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to
+be a Miss X. It sounds exciting.”
+
+“X,” Malone said at random, “marks the spot.”
+
+“Why, that’s the sweetest thing that’s been said to me all day,” the
+girl said. “I thought you could hardly talk, and here you come out
+with lovely things like that. But I’ll bet you say it to all the
+girls.”
+
+“I have never said it to anybody before,” Malone said flatly. “And I
+never will again.”
+
+The girl sighed. “I’ll treasure it,” she said. “My one great moment.
+Goodbye, Mr.—Malone, isn’t it?”
+
+“Ken,” Malone said. “Just call me Ken.”
+
+“And I’m Lou,” the girl said. “Goodbye.”
+
+An elevator arrived and Malone ducked into it. Louie? he thought.
+Louise? Luke? Of course, there was Sir Lewis Carter, who might be
+called Lou. Was he related to the girl?
+
+No, Malone thought wildly. Relations went by last names. There was no
+reason for Lou to be related to Sir Lewis. They didn’t even look
+alike. For instance, he had no desire whatever to make a date with Sir
+Lewis Carter, or to take him to a glittering night-club, or to make him
+any whispered propositions. And the very idea of Sir Lewis Carter
+sitting on the Malone lap was enough to give him indigestion and spots
+before the eyes.
+
+Sternly, he told himself to get back to business. The elevator stopped
+at the lobby and he got out and started down the street, feeling that
+consideration of the lady known as Lou was much more pleasant. After
+all, what did he have to work with, as far as his job was concerned?
+
+So far, two experts had told him that his theory was full of lovely
+little holes. Worse than that, they had told him that mass control of
+human beings was impossible, as far as they knew.
+
+And maybe it was impossible, he told himself sadly. Maybe he should
+just junk his whole theory and think up a new one. Maybe there was no
+psionics involved in the thing at all, and Boyd and O’Connor were
+right.
+
+Of course, he had a deep-seated conviction that psionics was somewhere
+at the root of everything, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything.
+A lot of people had deep-seated convictions that they were beetles, or
+that the world was flat And then again, murderers often suffered as a
+result of deep-seated convictions of one sort or another.
+
+On the other hand, maybe he had invented a whole new psionic theory
+or, at least, observed some new psionic facts. Maybe they would call
+the results Malonizing, instead of O’Connorizing. He tried to picture
+a man opening a door and saying: “Come out quick, Mr. Frembits is
+Malonizing again.”
+
+It didn’t sound very plausible. But, after all, he did have a
+deep-seated conviction. He tried to think of a shallow-seated
+conviction, and failed. Didn’t convictions ever stand up, anyhow, or
+lie down?
+
+He shook his head, discovered that he was on 69th Street, and headed
+for the FBI Headquarters. His convictions, he had found, were
+sometimes an expression of his precognitive powers; he determined to
+ride with them, at least for awhile.
+
+By the time he came to the office of the agent-in-charge, he had
+figured out the beginnings of a new line of attack.
+
+“How about the ghosts?” the agent-in-charge asked as he passed.
+
+“They’ll be along,” Malone said. “In a big bundle, addressed to me
+personally. And don’t open the bundle.”
+
+“Why not?” the agent-in-charge asked.
+
+“Because I don’t want the things to get loose and run around saying
+boo to everybody,” Malone said brightly, and went on.
+
+He opened the door of his private office, went inside and sat down at
+the desk there. He took his time about framing a thought, a single,
+clear, deliberate thought:
+
+_Your Majesty, I’d like to speak to you._
+
+He hardly had time to finish it. A flash of color appeared in the
+room, just a few feet from his desk. The flash resolved itself into a
+tiny, grandmotherly-looking woman with a coronal of white hair and a
+kindly, twinkling expression. She was dressed in the full court
+costume of the First Elizabethan period, and this was hardly
+surprising to Malone. The little old lady believed, quite firmly, that
+she was Queen Elizabeth I, miraculously preserved over all these
+centuries. Malone, himself, had practically forgotten that the woman’s
+real name was Rose Thompson, and that she had only been alive for
+sixty-five years or so. For most of that time, she had been insane.
+
+For all of that time, however, she had been a genuine telepath. She
+had been discovered during the course of Malone’s first psionic case,
+and by now she had even learned to teleport by “reading” the process
+in Malone’s mind.
+
+“Good afternoon, Sir Kenneth,” she said in a regal, kindly voice. She
+was mad, he knew, but her delusion was nicely kept within bounds. All
+of her bright world hinged on the single fact that she was unshakably
+certain of her royalty. As long as the FBI catered to that notion—
+which included a Royal dwelling for her in Yucca Flats, and the
+privilege of occasionally knighting FBI agents who had pleased her
+unpredictable fancy—she was perfectly rational on all other points.
+She co-operated with Dr. O’Connor and with the FBI in the
+investigation of her psionic powers, and she had given her Royal word
+not to teleport except at Malone’s personal request.
+
+“I’d like to talk to you,” Malone said, “Your Majesty.”
+
+There was an odd note in the Queen’s voice, and an odd, haunted
+expression on her face. “I’ve been hoping you’d ask me to come,” she
+said.
+
+“I had a hunch you were following me telepathically,” Malone said.
+“Can you give me any help?”
+
+“I—I really don’t know,” she said. “It’s something new, and something
+disturbing. I’ve never come across anything like it before.”
+
+“Like what?” Malone asked.
+
+“It’s the—” She made a gesture that conveyed nothing at all to
+Malone. “The—the static,” she said at last.
+
+Malone blinked. “Static?” he said.
+
+“Yes,” she said. “You’re not telepathic, so I can’t tell you what it’s
+really like. But—well, Sir Kenneth, have you ever seen disturbance on
+a TV screen, when there’s some powerful electric output nearby? The
+bright, senseless snowstorms, the meaningless hash?”
+
+“Sure,” Malone said.
+
+“It’s like that,” she said. “It’s a sudden, meaningless, disturbing
+blare of telepathic energy.”
+
+The telephone rang once. Malone ignored it.
+
+“What’s causing these disturbances?” he asked.
+
+She shook her head. “I don’t know, Sir Kenneth. I don’t know,” she
+said. “I can’t pick up a person’s mind over a distance unless I know
+him, and I can’t see what’s causing this at all. It’s—frankly, Sir
+Kenneth, it’s rather terrifying.”
+
+The phone rang again.
+
+“How long have you been experiencing this disturbance?” Malone asked.
+He looked at the phone.
+
+“The telephone isn’t important,” Her Majesty said. “It’s only Sir
+Thomas, calling to tell you he’s arrested three spies, and that
+doesn’t matter at all.”
+
+“It doesn’t?”
+
+“Not at all,” Her Majesty said. “What does matter is that I’ve only
+been picking up these flashes since you were assigned to this new
+case, Sir Kenneth. And....” She paused.
+
+“Well?” Malone said.
+
+“And they only appear,” Her Majesty said, “when I’m tuned to _your_
+mind!”
+
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Malone stared. He tried to say something but he couldn’t find any
+words. The telephone rang again and he pushed the switch with a sense
+of relief. The beard-fringed face of Thomas Boyd appeared on the
+screen.
+
+“You’re getting hard to find,” Boyd said. “I think you’re letting fame
+and fortune go to your head.”
+
+“I left word at the office that I was coming here,” Malone said
+aggrievedly.
+
+“Sure you did,” Boyd said. “How do you think I found you? Am I
+telepathic? Do I have strange powers?”
+
+“Wouldn’t surprise me in the least,” Malone said. “Now, about those
+spies—”
+
+“See what I mean?” Boyd said. “How did you know?”
+
+“Just lucky, I guess,” Malone murmured. “But what about them?”
+
+“Well,” Boyd said, “we picked up two men working in the Senate Office
+Building, and another one working for the State Department.”
+
+“And they are spies?” Malone said. “Real spies?”
+
+“Oh, they’re real enough,” Boyd said. “We’ve known about ’em for
+years, and I finally decided to pick them up for questioning. God
+knows, but maybe they have something to do with all this mess that’s
+bothering everybody.”
+
+“You haven’t the faintest idea what you mean,” Malone said. “Mess is
+hardly the word.”
+
+Boyd snorted. “You go on getting yourself confused,” he said, “while
+some of us do the real work. After all—”
+
+“Never mind the insults,” Malone said. “How about the spies?”
+
+“Well,” Boyd said, a trifle reluctantly, “they’ve been working as
+janitors and maintenance men, and of course we’ve made sure they
+haven’t been able to get their hands on any really valuable
+information.”
+
+“So they’ve suddenly turned into criminal masterminds,” Malone said.
+“After being under careful surveillance for years.”
+
+“Well, it’s possible,” Boyd said defensively.
+
+“Almost anything is possible,” Malone said.
+
+“Some things,” Boyd said carefully, “are more possible than others.”
+
+“Thank you, Charles W. Aristotle,” Malone said. “I hope you realize
+what you’ve done, picking up those three men. We might have been able
+to get some good lines on them, if you’d left them where they were.”
+
+There is an old story about a general who went on an inspection tour
+of the front during World War I, and, putting his head incautiously up
+out of a trench, was narrowly missed by a sniper’s bullet. He turned
+to a nearby sergeant and bellowed: “Get that sniper!”
+
+“Oh, we’ve got him spotted, sir,” the sergeant said. “He’s been there
+for six days now.”
+
+“Well, then,” the general said, “why don’t you blast him out of
+there?”
+
+“Well, sir, it’s this way,” the sergeant explained. “He’s fired about
+sixty rounds since he’s been out there, and he hasn’t hit anything
+yet. We’re afraid if we get rid of him they’ll put up somebody who
+_can_ shoot.”
+
+This was standard FBI policy when dealing with minor spies. A great
+many had been spotted, including four in the Department of Fisheries.
+But known spies are easier to keep track of than unknown ones. And, as
+long as they’re allowed to think they haven’t been spotted, they may
+lead the way to other spies or spy networks.
+
+“I thought it was worth the risk,” Boyd said. “After all, if they have
+something to do with the case—”
+
+“But they don’t,” Malone said.
+
+“Damn it,” Boyd exploded, “let me find out for myself, will you?
+You’re spoiling all the fun.”
+
+“Well, anyhow,” Malone said, “they don’t.”
+
+“You can’t afford to take any chances,” Boyd said. “After all, when I
+think about William Logan, I tell myself we’d better take care of
+every lead.”
+
+“Well,” Malone said finally, “you may be right. And then again, you
+may be normally wrong.”
+
+“What is that supposed to mean?” Boyd said.
+
+“How should I know?” Malone said. “I’m too busy to go around and
+around like this. But since you’ve picked the spies up, I suppose it
+won’t do any harm to find out if they know anything.”
+
+Boyd snorted again. “Thank you,” he said, “for your kind permission.”
+
+“I’ll be right down,” Malone said.
+
+“I’ll be waiting,” Boyd said. “In Interrogation Room 7. You’ll
+recognize me by the bullet hole in my forehead and the strange South
+American poison, hitherto unknown to science, in my esophagus.”
+
+“Very funny,” Malone said. “Don’t give up the ship.”
+
+Boyd switched off without a word. Malone shrugged at the blank screen
+and pushed his own switch. Then he turned slowly back to Her Majesty,
+who was standing, waiting patiently, at the opposite side of the desk.
+Interference, he thought, located around him....
+
+“Why yes,” she said. “That’s exactly what I did say.”
+
+Malone blinked. “Your Majesty,” he said, “would you mind terribly if I
+asked you questions before you answered them? I know you can see them
+in my mind, but it’s simpler for me to do things the normal way, just
+now.”
+
+“I’m sorry,” she said sincerely. “I do agree that matters are confused
+enough already. Please go on.”
+
+“Thank you, Your Majesty,” Malone said. “Well, then. Do you mean that
+_I’m_ the one causing all this mental static?”
+
+“Oh, no,” she said. “Not at all. It’s definitely coming from somewhere
+else, and it’s beamed at you, or beamed around you.”
+
+“But—”
+
+“It’s just that I can only pick it up when I’m tuned to your mind,”
+she said.
+
+“Like now?” Malone said.
+
+She shook her head. “Right now,” she said, “there isn’t any. It only
+happens every once in awhile, every so often, and not continuously.”
+
+“Does it happen at regular intervals?” Malone asked.
+
+“Not as far as I’ve been able to tell,” Her Majesty said. “It just
+happens, that’s all. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to
+it. Except that it did start when you were assigned to this case.”
+
+“Lovely,” Malone said. “Perfectly lovely. And what is it supposed to
+mean?”
+
+“Interference,” she said. “Static. Jumble. That’s all it means. I just
+don’t know any more than that, Sir Kenneth; I’ve never experienced
+anything like it in my life. It really does disturb me.”
+
+That, Malone told himself, he could believe. It must be an experience,
+he told himself, like having someone you were looking at suddenly
+dissolve into a jumble of meaningless shapes and lights.
+
+“That’s a very good analogy,” Her Majesty said. “If you’ll pardon me
+speaking before you’ve voiced your thought.”
+
+“Not at all,” Malone said. “Go right ahead.”
+
+“Well, then,” Her Majesty said. “The analogy you use is a good one.
+It’s just as disturbing and as meaningless as that.”
+
+“And you don’t know what’s causing it?” Malone said.
+
+“I don’t know,” she said.
+
+“Nor what the purpose of it is?” he said.
+
+Her Majesty shook her head slowly. “Sir Kenneth,” she said, “I don’t
+even know whether or not there _is_ any purpose.”
+
+Malone sighed deeply. Nothing in the case seemed to make any sense. It
+wasn’t that there were no clues, or no information for him to work
+with. There were a lot of clues, and there was a lot of information.
+But nothing seemed to link up with anything else. Every new fact was a
+bright, shiny arrow pointing nowhere in particular.
+
+“Well, then—” he started.
+
+The intercom buzzed. Malone jabbed ferociously at the button. “Yes?”
+he said.
+
+“The ghosts are here,” the agent-in-charge’s voice said.
+
+Malone blinked. “What?” he said.
+
+“You said you were going to get some ghosts,” the agent-in-charge
+said. “From the Psychical Research Society, in a couple of large
+bundles. And they’re here now. Want me to exorcise ’em for you?”
+
+“No,” Malone said wearily. “Just send them in to join the crowd. Got a
+messenger?”
+
+“I’ll send them down,” the agent-in-charge said. “About one minute.”
+
+Malone nodded, realized the man couldn’t see him, said: “Fine,” and
+switched off. He looked at his watch. A little over half an hour had
+passed since he had left the Psychical Research Society offices. That,
+he told himself, was efficiency.
+
+Not that the books would mean anything, he thought. They would just
+take their places at the end of the long row of meaningless,
+disturbing, vicious facts that cluttered up his mind. He wasn’t an FBI
+agent any more; he was a clown and a failure, and he was through. He
+was going to resign and go to South Dakota and live the life of a
+hermit. He would drink goat’s milk and eat old shoes or something, and
+whenever another human being came near he would run away and hide.
+They would call him Old Kenneth, and people would write articles for
+magazines about The Twentieth Century Hermit.
+
+And that would make him famous, he thought wearily, and the whole
+circle would start all over again.
+
+“Now, now, Sir Kenneth,” Queen Elizabeth said. “Things aren’t quite
+that bad.”
+
+“Oh, yes, they are,” Malone said. “They’re even worse.”
+
+“I’m sure we can find an answer to all your questions,” Her Majesty
+said.
+
+“Sure,” Malone said. “Even I can find an answer. But it isn’t the
+right one.”
+
+“You can?” Her Majesty said.
+
+“That’s right,” Malone said. “My answer is: to hell with everything.”
+
+* * * * *
+
+Malone’s Washington offices didn’t look any different. He sighed and
+put the two big packages from the Psychical Research Society down on
+his desk, and then turned to Her Majesty.
+
+“I wanted you to teleport along with me,” he said, “because I need
+your help.”
+
+“Yes,” she said. “I know.”
+
+He blinked. “Oh. Sure you do. But let me go over the details.”
+
+Her Majesty waved a gracious hand. “If you like, Sir Kenneth,” she
+said.
+
+Malone nodded. “We’re going on down to Interrogation Room 7 now,” he
+said. “Next door to it, there’s an observation room, with a one-way
+panel in the wall. You’ll be able to see us, but we won’t be able to
+see you.”
+
+“I really don’t require an observation panel,” Her Majesty said. “If I
+enter your mind, I can see through your eyes.”
+
+“Oh, sure,” Malone said. “But the observation room was built for more
+normal people—saving your presence, Your Majesty.”
+
+“Of course,” she said.
+
+“Now,” Malone went on, “I want you to watch all three of the men we’re
+going to bring in, and dig everything you can out of their minds.”
+
+“Everything?” she said.
+
+“We don’t know what might be useful,” Malone said. “Anything you can
+find. And if you want any questions asked—if there’s anything you
+think I ought to ask the men, or say to them—there’s a non-vision
+phone in the observation room. Just lift the receiver. That
+automatically rings the one in the interrogation room and I’ll pick it
+up. Understand?”
+
+“Perfectly, Sir Kenneth,” she said.
+
+“Okay, then,” Malone said. “Let’s go.” They headed for the door.
+Malone stopped as he opened it. “And by the way,” he said.
+
+“Yes?”
+
+“If you get any more of those disturbances, let me know.”
+
+“At once,” Her Majesty promised.
+
+They went on down the hall and took the elevator down to Interrogation
+Room 7, on the lowest level. There was no particular reason for
+putting the interrogation section down there, except that it tended to
+make prisoners more nervous. And a nervous prisoner, Malone knew, was
+very possibly a confessing prisoner.
+
+Malone ushered Her Majesty through the unmarked door of the
+observation chamber, made sure that the panel and phone were in
+working order, and went out. He stepped into Interrogation Room 7
+trying hard to look bored, businesslike and unbeatable. Boyd and four
+other agents were already there, all standing around and talking
+desultorily in low tones. None of them looked as if they had a
+moment’s worry in their lives. It was all part of the same technique,
+of course, Malone thought. Make the prisoner feel resistance is
+useless, and you’ve practically got him working for you.
+
+The prisoner was a hulking, flabby fat man in work coveralls. He had
+black hair that spilled all over his forehead, and tiny button eyes.
+He was the only man in the room who was sitting down, and that was
+meant to make him feel even more inferior and insecure. His hands were
+clasped fatly in his lap, and he was staring down at them in a
+regretful manner. None of the agents paid the slightest attention to
+him. The general impression was that something really tough was coming
+up, but that they were in no hurry for it. They were willing to wait
+for the third degree, it seemed, until the blacksmith had done a
+really good job with the new spikes for the Iron Maiden.
+
+The prisoner looked up apprehensively as Malone shut the door. Malone
+paid no attention to him, and the prisoner unclasped his hands, rubbed
+them on his coveralls and then reclasped them in his lap. His eyes
+fell again.
+
+Boyd looked up too. “Hello, Ken,” he said. He tapped a sheaf of papers
+on the single table in the room. Malone went over and picked them up.
+
+They were the abbreviated condensations of three dossiers. All three
+of the men covered in the dossiers were naturalized citizens, but all
+had come in as “political refugees” from Hungary, from Czechoslovakia,
+and from East Germany. Further checking had turned up the fact that
+all three were actually Russians. They had been using false names
+during their stay in the United States, but their real ones were
+appended to the dossiers.
+
+The fat one in the interrogation room was named Alexis Brubitsch. The
+other two, who were presumably waiting separately in other rooms, were
+Ivan Borbitsch and Vasili Garbitsch. The collection sounded, to
+Malone, like a seedy musical-comedy firm of lawyers: Brubitsch,
+Borbitsch and Garbitsch. He could picture them dancing gaily across a
+stage while the strains of music followed them, waving legal forms and
+telephones and singing away.
+
+Brubitsch did not, however, look very gay. Malone went over to him
+now, walking slowly, and looked down. Boyd came and stood next to him.
+
+“This is the one who won’t talk, eh?” Malone said, wondering if he
+sounded as much like Dick Tracy as he thought he did. It was a
+standard opening, meant to make the prisoner think his fellows had
+already confessed.
+
+“That’s him,” Boyd said.
+
+“Mmm,” Malone said, trying to look as if he were deciding between the
+rack and the boiling oil. Brubitsch fidgeted slightly, but he didn’t
+say anything.
+
+“We didn’t know whether we had to get this one to talk, too,” Boyd
+said. “What with the others, and all. But we did think you ought to
+have a look at him.” He sounded very bored. It was obvious from his
+tone that the FBI didn’t care in the least if Alexis Brubitsch never
+opened his mouth again, in what was likely to be a very short
+lifetime.
+
+“Well,” Malone said, equally bored, “we might be able to get a few
+corroborative details.”
+
+Brubitsch swallowed hard. Malone ignored him.
+
+“Now, just look at him,” Boyd said. “He certainly doesn’t _look_ like
+the head of a spy ring, does he?”
+
+“Of course he doesn’t,” Malone said. “That’s probably why the Russians
+used him. They figured nobody would ever look twice at a fat slob like
+this. Nobody would ever suspect him of being the head man.”
+
+“I guess you’re right,” Boyd said. He yawned, which Malone thought was
+overacting a trifle. Brubitsch saw the yawn, and one hand came up to
+jerk at his collar.
+
+“Who’d ever think,” Malone said, “that he plotted those killings in
+Redstone—all three of them?”
+
+“It is surprising,” Boyd said.
+
+“But, then,” Malone said, “we know he did. There isn’t any doubt of
+that.”
+
+Brubitsch seemed to be turning a pale green. It was a fascinating
+color, unlike any other Malone had ever seen. He watched it with
+interest.
+
+“Oh, sure,” Boyd said. “We’ve got enough evidence from the other two
+to send this one to the chair tomorrow, if we want to.”
+
+“More than enough,” Malone agreed.
+
+Brubitsch opened his mouth, shut it again and closed his eyes. His
+lips moved silently.
+
+“Tell me,” Boyd said conversationally, leaning down to the fat man.
+“Did your orders on that job come from Moscow, or did you mastermind
+it all by yourself?”
+
+Brubitsch’s eyes stirred, then snapped open as if they’d been pulled
+by a string. “Me?” he said in a hoarse bass voice. “I know nothing
+about this murder. What murder? I know nothing about it.”
+
+There were no such murders, of course. But Malone was not ready to let
+Brubitsch know anything about that. “Oh, the ones you shot in
+Redstone,” he said in an offhand way.
+
+“The what?” Brubitsch said. “I shot people? Never.”
+
+“Oh, sure you did,” Boyd said. “The others say you did.”
+
+Brubitsch’s head seemed to sink into his neck. “Borbitsch and
+Garbitsch, they tell you about a murder? It is not true. Is a lie.”
+
+“Really?” Malone said. “We think it’s true.”
+
+“Is a lie,” Brubitsch said, his little eyes peering anxiously from
+side to side. “Is not true,” he went on hopefully. “I have alibi.”
+
+“You do?” Boyd said. “For what time?”
+
+“For time when murder happened,” Brubitsch said. “I was someplace
+else.”
+
+“Well, then,” Malone said, “how do you know when the murders were
+done? They were kept out of the newspapers.” That, he reflected, was
+quite true, since the murders had never happened. But he watched
+Brubitsch with a wary eye.
+
+“I know nothing about time,” Brubitsch said, jerking at his collar. “I
+don’t know when they happened.”
+
+“Then how can you have an alibi?” Boyd snapped.
+
+“Because I didn’t do them!” Brubitsch said tearfully. “If I didn’t,
+then I _must_ have alibi!”
+
+“You’d be surprised,” Malone said. “Now, about these murders—”
+
+“Was no murder, not by me,” Brubitsch said firmly. “Was never any
+killing of anybody, not even by accident.”
+
+“But your two friends say—” Boyd began.
+
+“My two friends are not my friends,” Brubitsch said firmly. “If they
+tell you about murder and say it was me, they are no friends. I did
+not murder anybody, I have alibi. I did not even murder anybody a
+little bit. They are no friends. This is terrible.”
+
+“There,” Malone said reflectively, “I agree with you. It’s positively
+awful. And I think we might as well give it up. After all, we don’t
+need your testimony. The other two are enough; they’ll get maybe ten
+years apiece, but you’re going to get the chair.”
+
+“I will not sit down,” Brubitsch said firmly. “I am innocent. I am
+innocent like a small child. Does a small child commit a murder? It is
+ridiculous.”
+
+Boyd picked up his cue with ease. “You might as well give us your side
+of the story, then,” he said easily. “If you didn’t commit any
+murders—”
+
+“I am a small child,” Brubitsch announced.
+
+“Okay,” Boyd said. “But if you didn’t commit any murders, just what
+_have_ you been doing since you’ve been in this country as a Soviet
+agent?”
+
+“I will say nothing,” Brubitsch announced. “I am a small child. It is
+enough.” He paused, blinked, and went on, “I will only tell you this:
+no murders were done by our group in any of our activities.”
+
+“And what were your activities?” Malone asked.
+
+“Oh, many things,” Brubitsch said. “Many, many things. We—”
+
+The telephone rang loudly, and Malone scooped it up with a practiced
+hand. “Malone here,” he said.
+
+Her Majesty’s voice was excited. “Sir Kenneth!” she said. “I just got
+a tremendous burst of static!”
+
+Malone blinked. _Is my mind acting up again?_ he thought, knowing she
+would pick it up. _Am I being interfered with?_
+
+He didn’t feel any different. But then, how was he supposed to feel?
+
+“It’s not _your_ mind, Sir Kenneth,” Her Majesty said. “Not this time.
+It’s _his_ mind. That sneaky-thinking Brubitsch fellow.”
+
+_Brubitsch?_ Malone thought. _Now what is that supposed to mean?_
+
+“I don’t know, Sir Kenneth,” Her Majesty said. “But get on back to
+your questioning. He’s ready to talk now.”
+
+“Okay,” Malone said aloud. “Fine.” He hung up and looked back to the
+Russian sitting on his chair. Brubitsch was ready to talk, and that
+was one good thing, anyhow. But what was all the static about?
+
+What was going on?
+
+“Now, then,” Malone said. “You were telling us about your group
+activities.”
+
+“True,” Brubitsch said. “I did not commit any murders. It is possible
+that Borbitsch committed murders. It is maybe even possible that
+Garbitsch committed murders. But I do not think so.”
+
+“Why not?” Boyd said.
+
+“They are my friends,” Brubitsch said. “Even if they tell lies. They
+are also small children. Besides, I am not even the head of the
+group.”
+
+“Who is?” Malone said.
+
+“Garbitsch,” Brubitsch said instantly. “He worked in the State
+Department, and he told us what to look for in the Senate Office
+Building.”
+
+“What were you supposed to look for?” Boyd said.
+
+“For information,” Brubitsch said. “For scraps of paper, or things we
+overheard. But it was very bad, very bad.”
+
+“What do you mean, bad?” Malone said.
+
+“Everything was terrible,” Brubitsch said mournfully. “Sometimes
+Borbitsch heard something and forgot to tell Garbitsch about it.
+Garbitsch did not like this. He is a very inflamed person. Once he
+threatened to send Borbitsch to the island of Yap as a spy. That is a
+very bad place to go to. There are no enjoyments on the island of Yap,
+and no ones likes strangers there. Borbitsch was very sad.”
+
+“What did you do with your information?” Boyd said.
+
+“We remembered it,” Brubitsch said. “Or, if we had a scrap of paper,
+we saved it for Garbitsch and gave it to him. But I remember once that
+I had some paper. It had a formula on it. I do not know what the
+formula said.”
+
+“What was it about?” Malone said.
+
+Brubitsch gave a massive shrug. “It was about an X and some numbers,”
+he said. “It was not very interesting, but it was a formula, and
+Garbitsch would have liked it. Unfortunately, I did not give it to
+him.”
+
+“Why not?” Boyd said.
+
+“I am ashamed,” Brubitsch said, looking ashamed. “I was lighting a
+cigarette in the afternoon, when I had the formula. It is a very
+relaxing thing to smoke a cigarette in the afternoon. It is soothing
+to the soul.” He looked very sad. “I was holding the piece of paper in
+one hand,” he said. “Unfortunately, the match and the paper came into
+contact. I burned my finger. Here.” He stuck out a finger toward
+Malone and Boyd, who looked at it without much interest for a second.
+“The paper is gone,” he said. “Don’t tell Garbitsch. He is very
+inflamed.”
+
+Malone sighed. “But you remember the formula,” he said. “Don’t you?”
+
+Brubitsch shook his massive head very slowly. “It was not very
+interesting,” he said. “And I do not have a mathematical mind.”
+
+“We know,” Malone said. “You are a small child.”
+
+“It was terrible,” Brubitsch said. “Garbitsch was not happy about our
+activities.”
+
+“What did Garbitsch do with the information?” Boyd said.
+
+“He passed it on,” Brubitsch said. “Every week he would send a
+short-wave message to the homeland, in code. Some weeks he did not
+send the message.”
+
+“Why not?” Malone said.
+
+“The radio did not work,” Brubitsch said simply. “We received orders
+by short-wave, but sometimes we did not receive the orders. The radio
+was of very poor quality, and some weeks it refused to send any
+messages. On other weeks, it refused to receive any messages.”
+
+“Who was your contact in Russia?” Boyd said.
+
+“A man named X,” Brubitsch said. “Like in the formula.”
+
+“But what was his real name?” Malone said.
+
+“Who knows?” Brubitsch said. “Does it matter?”
+
+“What else did you do?” Boyd said.
+
+“We met twice a week,” Brubitsch said. “Sometimes in Garbitsch’s home,
+sometimes in other places. Sometimes we had information. At other
+times, we were friends, having a social gathering.”
+
+“Friends?” Malone said.
+
+Brubitsch nodded. “We drank together, talked, played chess. Garbitsch
+is the best chess player in the group. I am not very good. But once we
+had some trouble.” He paused. “We had been drinking Russian liquors.
+They are very strong. We decided to uphold the honor of our country.”
+
+“I think,” Malone murmured sadly, “I know what’s coming.”
+
+“Ah?” Brubitsch said, interested. “At any rate, we decided to honor
+our country in song. And a policeman came and talked to us. He took us
+down to the police station.”
+
+“Why?” Boyd said.
+
+“He was suspicious,” Brubitsch said. “We were singing the
+_Internationale_, and he was suspicious. It is unreasonable.”
+
+“Oh, I don’t know,” Boyd said. “What happened then?”
+
+“He took us to the police station,” Brubitsch said, “and then after a
+little while he let us go. I do not understand this.”
+
+“It’s all right,” Malone said. “I do.” He drew Boyd aside for a
+second, and whispered to him: “The cops were ready to charge these
+three clowns with everything in the book. We had a hell of a time
+springing them so we could go on watching them. I remember the
+stir-up, though I never did know their names until now.”
+
+Boyd nodded, and they returned to Brubitsch, who was staring up at
+them with surly eyes.
+
+“It is a secret you are telling him,” Brubitsch said. “That is not
+right.”
+
+“What do you mean, it’s not right?” Malone said.
+
+“It is wrong,” Brubitsch went on. “It is not the American way.”
+
+He went on, with some prodding, to tell about the activities of the
+spy ring. It did not seem to be a very efficient spy ring; Brubitsch’s
+long sad tale of forgotten messages, mixed orders, misplaced documents
+and strange mishaps was a marvel and a revelation to the listening
+officers. “I’ve never heard anything like it,” one of them whispered
+in a tone of absolute wonder. “They’re almost working on our side.”
+
+Over an hour later, Malone turned wearily away from the prisoner. “All
+right, Brubitsch,” he said. “I guess that pretty much covers things
+for the moment. If we want any more information, though—”
+
+“Call on me,” Brubitsch said sadly. “I am not going anyplace. And I
+will give you all the information you desire. But I did not commit any
+murders.”
+
+“Goodbye, small child,” Malone said, as two agents led the fat man
+away. The other two left soon afterward, and Malone and Boyd were
+alone.
+
+“Think he was telling the truth?” Boyd said.
+
+Malone nodded. “Nobody,” he said, “could make up a story like that.”
+
+“I suppose so,” Boyd said, and the phone rang. Malone picked it up.
+
+“Well?” he asked.
+
+“He was telling the truth, all right,” Her Majesty said. “There are a
+few more details, of course, like the girl Brubitsch was involved
+with, Sir Kenneth. But she doesn’t seem to have anything to do with
+the spy ring, and besides, she isn’t a very nice person. She always
+wants money.”
+
+“Sounds perfectly lovely,” Malone said. “As a matter of fact, I think
+I know her. I know a lot of girls who always want money. It seems to
+be in fashion.”
+
+“You don’t know this one, Sir Kenneth,” Her Majesty said, “and
+besides, she wouldn’t be a good influence on you.”
+
+Malone sighed. “How about the static explosions?” he said. “Pick up
+any more?”
+
+“No,” she said. “Just that one.”
+
+Malone nodded at the receiver. “All right,” he said. “We’re going to
+bring in the second one now. Keep up the good work.”
+
+He hung up.
+
+“Who’ve you got in the observation room?” Boyd asked.
+
+“Queen Elizabeth I,” Malone said. “Her Royal Majesty.”
+
+“Oh,” Boyd said without surprise. “Well, was Brubitsch telling the
+truth?”
+
+“He wasn’t holding back anything important,” Malone said, thinking
+about the girl. It would be nice to meet a bad influence, he thought
+mournfully. It would be nice to go somewhere with a bad influence (a
+bad influence, he amended, with a good figure) and forget all about
+his job, about the spies, about telepathy, teleportation, psionics and
+everything else. It might be restful.
+
+Unfortunately, it was impossible.
+
+“What’s this business about a static explosion?” Boyd said.
+
+“Don’t ask silly questions,” Malone said. “A static explosion is a
+contradiction in terms. If something is static, it doesn’t move—
+whoever heard of a motionless explosion?”
+
+“If it is a contradiction in terms,” Boyd said, “they’re your terms.”
+
+“Sure,” Malone said. “But I don’t know what they mean. I don’t even
+know what I mean.”
+
+“You’re in a bad way,” Boyd said, looking sympathetic.
+
+“I’m in a perfectly terrible way,” Malone said, “and it’s going to get
+worse. You wait and see.”
+
+“Of course I’ll wait and see,” Boyd said. “I wouldn’t miss the end of
+the world for anything. It ought to be a great spectacle.” He paused.
+“Want them to bring in the next one?”
+
+“Sure,” Malone said. “What have we got to lose but our minds? And who
+is the next one?”
+
+“Borbitsch,” Boyd said. “They’re saving Garbitsch for a big finish.”
+
+Malone nodded wearily. “Onward,” he said, and picked up the phone. He
+punched a number, spoke a few words and hung up.
+
+A minute later, the four FBI agents came back, leading a man. This one
+was tall and thin, with the expression of a gloomy, degenerate and
+slightly nauseated bloodhound. He was led to the chair and he sat down
+in it as if he expected the worst to start happening at once.
+
+“Well,” Malone said in a bored, tired voice. “So this is the one who
+won’t talk.”
+
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+Midnight.
+
+Kenneth J. Malone sat at his desk, in his Washington office,
+surrounded by piles of papers covering the desk, spilling off onto the
+floor and decorating his lap. He was staring at the papers as if he
+expected them to leap up, dance round him and shout the solution to
+all his problems at him in trained choral voices. They did nothing at
+all.
+
+Seated cross-legged on the rug in the center of the room, and looking
+like an impossible combination of the last Henry Tudor and Gautama
+Buddha, Thomas Boyd did nothing either. He was staring downward, his
+hands folded on his ample lap, wearing an expression of utter, burning
+frustration. And on a nearby chair sat the third member of the
+company, wearing the calm and patient expression of the gently-born
+under all vicissitudes: Queen Elizabeth I.
+
+“All right,” Malone said into the silence. “Now let’s see what we’ve
+got.”
+
+“I think we’ve got cerebral paresis,” Boyd said. “It’s been coming on
+for years.”
+
+“Don’t be funny,” Malone said.
+
+Boyd gave a short, mirthless bark. “Funny?” he said. “I’m absolutely
+hysterical with joy and good humor. I’m out of my mind with
+happiness.” He paused. “Anyway,” he finished, “I’m out of my mind.
+Which puts me in good company. The entire FBI, Brubitsch, Borbitsch,
+Garbitsch, Dr. Thomas O’Connor and Sir Lewis Carter—we’re all out of
+our minds. If we weren’t, we’d all move away to the moon.”
+
+“And drink to forget,” Malone added. “Sure. But let’s try and get some
+work done.”
+
+“By all means, Sir Kenneth,” Her Majesty said. Boyd had not included
+her in his list of insane people, and she looked slightly miffed. It
+was hard for Malone to tell whether she was miffed by the mention of
+insanity, or at being left out.
+
+“Let’s review the facts,” Malone said. “This whole thing started with
+some inefficiency in Congress.”
+
+“And some upheavals elsewhere,” Boyd said. “Labor unions, gangster
+organizations.”
+
+“Just about all over,” Malone said. “And though we’ve found three
+spies, it seems pretty obvious that they aren’t causing this.”
+
+“They aren’t causing much of anything,” Boyd said. “Except a lot of
+unbelieving laughter further up the FBI line. I don’t think anybody is
+going to believe our reports of those interviews.”
+
+“But they’re true,” Her Majesty said.
+
+“Sure they’re true,” Boyd said. “That’s the unbelievable part. They
+read like farce, and not very good farce at that.”
+
+“Oh, I don’t know,” Malone said. “I think they’re pretty funny.”
+
+“Shall we get back to the business at hand?” Her Majesty said gently.
+
+“Ah,” Malone said. “Anyhow, it isn’t the spies. And what we now have
+is confusion even worse compounded.”
+
+“Confounded,” Boyd said. “John Milton. _Paradise Lost_, I heard it
+somewhere.”
+
+“I don’t mean confounded,” Malone said. “I mean confusion. Anyhow, the
+Russian espionage rings in this country seem to be in as bad a state
+as the Congress, the labor unions, the syndicates, and all the rest.
+And all of them seem to have some sort of weird tie-in to these
+flashes of telepathic interference. Right, Your Majesty?”
+
+“I believe so, Sir Kenneth,” she said. The old woman looked tired and
+confused. Somehow, a lot of the brightness seemed to have gone out of
+her life. “That’s right,” she said. “I didn’t realize there was so
+much of it going on. You see, Sir Kenneth, you’re the only one I can
+pick up at a distance who has been having these flashes. But now that
+I’m here in Washington, I can feel it going on all around me.”
+
+“It may not have anything to do with everything else,” Boyd said.
+
+Malone shook his head. “If it doesn’t,” he said, “it’s the weirdest
+coincidence I’ve ever even dreamed about, and my dreams can be pretty
+strange. No, it’s got to be tied in. There’s some kind of mental
+static that is somehow making all these people goof up.”
+
+“But why?” Boyd said. “What is it being done for? Just fun?”
+
+“God only knows,” Malone said. “But we’re going to have to find out.”
+
+“In that case,” Boyd said, “I suggest lots and lots of prayers.”
+
+Her Majesty looked up. “That’s a fine idea,” she said.
+
+“But God helps those,” Malone said, “who help themselves. And we’re
+going to help ourselves. Mostly with facts.”
+
+“All right,” Boyd said. “So far, all the facts have been a great
+help.”
+
+“Well, here’s one,” Malone said. “We got one flash each from
+Brubitsch, Borbitsch and Garbitsch while we were questioning them. And
+in each case, that flash occurred just before they started to blab
+everything they knew. Before the flash, they weren’t talking. They
+were behaving just like good spies and keeping their mouths shut.
+After the flash, they couldn’t talk fast enough.”
+
+“That’s true,” Boyd said reflectively. “They did seem to give up
+pretty fast, even for amateurs.”
+
+Malone nodded. “So the question is this,” he said. “Just what happens
+during those crazy bursts of static?”
+
+He looked expectantly at Her Majesty, but she shook her head sadly. “I
+don’t know,” she said. “I simply don’t know. It’s just noise to me,
+meaningless noise.” She put her hands slowly over her face. “People
+shouldn’t do things like that to their Sovereign,” she said in a
+muffled voice.
+
+Malone got up and went over to her. She wasn’t crying, but she wasn’t
+far from it. He put an arm around her thin shoulders. “Now, look, Your
+Majesty,” he said in gentle tones, “this will all clear up. We’ll find
+out what’s going on, and we’ll find a way to put a stop to it.”
+
+“Sure we will,” Boyd said. “After all, Your Majesty, Sir Kenneth and I
+will work hard on this.”
+
+“And the Queen’s own FBI,” Malone said, “won’t stop until we’ve
+finished with this whole affair, once and for all.”
+
+Her Majesty brought her hands down from her face, very slowly. She was
+forcing a smile, but it didn’t look too well. “I know you won’t fail
+your Queen,” she said. “You two have always been the most loyal of my
+subjects.”
+
+“We’ll work hard,” Malone said. “No matter how long it takes.”
+
+“Because, after all,” Boyd said in a musing, thoughtful tone, “it is a
+serious crime, you know.”
+
+The words seemed to have an effect on Her Majesty, like a tonic. For a
+second her face wore an expression of Royal anger and indignance, and
+the accustomed strength flowed back into her aged voice. “You’re quite
+correct, Sir Thomas!” she said. “The security of the Throne and the
+Crown are at stake!”
+
+Malone blinked. “What?” he said. “Are you two talking about something?
+What crime is this?”
+
+“An extremely serious one,” Boyd said in a grave voice. He rose
+unsteadily to his feet, planted them firmly on the carpet, and
+frowned.
+
+“Go on,” Malone said, fascinated. Her Majesty was watching Boyd with
+an intent expression.
+
+“The crime,” Boyd said, “the very serious crime involved, is that of
+Threatening the Welfare of the Queen. The criminal has committed the
+crime of Causing the Said Sovereign, Baselessly, Reasonlessly and
+Without Consent or Let, to Be in a State of Apprehension for Her Life
+or Her Well-Being. And this crime—”
+
+“Aha,” Malone said. “I’ve got it. The crime is—”
+
+“High treason,” Boyd intoned.
+
+“High treason,” Her Majesty said with satisfaction and fire in her
+voice.
+
+“Very high treason,” Malone said. “Extremely high.”
+
+“Stratospheric,” Boyd agreed. “That is, of course,” he added, “if the
+perpetrators of this dastardly crime are Her Majesty’s subjects.”
+
+“My goodness,” the Queen said. “I never thought of that. Suppose
+they’re not?”
+
+“Then,” Malone said in his most vibrant voice, “it is an Act of War.”
+
+“Steps,” Boyd said, “must be taken.”
+
+“We must do our utmost,” Malone said. “Sir Thomas—”
+
+“Yes, Sir Kenneth?” Boyd said.
+
+“This task requires our most fervent dedication,” Malone said. “Please
+come with me.”
+
+He went to the desk. Boyd followed him, walking straight-backed and
+tall. Malone bent and removed from a drawer of the desk a bottle of
+bourbon. He closed the drawer, poured some bourbon into two handy
+water-glasses from the desk, and capped the bottle. He handed one of
+the water-glasses to Boyd, and raised the other one aloft.
+
+“Sir Thomas,” Malone said, “I give you Her Majesty, the Queen!”
+
+“To the Queen!” Boyd echoed.
+
+They downed their drinks and turned, as one man, to hurl the glasses
+into the wastebasket.
+
+In thinking it over later, Malone realized that he hadn’t considered
+anything about that moment silly at all. Of course, an outsider might
+have been slightly surprised at the sequence of events, but Malone was
+no outsider. And, after all, it was the proper way to treat a Queen,
+wasn’t it?
+
+And....
+
+When Malone had first met Her Majesty, he had wondered why, although
+she could obviously read minds, and so knew perfectly well that
+neither Malone nor Boyd believed she was Queen Elizabeth I, she
+insisted on an outward show of respect and dedication. He’d asked her
+about it at last, and her reply had been simple, reasonable and to the
+point.
+
+According to her—and Malone didn’t doubt it for an instant—most
+people simply didn’t think their superiors were all they claimed to
+be. But they acted as if they did, at least while in the presence of
+those superiors. It was a common fiction, a sort of handy oil on the
+wheels of social intercourse.
+
+And all Her Majesty had ever insisted on was the same sort of
+treatment.
+
+“Bless you,” she’d said, “I can’t help the way you _think_, but, as
+Queen, I do have some control over the way you _act_.”
+
+The funny thing, as far as Malone was concerned, was that the two
+parts of his personality were becoming more and more alike. He didn’t
+actually believe that Her Majesty was Queen Elizabeth I, and he hoped
+fervently that he never would. But he did have a great deal of respect
+for her, and more affection than he had believed possible at first.
+She was the grandmother Malone had never known; she was good, and
+kind, and he wanted to keep her happy and contented. There had been
+nothing at all phony in the solemn toast he had proposed, nor in the
+righteous indignation he had felt against anyone who was giving Her
+Majesty even a minute’s worth of discomfort.
+
+And Boyd, surprisingly enough, seemed to feel the same way. Malone
+felt good about that; Her Majesty needed all the loyal supporters she
+could get.
+
+But all of this was later. At the time, Malone was doing nothing
+except what came naturally. Nor, apparently, was Boyd. After the
+glasses had been thrown, with a terrifying crash, into the metal
+wastebasket, and the reverberations of that second had stopped ringing
+in their ears, a moment of silence had followed.
+
+Then Boyd turned, briskly rubbing his hands. “All right,” he said.
+“Let’s get back to work.”
+
+Malone looked at the proud, happy look on Her Majesty’s face; he saw
+the glimmer of a tear in the corner of each eye. But he gave no
+indication that he had noticed anything at all out of the ordinary.
+
+“Fine,” he said. “Now, getting on back to the facts, we’ve established
+something, anyhow. Some agency is causing flashes of telepathic static
+all over the place. And those flashes are somehow connected with the
+confusion that’s going on all around us. Somehow, these flashes have
+an effect on the minds of people.”
+
+“And we know at least one manifestation of that effect,” Boyd said.
+“It makes spies blab all their secrets when they’re exposed to it.”
+
+“These three spies, anyhow,” Malone said.
+
+“If spies is the right word,” Boyd said.
+
+“Okay,” Malone said. “And now we’ve got another obvious question.”
+
+“It seems to me we’ve got about twelve,” Boyd said.
+
+“I mean, who’s doing it?” Malone said. “Who is causing these
+telepathic flashes?”
+
+“Maybe it’s just happening,” Boyd said. “Out of thin air.”
+
+“Maybe,” Malone said. “But let’s go on the assumption that there’s a
+human cause. The other way, we can’t do a thing except sit back and
+watch the world go to hell.”
+
+Boyd nodded. “It doesn’t seem to be the Russians,” he said. “Although,
+of course, it might be a Red herring.”
+
+“What do you mean?” Malone said.
+
+“Well,” Boyd said, “they might have known we were on to Brubitsch,
+Borbitsch and Garbitsch—” He stopped. “You know,” he said, “every
+time I say that name I have to reassure myself that we’re not all
+walking around in the world of Florenz Ziegfeld.”
+
+“Likewise,” Malone said. “But go on.”
+
+“Sure,” Boyd said. “Anyhow, they might have set the three of them up
+as patsies, just in case we stumbled on to this mess. We can’t
+overlook this possibility.”
+
+“Right,” Malone said. “It’s faint, but it is a possibility. In other
+words, the agency behind the flashes might be Russian, and it might
+not be Russian.”
+
+“That clears that up nicely,” Boyd said. “Next question?”
+
+“The next one,” Malone said grimly, “is, what’s behind the flashes?
+Some sort of psionic power is causing them, that much is obvious.”
+
+“I’ll go along with that,” Boyd said. “I have to go along with it. But
+don’t think I like it.”
+
+“Nobody likes it,” Malone said. “But let’s go on. O’Connor isn’t any
+help; he washes his hands of the whole business.”
+
+“Lucky man,” Boyd said.
+
+“He says that it can’t be happening,” Malone said, “and if it is we’re
+all screwy. Now, right or wrong, that isn’t an opinion that gives us
+any handle to work with.”
+
+“No,” Boyd said reflectively. “A certain amount of comfort, to be
+sure, but no handles.”
+
+“Sir Lewis Carter, on the other hand—” Malone said. He fumbled
+through some of the piles of paper until he had located the ones the
+president of the Psychical Research Society had sent. “Sir Lewis
+Carter,” he went on, “does seem to be doing some pretty good work. At
+least, some of the more modern stuff he sent over looks pretty solid.
+They’ve been doing quite a bit of research into the subject, and their
+theories seem to be all right, or nearly all right, to me. Of course,
+I’m not an expert.”
+
+“Who is?” Boyd said. “Except for O’Connor, of course.”
+
+“Well, somebody is,” Malone said. “Whoever’s doing all this, for
+instance. And the theories do seem okay. In most cases, for instance,
+they agree with O’Connor’s work, though they’re not in complete
+agreement.”
+
+“I should think so,” Boyd said. “O’Connor wouldn’t recognize an astral
+plane if TWA were putting them into service.”
+
+“I don’t mean that sort of thing,” Malone said. “There’s lots about
+astral bodies and ghosts, ectoplasm, Transcendental Yoga, theosophy,
+deros, the Great Pyramid, Atlantis, Mu, norns, and other such
+ridiculous pets. That’s just silly, as far as I can see. But what they
+have to say about parapsychology and psionics as such does seem to be
+reasonably accurate.”
+
+“I suppose so,” Boyd said tiredly.
+
+“Okay, then,” Malone said. “Did anybody notice anything in that pile
+of stuff that might conceivably have any bearing whatever on our
+problems?”
+
+“I did,” Boyd said. “Or I think I did.”
+
+“You both did,” Her Majesty said. “And so did I, when I looked through
+it. But I didn’t bother with it. I dismissed it.”
+
+“Why?” Malone said.
+
+“Because I don’t think it’s true,” she said. “However, my opinion is
+really only an opinion.” She smiled around at the others.
+
+Malone picked up a thick sheaf of papers from one of the piles of his
+desk. “Let’s get straight what it is we’re talking about,” he said.
+“All right?”
+
+“Anything’s all right with me,” Boyd said. “I’m easy to please.”
+
+Malone nodded. “Now, this writer—what’s his name?” he said. He
+glanced at the copy of the cover page. “_Minds and Morons_,” he read.
+“By Cartier Taylor.”
+
+“Great title,” Boyd said. “Does he say which is which?”
+
+“Let’s get back to serious business,” Malone said, giving Boyd a
+single look. There was silence for a second, and then Malone said, “He
+mentions something, in the book, that he calls ‘telepathic
+projection.’ As far as I understand what he’s talking about, that’s
+some method of forcing your thoughts on another person.” He glanced
+over at the Queen. “Now, Your Majesty,” he said, “you don’t think it’s
+true—and that may only be an opinion, but it’s a pretty informed one.
+It seems to me as if Taylor makes a good case for this ‘telepathic
+projection’ of his. Why don’t you think so?”
+
+“Because,” Her Majesty said flatly, “it doesn’t work.”
+
+“You’ve tried it?” Boyd put in.
+
+“I have,” she said. “And I have had no success with it at all. It’s a
+complete failure.”
+
+“Now, wait a minute,” Boyd said. “Just a minute.”
+
+“What’s the matter?” Malone said. “Have you tried it, and made it
+work?”
+
+Boyd snorted. “Fat chance,” he said. “I just want to look at the
+thing, that’s all.” He held out his hand, and Malone gave him the
+sheaf of papers. Boyd leafed through them slowly, stopping every now
+and again to consult a page, until he found what he was looking for.
+“There,” he said.
+
+“There what?” Malone said.
+
+“Listen to this,” Boyd said. “‘For those who draw the line at demonic
+possession, I suggest trying telepathic projection. Apparently, it is
+possible to project one’s own thoughts directly into the mind of
+another—even to the point of taking control of the other’s mind.
+Hypnotism? You tell me, and we’ll both know. Ever since the orthodox
+scientists have come around to accepting hypnotism, I’m been chary of
+it. Maybe there really is an astral body or a soul that a person has
+stashed about him somewhere—something that he can send out to take
+control of another human being. But I, personally, prefer the
+telepathic projection theory. All you have to do is squirt your
+thoughts across space and spray them all over the other fellow’s
+brain. Presto-bingo, he does pretty much what you want him to do.’”
+
+“That’s the quote I was thinking of,” Malone said.
+
+“Of course it is,” Her Majesty said. “But it really doesn’t work. I’ve
+tried it.”
+
+“How have you tried it?” Malone said.
+
+“There were many times, Sir Kenneth,” Her Majesty said, “when I wanted
+someone to do something particular for me or for some other person.
+After all, you must remember that I was in a hospital for a long time.
+Of course, that represents only a short segment of my life-span, but
+it seemed long to me.”
+
+Malone, who was trying to view the years from age fifteen to age
+sixty-odd as a short segment of anybody’s lifetime, remembered with a
+shock that this was not Rose Thompson speaking. It was Queen Elizabeth
+I, who had never died.
+
+“That’s right, Sir Kenneth,” she said kindly. “And in that hospital,
+there were a number of times when I wanted one of the doctors or
+nurses to do what I wanted them to. I tried many times, but I never
+succeeded.”
+
+Boyd nodded his head. “Well—” he began.
+
+“Oh, yes, Sir Thomas,” Her Majesty said. “What you’re thinking is
+certainly possible. It may even be true.”
+
+“What _is_ he thinking?” Malone said.
+
+“He thinks,” Her Majesty said, “that I may not have the talent for
+this particular effect—and perhaps I don’t. But, talent or not, I
+know what’s possible and what isn’t. And the way Mr. Taylor describes
+it is simply silly, that’s all. And unladylike. Imagine any
+self-respecting lady ‘squirting’ her thoughts about in space!”
+
+“Well,” Malone said carefully, “aside from its being unladylike—”
+
+“Sir Kenneth,” Her Majesty said, “you are not telepathic. Neither is
+Sir Thomas.”
+
+“I’m nothing,” Boyd said. “I don’t even exist.”
+
+“And it is very difficult to explain to the non-telepath just what Mr.
+Taylor is implying,” Her Majesty went on imperturbably. “Before you
+could inject any thoughts into anyone else’s mind, you’d have to be
+able to see into that mind. Is that correct?”
+
+“I guess so,” Malone said.
+
+“And in order to do that, you’d have to be telepathic,” Her Majesty
+said. “Am I correct?”
+
+“Correct,” Malone said.
+
+“Well, then,” Her Majesty said with satisfaction, and beamed at him.
+
+A second passed.
+
+“Well, then, what?” Malone said in confusion.
+
+“Telepathy,” Her Majesty said patiently, “is an extremely complex
+affair. It involves a sort of meshing with the mind of this other
+person. It has nothing, absolutely nothing, in common with this simple
+‘squirting’ of thoughts across space, as if they were orange pips you
+were trying to put into a wastebasket. No, Sir Kenneth, I cannot
+believe in what Mr. Taylor says.”
+
+“But it’s still possible,” Malone said.
+
+“Oh,” Her Majesty said, “it’s certainly possible. But I should think
+that if any telepaths were around, and if they were changing people’s
+minds by ‘squirting’ at them, I would know it.”
+
+Malone frowned. “Maybe you would at that,” he said. “I guess you
+would.”
+
+“Not to mention,” Boyd put in, “that if you were going to control
+everything we’ve come across like that you’d need an awful lot of
+telepathic operators.”
+
+“That’s true,” Malone admitted. “And the objections seem to make some
+sense. But what else is there to go on?”
+
+“I don’t know,” Boyd said. “I haven’t the faintest idea. And I’m
+rapidly approaching the stage where I don’t care.”
+
+“Well,” Malone said, heaving a sigh, “let’s keep looking.”
+
+He bent down and picked up another sheaf of copies from the Psychical
+Research Society.
+
+“After all,” he said, without much hope, “you never know.”
+
+* * * * *
+
+Malone looked around the office of Andrew J. Burris as if he’d never
+seen it before. He felt tired, and worn out, and depressed; it had
+been a long night, and here it was morning and the head of the FBI was
+giving him instructions. It was, Malone told himself, a hell of a
+life.
+
+“Now, Malone,” Burris said, “this is a very ticklish situation. You’ve
+got to handle it with great care.”
+
+“I can see that,” Malone said apprehensively. “It certainly looks
+ticklish. And unusual.”
+
+“Well, we don’t want any trouble,” Burris said. “We have enough
+trouble now.”
+
+“Sometimes I think we have too much,” Malone said.
+
+“That’s our job,” Burris said, looking grim.
+
+Malone blinked. “What is?” he said.
+
+“Having trouble,” Burris said.
+
+There was a short silence. Malone broke it. “Anyhow,” he said, “you
+feel we have enough trouble, so we’re trying to make things easy for
+everybody.”
+
+Burris nodded. “I’ve talked with the president,” he said, “and he
+feels this is the best way to handle matters.”
+
+Malone tried to imagine Burris explaining the incredible complexities
+of the situation to the president, and was torn between relief that he
+hadn’t been there and a curious wish to have heard the scrambled
+conversation that must have taken place. “The way it seems to me,” he
+said cautiously, “shipping those spies back to Russia is a worse
+punishment than sending them to the federal pen.”
+
+“Maybe it is,” Burris said. “Maybe it is. How would you feel if you
+were being sent to jail?”
+
+“Innocent,” Malone said instantly.
+
+“But that isn’t the point,” Burris went on. “You see, Malone, we don’t
+really have much damaging evidence against those spies, except for
+their confessions. During all the time we were watching them, we took
+care that they never did come up with anything dangerous; we weren’t
+fishing for them but for their superiors, for the rest of the
+network.”
+
+“There doesn’t seem to be any more network,” Malone said. “Not in this
+country, anyhow.”
+
+“Sure,” Burris said. “We know that now, thanks to the confessions, and
+to Her Majesty. But we can’t prosecute on that sort of evidence. You
+know what a good defense attorney could do with unsupported
+confessions—and even if we wanted to take the lid off telepathy for
+the general public, it would be absolute hell bringing it into court.”
+
+“So,” Malone said, “we can’t put them in prison, even if we want to.”
+
+“Oh, I didn’t say that,” Burris said hastily. “We could probably win,
+even against a good defense. But they wouldn’t get much time in
+prison, and we’d only end up deporting them in any case.”
+
+Malone fished for a cigarette, lit it and blew out smoke. “So we’re
+going to save the taxpayers some money,” he said. “That’ll be nice for
+a change.”
+
+“That’s right,” Burris said, beaming. “We’re going to save Federal
+funds by shipping them back to their motherland now. After all, they
+did take out their naturalization papers under false names, and their
+declarations are chockfull of false information. So all it takes is a
+court order to declare their citizenships null and void, and hand all
+three of them back to the Soviets.”
+
+“A nice, simple housecleaning,” Malone said. “All open and
+above-board. And the confessions will certainly stand up in a
+deportation hearing.”
+
+“No question of it,” Burris said. “But the reason I called you here,
+Malone, is that there’s still one thing bothering me.”
+
+Malone blew out some more smoke, thought wistfully about cigars, and
+said: “What? Everything seems simple enough to me.”
+
+Burris frowned and leaned back in his chair. “It’s this notion of
+yours, Malone,” he said.
+
+“Notion?”
+
+“About going over there,” Burris said. “Now, I can understand your
+wanting some facts on Moscow, current background and all that sort of
+thing. So far, everything makes sense.”
+
+“Fine,” Malone said warily.
+
+“But, after all, Malone,” Burris said, “we do have such a thing as the
+Central Intelligence Agency. They send us reports. That’s what they’re
+for. And why you want to ignore the reports and make a trip over there
+to walk around and see for yourself—”
+
+“It’s because of everything that’s happening,” Malone said.
+
+Burris looked puzzled. “What?” he said.
+
+“Because of all the confusion,” Malone said. “Frankly, I can’t trust
+the CIA, or any other branch of the government. I’ve got to see for
+myself.”
+
+Burris considered this for a second. “It’s going to look very
+peculiar,” he said.
+
+Malone shrugged. “Everything looks peculiar,” he said. “A little more
+won’t hurt anything. And if I do turn up anything we can use, the
+whole trip will be worth it.”
+
+“But sending an FBI man along with Brubitsch, Borbitsch and Garbitsch
+is a little strange,” Burris said. “Not to mention Her Majesty.”
+
+“There is that,” Malone said. “I wonder what our Red friends are going
+to think of the Queen.”
+
+“God knows,” Burris said. “If they take her seriously, they’re liable
+to call her some sort of capitalist deviationist.”
+
+“And if they don’t take her seriously?” Malone said.
+
+“Then they’re going to wonder why she’s _pretending_ to be a
+capitalist deviationist,” Burris said.
+
+Malone flicked his cigarette at an ashtray. “You can’t win,” he said.
+
+“Frankly,” Burris said, “I wouldn’t allow Her Majesty to go along
+under any circumstances—except that there is an excuse for having an
+older woman around.”
+
+“There is?” Malone said.
+
+Burris nodded. “As a chaperone,” he said.
+
+“Now, wait a minute,” Malone said. “Brubitsch, Borbitsch and
+what’s his name don’t need a chaperone.”
+
+“I didn’t say it was for them,” Burris said.
+
+“Me?” Malone asked in a tone of absolute wonder. “Now, Chief, I don’t
+need a chaperone. I’m a grown man. I know my way around. And the idea
+of having Her Majesty along to chaperone me is going to make
+everything look even stranger. After all, Chief—”
+
+“Malone,” Burris said, in a voice of steel.
+
+“Sorry,” Malone mumbled. “But, really, I’m not some young, innocent
+girl in a Victorian novel.”
+
+“No,” Burris said, a trifle sadly, “you’re not. But there is one going
+along on the trip with the rest of you.”
+
+“There is?” Malone said. “Who is she? Rebecca?”
+
+“Her name’s Luba,” Burris said. “Luba Garbitsch.”
+
+“Garbitsch’s wife?” Malone said.
+
+Burris shook his head. “His daughter,” he said. “And don’t tell me
+there isn’t any such name as Luba. I know there isn’t. But what would
+you pick to go with Garbitsch?”
+
+“Wastepaper basket,” Malone said instantly. “Grapefruit rinds. Lemon
+peels. Coffee grounds.”
+
+“Damn it, Malone,” Burris said, “this is serious.”
+
+“Well,” Malone said, “it doesn’t sound serious. What are we doing,
+deporting the entire family?”
+
+“I suppose we could,” Burris said, “if we really wanted to get
+complicated about it. What with Garbitsch’s false declaration, I
+haven’t the faintest idea what his daughter’s status would be—but she
+_was_ born here, Malone, and as far as we can tell she’s perfectly
+loyal to the United States.”
+
+“Fine,” Malone said. “So you’re sending her to Russia. This is making
+less and less sense, you know.”
+
+Burris rubbed a hand over his face. “Malone,” he said in a quiet,
+patient voice, “why don’t you wait for me to finish? Then everything
+will make sense. I promise.”
+
+“Well, all right,” Malone said doubtfully. “Luba Garbitsch is going
+along to Russia, in spite of the fact that she’s perfectly loyal.”
+
+“True,” Burris said. “You see, Malone, she loves her traitorous old
+daddy just the same. Family affection. Very touching.”
+
+“And if he’s going to Moscow—”
+
+“She wants to go along,” Burris said. “That’s right.”
+
+“And you’re going to send her along,” Malone said, “out of the
+goodness of your kindly old heart. Just like Santa Claus. Or the
+Easter bunny.”
+
+Burris looked acutely uncomfortable. “Now, Malone,” he said. “It’s not
+exactly that, and you know it.”
+
+“It isn’t?” Malone said, trying to look surprised.
+
+Burris shook his head. “If we send Luba Garbitsch along,” he said,
+“that gives us a good excuse for Her Majesty. As a chaperone.”
+
+“Are you sure,” Malone asked slowly, “that anybody with a name like
+Luba Garbitsch could plausibly need a chaperone? Even in a den of
+vice? Because somehow it doesn’t sound right: Luba Garbitsch,
+chaperoned by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I.”
+
+“Well,” Burris said, “it won’t be the Queen. I mean, she won’t be
+known as the Queen.”
+
+“Incognito?” Malone said.
+
+Burris shrugged. “In away,” he said. “What do you think would be a
+good name for her to travel under?”
+
+Malone considered. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “But no more
+Lubas.”
+
+“I was thinking,” Burris said carefully. “How about Rose Thompson?”
+
+There was a long silence.
+
+“I don’t know whether she’ll go for the idea,” Malone said. “But I’ll
+try it.”
+
+“You can do it, Malone,” Burris said instantly. “I know you can. I
+just know it.”
+
+“Your faith,” Malone said with a sigh, “is going to be too much for me
+one of these days.”
+
+Burris shrugged. “Just take it easy, Malone,” he said. “You said you
+wanted to have Her Majesty over there to read a few minds, and you’ve
+got her. But remember, don’t get involved in anything complicated.
+Don’t start any fireworks.”
+
+“I hope not,” Malone said.
+
+“Stay out of political arguments,” Burris said.
+
+Malone blinked. “What do you think I’m going to do?” he said. “Bring
+along a soapbox?”
+
+“You never know,” Burris said. “Just keep quiet, and don’t go prowling
+around where you’re not wanted.”
+
+“That,” Malone said decisively, “would keep me out of Russia
+entirely.”
+
+“Damn it,” Burris said, “you know what I mean. We don’t want any
+international incidents, understand?”
+
+“Yes, sir,” Malone said.
+
+Burris nodded. “All right, then,” he said. “Your plane leaves from the
+airport in an hour. You’d better go and talk to Her Majesty first.”
+
+“Right,” Malone said.
+
+“And I hope you know what you’re doing,” Burris said.
+
+_So do I_, Malone thought privately. Aloud, he said, “I just want to
+get the feel of things over there, that’s all, sir. I won’t cause any
+more trouble than an ordinary tourist.”
+
+“Malone,” Burris said, “don’t be an ordinary tourist. They’re
+empty-headed morons and they do make trouble. Be an invisible tourist.
+Be nice to everybody. Be polite and kind. Don’t step on any toes, no
+matter whose and no matter why.”
+
+“Yes, sir,” Malone said.
+
+“Remember, they’re going to know who you are,” Burris said.
+
+“It’s not as if we could keep it a secret.”
+
+“Yes, sir,” Malone said. “I’ll remember.”
+
+“All right.” Burris extended his hand. “Good luck, Malone,” he said,
+with a deeper feeling of sincerity than Malone had experienced from
+him in months.
+
+Malone shook the hand. “Thank you, sir,” he said.
+
+* * * * *
+
+A little less than an hour later, Malone sat on the steps of the
+landing ramp that led up to the open door of the big Air Force
+transport plane on the runway. The plane was waiting, and so was
+Malone. He didn’t feel confident, or even excited. He felt just a
+little bit frightened. Burris’ complicated warnings had had some
+effect, and Malone was fighting down a minor case of the shakes.
+
+Next to him, her face wreathed in happy smiles, sat a smartly-dressed
+grey-haired woman in her sixties. She wore an unobtrusive tailored
+suit and a light jacket, and she looked as if she might be one of the
+elder matrons of the society set, very definitely an upper-crust type.
+In spite of the normality of her clothing, Her Majesty looked every
+inch a Queen, Malone thought.
+
+“And that, Sir Kenneth, is only natural,” she said sweetly. “Even when
+traveling incognito, one must retain one’s dignity. And I don’t object
+at all to using the name of Rose Thompson in a good cause; it was used
+for so many years it almost feels like part of me.”
+
+“I shouldn’t be at all surprised,” Malone said mildly.
+
+A voice from above and behind him interrupted his worried thoughts.
+“Mr. Malone!” it said. “Mr. Malone?”
+
+Malone screwed his head around and looked up. An Air Force colonel was
+standing in the doorway of the plane, looking down with a stern,
+worried expression. “Yes?” Malone said. “What is it?”
+
+“Takeoff, Mr. Malone,” the colonel said. “We’re due to go in fifteen
+minutes, and our clearance has been established.”
+
+“Fine,” Malone said.
+
+“But your passengers,” the colonel said. “Where are they?”
+
+Malone tried to look calm, cool and collected. “They’ll be here,” he
+said. “Don’t worry about a thing.” Privately, he hoped he was right.
+Boyd hadn’t shown up yet, and Boyd was bringing the musical-comedy spy
+trio. It wasn’t, Malone thought, that Boyd was usually late. But with
+Brubitsch, Borbitsch and Garbitsch in tow, almost anything could
+happen, he thought. He hoped fervently that it wouldn’t.
+
+“It won’t,” Her Majesty said. “At least, it hasn’t so far. They’re all
+in a car, and they’re driving right here. Boyd is thinking that he
+ought to be here within five minutes.”
+
+Malone nodded, wiping his forehead. “Five minutes, Colonel,” he called
+back to the figure at the door. The colonel nodded efficiently at him,
+turned and disappeared inside the plane. Malone looked at his watch.
+The second hand was going around awfully fast, he thought. He wondered
+if it were possible for time to speed up while he waited, so that by
+the time Boyd arrived he would be an old, old man. He felt about eight
+years older already, he told himself, and a minute hadn’t even passed.
+
+He forced his eyes away from the moving second hand. Looking at it, he
+knew, would only make him more nervous. Maybe there was some scenery
+around that he could stare at. He raised his eyes and looked out
+toward the gates that led to the interior of the air terminal.
+
+Scenery, he told himself in sudden wonder, was no word for it.
+
+He stared. He wanted to blink, but at the same time he felt that it
+would be a shame to close his eyes for even a tenth of a second. He
+held his eyelids apart by main force and went right on staring.
+
+The girl walking toward him across the field was absolutely beautiful.
+She seemed to make everything light up and start singing. Malone was
+sure that, somewhere, he could hear birds plugging their favorite
+numbers, and the soft rustle of the wind through pine branches. He
+could feel the soft caress of the wind on his face, and he could smell
+the odor of lilacs and honeysuckles and violets and whatever all those
+other flowers were. They had all different colors and shapes, and he
+couldn’t remember many of their names, but he could tell they were all
+around him. They had to be all around him. Especially all the red
+ones.
+
+The girl had red hair that tossed gently in the wind. The bottom
+two-thirds of her figure, Malone was happy to note, was not only as
+good as the top third but a good deal better. It took him several
+seconds to reach this conclusion, because at first he was willing to
+swear that he had never seen such a beautiful girl before.
+
+But, he told himself with a shade of apprehension, he had.
+
+As she approached, he stood up. “Well, well,” he said brightly. “If it
+isn’t the Lady That’s Known as Lou. Did the Psychical Research Society
+give you the day off, or are you here to see about a misplaced broom?”
+
+The girl beamed at him. “My, my,” she said. “How are you?”
+
+“Fine,” Malone said. “And—”
+
+“And how are the others?” she said.
+
+Malone blinked. “Others?” he said.
+
+She nodded. “Grumpy, Sleepy, Happy, Dopey, Bashful and Doc,” she said.
+
+Malone opened his mouth, shut it again, and thought for a second.
+“Now, wait a minute,” he said at last. “That’s not fair. I—”
+
+“Oh,” she said. “And I nearly forgot. I owe you one from last time:
+_gesundheit_.”
+
+“And many happy returns,” Malone said. “Seriously, what are you doing
+out here?”
+
+“Talking,” the girl said. “To you. Or hadn’t you noticed?”
+
+“I mean in general,” Malone said desperately.
+
+“In general,” she said agreeably, “I’m here to take a little trip.”
+
+“Oh,” Malone said. “By plane?”
+
+She smiled sweetly and shook her head. “Not at all,” she said. “I’m
+waiting for the next scheduled broomstick.”
+
+Malone took a deep breath. “When does your plane leave?” he said
+doggedly.
+
+“In ten minutes or so,” she said.
+
+“Then you’d better hurry and get on,” he said.
+
+She nodded. “That’s what I thought,” she said.
+
+A second passed.
+
+“Did you want to say something?” Malone said uncomfortably.
+
+She shook her head. “Not particularly,” she said.
+
+“Well, then—”
+
+“The time _is_ growing short,” she said.
+
+“Isn’t it, though?” Malone said, feeling a little mystified. “Well,
+now. Goodbye. I’ll see you soon.”
+
+“Goodbye,” she said.
+
+Another second passed.
+
+“Your plane—” Malone started.
+
+“How about yours?” she said.
+
+“I’m all right,” Malone said nervously. “But if your plane’s leaving
+in ten minutes you’d better get on it.”
+
+“I intend to,” she said, without moving.
+
+“Well—” Malone started.
+
+“As soon as you quit blocking the ramp,” she said. “Would you mind
+terribly if I climbed over your head? Because I do have to get on
+board.”
+
+“Now wait a minute,” Malone said. “This isn’t your plane.”
+
+“How do you know?” she said. “Do you own it? Are you flying it away?”
+
+“Well,” Malone said helplessly, “it’s my plane, and there’s nobody
+going on it but—”
+
+He paused. A great light seemed to burst in his mind, shedding a
+perfectly horrible glow over the wreck of his mental processes. “You
+know,” he said in a tentative tone, “we never have been properly
+introduced. I only know your name is Lou.”
+
+“That’s what people call me,” the girl said. “For short. I’m Luba
+Garbitsch.”
+
+“And I’m Kenneth Malone,” Malone said. “Kenneth J. Malone. Of the
+FBI.”
+
+She nodded. “Yes,” she said. “I know.”
+
+“Your father—”
+
+“My father is going to Russia,” she said, “and I am going along with
+him.”
+
+“Oh,” Malone said. “Sure. Sure. Oh.”
+
+There was a longer silence.
+
+“Can I get on board now?” Luba said.
+
+“There isn’t any hurry,” Malone said. “We’re still waiting for—for
+passengers. And this is one of them.” He turned and indicated the
+Queen. “This is Her—Rose Thompson. She’ll be traveling along with
+us.”
+
+Her Majesty was wearing a broad, broad grin, Malone noticed nervously
+as he turned. Undoubtedly she had been tuned in to the whole
+conversation, and knew just what had gone on in both minds. But she
+only said, “I’m very pleased to meet you, my dear.”
+
+Lou blinked, smiled and stretched out her hand. “Well, then,” she
+said. “Hello. And let’s all have a happy trip.”
+
+“By all means,” Malone said. “And the trip seems to be about to
+start.”
+
+He could hear the tramping of a lot of feet coming across the field
+toward them. He looked and saw that the feet were all neatly attached
+to bodies, two to a body. There were Thomas Boyd’s feet, the assorted
+twelve feet of six FBI agents, and three pairs that belonged to Alexis
+Brubitsch, Ivan Borbitsch and Vasili Garbitsch. Brubitsch looked even
+fatter than ever, Borbitsch even thinner. Garbitsch was of an
+indeterminate middling shape; he had grey hair and a pair of
+pince-nez, and he walked a trifle unevenly, like a duck, with his
+hands clasped low in front of him. He was looking down at the ground
+as the crowd shoved him along.
+
+When the crowd neared the steps, Luba went over to him. Garbitsch
+looked up, with a pleasant, somehow wistful smile on his face. “Hello,
+Luba, my child,” he said.
+
+Luba smiled, too. “Hello, Dad,” she said. “All ready to go?”
+
+“Certainly I am ready,” he said. “I am all packed. We take off in a
+few minutes. And you, Luba, my child?”
+
+“Fine, Dad,” she said.
+
+She looked down. “They’ve got handcuffs on you,” she said. “Why,
+that’s—”
+
+Garbitsch shrugged. He looked even more wistful. “A formality,” he
+said. “It makes no difference.”
+
+“Okay,” Boyd said suddenly. “We’ve got to get out of here pretty soon,
+and you’ll be taking off. Let’s break it up. Miss Thompson, you and
+Luba go aboard. Malone, you follow with the others.”
+
+Malone rounded up Brubitsch, Borbitsch and Garbitsch and followed the
+ladies aboard.
+
+He came back to the door then, and stuck his head out. “The keys,” he
+said.
+
+Boyd stared. “What?”
+
+“The keys to the handcuffs,” Malone said. “I’ll need ’em.”
+
+“You’re going to take them off when they get to Russia?” Boyd said.
+
+Malone shook his head. “No,” he said. “Now.”
+
+“But—”
+
+“I think we’ll have plenty of warning if they decide to try anything,
+Tom,” Malone said quietly. “Her Majesty, after all, is keeping them
+under surveillance.”
+
+Without another word, Boyd tossed up the keys. Malone caught and
+pocketed them. “I’ll be back as soon as possible,” he said.
+“Meanwhile, you can keep digging on other stuff—what we’ve discussed
+and anything it seems to lead into.”
+
+“Right,” Boyd said. “Stay out of trouble, Ken. So long.”
+
+Malone nodded and ducked back into the plane. He unlocked the
+handcuffs, and Brubitsch and Borbitsch immediately went and sat down
+mournfully together at the back of the plane. Malone looked for Lou,
+but she was already seated—with Her Majesty, naturally. He sighed
+briefly and sat down, at last, next to the wistful Garbitsch.
+
+“It will be nice to see Russia again,” Garbitsch said. “I hardly hoped
+to do so.”
+
+The plane shuddered, roared and took off. Then it settled down to its
+normal state of unnatural quiet. Malone sat back and tried to relax.
+
+It was impossible.
+
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+Red Square was, somehow, disappointing. It was crowded with men and
+women, all looking very Russian in an undefined sort of way, and the
+big glass windows sparkled from every side. “I know it’s silly,” Luba
+said in a baffled voice, “but, somehow, I always expected Red Square
+to be red.”
+
+“And why should that be?” the MVD man next to her said. He was a burly
+man with a sour expression, as if he had eaten too many onions the day
+before.
+
+“Well,” Malone said, “it is Red Square, after all.”
+
+“But red is symbolic only,” the MVD man said surlily. “Is not color.
+Only symbol of glorious Russia.”
+
+“I suppose so,” Luba said. “But it’s still disappointing.”
+
+“You expect, perhaps, that we recruit our glorious Red Army from
+American Indian tribes?” the MVD man said sourly. “You are
+literal-minded bourgeois intellectual. This is not good thing to be.”
+
+“Somehow,” Malone mused, “I didn’t think it was.”
+
+“But this is different,” Luba said. “The Red Army is made up of
+Russians. But this is just a square. You could paint it.”
+
+“After all,” Malone offered, “the White House is white, isn’t it?”
+
+“White is cowardly color,” the MVD man pointed out with satisfaction.
+
+“Never mind that,” Malone said. “We call it a white house, and it is a
+white house. You call this a red square, and it isn’t even pink. Not
+even a little bit pink. It’s just—just—”
+
+“Just building-colored,” Luba put in. Malone turned to her and
+executed a small bow.
+
+“Thank you,” he said.
+
+“Think nothing of it,” Luba said.
+
+“Oh, don’t worry,” Malone said. “I will.”
+
+The MVD man hissed like a teakettle and both heads swung round to look
+at him again. Her Majesty, who had been admiring some dresses in a
+shop window, also turned. “My goodness,” she said. “That’s a terrible
+wheeze. Do you take something for it?”
+
+“Is not wheeze,” the MVD man said. “Is noise representing impatience
+with arrogance and stupidity of capitalist warmonger conversation.”
+
+“Arrogance?” Luba said.
+
+“Stupidity?” Malone said.
+
+Her Majesty drew herself to her full height. “We do not monger war,”
+she said. “Not in the least. We are not mongers.”
+
+The MVD man looked at her, blinked, sighed and looked away. “This
+color discussion,” he said, “it is very silly. Look at the Blue Ridge
+Mountains, in your country. Are they blue?”
+
+“Well—” Malone said.
+
+“What color, for example, is the Golden Gate Bridge?” the MVD man
+continued, with heavy sarcasm. “Is not even a gate. Is a bridge. Is
+not golden. But you say we disappoint. No. You disappoint.”
+
+There seemed to be no immediate answer to that, so Malone didn’t try
+for one. Instead, he went back to looking at the Square, and beyond it
+to where the inverted turnips of the Kremlin gleamed in the moonlight.
+The turnips were very pretty, if a little odd for building-tops. But
+Red Square, in spite of all its historic associations, seemed to be a
+little dull. The buildings were just buildings, and the streets were
+filled with Russians. They were not bomb-throwing Russians, bearded
+Russians or even “Volga Boatman”-singing Russians. They were just
+ordinary, dull Russians of every sort, shade, race, color and previous
+condition of servitude.
+
+It was just about what he’d expected after the trip. That hadn’t been
+exciting either, he told himself. There had been no incident of any
+kind. None of the three spies seemed to be exactly overjoyed about
+being sent back to good old Mother Russia, but none seemed inclined to
+make much fuss about the matter, either. Malone had blandly told them
+that they were being deported, instead of tried, because there was no
+evidence that was worth the expense of a trial. And, besides that, he
+had particularly emphasized that the FBI did not believe any of the
+stories the three men had told.
+
+“They just don’t match up,” he said. “You all told different stories,
+and there’s too much disagreement between them. Frankly, we don’t
+believe any of them—not yet, we don’t. But mark my words. We’ll find
+out the truth some day.”
+
+He’d thought it was a good speech, and Her Majesty had agreed with
+him. It had its desired effect, since the plane was the first place
+the three had had a chance to meet since their arrest. “Each one knows
+that he told the truth,” Her Majesty said, “but nobody knows what the
+other two said.”
+
+“That’s what I figured,” Malone said. “They didn’t have a chance to
+talk to each other.”
+
+“And so each one is lying his head off to the others,” Her Majesty
+said, “and telling them all about how he, too, lied gloriously and
+bravely in defense of the Motherland. It’s really very funny.”
+
+“Well,” Malone said, “it makes them happy. And why not?”
+
+Luba, too, had chatted with her father quite a lot of the time. Her
+Majesty reported that none of this conversation could possibly be
+understood as dangerous or harmful. It was just simple conversation.
+
+Of course, Luba and her father hadn’t talked all the time, and Malone
+did have a chance to get a few words in edgewise. Her Majesty made no
+report on those conversations, but Malone was comfortably aware that
+they did not belong in the harmless class. His relationship with the
+girl seemed, he told himself happily, to be improving slightly. Now
+and again, he even won a round from her.
+
+As the American plane crossed the border, it was picked up by an
+escort of Russian fighter craft, which stuck with them all the way
+into Moscow. The fighters didn’t do anything; they were just there,
+Malone figured, for insurance. But they made him nervous when he
+looked out the window. The trip from the border to Moscow seemed to
+take a long time.
+
+Then, at the airfield, a group of MVD men had almost elbowed the
+American Embassy delegation out of the way in greeting the
+disembarking little band. There was a lot of palaver, in Russian,
+English and various scrambled mixtures which nobody understood. The
+American delegation greeted Malone, Luba and Her Majesty formally, and
+the MVD concentrated on Brubitsch, Borbitsch and Garbitsch. The three
+spies were hustled away, apparently to MVD Headquarters, without much
+fuss. Luba said goodbye to her father calmly enough, and Vasili
+Garbitsch seemed almost entirely unaffected by his surroundings. As
+the plane touched ground, he had said: “Ah, the soil of Mother
+Russia,” but, outside of a goodbye or two, those were his last words
+before leaving.
+
+One MVD man stayed behind, even after the American delegation had
+left. His name, he explained, was Vladimir Josefovitch Petkoff. “It
+will be my pleasure to show your group the many historic and
+interesting sights of Moskva,” he announced to Malone.
+
+“Pleasure?” Malone said. Petkoff was tall and heavy, and wore a row of
+medals that strung out across his chest like a newspaper headline.
+
+“My duty,” Petkoff said flatly, “is my pleasure. That is how we
+arrange matters in Russia.”
+
+And so the tour had started, with Red Square. Malone told himself he
+didn’t really mind if it weren’t red, but he did think it could at
+least look sinister. Unfortunately, the Square did not seem
+particularly willing to oblige.
+
+“So this is Red Square,” Malone said, after a long silence.
+
+“You do not sound interested,” Petkoff said in what sounded like a
+vaguely ominous voice. “Because it is not painted in capitalistic and
+obvious colors, it bores you?”
+
+“Not exactly,” Malone said. “But when you’ve seen one Square, you’ve
+seen them all, is how I feel about it. There must be somewhere else to
+sight-see.”
+
+“Somewhere?” Petkoff said. “There is everywhere. This is Moskva, the
+capital and the greatest city in Mother Russia. That is what we are
+told to say.” He lowered his voice. “Personally,” he added, “I come
+from Leningrad. I prefer it. But in Moskva one talks only of Moskva.”
+
+“I know just how you feel,” Malone assured him. “I’ve been to San
+Francisco.”
+
+“Well, then,” Petkoff said, almost smiling at him. “What is there you
+would like to see?”
+
+Malone fished in his pocket for an American cigarette. He’d brought a
+carton with him, having once tried Russian makes. They seemed to be
+mostly cardboard, both the long filter and the tobacco. He lit the
+cigarette and thought for a second. “I don’t suppose,” he said
+cautiously, “that we could take a look around inside the Kremlin,
+could we?”
+
+“Aha,” Petkoff said. “I see what is in your mind.”
+
+“You do?” Malone said, startled.
+
+“Naturally,” Petkoff said. “You wish to see the tomb of Lenin. It is
+famous throughout the world.”
+
+Malone considered that for a minute. “Somehow,” he said cautiously,
+“the coffin of Lenin doesn’t exactly sound like a gay start for
+sight-seeing.”
+
+Petkoff looked pleased instantly. “I understand,” he said. “Truly I
+understand. You, too, feel sad over the death of the great Lenin. How
+beautiful! How cultured!”
+
+Malone wondered whether or not to disillusion the man, and decided
+against it. “Well, something like that,” he said vaguely.
+
+“I’ll tell you what: is there a restaurant around here where we could
+get something to eat?”
+
+“To eat?” Petkoff said, still looking pleased. “You wish to eat?”
+
+“Well,” Malone said, “I’m rather hungry, and I guess the ladies must
+be, too.”
+
+“What?” Luba said, returning to the group. She had joined Her Majesty
+in viewing the display of dresses. The Queen came scurrying over, too,
+through the silent and jostling Russian crowds.
+
+“I was suggesting a restaurant,” Malone said.
+
+“Best idea anybody’s had all day,” Lou said. Her Majesty graciously
+consented to agree, and Petkoff beamed like the rising sun.
+
+“My friends,” he said. “My very fine friends—although you are
+capitalistic bourgeois intellectuals, thrown aside by the path of
+progress—in Moskva we have the finest restaurants in all the world.”
+
+“How about ... oh, Leningrad?” Malone said in a low voice.
+
+“In Leningrad,” Petkoff admitted, “the restaurants are better. But in
+Moskva, the restaurants are very good indeed. Much better than one
+might expect, if one knows Leningrad.”
+
+“Well,” Malone said, “I suppose we’ve just got to put up with Moscow.”
+
+They went back to the corner, and hailed the long, black,
+sleek-looking limousine that had brought them in from the airport. The
+two silent men in the front seat of the gleaming Volga sedan were
+waiting patiently. Malone, Her Majesty and Lou got into the back,
+Petkoff in front. The two men were as still as statues—and rather
+unpleasant-looking statues, Malone thought—until Petkoff snapped
+something in Russian. Then one of them, at the wheel, said: “_Da,
+Tovarishch_.”
+
+The car started down the Moscow streets.
+
+Her Majesty was silent and somewhat abstracted during the ride, just
+as she had been during the entire trip so far. She was, Malone knew,
+prying into every mind she could touch. He smiled inwardly when he
+thought about that.
+
+The MVD, all unbeknownst to itself, was busily carrying around and
+protecting the single most dangerous spy in Moscow.
+
+Nobody else spoke, either, until the car was moving along at a good
+clip. Petkoff began some small talk then, but it wasn’t very
+interesting until he finally managed to edge it around to the subject
+he really wanted to talk about.
+
+“By the way, Mr. Malone,” he said, in a voice that sounded as if
+Petkoff were trying to establish an offhand manner, and not succeeding
+in the least. “It was thoughtful, very thoughtful, of American
+government, to return to us those men. Very kind.”
+
+Malone’s expression conveyed nothing but the sheerest good will.
+“Well, you know how it is,” he said. “Anything we can do to preserve
+peace and amity between our countries—we’ll do it. You know that.
+Getting along, coexistence, that sort of thing. Oh, we’re glad to
+oblige.”
+
+“I am sure,” Petkoff said darkly. “You realize, of course, that they
+are criminals? Deserters from Red Army, embezzlers. Embezzlers of
+money.”
+
+Wondering vaguely what else you could be an embezzler of, Malone
+nodded. “That’s what your ambassador in Washington said, when we told
+him about the deportation order.”
+
+“But Dad’s not an embezzler,” Luba broke in. “Or a deserter, either.
+He—”
+
+“We have the records,” Petkoff said.
+
+“But—”
+
+“Ordinarily, Mr. Malone,” Petkoff said pointedly, “we do not find it
+the policy of the American government to send back political
+refugees.”
+
+“Now, listen,” Lou said. “If you think you can shut me up—”
+
+“That is exactly what I think,” Petkoff said. “Let me assure you that
+no offense has been intended.”
+
+Lou opened her mouth and started to say something. Then she shut it
+again. “Well,” she said, “I guess this isn’t the time to argue about
+it. I’m sorry, Mr. Petkoff.”
+
+The MVD man beamed back at her. “Call me Vladimir,” he said.
+
+Malone broke in hastily. “You see, Major,” he said, “these men are all
+embezzlers, as you’ve said yourself. We have the word of your
+government on that.”
+
+Petkoff took his eyes off Lou with what seemed real reluctance. “Oh,”
+he said. “Yes. Of course you do.”
+
+“Therefore,” Malone said smoothly, “the three are criminals and not
+political refugees.”
+
+“Indeed,” Petkoff said blandly. “Very interesting. Your government has
+done a good deal of thinking in this matter.”
+
+“Sure we have,” Malone said. “After all, we don’t want to cause any
+trouble.”
+
+“No,” Petkoff said, and frowned. “Of course not.”
+
+“Naturally,” Malone said.
+
+After that, there was silence for almost a full minute. Then Major
+Petkoff turned to Malone again with a frown. “Wait,” he said.
+
+“Wait?” Malone said.
+
+“The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” Petkoff said, “has no
+extradition treaty with your capitalist warmongering country.”
+
+“We’re not warmongers,” Her Majesty put in. Both men ignored her.
+
+“True,” Malone admitted.
+
+“Then there was no reason to send these men back to us,” Petkoff said.
+
+“Oh, no,” Malone said. “There was a very good reason. You see, we
+didn’t want them in our country, either.”
+
+“But—”
+
+“And when we found that they’d lied on their naturalization papers,
+why, naturally, we took immediate steps. The only steps we could take,
+as a matter of fact.”
+
+“The only steps?” Petkoff said. “You could have preferred charges.
+This was not done. Why was it not done?”
+
+“That,” Malone said, sidestepping neatly, “is a matter of governmental
+policy, Major Petkoff. And I can’t provide any final answer.”
+
+“Ah?” Petkoff said.
+
+“But, after all, a trial would not make sense,” Malone said, now
+busily attacking from the side. “You see, at first we thought they
+were espionage agents.”
+
+“A foolish conclusion,” Petkoff said uneasily.
+
+Malone nodded. “That’s what we finally realized,” he said. “We
+questioned them, but their stories were nonsense, absolute nonsense.
+Of course, we had no idea of what foreign government might have
+employed them.”
+
+“Of course not,” Petkoff said, shifting slightly in his seat. The car
+took a wide curve and swayed slightly, and Malone found himself nearly
+in Lou’s lap. The sensation was so pleasant that all conversation was
+delayed for a couple of seconds, until the car had righted itself.
+
+“So,” Malone went on when he had straightened out, “we decided to save
+ourselves the expense of a trial.”
+
+“Very natural,” Petkoff said. The slight delay had apparently allowed
+him to recover his own mental balance. “The capitalist countries think
+only of money.”
+
+“Sure,” Malone said agreeably. “Well, anyhow, that’s the way it was.
+There was no point, really, in putting them in prison—what for? What
+good could it do us?”
+
+“Who knows?” Petkoff said.
+
+“Exactly,” Malone said. “So, since all we wanted to do was get rid of
+them, and since we had an easy way to do that, why, we took it, that’s
+all, and shipped them here.”
+
+“I see,” Petkoff said. “And the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is
+properly grateful.”
+
+“My goodness,” Her Majesty put in, apparently out of an irrepressible
+sense of fun. “Maybe we’ll get medals.”
+
+“Medals,” Petkoff said sternly, “are not given to capitalist
+agitators.”
+
+“We are not agitated,” Her Majesty said, and folded her hands in her
+lap, looking quite satisfied with herself.
+
+Petkoff thought for a second. “And why,” he said, “did you feel that
+such elaborate precautions were necessary in returning these men to
+us?”
+
+Malone shrugged. “Well, we couldn’t have them just running around all
+over the world, could we?” he said. “We felt that here they’d be
+properly housed and fed, in their own homeland, even if they didn’t
+get a job.”
+
+“They will be properly taken care of,” Petkoff prophesied darkly.
+
+“Now, wait a minute—” Lou began, and then stopped. “Sorry,” she said.
+
+Malone felt sorry for her, but there was nothing he could say to make
+things any better. “Exactly,” he told Petkoff with what he hoped was a
+smile.
+
+“Ah, well,” Petkoff said. “My friend and colleague, we should cease
+this shoptalk. Shoptalk?”
+
+“Quite correct,” Malone said.
+
+“I have studied English a long time,” Petkoff said. “It is not a
+logical language.”
+
+“You’re doing very well,” Malone said. Petkoff gave him a military
+duck of the head.
+
+“I appreciate your compliments,” he said. “But I fear we are boring
+the ladies.”
+
+The major had timed his speech well. At that moment, the ornate Volga
+pulled up to a smooth stop before a large, richly decorated building
+that glowed brightly under the electric lights of a large sign. The
+sign said something incomprehensible in Cyrillic script. Under it, the
+building entrance was gilded and carved into fantastic rococo shapes.
+Malone stared at the sign, and was about to ask a question about it
+when Petkoff spoke.
+
+“Trotkin’s,” he said. “The finest restaurant in all the world—in
+Moskva, this is what they say of it.”
+
+“I understand,” Malone said.
+
+“Come,” Petkoff said grandly, and got out of the car. One of the two
+silent men leaped out and opened the back door, and Her Majesty, Lou
+and Malone climbed out and stood blinking on the sidewalk under the
+sign.
+
+Petkoff leaned over and said something to the driver. The second
+silent man got back into the car, and it drove away down the street,
+turned a corner and disappeared. The party of four started toward the
+entrance of the restaurant.
+
+The door swung open before Major Petkoff reached it. A doorman was
+holding it, and bowing to each of the four as they passed. He was
+dressed in Victorian livery, complete to knee-breeches and lace, and
+Malone thought this was rather odd for the classless Russian society.
+But the doorman was only the opening note of a great symphony.
+
+Inside, there were tables and chairs—or at least, Malone told
+himself, that’s what he thought they were. They were massive wood
+affairs, carved into tortuous shapes and gilded or painted in all
+sorts of colors that glittered madly under the barrage of several
+electric chandeliers.
+
+The chandeliers hung from a frescoed ceiling, and looked much too
+heavy. They swayed and tinkled in time to the music that filled the
+room, but for a second Malone looked past them at the ceiling. It
+appeared to represent some sort of Russian heaven, at the end of the
+Five-Year Plan. There were officers and ladies eating grapes,
+waltzing, strolling on white puffy clouds, singing, drinking, making
+love. There was an awful lot of activity going on up on the ceiling,
+and it wasn’t until Malone lowered his gaze that he realized that none
+of this activity had been exaggerated.
+
+True, there were no white puffy clouds, and he couldn’t immediately
+locate a bunch of grapes anywhere. But there were the musicians, in
+the same Victorian outfits as the doorman: three fiddlers, a cellist,
+and a man who played piano. “Just like in night-clubs in bourgeois
+Paris,” Petkoff said, following Malone’s gaze with every evidence of
+pride.
+
+Between the musicians and Malone were a lot of tables and chairs and
+ancient, proud-looking waiters who appeared to have been hired when
+Trotkin’s had opened—and that, Malone thought, had been a long, long
+time ago. He felt like those two ladies, whose names he couldn’t
+remember, who said they’d slipped back in time. Officers and their
+ladies, the men in glittering uniforms, the ladies in ball dresses of
+every imaginable shade, cut, material and degree of exposure, were
+waltzing around the room looking very polite and old-world. Others
+were sitting at the tables, where candles fluttered, completely
+useless in the electric glare. The noise was something terrific, but,
+somehow, it was all very well-bred.
+
+The headwaiter was suddenly next to them. He hadn’t walked there, at
+least not noticeably; he appeared to have perfected the old-world
+manner of the silent servant. Or, of course, Malone thought, the man
+might be a teleport.
+
+“Ah, Major Petkoff,” he said, in a silken voice. “It is so good to see
+you again. And your friends?”
+
+“Americans,” Petkoff said. “They have come to see the glorious Soviet
+Union.”
+
+“Ah,” the headwaiter said. “Your usual table, Major?”
+
+Petkoff nodded. The headwaiter led the party through the dancers,
+snaking slowly along until they reached a large table near the
+musicians and at the edge of the dance floor. Her Majesty
+automatically took the seat nearest the musicians, which she imagined
+to be the head of the table. Lou sat at her left hand, and Malone at
+her right, his back against a wall. Petkoff took the foot of the
+table, called a waiter over, and ordered for the party. He did a
+massive job of it, with two waiters, at last, taking down what seemed
+to be his entire memoirs, plus the list of all soldiers in the Red
+Army below the rank of Grand Exalted Elk, or whatever it might have
+been. Malone had no idea what the major was ordering, except that it
+sounded extensive and very, very Russian.
+
+Finally the waiter went on his way. Major Petkoff turned to Malone and
+smiled. “Naturally,” he said, “we will begin with vodka, _nyet_?”
+
+Malone considered saying _nyet_, but he didn’t feel that this was the
+time or the place. Besides, he told himself grimly, it would be a sad
+day when a Petkoff could drink a Malone under the table. His proudest
+heritage from his father was an immense capacity, he told himself. Now
+was his chance to test it.
+
+“And, naturally, a little caviar to go with it,” Petkoff added.
+
+“Certainly,” Malone said, as if caviar were the most common thing in
+the world in his usual Washington saloons.
+
+It wasn’t long before the waiter reappeared, bringing four glasses and
+three bottles of vodka chilled in an ice-bucket, like a bouquet of
+champagne. Petkoff bowed him out after one bottle had been opened, set
+the glasses up and began to pour.
+
+“Oh, goodness,” Her Majesty started to say.
+
+“None for me, thanks,” Lou chimed in.
+
+“Oh, yes,” Her Majesty said. “I don’t think I’ll have any either. An
+old lady has to be very careful of her system, you know.”
+
+“You do not look like an old lady,” Petkoff said gallantly.
+“Middle-aged, perhaps, to be cruel. But certainly not old. Not over ...
+oh, perhaps forty.”
+
+Her Majesty smiled politely at him. Malone began to wonder if it had
+been gallantry, after all. From what he’d seen of the Russian women,
+it was likely, after all, that Petkoff really thought Her Majesty
+wasn’t much over forty at that.
+
+“You’re very flattering, Major,” Her Majesty said. “But I assure you
+that I’m a good deal older than I look.”
+
+Malone tried to tell himself that no one else had noticed the stifled
+gulp that had followed that remark. It had been his own stifled gulp.
+And his face, he felt sure, had aged one hundred and twelve years
+within a second or so. He waited for Her Majesty to tell Major Petkoff
+just how old she really was....
+
+But she said nothing else. After a second she turned and smiled at
+Malone.
+
+“Thanks,” he said.
+
+“Oh, you’re quite welcome,” she said.
+
+Petkoff frowned at both of them, shrugged, and readied the bottle.
+“Well, then,” he said. “It seems as if the drinking will be done by
+men—and that is right. Vodka is the drink for men.”
+
+He had filled his own glass full of the cold, clear liquid. Now he
+filled Malone’s. He stood, glass in hand. Malone also climbed to his
+feet.
+
+“To the continued friendship of our two countries!” Petkoff said. He
+raised his glass for a second, then downed the contents. Malone
+followed suit. The vodka burned its merry way into his stomach. They
+sat.
+
+A waiter arrived with a large platter. “Ah,” Petkoff said, turning.
+“Try some of this caviar, Mr. Malone. You will find it the finest in
+the world.”
+
+Malone, somehow, had never managed to develop a taste for caviar. He
+was willing to admit, if pressed, that this made him an uncultured
+slob, but caviar always made him think of the joke about the country
+bumpkin who thought it was marvelous that you could soften up buckshot
+just by soaking it in fish oil.
+
+Now, though, he felt he had to be polite, and he tried some of the
+stuff. All things considered, it wasn’t quite as bad as he’d thought
+it was going to be. And it did make a pretty good chaser for the
+vodka.
+
+Her Majesty also helped herself to some caviar. “My goodness,” she
+said. “This reminds me of the old days.”
+
+Malone waited, once again, with bated breath. But, though Her Majesty
+may have been crazy, she wasn’t stupid. She said nothing more.
+
+Petkoff, meanwhile, refilled the glasses and looked expectantly at
+Malone. This time it was his turn to propose the toast. He thought for
+a second, then stood up and raised his glass.
+
+“To the most beautiful woman in all the world,” he said, feeling just
+a little like a character in _War and Peace_. “Luba Vasilovna
+Garbitsch.”
+
+“Ah,” Petkoff said, smiling approvingly. Malone executed a little bow
+in Lou’s direction and followed Petkoff in downing the drink. Two more
+glasses of vodka wended their tortuous ways into the interior.
+
+“Tell me, colleague,” Petkoff said as be spooned up some more caviar,
+“how are things in the United States?”
+
+Malone shot a glance at Her Majesty, but she was concentrating on
+something else, and her eyes seemed far away. “Oh, all right,” he said
+at last.
+
+“Of course, you must say so,” Petkoff murmured. “But, as one colleague
+to another, tell me: how much longer do you think it will be before
+the proletarian uprising in your country?”
+
+There were a lot of answers to that, Malone told himself. But he chose
+one without too much difficulty. “Well, that’s hard to judge,” he
+said. “I’d hate to make any prediction. I don’t have enough
+information.”
+
+“Not enough information?” Petkoff said. “I don’t understand.”
+
+Malone shrugged. “Since our proletariat,” he said, “have shown no sign
+of wanting any rebellion at all, how can I predict when they’re going
+to rebel?”
+
+Petkoff gave him an unbelieving smile. “Well,” he said. “We must have
+patience, eh, colleague?”
+
+“I guess so,” Malone said, watching Petkoff pour more vodka.
+
+By the time the meal came, Malone was feeling a warm glow in his
+interior, but no real fogginess. The dance floor had been cleared by
+this time, and a group of six costumed professionals glided out and
+took places. The musicians broke out into a thunderous and bumpy
+piece, and the dancers began some sort of Slavic folk dance that
+looked like a combination of a _kazotska_ and a shivaree. Malone
+watched them with interest. They looked like good dancers, but they
+seemed to be plagued with clumsiness; they were always crashing into
+one another. On the other hand, Malone thought, maybe it was part of
+the dance. It was hard to tell.
+
+The dinner was as extensive as anything Malone had ever dreamed of:
+_borshcht_, beef Stroganoff, smoked fish, vegetables in gigantic
+tureens, ices and cheeses and fruits. And always, between the courses,
+during the courses and at every available moment, there was vodka.
+
+The drinking didn’t bother him too much. But the food was too much.
+Unbelieving, he watched Petkoff polish off a large red apple, a pear
+and a small wedge of white, creamy-looking cheese at the end of the
+towering meal. Her Majesty was staring, too, in a very polite manner.
+Lou simply looked glassy-eyed and overstuffed. Malone felt a good deal
+of sympathy for her.
+
+Petkoff finished the wedge of cheese and ripped off a belch of
+incredible magnitude and splendor. Malone felt he should applaud, but
+managed to restrain himself. Her Majesty looked startled for a second,
+and then regained her composure. Only Lou seemed to take the event as
+a matter of course, which set Malone to wondering about her home-life.
+Somehow he couldn’t picture her wistful little father ever producing a
+sound of such awesome magnitude.
+
+“My dear colleague,” Petkoff was saying. Malone turned to him and
+tried to look interested. “There is one thing I have wondered for many
+years.”
+
+“Really?” Malone said politely.
+
+“That is right,” Petkoff said. “For years, there has never been a
+change of name in your organization of secret police.”
+
+“We’re not secret police,” Malone said.
+
+Petkoff gave a massive shrug. “Naturally,” he said, “one must say
+this. But surely, one tires of being called FBI all the time.”
+
+“One does?” Malone said. “I don’t know. It gives a person a sort of
+sense of security.”
+
+“Ah,” Petkoff said. “But take us, for instance. We pride ourselves on
+our ability to camouflage ourselves. GPU, and then OGPU—which were, I
+understand, subject for many capitalist jokes.”
+
+Malone tried to look as if he couldn’t imagine such a thing. “I
+suppose they might have been,” he said.
+
+“Then we were NKVD,” Petkoff said, “and now MVD. And I understand,
+quite between us, Mr. Malone, that there is talk of further change.”
+
+There was a sudden burst of applause. Malone wondered what for, looked
+at the dance floor and realized that the six Slavic dancers were
+taking bows. As he watched, one of them slipped and nearly fell. The
+musicians obliged with a final series of chords and the dancers
+trotted away. A waltz began, and couples from the tables began
+crowding the floor.
+
+“How can you manage the proletariat,” Petkoff asked, “if you do not
+keep them confused?”
+
+“We don’t, exactly,” Malone said. “They more or less manage us.”
+
+“Ha,” Petkoff said, dismissing this with a wave of his hand.
+“Propaganda.” And then he, too, turned to watch the dancers. The waltz
+was finishing, and a fox-trot had begun. “With your permission, Mr.
+Malone,” he said, rising, “I should like to ask so-lovely Miss
+Garbitsch to dance with me.”
+
+Malone glanced at the girl. She gave him a quick smile, with just a
+hint of nervousness or strain in it, and turned to Petkoff. “I’d be
+delighted, Major,” she said. Malone shut his own mouth. As the girl
+rose, he got to his feet and gave the couple a small, Victorian bow.
+Petkoff and Lou walked to the floor, and Malone, sitting down again,
+watched enviously as he took her in his arms and began to guide her
+expertly across the floor in time to the music.
+
+Malone sighed. Some men, he told himself, had all the luck. But, of
+course, Lou had to be polite, too. She didn’t really like Petkoff, he
+told himself; she was just being diplomatic. And he had made some
+progress with her on the plane, he thought.
+
+He looked over at Her Majesty, but the Queen was staring abstractedly
+at a crystal chandelier. Malone sighed again, took a little caviar and
+washed it down with vodka. The vodka felt nice and warm, he thought
+vaguely. Vodka was good. It was too bad that the people who made such
+good vodka had to be enemies. But that was the way things were, he
+told himself philosophically.
+
+Terrible. That’s how things were.
+
+The fox-trot went to its conclusion. Malone saw Petkoff, chatting
+animatedly with Lou, lead her off to a small bar at the opposite side
+of the room. “Some people,” he muttered, “have too much luck. Or too
+much diplomacy.”
+
+Her Majesty was tugging at his arm. That, Malone thought, was going to
+be more bad news.
+
+It was.
+
+“Sir Kenneth,” she said softly, “do you realize that this place is
+full of MVD men? Of course you don’t; I haven’t told you yet.”
+
+Malone opened his mouth, shut it again, and thought in a hurry. If the
+place were full of MVD men, that meant they probably had it bugged.
+And that meant several things, all of them unpleasant. Her Majesty
+shouldn’t have said anything—she shouldn’t have shown any nervousness
+or anxiety in the first place, she shouldn’t have known there were so
+many MVD men in the second place—because there was no way for her to
+know, except through her telepathy, a little secret Malone did not
+want the Russians to find out about. And she should definitely, most
+definitely, not have called him “Sir Kenneth.”
+
+“Oh,” Her Majesty said. “I am sorry, Sir—er—Mr. Malone. You’re quite
+right, you know.”
+
+“Sure,” Malone said. “Well. My goodness.” He thought of something to
+say, and said it at once. “Of course there are MVD men here. This is
+just the place for good old MVD men to come when they go off duty. A
+nice, relaxing place full of fun and dancing and food and vodka....”
+And he was thinking, at the same time: _Are they doing anything odd?_
+
+“Russian, you know,” Her Majesty said, almost conversationally, “is an
+extremely difficult language. It takes a great deal of practice to
+learn to think in it really fluently.”
+
+“Yes, I should think it would,” Malone said absently. _You mean you
+haven’t been able to pick up what these people are thinking?_
+
+“Oh, one can get the main outlines,” Her Majesty went on, “but a
+really full knowledge is nearly impossible. Though, of course, it
+isn’t quite as bad as all that. A man who speaks both languages, like
+our dear Major Petkoff, for instance—so charming, so full of _joie de
+vivre_—could be an invaluable assistant to anyone interested in
+learning exactly how Russians really think.” She smiled nervously. Her
+face was suddenly set and strained. “I find that—”
+
+She stopped then, very suddenly. Her eyes widened, and her right hand
+reached out to grasp Malone’s arm more strongly than he had thought
+she ever could. “Sir Kenneth!” Her voice, all restraint gone, was a
+hissing whisper. Malone started to say something, but Her Majesty went
+on, her eyes wide. “Do something quickly!” she said.
+
+“What?” Malone said.
+
+“They’ve put something in Lou’s drink!” Her Majesty hissed.
+
+Malone was on his feet before she’d finished, and he took a step
+across the room.
+
+“She’s already swallowed it!” the Queen said. “Do something! Quickly!”
+
+The dancers on the floor were no concern of his, Malone told himself
+grimly. He didn’t decide to move; he was on his way before any thought
+filtered through into his mind. Officers and their ladies looked after
+him with shocked stupor as he plowed his way across the dance floor,
+using legs, elbows, shoulders and anything else that allowed him free
+passage. Sometimes the dancers managed to get out of his way.
+Sometimes they didn’t. It was all the same to Kenneth J. Malone.
+
+Her Majesty followed in his wake, silent and stricken, scurrying after
+him like a small destroyer following a battleship, or like a
+ball-carrying grandmother following up her interference.
+
+Malone caught sight of Lou, standing at the bar. In that second, she
+seemed to realize for the first time that something was wrong. She
+pushed herself violently away from the bar, and looked frantically
+around, her mouth opening to call. Petkoff was a blur next to her;
+Malone didn’t look at him clearly. Lou took a step....
+
+And two men with broken, lumpy faces came through a door somewhere in
+the rear of the restaurant, closer to her than Malone. Petkoff
+suddenly swam into sight; he was standing very still and looking
+entirely baffled.
+
+Malone pushed through a pair of dancers, ignored their glares and the
+man’s hissed insult, which he didn’t understand anyhow, and found his
+view suddenly blocked by a large expanse of dark grey.
+
+It was somebody’s chest, in a uniform. Malone shifted his gaze half an
+inch and saw a row of gold buttons. He looked upward.
+
+There, towering above him, was a face. It stared down, looking heavy
+and cruel and stupid. Malone, his legs still carrying him forward,
+bounced off the chest and staggered back a step or two. He heard a
+hissed curse behind him, and realized without thinking about it that
+he had managed to collide with the same pair of dancers again. He
+didn’t look around to see them. Instead, he looked ahead, at the giant
+who blocked his path.
+
+The man was about six feet six inches tall, a great Mongol who weighed
+about a sixth of a ton. But he didn’t look fat; he looked strong
+instead, and enormously massive. Malone sidestepped, and the Mongol
+moved slightly to block him. To one side, Malone saw Her Majesty
+scurrying by. The Mongol was apparently more interested in Malone than
+in trying to stop sweet little old ladies. Malone saw Her Majesty
+heading for the bar, and forgot about her for the second.
+
+The Mongol shifted again to block Malone’s forward progress.
+
+“What seems to be such great hurry, _Tovarishch_?” he said in a voice
+that sounded like an earthquake warning. “Have you no culture? Why you
+run across floor in such impolite manner?”
+
+The man might have been blocking his way because of Lou, or might
+simply want to teach an uncultured _Amerikanski_ a lesson. Malone
+couldn’t tell which, and it didn’t seem to matter. He whirled and
+reached for a glass of vodka standing momentarily unattended on a
+nearby table.
+
+He tossed the vodka at the giant’s eyes, and scooted around the
+mountain of flesh before it erupted with a volcanic succession of
+Russian curses that shook the room with their volume and sincerity.
+
+But Lou and Her Majesty were nowhere in sight. Major Petkoff was
+staring, and Malone followed his line of sight.
+
+A door in the rear of the restaurant was just closing. Behind it
+Malone saw Her Majesty and Lou, disappearing from sight.
+
+Malone knocked over a waiter and headed for Petkoff. “What’s going on
+here?” he bellowed over the crash of dishes and the rising wave of
+Russian profanity.
+
+Petkoff shrugged magnificently. “I have no ideas, colleague,” he said.
+“I have no ideas.”
+
+“But she—”
+
+“Miss Garbitsch was taken suddenly ill,” Petkoff said.
+
+“Damn sudden,” Malone growled.
+
+“Her friend, Miss Thompson, has taken her to the ladies’ room,”
+Petkoff said. He gestured, narrowly missing a broken, lumpy face
+Malone had seen before.
+
+“You are under arrest,” the face said. Its partner peered over
+Petkoff’s shoulder.
+
+“I?” Petkoff said.
+
+“Not you,” the face said. “Him.” He started for Malone and Petkoff
+threw out both arms.
+
+“Hold!” he said. “My orders are to see that this man is not molested.”
+
+The guests had suddenly and silently melted away. Malone backed off a
+step, looking for something to stage a fight with.
+
+“On the other hand, Comrade,” one of the lumpy-faced men said, “we
+have orders also.”
+
+“My orders—” Petkoff began.
+
+“Your orders do not exist,” the other lumpy man said. “We are to
+arrest this man. Our orders say so.”
+
+“You are fools,” Petkoff said. He spread his arms wider, blocking both
+of them. Malone edged back against the bar, feeling behind him for a
+bottle or maybe a bungstarter. Instead, his hand touched a sleeve.
+
+A voice behind him bellowed: “Cease!”
+
+The two lumpy-faced men goggled. Petkoff did not move.
+
+Malone turned, and saw a tall, thin civilian with dark glasses.
+“Cease,” the civilian repeated. “It is the girl we are to arrest! The
+girl!”
+
+“This is not a girl,” one of the lumpy men said. “Sir. We are to
+arrest this man. Our orders say distinctly—”
+
+“Never mind your orders!” Petkoff said. “Go and reduce your orders to
+shreds and stuff them up your nostrils and die of suffocation! My
+orders say—”
+
+“The girl!” the civilian said. “Where is the girl?”
+
+Malone darted forward. Petkoff caught him neatly with one arm as he
+went by. “Until we decide what to do,” the MVD man said, “you stay
+here.” Malone bucked against him, but could get nowhere. “Meanwhile,”
+Petkoff said, “I am for letting you go.”
+
+“I appreciate it,” Malone said through his teeth. “How about proving
+it?”
+
+“If you let him go,” a lumpy man said, “you will answer to our group
+head.”
+
+Petkoff tightened his hold protectively. Meanwhile, the civilian was
+climbing up into a stratospheric rage.
+
+“You are dolts, imbeciles, worms without brains and walking bellies
+filled with carrion!” he said magnificently. “I have orders which I am
+sworn to carry out!”
+
+“You are not alone,” Petkoff said.
+
+Malone took another try at a getaway, and failed.
+
+“We take precedence,” a lumpy man said. “We can talk later. Arrest
+comes first.”
+
+“But who?” the civilian snapped. “I insist—”
+
+“There shall be no arrest!” Petkoff screamed. “No one is to be
+arrested at all!”
+
+“I swear by the bones of Stalin that my orders state—” the tall man
+began.
+
+“The bones of Stalin are with us!” a lumpy man said. “Go and die in a
+kennel filled with fleas and old newspaper! Go and freeze to the
+likeness of an obscene statue of a bourgeois deity! Go and hang by the
+ears from a monument four thousand feet high in the center of the
+great desert!”
+
+Inspired, the other lumpy man screamed “Charge!” and came for Petkoff
+and the civilian. Petkoff whirled, letting go of Malone in order to
+beat back this wave of maddened attackers, and Malone took the
+advantage. He ducked free under Petkoff’s left arm and started around
+the gesticulating, screaming, fighting group for the door at the back
+of the restaurant. He took exactly four steps.
+
+Then he stopped. The Mongol, his eyes red with a combination of vodka
+and bull-roaring rage, was charging toward him, his hands outflung and
+his fingers grasping at the air. “Warmonger!” he was shouting.
+“Capitalist slave-owner! Leprous and ancient cannibal without culture!
+You have begun a war you can not finish!”
+
+“Ha!” Malone said, feeling inadequate to the occasion. As the Mongol
+charged, he felt a wave of intense pragmatism come over him. He
+reached back toward the bar, grabbed a bottle of vodka and tossed
+several glassfuls into the giant’s face. The Mongol, deluged and
+screaming, clawed wildly at his eyes and spun round several times,
+cursing Malone and all his kin for the next twenty-seven generations,
+and grabbing thin air in his attempt to reach the _Amerikanski_.
+
+All of the customers appeared to have discovered urgent engagements
+elsewhere. There was little for the Mongol to collide with except
+empty tables and chairs. But he did manage to swipe one of the
+lumpy-faced men on the side of the head with one flail of his arms.
+The lumpy-faced man said “Yoop!” and went staggering away into
+Petkoff, who spun him around and threw him away in the general
+direction of the bandstand. The diversion provided Malone with just
+enough time to start moving again.
+
+Four uniformed men were making their way toward the ladies’ room from
+the opposite side of the restaurant. They were carrying a stretcher,
+which seemed pitifully inadequate for the carnage Malone had just
+left.
+
+He blocked their path. “Where are you going?” he said.
+
+“You are American?” one of them said. “I speak English good, no?”
+
+Behind him, Malone heard a yowl and a crunch, as of a body striking
+wood. It sounded as if somebody had fetched up against the bar. “You
+speak English fine,” he said, feeling wildly out of place. “Have you
+been taking lessons?”
+
+“Me?” the man said. “It is no time for talk. We got to get lady for
+hospital.”
+
+“Lady?” Malone said. “For hospital?”
+
+“Miss Garbitsch her name is,” the stretcher-man said, trying to get
+past Malone. The FBI agent shifted slightly, blocking the path. “We
+wait outside one revolution—”
+
+“One what?”
+
+“When hands revolve once,” the man said. “One hour. Now we get call so
+we take her to hospital.”
+
+It sounded suspicious to Malone. He heard more yells behind him, and
+they sounded a little closer. The sound of running men came to his
+ears. “Well,” he said happily, “goodbye all.”
+
+The stretcher-bearer said, “Vot?” Malone shoved him backward into the
+approaching mob, grabbed the stretcher away from the other three men,
+who were acting a little dazed, and swung it in a wide arc. He caught
+an MVD man in the stomach, and the man doubled up with a weird
+whistling groan, turned slightly in agony, and hit another MVD man
+with his bowed head. The second man fell; Malone heard more crashes
+and screaming, but he didn’t find out any details. Instead, he threw
+the stretcher at the milling mob and turned, already in motion, racing
+for the ladies’ room.
+
+He had no notion of what he was going to do when he got there, or what
+he was going to find. Her Majesty and Lou were in there, all right,
+but how were they going to get out without being arrested, clubbed,
+disemboweled or taken to a Russian hospital for God alone knew what
+novel purposes?
+
+His mind was still a little foggy from the vast amounts of vodka he
+had poured down, and he wasn’t in the least sure that teleportation
+would even work. He tried to figure out whether Her Majesty had
+already carried Lou off that way—but he doubted it. Lou was quite a
+burden for the old woman. And besides, he wasn’t at all sure whether
+it was possible to teleport a human being. A lump of inanimate matter
+is one thing; an intelligent woman with a mind of her own is
+definitely something else.
+
+It seemed to take forever for him to reach the door, and he was
+panting heavily when he reached for it. Suddenly, another hand shot in
+front of his, turning the doorknob. Malone looked up.
+
+It was impossible to figure out where she had come from, or what she
+thought she was doing, but a bulging, slightly intoxicated Russian
+matron with bluish hair piled high on her head, a rusty orange dress
+and altogether too many jewels scattered here and there about her
+ample person, stood regarding him with a mixture of scorn, surprise
+and shock.
+
+Malone crowded her aside without a thought and jerked the door open.
+Behind her he could see the melee still continuing, though it looked
+by now as if the Russians weren’t very sure who they were supposed to
+be fighting. The Mongol’s great head rose for a second above the
+storm, shouting something unintelligible, and dropped again into the
+crowd.
+
+Malone focused on the matron, who was standing with her mouth open
+staring at him.
+
+“Madam,” he said with stern dignity, “wait your turn!”
+
+He ducked inside and slammed the door behind him. There was a small
+knob to bolt the door with, and he used it. But it wasn’t going to
+hold long, he knew. If the mob outside ever got straightened out, the
+door would go down like a piece of cardboard, bolt or no bolt.
+Undoubtedly the gigantic Mongol could do the job with one hand tied
+behind his back.
+
+Malone turned around and put his own back to the door. Women were
+looking up and making up their minds whether or not to scream. Time
+stood absolutely still, and nobody seemed to be moving—not even the
+two directly before him: a frightened-looking little old lady, who was
+trying to hold up a semiconscious redhead.
+
+And, somewhere behind him, he knew, was a howling mob of thoroughly
+maddened Russians.
+
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+The door rattled against Malone’s back as a hand twisted the knob and
+shook it. He braced himself for the next assault, and it came: the
+shudder of a heavy body slamming up against it. Miraculously, the door
+held, at least for the moment. But the roars outside were growing
+louder and louder as the second team came up.
+
+Where was the Mongol? he wondered. But there was no time for idle
+contemplation. The scene inside the room demanded his immediate
+attention.
+
+He was in the anteroom, a gilded and decorated parlor filled with
+overstuffed chairs and couches. There was a door at the far side of
+the room, and a woman suddenly came out of it holding a pocketbook in
+one hand and a large powder-puff in the other. She saw Malone and
+reacted instantly.
+
+Her scream seemed to be a signal. The two other women sitting on
+couches screamed, too, and jumped up with their hands to their faces.
+Malone shouted something unintelligible but very loud at them and
+brandished a fist menacingly. They shrieked again and ran for the
+interior room.
+
+Malone heard the roaring outside, and pressed his back tighter against
+the door. Then, suddenly, he broke away from it and ran over to Her
+Majesty and Lou. He looked down. Lou was apparently completely
+unconscious by this time, and there was a peaceful look on her face.
+The Queen looked down at her, then up at Malone.
+
+“I’m sorry, Sir Kenneth,” she said, “but we really haven’t time for
+romantic thoughts just now.”
+
+Malone passed a hand over his brow. “We haven’t got time for
+anything,” he said. “You can see what’s going on outside.”
+
+“My goodness,” Her Majesty said. “Oh, yes. My goodness, yes.”
+
+“Okay,” Malone said. “We’ve got to teleport out, if we can—and if we
+can take Lou with us.”
+
+“I don’t know, Sir Kenneth,” the Queen said.
+
+“We’ve got to try,” Malone said grimly, looking down. There was a
+crash as something hit the door. It shuddered, creaked, and held.
+Malone took a breath. Lou was too beautiful to leave behind, no matter
+what.
+
+“I’ll mesh my mind with yours,” Her Majesty said, “so we’ll be
+synchronized.”
+
+“Right,” Malone said. “The plane. Let’s go.”
+
+There was another crash, but he hardly heard it. He closed his eyes
+and tried to visualize the interior of the plane that was waiting for
+them at the airfield. He wasn’t sure he could do it; the vodka might
+have clouded his mental processes just enough to make teleporting
+impossible. He concentrated. The crash came again, and a shout. He
+almost had it ... he almost had it....
+
+The last sound he heard was the splintering of the door, and a great
+shout that was cut off in the middle.
+
+Malone opened his eyes.
+
+“We made it,” he said softly. “And I wonder what the MVD is going to
+think.”
+
+Her Majesty took a deep breath. “My goodness,” she said. “That _was_
+exciting, wasn’t it?”
+
+“Not half as exciting as it’s going to be if we don’t hurry now,”
+Malone said. “If you know what I mean.”
+
+“I do,” Her Majesty said.
+
+“That’s good,” Malone said at random. “I don’t.” He helped the Queen
+ease the unconscious body of Luba Garbitsch into one of the padded
+seats, and Malone pushed a switch. The seat gave a tiny squeak of
+protest, and then folded back into a flat bedlike arrangement. Lou was
+arranged on this comfortable surface, and Malone took a deep breath.
+“Take care of her for a minute, Your Majesty,” he said.
+
+“Of course,” the Queen said.
+
+Malone nodded. “I’m going to see who’s up front,” he said. He walked
+through the corridors of the plane and rapped authoritatively on the
+door of the pilot’s cabin. A second passed, and he raised his hand to
+knock again.
+
+It never reached the door, which opened very suddenly. Malone found
+himself facing a small black hole.
+
+It was the muzzle and the bore of the barrel of an M-2 .45 revolver,
+and it was pointing somewhere in the space between Malone’s eyes.
+Behind the gun was a hard-eyed air force colonel with a grim
+expression.
+
+“You know,” Malone said pleasantly, “they’re good guns, but they
+really can’t compare to the .44 Magnum.”
+
+The pilot blinked, and his gun wavered just a little. “What?” he said.
+
+“Well,” Malone said, “if you’d only join the FBI, like me, you’d have
+a .44 Magnum, and you could compare the guns.”
+
+The pilot blinked again. “You’re—”
+
+“Malone,” Malone said. “Kenneth J. Malone, FBI. My friends call me
+Snookums, but don’t try it. Why not let’s put the gun away and be
+friends?”
+
+“Oh,” the colonel said weakly. “Mr.—sure. I’m sorry, Mr. Malone.
+Didn’t recognize you for a second there.”
+
+“Perfectly all right,” Malone said. The gun was still pointing at him,
+and in spite of the fact that he felt pleasantly like Philip Marlowe,
+or maybe the Saint, he was beginning to get a little nervous. “The
+gun,” he said.
+
+The colonel stared at it for a second, then reholstered it in a hurry.
+“I am sorry,” he said. “But we’ve been worried about Russians coming
+aboard. I’ve got my copilot and navigator outside, guarding the plane,
+and they were supposed to let me know if anybody came in. When they
+didn’t let me know, and you knocked, I assumed you were Russians. But,
+of course, you—”
+
+Conversation came to a sudden dead stop.
+
+“About these Russians—” Malone said desperately. But the pilot’s eyes
+got a little glazed. He wasn’t listening.
+
+“Now, wait a minute,” he said. “Why _didn’t_ they notify me?”
+
+“Maybe they didn’t see me,” Malone said. “I mean us.”
+
+“But—”
+
+“I’m not very noticeable,” Malone said hopefully, trying to look small
+and undistinguished. “They could just have ... not noticed me. Okay?”
+He gave the pilot his most friendly smile.
+
+“They’d have noticed you,” the pilot said. “If they’re still out
+there. If nothing’s happened to them.” He leaned forward. “Did you see
+them, Malone?”
+
+Malone shrugged. “How would I know?” he said.
+
+“How would you—” The pilot seemed at a loss for words. Malone waited
+patiently, trying to look as if everything were completely and
+perfectly normal. “Mr. Malone,” the pilot said at last, “how _did_ you
+get aboard this aircraft?”
+
+He didn’t wait for an answer, and Malone was grateful for that.
+Instead, he stepped over to a viewport and looked out. On the field,
+two air force officers were making lonely rounds about the plane.
+Fifty yards farther away, a squad of Russian guards also patrolled the
+brightly-lit area. There was nothing else in sight.
+
+“There isn’t any way you could have done it,” the pilot said without
+turning.
+
+“That’s the FBI for you,” Malone said. “We’ve got our little trade
+secrets, you know.” Somehow, the pilot’s back looked unconvinced.
+“Disguise,” Malone added. “We’re masters of disguise.”
+
+The pilot turned very slowly. “Now what the hell would you disguise
+yourself as?” he said. “A Piper Cub?”
+
+“It’s a military secret,” Malone said hurriedly.
+
+The pilot didn’t say anything for what seemed a long time. “A military
+secret?” he asked at last, in a hushed voice. “And you can’t tell me?
+You’re a civilian, and I’m a colonel in the United States Air Force,
+and you can’t tell me a military secret?”
+
+Malone didn’t hesitate a second. “Well, Colonel,” he said cheerfully,
+“that’s the way things are.”
+
+The pilot threw up his hands. “It’s none of my business,” he said
+loudly. “I’m not even going to think about it. Because if I do, you’ll
+have a mad pilot on your hands, and you wouldn’t like that, would
+you?”
+
+“I would hate it,” Malone said sincerely, “like hell. Particularly
+since I’ve got a sick woman aboard.”
+
+“Disguised,” the pilot offered, “as Lenin, I suppose.”
+
+Malone shook his head. “I’m not kidding now,” he said. “She is sick,
+and I want a doctor for her.”
+
+“Why didn’t you bring one with you?” the pilot said. “Or wasn’t the
+disguise big enough for three?”
+
+“Four,” Malone said. “We’ve got three now; me and Miss Garbitsch and
+Miss Thompson. Lou—Miss Garbitsch is the one who’s sick. But I want a
+doctor from the American Embassy.”
+
+“I think we could all use one,” the pilot said judiciously. “But you’d
+better tell me what’s the matter with the girl.”
+
+Malone gave him a brief and highly censored version of the melee at
+Trotkin’s, particularly omitting the details of the final escape from
+the MVD men.
+
+When he had finished, the pilot gave a long, low whistle. “You have
+been having fun,” he said. “Can I go on your next adventure, or is it
+only for accredited Rover Boys?”
+
+“You have to buy a pin and a special compass that works in the dark,”
+Malone said. “I don’t think you’d like it. How about that doctor?”
+
+The pilot nodded wearily. “I’ll send my navigator over to the airfield
+phone,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I’ll tell him to tell the
+doctor I’m the one who’s sick, so the Russians don’t get suspicious.
+It may even be true.”
+
+“Just so he gets here,” Malone said. The pilot was flagging his
+navigator through the viewport as Malone went out, closing the door
+gently behind him. He went back down the plane corridor to Her Majesty
+and Lou.
+
+Lou was still lying on the makeshift bed, her eyes closed. She looked
+more beautiful and defenseless than ever, and Malone wanted to do
+something big and terrible to all the Russians who had tried to take
+her away or dope her. With difficulty, he restrained himself. “How is
+she?” he asked.
+
+“She seems to be all right,” the Queen said. “The substance they put
+in her drink doesn’t appear to have had any other effect than putting
+her to sleep and making her a little sick—and that was a good thing.”
+
+“Oh, sure,” Malone said. “That was fine.”
+
+“Well,” Her Majesty said, “she did get rid of quite a bit of the drug
+in the ladies’ room.” She smiled, just a trifle primly. “I think
+she’ll be all right,” she said.
+
+“There’s a doctor on the way, anyhow,” Malone said, staring down at
+her. He tried to think of something he could do for her—fan her, or
+bring her water, or cool her fevered brow. But she didn’t look very
+fevered. She just looked helpless and beautiful. He felt sorry for all
+the nasty things he had said to her, and all the nasty things she had
+said to him. If she got well—and of course she was going to get well,
+he told himself firmly—things would be different. They’d be sweet and
+kind to each other all the time, and do nice things for each other.
+
+And she was definitely going to get well. He wouldn’t even think about
+anything else. She was going to be fine again, and very soon. Why, she
+was hardly hurt at all, he told himself, hardly hurt at all.
+
+“Sir Kenneth,” Her Majesty said. “I’ve been thinking: while we were
+about it, why didn’t we just teleport all the way back home?”
+
+Malone turned. “Because,” he said, “we’d have had the devil of a time
+explaining just how we managed to do it.”
+
+“Oh,” she said. “I see. Of course.”
+
+“This teleportation gimmick is supposed to be a secret,” Malone went
+on. “We don’t want to let out anything more about it than we have to.
+As it is, there’s going to be some fierce wondering among the Russians
+about how we got out of that restaurant.”
+
+“Obviously,” the Queen said, entirely unexpectedly, “a bourgeois
+capitalistic trick.”
+
+“Obviously,” Malone agreed. “But we don’t want to start up any more
+questions than we have to.”
+
+“And how about the plane itself?” Her Majesty went on. “Do you think
+they’ll let us take off?”
+
+“I don’t know how they can stop us,” Malone said.
+
+“You don’t?”
+
+“Well, they don’t want to cause any incidents now,” Malone said. “At
+least, I don’t think they do. If they could have captured us—me, or
+Lou, or both of us, depending on which side of the argument you want
+to take—anyhow, if they could have grabbed us on their own home
+grounds, they’d have had an excuse. Lou got sick, they’d say, and they
+just took her to the hospital. They wouldn’t have to call it an arrest
+at all.”
+
+“Oh, I see,” Her Majesty said. “But now we’re not on their home
+grounds.”
+
+“Not so long as we stay in this plane, we’re not,” Malone said. “And
+we’re going to stay here until we take off.”
+
+Her Majesty nodded.
+
+“I wish I knew what they thought they were doing, though,” Malone
+mused. “They certainly couldn’t have held us for very long, no matter
+how they worked things.”
+
+“I know what was on their minds,” Her Majesty said. “At least partly.
+It was all so confused it was difficult to get anything really
+detailed or complete.”
+
+“There,” Malone said fervently, “I agree with you.”
+
+“The whole trouble was,” the Queen said, “that nobody knew about
+anybody else.”
+
+“I’d gathered something like that,” Malone said. “But what exactly was
+it all about?”
+
+“Well,” the Queen said, “Major Petkoff was supposed to tell Lou, in
+effect, that if she didn’t agree to do espionage work for the Soviet
+Union, things would go hard with her father.”
+
+“Nice,” Malone said. “Very friendly gentleman.”
+
+“Well,” the Queen continued, “he was supposed to tell her about that
+at the bar, when he had her alone. But she got that drugged drink
+before he could begin to say anything.”
+
+“Then who drugged it?” Malone said. “Lou?”
+
+The Queen shrugged. “Someone else,” she said. “Major Petkoff didn’t
+know anything about the drugged drink.”
+
+“A nice surprise for him, anyhow,” Malone said.
+
+“It was a surprise for everybody,” the Queen said. “You see, the
+drugged drink was meant to get her to the hospital, where they’d have
+her alone for a long time and could really put some pressure on her.”
+
+“And then,” Malone said, “there were the men who wanted to arrest me.
+And the ones who wanted to take Lou to jail. And the mad Mongol who
+just wanted to fight, I guess.”
+
+“There were so many different things, all going on at once,” the Queen
+said.
+
+Malone nodded. “There seems to be quite a lot of confusion in the
+Soviet Union, too,” he said. “That does not sound to me like an
+efficient operation.”
+
+“It wasn’t, very,” the Queen said. “You see, they have Garbitsch now,
+but they can’t do anything to him because they can’t get to Lou. And
+it doesn’t do them any good to do anything to her father, unless she
+knows about it first.”
+
+“It sounds,” Malone said, “as if the USSR is going along the same
+confused road as the good old United States.”
+
+The Queen nodded agreement. “It’s terrible,” she said. “I get those
+same flashes of telepathic static, too.”
+
+“You do?” Malone said, leaning forward.
+
+“Just the same,” the Queen said. “Whatever is operating in the United
+States is operating over here, too.”
+
+Malone sat down in a seat on the aisle. “Everything,” he announced,
+“is now perfectly lovely. The United States is being confused and
+mixed up by somebody, and the Somebody looked like a Russian spy. But
+now Russia is being confused, too.”
+
+“Do you think there are some American spies working here?” the Queen
+said.
+
+“If they’re using psionics,” Malone said, “as they obviously are—and
+I don’t know about them, Burris doesn’t know about them, O’Connor
+doesn’t know about them and nobody else I can find knows about them—
+then they don’t exist. That’s flat.”
+
+“How about outer space?” the Queen said. “I mean, spies from outer
+space trying to take over the Earth.”
+
+“It’s a nice idea,” Malone said sourly. “I wish they’d hurry up and do
+it.”
+
+“Then you don’t think—”
+
+“I don’t know what to think,” Malone said. “There’s some perfectly
+simple explanation for all this. And somewhere, in all the running
+around and looking here and there I’ve been doing, I’ve got all the
+facts I need to come up with that answer.”
+
+“Oh, my,” the Queen said. “That’s wonderful.”
+
+“Sure it is,” Malone said. “There’s only one trouble, as a matter of
+fact. I don’t know what the explanation is, and I don’t know which
+facts are important and which ones aren’t.”
+
+There was a short silence.
+
+“I wish Tom Boyd were here,” Malone said wistfully.
+
+“Really?” the Queen said. “Why?”
+
+“Because,” Malone said, “I feel like hearing some really professional
+cursing.”
+
+* * * * *
+
+Three-quarters of an hour passed, each and every minute draped in some
+black and gloomy material. Malone sat in his seat, his head supported
+by both hands, and stared at the back of the seat ahead of him. No
+great messages were written on it. The Queen, respecting his need for
+silent contemplation, sat and watched Lou and said nothing at all.
+
+It was always possible, of course, Malone thought, that he would fall
+asleep and dream of an answer. That kind of thing kept happening to
+detectives in books. Or else a strange man in a black trenchcoat would
+sidle up to him and hand him a slip of paper. The words: “Five
+o’clock, watch out, the red snake, doom,” would be written on the
+paper and these words would provide him with just the clues he needed
+to solve the whole case. Or else he would go and beat somebody up, and
+the exercise would stimulate his brain and he would suddenly arrive at
+the answer in a blinding flash.
+
+Wondering vaguely if a blinding flash were anything like a dungeon,
+because people kept being in them and never seemed to come out, Malone
+sighed. Detectives in books were great, wonderful people who never had
+any doubts or worries. Particularly if they were with the FBI. Only
+Kenneth J. Malone was different.
+
+Maybe someday, he thought, he would be a real detective, instead of
+just having a few special gifts that he hadn’t really worked for,
+anyhow. Maybe someday, in the distant future, he would be the equal of
+Nick Carter.
+
+Right now, though, he had a case to solve. Nick Carter wasn’t around
+to help.
+
+And Kenneth J. Malone, FBI, was getting absolutely nowhere.
+
+Finally, his reverie was broken by the sounds of argument outside the
+plane door. There were voices speaking both English and Russian, very
+loudly. Malone went to the door and opened it. A short, round,
+grey-haired man who looked just a little like an over-tired bear who
+had forgotten to sleep all winter almost fell into his arms. The man
+was wearing a grey overcoat that went nicely with his hair, and
+carrying a small black bag.
+
+Malone said: “Oog,” replaced the man on his own feet and looked past
+him at the group on the landing ramp outside. The navigator was there,
+arguing earnestly with two men in the uniform of the MVD.
+
+“Damn it,” the navigator said, “you can’t come in here. Nobody comes
+in but the doctor. This is United States territory.”
+
+The MVD men said something in Russian.
+
+“No,” the navigator said. “Definitely no.”
+
+One of the MVD men spat something that sounded like an insult.
+
+The navigator shrugged. “I don’t understand Russian,” he told them.
+“All I know is one word. No. _Nyet_ Definitely, absolutely irrevocably
+_nyet_.”
+
+“_Sikin sin Amerikanyets!_”
+
+The MVD men turned, as if they’d been a sister act, and went down the
+steps. The navigator followed them, wiping his forehead and breathing
+deeply. Malone shut the door.
+
+“Well, well, well,” the doctor said, in a burbling sort of voice.
+“Somehow, we thought it might be you. Anyhow, the ambassador did.”
+
+“Really?” Malone said, trying to sound surprised.
+
+“Oh, yes,” the doctor assured him. “You have raised something of a
+stench in and around good old Moscow, you know.”
+
+“I’m innocent,” Malone said.
+
+The doctor nodded. “Undoubtedly,” he said judiciously. “Who isn’t? And
+where, by the way, is the girl?”
+
+“Over there.” Malone pointed. News apparently traveled with great
+speed in Moscow, MVD and censorship notwithstanding. At any rate, he
+thought, it traveled with great speed to the ears of the Embassy
+staff.
+
+The doctor lifted Lou’s limp wrist to time her pulse, his lips pursed
+and his eyes focused on a far wall.
+
+“What have you heard?” Malone said.
+
+“The MVD boys are extremely worried,” the doctor said. “Extremely.” He
+didn’t let go of the wrist, a marvel of which Malone had never grown
+tired. Doctors always seemed to be able, somehow, to examine a patient
+and carry on a conversation about totally different things, without
+even showing the strain. This one was no exception. Malone watched in
+awe.
+
+“According to the reports we got from them,” the doctor said, “you
+wandered off from _Trotkin’s_ without your escort.”
+
+“Well,” Malone said at random, “I didn’t think to leave them a
+farewell note. I hope they don’t think I disliked their company.”
+
+“Officially,” the doctor said, lifting Lou’s left eyelid and gazing
+thoughtfully into the blue iris thus exposed, “they’re afraid you’re
+lost, and they were apologetic as all hell about it to the
+ambassador.” The iris appeared to lose its fascination; the doctor
+dropped the eyelid and fished in his black bag, which he had put on
+the seat next to Lou.
+
+“And unofficially?” Malone asked.
+
+“Unofficially,” the doctor said, “we’ve got news of a riot at
+_Trotkin’s_ tonight, in which you seem to have been involved. Mr.
+Malone, you must be quite a barroom brawler when you’re at home.”
+
+“Frankly,” Malone said, “I’m a little out of practice. And I hope I
+never have the chance to get back _into_ practice.”
+
+The doctor nodded, removing a stethoscope from the bag and applying it
+to Lou’s chest. He waited a second, frowned and then took the plugs
+out of his ears. “I know just what you mean,” he said. “You might be
+interested to know the first unofficial score of that little match.”
+
+“Score?” Malone said.
+
+The doctor nodded again. “Three concussions,” he said, “one possible
+skull fracture, a broken arm, two bitten hands, and a large and varied
+assortment of dental difficulties and plain hysteria. No dead,
+however. I really don’t understand why not.”
+
+“Well,” Malone said, “nobody wanted to create an international
+incident.”
+
+“Hmf,” the doctor said. “I see. Or I think I do, which is as far as I
+care to go in the matter. The Russians suspect, by the way, that
+you’ve managed to get aboard the plane. They do know, of course, about
+the girl, and when the pilot called for me they put two and two
+together. In spite of his story about being sick. What they can’t
+figure out is how you managed to _get_ aboard the plane.”
+
+“Neither can I,” Malone said at random. The doctor gave him a single
+bright stare.
+
+“Well,” he said at last, “I suppose you know your own business best.
+By the way, my examination accords pretty well with our unofficial
+information about the girl—that she was given some sort of drug in a
+drink. Is that what happened?”
+
+Malone nodded. “As far as we know,” he said. “She did get rid of a lot
+of it within a few minutes, though.”
+
+“Good,” the doctor said. “Very sensible.”
+
+“Sense had nothing to do with it,” Malone said.
+
+“In any case,” the doctor went on doggedly, “there can’t be too much
+left in her system. Her pulse is good, she’s breathing easily and
+there don’t seem to be any complications, so I should doubt strongly
+that there’s been much damage done. Besides all which, of course, the
+Russians would hardly have wanted to hurt her; what they gave her
+would probably have done little more harm even if she’d ingested it
+all, and kept it down.”
+
+“Good,” Malone said sincerely.
+
+“I’ll give you some pills,” the doctor said, fishing in his bag again,
+“and you can give them to her when she wakes up.”
+
+“Is that all?” Malone said, vaguely disappointed.
+
+The doctor eyed him keenly. “Well,” he said, “I could give her an
+injection, but I’d be a little afraid to. If it had a synergistic
+action with the drug, she might be worse off than before.”
+
+“Oh,” Malone said. “By all means. Just the pills.”
+
+“I’m glad you agree,” the doctor said. “Oh, and about leaving—”
+
+“Yes?” Malone said. “We want to get out of here in a hurry, if we
+can.”
+
+“I think you can,” the doctor said. “The ambassador mentioned that
+he’d try to arrange it with the Russians. I don’t know what he’ll tell
+them—but then, that’s why he’s an ambassador, and I’m a doctor.” He
+straightened up and handed Malone an envelope containing three green
+capsules. “Give her these if she wakes up with a headache,” he said.
+“If she feels all right, just forget all about them.”
+
+“Sure,” Malone said. “And thanks, Doctor. Tell the ambassador we’d
+appreciate it if he got us out of here as soon as possible.”
+
+“Certainly,” the doctor said. “After all, I might as well take on the
+job of a diplomatic courier.”
+
+Malone nodded. “Well,” he said, “goodbye, Mr. Courier.”
+
+The doctor went to the door, opened it and turned.
+
+“Absolutely,” he said, “Mr. Ives.”
+
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+Lou didn’t wake up until the plane was dropping toward the Washington
+airfield, and when she did awaken it was as if she had merely come out
+of an especially deep sleep. Malone was standing over her, which was
+far from a coincidence; he had been waiting and watching virtually
+every minute since takeoff.
+
+During his brief periods of rest, Her Majesty had taken over, and she
+was now peacefully asleep at the back of the plane, looking a little
+more careworn, but just as regal as ever. She looked to Malone as if
+she had weathered a small revolution against her rule, but had managed
+to persuade the populace (by passing out cookies to the children,
+probably) that all was, in the last analysis, for the best in this
+best of all possible worlds. She looked, he thought, absolutely
+wonderful.
+
+So did Lou. She blinked her eyes open and moved one hand at her side,
+and then she came fully awake. “Well,” she said. “And a bright hello
+to you, Sleuth. If it’s not being too banal, where am I?”
+
+“It is,” Malone said, “but you’re in an airplane, coming into
+Washington. We ought to be there in a few minutes.”
+
+Lou shook her head slowly from side to side. “I have never heard any
+news that sounded better in my entire life,” she said. “How long ago
+did we leave Moscow?”
+
+“Our trip to Beautiful Moskva,” Malone said, “ended right after they
+tried to get you to the hospital, by giving you a drugged drink. Do
+you remember that?”
+
+“I remember it, all right,” she said. “I’m never going to forget that
+moment.”
+
+“How do you feel?” Malone said.
+
+“Fine,” Lou said. “And how are _you_?”
+
+“Me?” Malone said. “I’m all right. I’ve _been_ all right. Don’t worry
+about _me_.”
+
+“Well, one never knows,” Lou said. “With your cold and all.”
+
+“I think that’s better,” Malone said hastily. “But you’re sure you
+feel fine?”
+
+Lou nodded. “A little tired, maybe, but that’s all.” She paused. “I
+remember Miss Thompson taking me to the ladies’ room. I got pretty
+sick. But from there on, I’m not sure what happened.”
+
+“I came in,” Malone said, “and got you out.”
+
+“How brave!” Lou said.
+
+“Not very,” Malone said casually. “After all, what could happen to me
+in a ladies’ room?”
+
+“You’d be surprised,” Lou murmured. “And you came and got me, and took
+me to the plane and all. And I—” She hesitated, and for a second she
+looked very small and wistful. “Do you—do you think they’ll do
+anything to Dad?” she said.
+
+“I don’t see why,” Malone said confidently. “After all, the only thing
+he did wrong was to get caught, and that’s an occupational risk if
+you’re in the spy business. Lots of people get caught. Happens all the
+time. Don’t worry about it.”
+
+“I—all right,” she said. “I won’t, then.”
+
+“Good,” Malone said. He fished in his pocket. “I’ve got some pills
+here,” he said, “in case you have a headache. The doctor said I could
+give them to you if you had a headache, but otherwise I should just
+forget about them.”
+
+Lou smiled. “I think you’d better just forget about them,” she said.
+
+Malone’s hand came out of his pocket empty. “I just want to make sure
+you’re okay,” he said. “Probably very silly. Of course you’re okay.”
+
+“Of course I am,” she said. “But I don’t think you’re silly.” She
+smiled again, a very warm smile. Malone took a deep breath and
+discovered that he hadn’t been breathing at all regularly for several
+minutes. Lou’s smile increased a trifle in intensity and he stopped
+breathing all over again. “All things considered,” she said, “I think
+you’re pretty wonderful, Ken.”
+
+Malone’s voice sounded to him as if it were coming from a great
+distance. He wondered if the strange feeling in his stomach were the
+pangs of love, or the descent of the plane. Then he realized that he
+didn’t care. “Well, well,” he said airily. “Well, well, well. Frankly,
+Lou, I’m inclined to agree with you. Though I’m not sure about the
+qualification.”
+
+“Fine thing,” she said. “Tell a man he’s wonderful and he just nods
+his head as if he knew it all along.”
+
+Malone swallowed hard. “Maybe I did,” he said. “And how did you come
+to this startling conclusion?”
+
+It was Lou who broke the light mood of their speech first. “Look,
+Ken,” she said seriously, “I’m the daughter of an enemy spy. You know
+that. You’re an FBI agent.”
+
+“So what?” he said.
+
+“So,” she said, “you don’t treat me like the daughter of a spy. You
+treat me just like anybody else.”
+
+“I do not,” Malone said instantly.
+
+“All right,” she said, and shrugged. “But I’m sure none of this is in
+the FBI manual for daughters of convicted spies.”
+
+“Now, you look,” Malone said. “Just what do you think this is? The
+McCarthy era? Any way I treat you, it has nothing to do with your
+father. He’s a spy, and we caught him and we sent him back to Moscow.
+That’s our job. But all this about the sins of the fathers being
+visited on the heads of the children, even unto the seventh
+generation—this is just plain silly. You’re you; you’re not your
+father. You haven’t done anything—why should I treat you as if you
+have?”
+
+“How do you know I’m not a spy, too?” she said.
+
+“Because,” Malone said flatly, “I know.”
+
+“Really?” she said softly. “Do you really?”
+
+Malone opened his mouth, shut it and then started again. “Strictly
+speaking,” he said carefully, “I don’t know. But we’re in the United
+States now, where a person is considered innocent until proven
+guilty.”
+
+“And that,” Lou said, “is all you’re going on, I suppose.”
+
+“Not all,” Malone said.
+
+“I didn’t think so,” Lou said, still smiling.
+
+“Don’t ask me how,” Malone said, “but we’re pretty sure you knew
+nothing about your father’s activities. Forget it.”
+
+Lou looked suddenly slightly disappointed. Malone wondered why. Of
+course, there was one more reason, and maybe she’d thought of that.
+“It does make it easier,” he said, “that you happen to be a beautiful
+girl.”
+
+She smiled again, and started to say something, but she never got the
+chance. The landing gear of the aircraft bumped gently against the
+runway, and the ship rolled slowly in to a stop.
+
+A second passed. From the back of the plane a voice said: “Are we back
+in Washington, S—Mr. Malone?”
+
+“That’s right, Miss Thompson,” Malone told the Queen.
+
+“And Miss Garbitsch—”
+
+“I’m fine, Miss Thompson,” Luba said. She swung her feet around to the
+deck.
+
+“Wait a minute,” Malone said. “Do you think you ought to get up?”
+
+Lou’s smile seemed to reduce him to small, very hot ashes. “Ken,” she
+said, “the doctor said I was fine, so what are you worrying about? I
+can get up. I’ll be all right.”
+
+“Oh, okay,” he said, and stepped back. Her Majesty had already left
+the plane. Lou got up, and wavered just a little. Malone held out his
+arms, and found her in them before he had thought about it.
+
+A long time seemed to pass. Malone wasn’t sure whether he was standing
+still because he wanted to, or because he was absolutely incapable of
+motion. Lou didn’t seem in any hurry to break away, either.
+
+Then she put her arms around his neck.
+
+“Sleuth,” she said, “don’t you ever follow up a hint?”
+
+“Hint?” Malone said.
+
+“Damn it,” Lou said in a soft, sweet voice, “kiss me, Ken.”
+
+Malone had no answer to that—at least, no verbal answer.
+
+One didn’t seem to be needed.
+
+When he finally came up for air, he said: “Lou....”
+
+“Yes, Ken?”
+
+“Lou, where are you going from here?”
+
+Lou stepped back a pace. “What?” she said.
+
+“I mean, back to New York?” Malone said. “Or someplace else? I mean—
+well, what are you going to do?”
+
+“Oh,” Lou said. “Oh, yes. I’ll be going back to New York. After all,
+Ken, I do have a living to make, such as it is, and Sir Lewis is
+expecting me.”
+
+“I don’t know,” Malone said, “but it still sounds funny. A girl like
+you working for—well, for the Psychical Research people. Ghosts and
+ectoplasm and all that.”
+
+Lou stepped back another pace. “Now, wait a minute,” she said. “You
+seemed to need their information, all right.”
+
+“But that was—oh, well,” Malone said. “Never mind. Maybe I’m silly.
+It really doesn’t matter.”
+
+“I guess it doesn’t, now,” she said. “Except that it does mean I’ve
+got to leave for New York almost at once.”
+
+“Can you cut out that ‘almost’?” Malone said. “Because I’ve got to be
+there myself, and right away. If you hurry, we can get the same
+plane.”
+
+“That would be great,” she said.
+
+“Okay, then,” Malone said. “Don’t you worry about a thing, I’ll take
+care of reservations and everything.”
+
+“My, my,” Lou said. “What it must be like to have all that pull and
+influence.”
+
+“What?” Malone said.
+
+Lou grinned. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing.”
+
+“Then it’s all settled. I’ll take care of the reservations, and we’ll
+go in together,” Malone said.
+
+“Fair enough,” Lou said, “my fine feathered Fed.”
+
+* * * * *
+
+Actually, it took Malone nearly three hours to get everything set in
+Washington for his New York departure. He had to make a verbal report
+to Andrew J. Burris first, and that consumed quite a lot of time,
+since Burris was alternately shocked, horrified, gleeful and confused
+about the whole trip, and spent most of his time interrupting Malone
+and crying out for God’s vengeance, mercy, justice or understanding.
+
+Then Malone had to dictate a longer report for the written record.
+This didn’t take quite as long, since there were no interruptions, but
+by the time it was over he felt as if he were going out to become a
+Carthusian monk. He felt, as he rubbed his raw throat, that it
+wouldn’t be a bad idea at all to take a nice vow of silence for
+awhile. He could write people little notes, and they would all treat
+him kindly and gently. He would be pointed out to strangers, and
+people would try to do him favors.
+
+Unfortunately, he couldn’t take the vow at once. During his absence,
+his desk log showed, several calls had come in, all of which had to be
+taken care of at once. Some of them dealt with evidence or statements
+from old cases, some were just nuisances. The most urgent was from Dr.
+O’Connor at Yucca Flats.
+
+“If you’re not too busy,” O’Connor said in his icily polite tone, “I
+would like to have Miss Thompson back as soon as possible.” He sounded
+as if Malone had borrowed his scalpel.
+
+“I’ll see what I can do,” Malone said carefully.
+
+“There is a new series of tests,” O’Connor said, “on which I am now at
+work; the assistance of Miss Thompson would be invaluable to me at
+this time.”
+
+After he’d hung up, Malone called Her Majesty at her Washington hotel.
+She was very glad of the chance to return to Yucca Flats, she said.
+There, Malone knew, she would be able to return to her accustomed
+dignity as Queen of the Greater English Commonwealth, a district
+which, in her mind, seemed to include the greater part of the Western
+world. On her present mission, she was plain Miss Thompson and, though
+the idea of going about incognito had its charms, it became a little
+dull after awhile. The adventuring was fine, although a little rougher
+than she’d thought it would be; the sight of the Queen’s Own FBI in
+action was still a powerful attraction for Her Majesty. But the peace
+and quiet and dignity of Her Own Royal Palace won out without too much
+trouble.
+
+“Of course,” Malone said, “you’ll be on call in case I need you.”
+
+“I am always in touch with my subjects,” Her Majesty said with
+dignity, “and most especially with you, Sir Kenneth. I shall so
+remain.”
+
+And then there was a little paperwork to take care of. By the time
+Malone had finished, he would have been glad to teleport to New York
+on his own. But on reflection he decided that he would much rather
+travel with Lou, and hurried down to the airport.
+
+By the time the plane landed at La Guardia, and they’d taken
+a ’copter to the East Side Terminal and a taxi to the big
+blue-aluminum-and-glass Ravell Building, Malone had reached a new
+decision. It would be nothing short of wonderful, he felt, if he
+could spend the rest of his life traveling around with Luba Garbitsch.
+
+Of course, that name was something of a handicap. It was hardly a
+romantic one. He wondered, very briefly, whether or not “Luba Malone”
+were an improvement. But he buried the thought before it got any
+further. Enough, he told himself firmly, was enough.
+
+“It’s been a nice trip,” Lou said. She, too, sounded subdued, as if
+she were thinking about something terribly serious.
+
+“Great,” Malone said happily. “A wonderful trip.”
+
+“I enjoyed being with you,” Lou said.
+
+“Me, too,” Malone said. He paid off the taxi-driver and they got out
+at the corner. Malone went to the newsstand there and picked up a copy
+of the _Post_.
+
+“That,” Lou said over his shoulder, “is one whole hell of a headline.”
+
+It filled the entire page, four lines of thick black capitals:
+
+     JUDGE
+     DROPS
+     UNION
+     SUIT!
+
+“Well, well,” Malone said. “Let’s see what this is all about.” He
+flipped to page three. Lou craned her neck over his shoulder and they
+read the start of the story together.
+
+     DISTRICT COURT RULES UNION HAS NO CASE
+
+     New York [AP], August 23. Judge James Lefkowitz
+     of the New York Supreme Court ruled today that
+     the International Truckers’ Brotherhood had no
+     grounds for their suit against the United Transport
+     Corp. and its officers. The action, a bitterly
+     fought contest, involved a complaint by the
+     Brotherhood that UTC had violated their contract
+     with the Brotherhood by hiring “unqualified drivers”
+     to work for the corporation.
+
+     In a statement made immediately after the ruling,
+     Judge Lefkowitz said: “It is obvious that a man with
+     a state-certified chauffeur’s license is not an
+     ‘unqualified driver.’”
+
+     Effects of this ruling are thought to be
+     far-reaching. Comment from the international
+     Truckers’ Brotherhood....
+
+There was more to it, a lot more, but Malone didn’t feel like reading
+it. It sounded just as confused as he expected news to sound these
+days, but it also sounded a little dull. He could feel Lou’s breathing
+against his ear as he read, and he lost interest in the paper almost
+at once.
+
+“My, my,” she said. “And I expected a real exposé of a story, after
+that headline.”
+
+“This is an exposé,” Malone said. “But I’m not sure what of.”
+
+“It sounds pretty confused,” Lou said.
+
+“Everything seems to, these days,” Malone said. “Including any story
+of what’s been happening during the last little while.”
+
+“Agreed,” Lou said. “Without argument.”
+
+“Listen,” Malone said suddenly. “Would it help if I went up and told
+Sir Lewis that there’s no mark against your record?”
+
+“Mark?” Lou said. “Against my record?”
+
+“Well,” Malone said, “I mean—well, he isn’t the sort of man who’d
+fire somebody, because of—because of something like this?”
+
+“You mean because I know an FBI man?” Lou said.
+
+“I—”
+
+“Never mind,” she said. “I know what you mean. And he won’t. He’ll
+understand.” She came round to face him, and patted his cheek.
+“Thanks,” she said. “Thanks a lot, anyway.”
+
+“If there’s anything I can do—”
+
+“There won’t be,” Lou said. “You’ll call me, though, about tonight?”
+
+“Sure I will,” Malone said. He hoped that the tentative date he’d made
+with her for that evening wouldn’t be broken up because of a sudden
+onslaught of work. “I’ll let you know before five, for sure.”
+
+“Fine,” Lou said. “I’ll wait to hear from you.”
+
+She turned to walk away.
+
+“Hey,” Malone said. “Wait a minute.”
+
+“What?” she said, turning again.
+
+Malone looked judicious. “I think,” he said weightily, “that,
+considering all the fun we’ve had, and all the adventuring and
+everything else, the least you could do would be to kiss me goodbye.”
+
+“On Fifth Avenue?”
+
+“No,” Malone said. He tapped his lips. “Here.”
+
+She laughed, bent closer and pecked him on the cheek. Then, before he
+could say anything else, she was gone.
+
+
+
+
+10
+
+
+On the way to FBI Headquarters on 69th Street, he read the _Post_ a
+little more carefully. The judge and his union suit weren’t the only
+things that were fouled up, he saw. Things were getting pretty bad all
+over.
+
+One story dealt with the recent factional fights inside the American
+Association for the Advancement of Medicine. A new group, the United
+States Medical-Professional Society, appeared to be forming as a
+competitor to the AAAM, and Malone wasn’t quite so sure, when he
+thought about it, that this news was as bad as it appeared on the
+surface. Fights between doctors, of course, were reasonably rare, at
+least on the high hysterical level the story appeared to pinpoint. But
+the AAAM had held a monopoly in the medical field for a long time;
+maybe it was about time some competition showed itself. From what he
+could find out in the story, the USMPS seemed like a group of fairly
+sensible people.
+
+But that was one of the few rays of light Malone could discern amid
+the encircling bloom of the news. The gang wars had reached a new
+high; the _Post_ was now publishing what it called a Daily Scoreboard,
+which consisted in this particular paper of six deaths, two
+disappearances and ten hospitalizations. The six deaths were evenly
+scattered throughout the country: two in New York, one each in Chicago
+and Detroit, and two more in San Francisco. The disappearances were in
+Los Angeles and in Miami, and the hospitalizations were pretty much
+all over.
+
+The unions had been having trouble, too. Traditional forms of
+controversy appeared to have gone out the window, in favor of
+startling disclosures, beatings, wild cries of foul and great masses
+of puzzling evidence. How, for instance, Malone wondered, had the
+president of Local 7574 of the Fishermen’s Fraternal Brotherhood
+managed to mislay a pile of secret records, showing exactly how the
+membership was being bilked of dues, on a Boston subway train? But,
+somehow, he had, and the records were now causing shakeups, denials
+and trouble among the fishermen.
+
+Of course, the news was not all bad. There were always the comic
+strips. Pogo was busily staving off an approaching wedding between
+Albert Alligator and a new character named Tranquil Portly, who
+appeared to be a brown bear. He was running into some resistance,
+though, from a wolflike character who planned to abscond with Albert’s
+cigars while Albert was honeymooning. This character, Don Coyote by
+name, looked like a trouble-maker, and Malone vowed to keep a careful
+eye on him.
+
+And then there were other headlines:
+
+     FUSION POWER SOON COMMERCIALLY
+     AVAILABLE SAYS AEC HEAD
+     Sees Drastic Cut in Power Rates
+
+     UN POLICE CONTINGENT OKAYED:
+     MILLION MEN TO FORM 1ST GROUP
+     Member Countries Pledge $20
+     Billion in Support Moneys
+
+     OFFICIAL STATES: “WE’RE AHEAD AFTER 17 YEARS!”
+     US Space Program Tops Russian Achievements
+
+     ARMED FORCES TO TOUGHEN TRAINING PROGRAM IN 1974
+     Gen. Foote: “Our aim is to train fighting men,
+     not to run a country club.”
+
+     GOVERNMENT TO SAVE $1 BILLION ANNUALLY?
+     Senator Hits Duplication of Effort in Government,
+     Vows Immediate Reform
+
+Malone read that one a little more carefully, because it looked, at
+first sight, like one of the bad-news items. There had been
+government-spending reforms before, almost all of which had resulted
+in confusion, panic, loss of essential services—and twice as many men
+on the payroll, since the government now had to hire useless
+efficiency experts, accountants and other such supernumerary workers.
+
+But this time, the reform looked as if it might do some good. Of
+course, he told himself sadly, it was still too early to tell.
+
+The senator involved was Deeks, of Massachusetts, who was also in the
+news because of a peculiar battle he had had with Senator Furbisher of
+Vermont. Congress, Malone noted, was still acting up. Furbisher
+claimed that the moneys appropriated for a new Vermont dam were really
+being used for the dam. But Deeks had somehow come into possession of
+several letters written by a cousin of Furbisher’s, detailing some of
+the graft that was going on in the senator’s home state. Furbisher was
+busily denying everything, but his cousin was just as busy confessing
+all to anybody who would listen. It was building up into an extremely
+interesting fracas, and, Malone thought, it would have been even
+funnier than Pogo except that it was happening in the Congress of the
+United States.
+
+He heaved a sigh, folded up the paper and entered the building that
+housed the New York contingent of the FBI.
+
+Boyd was waiting in his office when he arrived.
+
+“Well, there, Kenneth,” he said. “And how are all our little Slavic
+brothers?”
+
+“Unreasonable,” Malone said, “and highly unpleasant.”
+
+“You refer, no doubt,” Boyd said, “to the _Meeneestyerstvoh
+Vnootrenikh Dyehl_?”
+
+“_Gesundheit_,” Malone said kindly.
+
+“The MVD,” Boyd said. “I’ve been studying for days to pull it on you
+when you got back.”
+
+Malone nodded. “Very well, then,” he said in a stately, orotund tone.
+“Say it again.”
+
+“Damn it,” Boyd said, “I _can’t_ say it again.”
+
+“Cheer up,” Malone said. “Maybe some day you’ll learn. Meantime,
+Thomas, did you get the stuff we talked about?”
+
+Boyd nodded. “I think I got enough of it,” he said. “Anyhow, there is
+a definite trend developing. Come on into the private office, and I’ll
+show you.”
+
+There, on Boyd’s massive desk, were several neat piles of paper.
+
+“It looks like enough,” Malone said. “As a matter of fact, it looks
+like too much. Haven’t we been through all this before?”
+
+“Not like this, we haven’t,” Boyd said. “Information from all over,
+out of the everywhere, into the here.” He picked up a stack of papers
+and handed them to Malone.
+
+“What’s this?” Malone said.
+
+“That,” Boyd said, “is a report on the Pacific Merchant Sailors’
+Brotherhood.”
+
+“Goody,” Malone said doubtfully.
+
+Boyd came over, pulling at his beard thoughtfully, and took the top
+few sheets out of Malone’s hands. “The report,” he said, looking down
+at the sheets, “includes the checks we made on the office of the
+president of the Brotherhood, as well as the Los Angeles local and the
+San Francisco local.”
+
+“Only two?” Malone said. “That seems as if you’ve been lying down on
+the job.”
+
+“They’re the top two in membership,” Boyd said. “But listen to this:
+the president and three of his underlings resigned day before
+yesterday, and not quite in time. The law—by which I mean us, and a
+good many other people—is hot on their tails. It seems somebody
+accidentally mixed up a couple of envelopes.”
+
+“Sounds like a case for the Post Office,” Malone said brightly.
+
+“Not these envelopes,” Boyd said. “There was a letter that was
+supposed to go to the head of the San Francisco local, dealing with a
+second set of books—not the ones used for tax purposes, but the real
+McCoy. The letter didn’t get to the San Francisco man. Instead, it
+went to the attorney general of the state of California.”
+
+“Lovely,” Malone said. “Meanwhile, what was San Francisco doing?”
+
+Boyd smiled. “San Francisco was getting confused,” he said. “Like
+everybody else. The San Francisco man got a copy of an affidavit
+dealing with merchant-ship tonnage. That was supposed to go to the
+attorney general.”
+
+“Good work,” Malone said. “So when the Frisco boys woke up to what was
+happening—”
+
+“They called the head man, and he put two and two together, resigned
+and went into hiding. Right now, he’s probably living an undercover
+life as a shoe salesman in Paris, Kentucky.”
+
+“And, after all,” Malone added, “why not? It’s a peaceful life.”
+
+“The attorney general, of course, impounded the second set of books,”
+Boyd went on. “A grand jury is hearing charges now.”
+
+“You know,” Malone said reflectively, “I almost feel sorry for the
+man. Almost, but not quite.”
+
+“I see what you mean,” Boyd said. “It is a hell of a thing to happen.”
+
+“On the other hand—” Malone leafed through the papers in a hurry,
+then put them back on Boyd’s desk with a sigh of relief. “I’ve got the
+main details now,” he said. “I can go through the thing more
+thoroughly later. Anything else?”
+
+“Oh, lots,” Boyd said. “And all in the same pattern. The FPM, for
+instance, literally dropped one in our laps.”
+
+“Literally?” Malone said. “What was the Federation of Professional
+Musicians doing in your lap?”
+
+“Not mine,” Boyd said hastily. “Not mine. But it seems that some
+secretary put a bunch of file folders on the windowsill of their
+second-floor offices, and they fell off. At the same time, an agent
+was passing underneath, slipped on a banana peel and sat down on the
+sidewalk. Bingo, folders in lap.”
+
+“Wonderful,” Malone said. “The hand of God.”
+
+“The hand of something, for sure,” Boyd said. “Those folders contain
+all the ammunition we’ve ever needed to get after the FPM. Kickbacks,
+illegal arrangements with night-clubs, the whole works. We’re putting
+it together now, but it looks like a long, long term ahead for our
+friends from the FPM.”
+
+And Boyd went to his desk, picked up a particularly large stack of
+papers. “This,” he said, “is really hot stuff.”
+
+“What do you call the others?” Malone said. “Crime on ice?”
+
+“The new show at the Winter Garden,” Boyd said blithely. “Don’t miss
+it if you can.”
+
+“Sure,” Malone said. “So what’s so hot?”
+
+Boyd smiled. “The police departments of seven major cities,” he said.
+“They’re all under attack either by the local prosecuting attorney or
+the state’s attorney general. It seems there’s a little graft and
+corruption going on.”
+
+“This,” Malone said, “is not news.”
+
+“It is to the people concerned,” Boyd said. “Four police chiefs have
+resigned, along with great handfuls of inspectors, captains and
+lieutenants. It’s making a lovely wingding all over the country, Ken.”
+
+“I’ll bet,” Malone said.
+
+“And I checked back on every one,” Boyd went on. “Your hunch was
+absolutely right, Ken. The prosecuting attorneys and the attorneys
+general are all new men—all the ones involved in this stuff. Each one
+replaced a previous incumbent in a recent election. In two cases, the
+governor was new, too—elected last year.”
+
+“That figures,” Malone said. “What about the rest?”
+
+Boyd’s grandiose wave of a hand took in all the papers on the desk.
+“It’s all the same,” he said. “They all follow a pattern, Ken, _the_
+pattern. The one you were looking for.”
+
+Malone blinked. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “I’ll be doubly damned.”
+
+“And how about the Russians?” Boyd said.
+
+“You mean the _Meeneestyerstvoh Vnootrenikh Dyehl_?” Malone said.
+
+“Now,” Boyd said, “I’ll be damned. And after I practiced for days.”
+
+“Ah,” Malone said. “But I was _there_. The Russians are about as mixed
+up as a group of Transylvanian villagers with two vampires to track
+down and not enough flambeaux for all. Here, for instance, is just one
+example: the conflicting sets of orders that were given about me and
+Her Majesty and L—Miss Garbitsch.”
+
+Briefly, he outlined what had happened.
+
+“Sounds like fun,” Boyd said.
+
+“They were so busy arguing with each other,” Malone finished, “that I
+have a feeling we hardly needed the teleportation to escape. It would
+just have taken longer, that’s all.” He paused. “By the way, Tom,
+about the stakeout—”
+
+“Luba Garbitsch is being protected as if she were Fort Knox,” Boyd
+said. “If any Soviet agent tries to approach her with a threat of any
+kind, we’ll have him nabbed before he can say Ivan Robinovitch.”
+
+“Or,” Malone suggested, “_Meeneestyerstvoh_—”
+
+“If we waited for that one,” Boyd said, “we might have to wait all
+day.” He paused. “But who’s doing it?” he went on. “That’s still the
+question. Martians? Venerians? Or is that last one Venusians?”
+
+“Aphrodisiacs,” Malone suggested diplomatically.
+
+“Thank you, no,” Boyd said politely. “I never indulge while on duty.”
+
+“Thomas,” Malone said, “you are a Rover Boy First-Class.”
+
+“Good,” Boyd said. “But, meanwhile, who is doing all this? Would you
+prefer Evil Beings from the Planet Ploor?”
+
+“I would not,” Malone said firmly.
+
+“But I have a strange feeling,” Boyd said, “that, in spite of all the
+evidence to the contrary, you do not hold with the Interplanetary
+Alien Theory.”
+
+“Frankly,” Malone said, “I’m not sure of anything. Not really. But I
+do want to know why, if it’s interplanetary aliens doing this stuff,
+they’re picking such a strange way of going about it.”
+
+“Strange?” Boyd said. “What’s strange about it? You wouldn’t expect
+Things from Ploor to come right out and _tell_ us what they want,
+would you? It’s against custom. It may even be against the law.”
+
+“Well, maybe,” Malone said. “But it is pretty strange. The difference
+between what’s happening in Russia and what’s happening here—”
+
+“What difference?” Boyd said. “Everybody’s confused. Here, and over
+there. It all looks the same to me.”
+
+“Well, it isn’t,” Malone said. “Take a look at the paper, for
+instance.” He tossed the _Post_ at Boyd, who caught it with a
+spasmodic clutching motion and reassembled it slowly.
+
+“Why throw things?” Boyd said. “You sore or something?”
+
+“I guess I am,” Malone said. “But not at you. It’s—somebody or
+something. Person or persons unknown.”
+
+“Or Ploorians,” Boyd said.
+
+“Whatever,” Malone said. “But take a look at the paper and see if you
+see what I see.” He paused. “Does that mean anything?” he said.
+
+“Probably,” Boyd said. “We’ll figure it out later.” He leafed through
+the newspaper slowly, pulling thoughtfully at his beard from time to
+time. Malone watched him in breathless silence.
+
+“See it?” he said at last.
+
+Boyd looked up and, very slowly, nodded. “You’re right, Ken,” he said
+in a quiet voice. “You’re absolutely right. It’s as plain as the nose
+on your face.”
+
+“And that,” Malone said, “sounds like an insult. It’s much plainer
+than that. Suppose you tell me.”
+
+Boyd considered. “Over here,” he said at last, “there are a lot of
+confused jerks and idiots. Right?”
+
+“Correct,” Malone said.
+
+“And in Russia,” Boyd went on, “there’s a lot of confusion. Right?”
+
+“Sure,” Boyd said. “It’s perfectly clear. I wonder why I didn’t see it
+before.”
+
+“That’s it!” Malone cried. “That’s the difference!”
+
+“Sure,” Boyd said. “It’s perfectly clear. I wonder why I didn’t see it
+before.”
+
+“Because you weren’t looking for it,” Malone said. “Because nobody
+was. But there’s one more check I want to make. There’s one area I’m
+not sure of, simply because I don’t have enough to go on.”
+
+“What area is that?” Boyd said. “It seems to me we did a pretty good
+job—”
+
+“The Mafia,” Malone said. “We know they’re having trouble, but—”
+
+“But we don’t know what kind of trouble,” Boyd finished. “Right you
+are.”
+
+Malone nodded. “I want to talk to Manelli,” he said. “Can we set it
+up?”
+
+“I don’t see why not,” Boyd said. “The A-in-C can give us the latest
+on him. You want me with you?”
+
+“No,” Malone said after some thought. “No. You go and see Mike Sand,
+heading up the International Truckers’ Union. We know he’s tied up
+with the Syndicate, and maybe you can get some information from him.
+You know what to dig for?”
+
+“I do now,” Boyd said. He reached for the intercom phone.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Cesare Antonio Manelli was a second-generation Prohibition mobster,
+whose history can most easily be described by reference to the various
+affairs of State which coincided with his development. Thus:
+
+When Cesare was a small toddler of uncertain gait and chubby visage,
+the Twenty-First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States
+canceled out not only the Eighteenth Amendment, but the thriving
+enterprises conducted by Manelli, Sr., and many of his friends.
+
+When Cesare was a young schoolboy, poring over the multiplication
+tables, his father and his father’s friends were busy dividing. They
+were dividing, to put it more fully, husbands from families as a means
+of requesting ransom, and money from banks as a means of getting the
+same cash without use of the middleman, or victim. This was the period
+of the Great Readjustment, and the frenzied search among gangland’s
+higher echelons for a substitute for bootlegging.
+
+And when Cesare was an innocent high-schooler, sporting a Paleolithic
+switchblade knife and black leather jacket, his father and his
+father’s friends had reached a new plateau. They consolidated into a
+Syndicate, and began to concentrate on gambling and the whole,
+complex, profitable network of unions.
+
+And then World War II had come along, and it was time for Cesare to do
+his part. Bidding a fond farewell to his father and such of his
+father’s friends as had survived the disagreements of Prohibition, the
+painful legal processes of the early Thirties and the even more
+painful consolidations of the years immediately before the war, young
+Cesare went off to foreign lands, where he distinguished himself by
+creating and running the largest single black-market ring in all of
+Southern Europe.
+
+Cesare had followed in his father’s footsteps. And, before his sudden
+death during a disagreement in Miami, Giacomo “Jack the Ripper”
+Manelli was proud of his son.
+
+“Geez,” he often said. “Whattakid, huh? Whattakid!”
+
+At the war’s end, young Cesare, having proven himself a man, took unto
+himself a nickname and a shotgun. He did not have to use the shotgun
+very much, after the first few lessons; soon he was on his way to the
+top.
+
+There was nowhere for Cesare “Big Cheese” Antonio Manelli to go,
+except up.
+
+Straight up.
+
+Now, in 1973, he occupied a modestly opulent office on Madison Avenue,
+where he did his modest best to pretend to the world at large that he
+was only a small cog—indeed, an almost invisible cog—in a large
+advertising machine. His best was, for all practical purposes, good
+enough.
+
+Though it was common knowledge among the spoil-sport law enforcement
+officers who cared to look into the matter that Manelli was the real
+owner of the agency, there was no way to prove this. He didn’t even
+have a phone under his own name. The only way to reach him was by
+going through his front man in the agency, a blank-faced, truculent
+Arab named Atif Abdullah Aoud.
+
+According to the agent-in-charge of the New York office, Malone had
+his choice of two separate methods of getting to Manelli. One, more
+direct, was to walk in, announce that he was an agent of the FBI, and
+insist on seeing Manelli. If he had a search warrant, the A-in-C told
+him, he might even get in. But, even if he did, he would probably not
+get anything out of Manelli.
+
+The second and more diplomatic way was to call up Atif Abdullah Aoud
+and arrange for an appointment.
+
+Malone made his decision in a flash. He flipped on the phone and
+punched for a PLaza exchange.
+
+The face that appeared on the screen was that of a fairly pretty, if
+somewhat vapid, brunette. “Rodger, Willcoe, O’Vurr and Aoud, good
+afternoon,” she said.
+
+Malone blinked.
+
+“Who is calling, please?” the girl said. She snapped gum at the screen
+and Malone winced and drew away.
+
+“This is Kenneth J. Malone,” he said from what he considered a safe
+distance. “I want to talk to Mr. Aoud.”
+
+“Mr. Aoud?” she said in a high, unhelpful whine.
+
+“That’s right,” Malone said patiently. “You can tell him that there
+may be some government business coming his way.”
+
+“Oh,” she said. “But Mr. Aoud isn’t in.”
+
+Mr. Aoud wasn’t in. Mr. Aoud was out. Malone turned that over in his
+mind a few times, and decided to try and forget it just as quickly as
+possible. “Then,” he said, “let me talk to one of the other partners.”
+
+“Partners?” the girl said. She popped her gum again. Malone moved back
+another inch.
+
+“You know,” he said. “The other people he works with. Rodger, or
+Willcoe, or O’Vurr.”
+
+“Oh,” the girl said. “Them.”
+
+“That’s right,” Malone said patiently.
+
+“How about Mr. Willcoe?” the girl said after a second of deep and
+earnest thought. “Would he do?”
+
+“Why not let’s try him and see?” Malone said.
+
+“Okay,” the girl said brightly. “Let’s.” She flashed Malone a dazzling
+smile, only slightly impeded by the gum, and flipped off. Malone
+stared at the blank screen for a few seconds, and then the girl’s
+voice said, invisibly: “Mr. Willcoe will speak to you now, Mr. Melon.
+Thank you for waiting.”
+
+“I’m not—” Malone started to say, and then the face of Frederick
+Willcoe appeared on the screen.
+
+Willcoe was a thin, wrinkle-faced man with very pale skin. He seemed
+to be in his sixties, and he looked as if he had just lost an
+all-night bout with Count Dracula. Malone looked interestedly for
+puncture marks, but failed to find any.
+
+“Ah,” Willcoe said, in a voice that sounded like crinkled paper. “Mr.
+Melon. Good afternoon.”
+
+“I’m not Mr. Melon,” Malone said testily.
+
+Willcoe looked gently surprised, like a man who has discovered that
+his evening sherry contains cholesterol. “Really?” he said. “Then I
+must be on the wrong line. I beg your pardon.”
+
+“You’re not on the wrong line,” Malone said. “I am Mr. Melon in a
+way.” That didn’t sound very clear when he got it out, so he added:
+“Your secretary got my name wrong. She thinks I’m Mr. Melon—Kenneth
+J. Melon.”
+
+“But you’re not,” Willcoe said.
+
+Malone resisted an impulse to announce that he was really Lamont
+Cranston. “I’m Kenneth J. Malone,” he said.
+
+“Ah,” Willcoe said. “Quite amusing. Imagine my mistaking you for a Mr.
+Melon, when you’re really Mr. Malone.” He paused, and his face got
+even more wrinkled. “But I don’t know you under either name,” he said.
+“What do you want?”
+
+“I want to talk to Mr. Manelli,” Malone said.
+
+“But Mr. Aoud—”
+
+“Mr. Aoud,” Malone said, wondering if it sounded as silly to Willcoe
+as it did to him, “isn’t in. So I thought you might be able to arrange
+an appointment for this afternoon.”
+
+Willcoe bit his lip. “Mr. Manelli isn’t in just now,” he said.
+
+“Yes,” Malone said. “I didn’t think he would be. That’s why I want to
+arrange an appointment for later, when he _will_ be in.”
+
+“Does Mr. Manelli know you?” Willcoe said suspiciously, the wrinkles
+deepening again.
+
+“He knows my boss,” Malone said carefully. “You just tell him that
+this is something that ought to be worth time and money to him. His
+time, and his money.”
+
+“Hmm,” Willcoe said. “I see. Would you wait a moment, Mr. Mel—Mr.
+Malone?”
+
+The screen blanked out immediately. The wait this time was slightly
+longer.
+
+And the next face that appeared on the screen was that of Cesare “Big
+Cheese” Antonio Manelli, the nearly invisible cog.
+
+For a cog, the face was not a bad one. It was strong and well-muscled,
+and it had dark, wavy hair running along the top. At the sides of the
+face, the hair was greying slightly, and behind the grey two large
+ears stuck out. Manelli’s nose was a long, faintly aquiline affair and
+his eyes were very pleasant and candid. They were light grey.
+
+“Aha,” Manelli said. “You are Mr. Malone, right?” His voice was
+guttural, but it was obvious that he was trying for control. “I regret
+announcing that I was out, Mr. Malone,” he said. “But a man in my
+position—I like privacy, Mr. Malone, and I try to keep privacy for
+myself. Let me request you to answer a question, Mr. Malone: do I know
+you, Mr. Malone?”
+
+“Not personally,” Malone said. “I—”
+
+“But I’m supposed to know your boss,” Manelli said. “I don’t know him,
+either, so far.”
+
+Malone shrugged. “I’m sure you do,” he said, and dropped the name
+almost casually: “Andrew J. Burris.”
+
+Manelli raised his eyebrows. “So that’s who you are,” he said. “I
+ought to have known, Mr. Malone. And you want to talk to me a little
+bit, right?”
+
+“That’s right,” Malone said.
+
+“But this is no way to act, Mr. Malone,” Manelli said reproachfully.
+“After all, we understand each other, you and me. What you should do,
+you should come in through channels, in the correct way, so everything
+it would be open and above the board.”
+
+“Through channels?” Malone said.
+
+Manelli regarded him with a pitying glance. “You must be new on your
+job, Mr. Malone,” he said. “Because there is an entire system built
+up, and you don’t know about it. The way things work, we sit around
+and we don’t see people. And then somebody comes and presents his
+credentials, you might say—search warrants, for instance, or
+subpoenas. And then we know where we are.”
+
+Malone shook his head. “This isn’t that kind of call,” he said. “It’s
+more a friendly type of call.”
+
+“Mr. Malone,” Manelli said. The reproach was stronger in his voice.
+“You must be very new at your job.”
+
+“Nevertheless,” Malone said.
+
+Manelli hesitated only a second. “Because I like you,” he said, “and
+to teach you how things operate around here, I could do you a favor.”
+
+“Good,” Malone said patiently.
+
+“In an hour,” Manelli said. “My place. Here.”
+
+The screen blanked out before Malone could even say goodbye.
+
+Malone got up, went out to the corridor, and decided that, since he
+had time to kill, he might as well walk on down to Manelli’s office.
+That, he told himself, would give him time to decide what he wanted to
+say.
+
+He toyed at first with the idea of a nice bourbon and soda in a
+Madison Avenue bar, but he discarded that idea in a hurry. It was
+always possible for him to get into a tight spot and have to teleport
+his way out, and he didn’t want to be fuzzy around the edges in case
+that happened. _Trotkin’s_ had showed him that, under enough stress,
+he could manage the job with quite a lot of vodka in him. But there
+was absolutely no sense, he told himself sadly, in taking chances.
+
+He started off downtown along Fifth. Soon he was standing in front of
+the blue-and-crystal tower of the Ravell Building.
+
+That made up his mind for him. He checked his watch, mentally flipped
+a coin and then cheated a little to make the answer come out right. He
+went inside and stepped into an elevator.
+
+“Six,” he said with decision.
+
+Lou was sitting at the Psychical Research Society desk, talking to the
+tweedy Sir Lewis Carter. Malone waved at Carter, decided that
+conversation with Lou was out, and started to walk away. Then he
+realized that he couldn’t have Carter thinking he was crazy. He had to
+figure out something to tell the man—and in a hurry, too.
+
+Carter smiled and gestured to him. “Ah, Mr. Malone,” he said. “I’m
+glad you brought our Lou home safely. I’ve heard a little about your—
+ah—escapade. Astounding, really.”
+
+“Not for the FBI,” Malone said modestly. “We’ve been through too
+much.”
+
+“But—”
+
+“No, really,” Malone said. “We never call anything astounding any
+more.”
+
+“I can well imagine,” Carter said. “Is there anything I can do for
+you?”
+
+Malone thought fast. He had to have something, and he didn’t have much
+time. “Why—uh—” he said, and then it came to him. “Yes, as a matter
+of fact you can,” he said.
+
+“Glad to be of service,” Carter said. “I’m sure we can do anything you
+request.”
+
+“Have you got any more data on telepathic projection?” Malone said.
+
+Sir Lewis Carter frowned. “Telepathic projection?” he said.
+
+“The stuff—the phenomenon Cartier Taylor mentioned,” Malone said, “in
+_Minds and Morons_. I think it was page eighty-four.”
+
+“Oh,” Carter said. “Oh, yes. Of course. Well, Mr. Malone, we’ll see
+what we can do for you.”
+
+Malone sighed. “Thanks,” he said mournfully. “I guess—I guess that’s
+all, then.” He smiled at Lou, and turned the smile into a terrifying
+scowl when his eye caught Carter’s. “Oh,” Malone said. “So long. So
+long, everybody.”
+
+“Ken—”
+
+This was not, he told himself sadly, either the time or the place.
+“Goodbye, Sir Lewis,” he said. “Goodbye, Lou.”
+
+The elevator opened its doors and received him.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Exactly fifty-nine minutes after Cesare Manelli had hung up on him,
+Malone showed up in the stately and sumptuous suite that belonged, for
+a stiff fee every month, to the firm of Rodger, Willcoe, O’Vurr and
+Aoud. The girl at the desk was his old Spearmint friend.
+
+“Mr. Manelli,” Malone said. “I’ve got an appointment. My name is
+Malone and his is Manelli. He works here.” That, he told himself, was
+an understatement; but at least he had a chance of getting his point
+across.
+
+“Oh,” the girl said. Her gum popped. “Certainly. Right away, Mr.
+Maloney.”
+
+Malone opened his mouth, then shut it again. It just wasn’t worth the
+trouble, he thought.
+
+The girl did things with a switchboard, then turned to him again. “Mr.
+Manelli’s office is right down there in back,” she said, pointing
+vaguely. “Think you can find it, Mr. Maloney?”
+
+“I’ll try,” Malone promised. He went down the long corridor and
+stopped at an unmarked door. It was at least an even chance, he told
+himself, and opened the door.
+
+The room inside appeared to be mostly desk. The gigantic slab of wood
+sat against the far wall of the room, in the right-hand corner and
+spreading over toward the center. It appeared, in the soft half-light
+of the room, to be waiting for somebody to walk into its lair. Malone
+was sure, at first sight, that this desk ate people; it was just the
+type: big and dark and glowering and massive.
+
+There wasn’t anybody seated behind it, which reinforced his belief.
+The desk had eaten its master. Now it was out of control and they
+would have to have it shot. Malone took a deep breath and tried not to
+veer.
+
+Then he heard a voice.
+
+“Sit down, Mr. Malone,” the voice said. “How about you having a drink
+while we talk? If this is going to be so friendly.”
+
+The voice didn’t belong to the desk. It belonged, unmistakably, to Big
+Cheese himself. Malone turned and saw him, sitting in the left-hand
+corner of the room behind a low table. There was another empty chair
+facing Manelli, and Malone went over and sat in it.
+
+“A drink?” he said. “Okay. Sure.”
+
+“Bourbon and soda, isn’t it?” Manelli said. He stood up.
+
+“Your research department gets fast answers,” Malone said. “Bourbon
+and soda it is.”
+
+“After all,” Manelli said, shrugging slightly, “a person in my
+position, he has to make sure he knows what is what, and all the time.
+It’s routine, what you call S. O. P. Standard Operating Procedure,
+they call it.”
+
+“I’m sure they do,” Malone murmured politely.
+
+“And besides,” Manelli said, “you are a well-known type. I thought I
+knew the name when old Fred mentioned it, or I would never talk to
+you. You know how it is.”
+
+Malone nodded. “Well,” he said, as Manelli went over to a small
+portable bar at the back of the room and got busy, “we’re being frank,
+anyway.”
+
+“And why shouldn’t we be frank, Mr. Malone?” Manelli said. “It’s a
+nice, friendly conversation, and what have we got on our minds?”
+
+For the first time, as he turned, Malone got a glimpse of something
+behind the structured and muscular face. There was panic there, just a
+tiny seed under iron control, but it showed in the eyes and in the
+muscles of the cheek.
+
+“Just a nice, friendly conversation,” Malone said. Manelli brought the
+drinks over and set them on the table.
+
+“Take your pick,” he said. “That’s not what a good host should do, ask
+the guest to pick one, like a game; but I got into the habit. People
+get nervous about arsenic in the drinks. Which is silly.”
+
+“Sure it is,” Malone agreed. He picked up the left-hand glass and
+regarded it carefully. “If you wanted to kill me, you’d need a motive
+and an opportunity, and you don’t have either at the moment. Besides,
+you’d make sure to be far away when it happened.” He hoped he sounded
+confident. He took a sip of the drink, but it tasted like bourbon and
+soda.
+
+“Mr. Malone,” Manelli said, “you say these things about me, and it
+hurts. It hurts me, right here.” He pressed a hand over the checkbook
+side of his jacket. “I’m a legitimate businessman, and no different
+from any other legitimate businessman. You can’t prove anything else.”
+
+“I know I can’t,” Malone said. “But I want to talk to you about your
+real business.”
+
+“This is my real business,” Manelli said. “The advertising agency. I
+work here. Advertising is in my blood. And I don’t understand the
+least little bit why you have to do things to me all the time.”
+
+“Do things?” Malone said. “What did I do?”
+
+“Now, Mr. Malone,” Manelli said. He took a swallow of his drink. “You
+said let’s be frank, so I’m frank. Why not you?”
+
+“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Malone said, telling part of
+the truth.
+
+Manelli took another swallow of his drink, fished in a jacket pocket
+and brought out two cigars. “Smoke, Mr. Malone?” he said. “The very
+best, from Havana, Cuba. Cost me a dollar and a half each.”
+
+Malone looked with longing at the cigar. But it was okay for Manelli
+to smoke cigars, he thought bitterly. Manelli was a gangster, and who
+cared how he looked? Malone was an FBI man, and FBI men didn’t smoke
+cigars. Particularly Havana cigars. That, he told himself with
+regretful firmness, was that.
+
+“No, thanks,” he said. “I never smoke on duty.”
+
+Manelli shrugged and put one cigar away. He lit the other one and
+dense clouds of smoke began to rise in the room. Malone breathed
+deeply.
+
+“I understand you’ve been having troubles,” he said.
+
+Manelli nodded. “Now, you see, Mr. Malone?” he said. “You tell me you
+don’t know what’s happening, but you know I got troubles. How come,
+Mr. Malone? How come?”
+
+“Because you have got troubles,” Malone said. “But I have nothing to
+do with them.” He hesitated, thought of adding: “Yet,” and decided
+against it.
+
+“Now, Mr. Malone,” Manelli said. “You know better than that.”
+
+“I do?” Malone said.
+
+Manelli sighed, took another swallow of his drink and dragged deeply
+on the cigar. “Let’s take a for-instance,” he said. “Now, you
+understand my business is advertising, Mr. Malone?”
+
+“It’s in your blood,” Malone said, involuntarily.
+
+“Right,” Manelli said. “But I think about things. I like to figure
+things out. In a sort of a theoretical way, like a for-instance.
+Understand?”
+
+“What sort of theoretical story are you going to tell me?” Malone
+said.
+
+Manelli leaned back in his chair. “Let’s take, for instance, some
+numbers runners who had some trouble the other day, got beat up and
+money taken from them. Maybe you read about it in the papers.”
+
+“I haven’t been following the papers much,” Malone said.
+
+“That’s all right,” Manelli said grandly. “Maybe it wasn’t _in_ the
+papers. But anyhow, I figured out maybe that happened. I had nothing
+to do with this, Mr. Malone; you understand that? But I figured out
+how maybe it happened.”
+
+“How?” Malone said.
+
+Manelli took another puff on his cigar. “Maybe there was an error at a
+racetrack—we could say Jamaica, for instance, just for laughs. And
+maybe two different totals were published for the pari-mutuel numbers,
+and both got given out. So the numbers runners got all fouled up, so
+they got beat up and money taken from them.”
+
+“It could have happened that way,” Malone said.
+
+“I figure maybe the FBI had something to do with this,” Manelli said.
+
+“We didn’t,” Malone said. “Frankly.”
+
+“And that’s not all,” Manelli said. “Let’s say at Jamaica one day
+there was a race.”
+
+“All right,” Malone said agreeably. “That doesn’t require a whole lot
+of imagination.”
+
+“And let’s say,” Manelli went on, “that the bookies—if there are any
+bookies in this town; who knows?—that they got the word about who
+came in, win, place and show.”
+
+“Sounds natural,” Malone said.
+
+“Sure it does,” Manelli said. “But there was a foul-up someplace,
+because the win animal was disqualified and nobody heard about it
+until after a lot of payoffs were made. That costs money.” He stopped.
+“I mean it would cost money, if it happened,” he finished.
+
+“Sure,” Malone said. “Certainly would.”
+
+“And you tell me it’s not the FBI?” Manelli said.
+
+“That’s right,” Malone said. “As a matter of fact, we’re investigating
+things like these confusions and inefficiencies all over.”
+
+Manelli finished his drink in one long, amazed swallow. “Now, wait a
+minute,” he said. “Let’s say for a joke, like, for laughs, that I am
+some kind of a wheel in these things, in bookies and numbers boys and
+like that.”
+
+“Let’s call it a syndicate,” Malone said. “Just for laughs.”
+
+“Okay, then,” Manelli said, with a suspicious gaze at Malone.
+“Whatever you call it, a man like me today, he wouldn’t be some
+two-bit chiseler without brains. He would be a businessman, a
+smooth-operating smart businessman. Right?”
+
+“Right,” Malone said. “And what I want to know is: how’s business?”
+
+“You’re kidding?” Manelli said.
+
+“I’m not kidding,” Malone said. “I mean it. The FBI’s investigating
+mix-ups just like the ones you’re telling me about. We want to stop
+them.”
+
+Manelli blinked. “You know, Mr. Malone,” he said softly, “I heard
+about government interference in private enterprise, but don’t you
+think this is a little too far out?”
+
+Malone shrugged. “That’s what I’m here for,” he said. “Take it or
+leave it.”
+
+“Just so it’s understood,” Manelli said, “that we’re talking about
+imaginary things. Theoretical.”
+
+“Sure,” Malone said. “Imagine away.”
+
+“Well,” Manelli said slowly, “you heard about this wrecked night-club
+in Florida? It happened maybe a month ago, in Miami?”
+
+“I heard about it,” Malone said.
+
+“This is just a for-instance, you know,” Manelli said. “But suppose
+there was a roulette wheel in that club. Just a wheel.”
+
+“Okay,” Malone said.
+
+“And suppose the wheel was rigged a little bit,” Manelli said. “Not
+seriously, just a little bit.”
+
+“Fine,” Malone said. “This is going to explain a wrecked club?”
+
+“Well, sure,” Manelli said. “Because something went wrong with the
+machinery, or maybe the operator goofed up. And number seven came up
+eight times in a row.”
+
+“Good old lucky seven,” Malone said.
+
+“So there was a riot,” Manelli said. “Because some people had money on
+the number, and some people got suspicious, and like that. And there
+was a riot.”
+
+“And the club got wrecked,” Malone said. “That’s what I call bad
+luck.”
+
+“Luck?” Manelli said. “What does luck have to do with roulette?
+Somebody goofed, that’s all.”
+
+“Oh,” Malone said. “Sure.”
+
+“And that’s the way it’s been going,” Manelli said. He puffed on his
+cigar, put it in a nearby ashtray, and blew out a great Vesuvian spout
+of smoke.
+
+“Too bad,” Malone said sympathetically.
+
+“It’s all over,” Manelli said. “Mistakes and people making the
+mistakes, goofing up here and there and everyplace. There have been
+guys killed because they made mistakes, and nobody can afford guys
+being killed all the time.”
+
+“It does run into expense,” Malone said.
+
+“And time, and hiring guys to do the killing, and then they goof up,
+too,” Manelli said. “It’s terrible. Some guys have even been killed
+without they made any mistakes at all. Just by accident, sort of.”
+
+“Well,” Malone said carefully, “you can depend on the government to do
+everything in its power to straighten things out.”
+
+Manelli frowned. “You mean that, Mr. Malone?”
+
+“Of course I do,” Malone said honestly. He hadn’t, he reminded
+himself, promised to help Manelli. He had only promised to straighten
+things out. And he could figure out what that might mean later, when
+he had the time.
+
+“All I say is, it’s funny,” Manelli said. “It’s crazy.”
+
+“That’s the way it is,” Malone said.
+
+Manelli looked at him narrowly. “Mr. Malone,” he said at last, “maybe
+you mean it at that. Maybe you do.”
+
+“Sure I do,” Malone said. “After all, the government is supposed to
+help its citizens.”
+
+Manelli shook his head. “Mr. Malone,” he said, “you can call me
+Cesare. Everybody does.”
+
+“No, they don’t,” Malone said. “They call you Cheese. I’ve got a
+research staff too.”
+
+“So call me Cheese,” Manelli said. “I don’t mind.”
+
+“There’s only one little trouble,” Malone said. “If I called you
+Cheese, you’d call me Ken. And word would get around.”
+
+“I see what you mean,” Manelli said.
+
+“I don’t think either one of us wants his associates to think we’re
+friends,” Malone said.
+
+“I guess not,” Manelli said. “It would cause uneasiness.”
+
+“And a certain lack of confidence,” Malone said. “So suppose I go on
+calling you Mr. Manelli?”
+
+“Fine,” Manelli said. “And I’ll call you Mr. Malone, like always.”
+
+Malone smiled and stood up. “Well, then,” he said, “goodbye, Mr.
+Manelli.”
+
+Manelli rose, too. “Goodbye, Mr. Malone,” he said. “And good luck, if
+you really mean what you said.”
+
+“Oh, I do,” Malone said.
+
+“Because things are terrible,” Manelli said. “And they’re getting
+worse every day. You should only know.”
+
+“Don’t worry,” Malone said. “Things will be straightened out pretty
+soon.” He hoped, as he went out the door and down the corridor, that
+he was telling the truth there, at least. He’d sounded fairly
+confident, he thought, but he didn’t feel quite so confident. The
+secretary was busy on the switchboard when he came out into the
+anteroom, and he went by without a greeting, his mind busy, churning
+and confused.
+
+He felt as if his head were on just a little crooked. Or as if, maybe,
+he had a small hole in it somewhere and facts were leaking out onto
+the sidewalk.
+
+If he only looked at the problem in the right way, he told himself, he
+would see just what was going on.
+
+But what was the right way?
+
+“That,” Malone murmured as he hailed a cab for the ride back to 69th
+Street, “is the big, sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. And how much
+time do I have for an answer?”
+
+
+
+
+11
+
+
+“Boyd?” the agent-in-charge said. “He went out to talk to Mike Sand
+down at the ITU a while ago, and he hasn’t come back yet.”
+
+“Fine,” Malone said. “I’ll be in my office if he wants me.”
+
+The agent-in-charge picked up a small package. “A messenger brought
+this,” he said. “It’s from the Psychical Research Society, and if it’s
+ghosts, they’re much smaller than last time.”
+
+“Dehydrated,” Malone said. “Just add ectoplasm and out they come,
+shouting _boo_ at everybody and dancing all over the world.”
+
+“Sounds wonderful,” the agent-in-charge said. “Can I come to the
+party?”
+
+“First,” Malone said judiciously, “you’d have to be dead. Of course, I
+can arrange that—”
+
+“Thanks,” the agent-in-charge said, leaving in a hurry. Malone went on
+down to his office and opened the package. It contained more
+facsimiles from Sir Lewis Carter, all dealing with telepathic
+projection. He spent a few minutes looking them over and trying to
+make some connected sense out of them, and then he just sat and
+thought for awhile.
+
+Finally he picked up the phone. In a few minutes he was talking to Dr.
+Thomas O’Connor, at Yucca Flats.
+
+“Telepathic projection?” O’Connor said when Malone asked him the
+question he’d thought of. “Well, now. I should say that—no. First,
+Mr. Malone, tell me what evidence you have for this phenomenon.”
+
+Malone felt almost happy, as if he had done all his homework before
+the instructor called on him. “According to what I’ve been able to get
+from the PRS,” he said, “ordinary people—people who aren’t
+telepaths—occasionally receive some sort of messages from other
+people.”
+
+“I assume,” O’Connor said frostily, “that you are speaking of
+telepathic messages?”
+
+Malone nodded guiltily. “I didn’t mean the phone,” he said, “or
+letters or things like that. Telepathic messages, or something very
+like it.”
+
+“Indeed,” O’Connor said. “Mr. Malone, I believe you will find that
+such occurrences, when accurately reported, are confined to close
+relatives or loved ones of the person projecting the message.”
+
+Malone thought back. “That’s right,” he said.
+
+“And, further,” O’Connor went on, “I think you’ll find that the—ah—
+message so received is one indicating that the projector of such a
+message is in dire peril. He has, for instance, been badly injured, or
+is rapidly approaching death, or else he has narrowly escaped death.”
+
+“True,” Malone said.
+
+“Under such circumstances,” O’Connor said coldly, “it is possible that
+the mind of the person projecting the communication might be capable
+of generating immense psionic power, thereby forcing even a
+non-telepath to recognize the content of the message.”
+
+“Good,” Malone said. “That’s wonderful, Doctor, and I—”
+
+“But,” O’Connor said sharply, “the amount of psionic energy necessary
+for such a feat is tremendous. Usually, it is the final burst of
+energy, the outpouring of all the remaining psionic force immediately
+before death. And if death does not occur, the person is at the least
+greatly weakened; his mind, if it ever does recover, needs time and
+rest to do so.”
+
+Malone let that sink in slowly. “Then a person couldn’t do it very
+often,” he said.
+
+“Hardly,” O’Connor said.
+
+Malone nodded. “It’s like—like giving blood to a blood bank. Giving,
+say, three quarts of blood. It might not kill you. But if it didn’t,
+you’d be weak for a long time.”
+
+“Exactly,” O’Connor said. “A good analogy, Mr. Malone.”
+
+Malone hated himself for it, but he felt pleased when O’Connor praised
+him. “Well,” he said, “that winds up Cartier Taylor’s theory pretty
+thoroughly.”
+
+“I should think so,” O’Connor said. “I am surprised, Mr. Malone, that
+you would put any credence whatever in that man’s theories. His
+factual data, I will admit, is fairly reliable. But his theories are—
+well, they are hardly worth the time it takes to read them.”
+
+“I see,” Malone said. “It did seem like a good answer, though.”
+
+“It undoubtedly is a good one,” O’Connor said. “It is clever and has
+the advantage of being simple. It is contradicted, Mr. Malone, only by
+the facts.”
+
+“Sure,” Malone said sadly. “But—hey. Wait a minute.”
+
+“Yes?” O’Connor said.
+
+“One person couldn’t do this alone, at least, not very often and not
+without serious harm to himself. Right?”
+
+“That is what I said,” O’Connor agreed. “Yes, Mr. Malone.”
+
+“But how about several people?” Malone said. “I mean, well, let’s look
+at that blood bank again. You need three quarts of blood. But one
+person doesn’t have to give it. Suppose twelve people gave half a pint
+each. Suppose twenty-four people gave a quarter of a pint each.
+Suppose—”
+
+“There is,” O’Connor said, “a point of diminishing returns. But I do
+see your point, Mr. Malone.” He thought for a second. “It might just
+be possible,” he said. “At least theoretically. But it would take a
+great deal of mental co-ordination among the participants. They would
+have to be telepathic themselves, for one thing.”
+
+“Why?” Malone said, feeling stupid.
+
+“Because they would have to mesh their thoughts closely enough to
+direct them properly and at the correct time.” O’Connor nodded. “But,
+given that, I imagine that it could be done.”
+
+“Wonderful,” Malone said.
+
+“However,” O’Connor said, apparently glad to throw even a little cold
+water on the notion, “it could not be done for very long periods of
+time, you realize.”
+
+“Sure,” Malone said happily.
+
+“By the way, Mr. Malone,” O’Connor said. “Does this have anything to
+do with the hypothesis you presented to me some time ago? Mass
+hypnotism, as I recall—”
+
+“No,” Malone said. “I’ve given that idea up for good. I think this is
+being done on an individual basis—working on one person at a time.”
+Then another idea hit him. “You say these people would have to be
+telepaths?”
+
+“That’s right,” O’Connor said.
+
+“Then wouldn’t Her Majesty know about them? If they’re telepaths? Or
+is there some kind of a mind shield or something that a telepath could
+work out?”
+
+“Mind shield?” O’Connor said. “Ah, yes. Miss Thompson might be fooled
+by such a shield. It would have to be an exceptional one, but such
+things do seem to be possible. They belong to the realm of mental
+disciplines, of course, rather than psionics.”
+
+“Sure,” Malone said. “But there could be that kind of shield?”
+
+“There could,” O’Connor said. “The mind which created the shield for
+itself would have to be of tremendous power and a really high order of
+control. A strong, sane mind might conceivably create such a block
+that even Miss Thompson, let us say, might believe that she was
+picking up a real mind, when she was only picking up surface thoughts,
+with the real thought hidden behind the telepathic block.”
+
+“Fine,” Malone said. “Thanks. Thanks a lot, Dr. O’Connor.”
+
+“I am always happy to put my extensive knowledge of science at your
+disposal, Mr. Malone,” O’Connor said.
+
+Malone watched the image collapse without really seeing it. Instead,
+he was busily talking to himself, or rather to his other self.
+
+“Well, now, Sir Kenneth,” he said. “Let’s pull all the facts together
+and see what happens.”
+
+“Indeed, Mr. Malone,” said Sir Kenneth Malone, “it is time that we
+did. Proceed, Sirrah. I shall attend.”
+
+* * * * *
+
+“Let’s start from the beginning,” Malone said. “We know there’s
+confusion in all parts of the country, in all parts of the world, I
+guess. And we know that confusion is being caused by carefully timed
+accidents and errors. We also know that these errors appear to be
+accompanied by violent bursts of psionic static—violent energy. And
+we know, further, that on three specific occasions, these bursts of
+energy were immediately followed by a reversal of policy in the mind
+of the person on the receiving end.”
+
+“You mean,” Sir Kenneth put in, “that they changed their minds.”
+
+“Correct,” Malone said. “I refer, of course, to the firm of Brubitsch,
+Borbitsch and Garbitsch, Spying Done Cheap.”
+
+“Indeed,” Sir Kenneth said. “Then the operators of this force,
+whatever it may be, have some interest in allowing these spies to
+confess?”
+
+“Maybe,” Malone said. “Let’s leave that for later. To get back to the
+beginning of all this: it seems to me to follow that the accidents and
+errors which have caused all the confusion through the United States
+and Russia are caused by somebody’s mind being changed at exactly the
+right moment. A man does something just a little differently than he
+decided to—or else he forgets to do it at all.”
+
+“Correct,” Sir Kenneth said. “And you feel, Mr. Malone, that a
+telepathic command is the cause of this confusion?”
+
+“A series of them,” Malone said. “But we also know, from Dr. O’Connor,
+that it takes a great deal of psychic energy to perform this
+particular trick—more than a person can normally afford to expend.”
+
+“Marry, now,” Sir Kenneth exclaimed, “such a statement does not seem
+to have reason in it. Changing the mind of a man seems a small thing
+in comparison to teleportation, or psychokinesis, or levitation. And
+yet it takes more power than any of these?”
+
+Malone thought for a second. “Sure it does,” he said. “I’d say it was
+a matter of resistance. Moving an inanimate object is pretty simple—
+comparatively, anyhow—because inert matter has no mental resistance.”
+
+“And moving yourself?” Sir Kenneth said.
+
+“There is some resistance there, probably,” Malone said. “But you’ll
+remember that part of the Fueyo training system for teleportation
+involved overcoming your own mental resistance to the idea.”
+
+“True,” Sir Kenneth said. “Quite true. Then let us say that it
+requires enormous power to effect these changes. What is our next
+step, Mr. Malone?”
+
+“Next, Sir Kenneth,” Malone said, “We have to do a little supposing.
+This project must be handled by a fairly large group, since no
+individual can work it. This large group has to be telepathic, and not
+only for the precise timing O’Connor specified.”
+
+“There is another reason?” Sir Kenneth said.
+
+“There is,” Malone said. “They’ve also got to know exactly when to
+make their victim change his mind. Right?”
+
+“Absolutely,” said Sir Kenneth. “Now, Sirrah, where does all this
+leave us? We have had the orderly presentation of the case; where,
+Sirrah, is your summation?”
+
+“Coming up,” Malone said. “We’ve got to look for a widespread
+organization of telepaths, with enough mental discipline to hold a
+mental shield that Her Majesty can’t crack, and can’t even recognize
+the existence of. We thought she’d found all the telepaths. She said
+so, and she obviously thought so. But she didn’t. These are strong,
+trained—and sane.”
+
+“Aha,” said Sir Kenneth.
+
+“Her Majesty,” Malone said, “found us only the crazy telepaths, the
+weak ones, the nuts.”
+
+“Fine,” said Sir Kenneth. “And this, Mr. Malone, leaves us with only
+one question. Her Majesty—may God bless her—stated that she first
+spotted these flashes of telepathic static by listening in on our
+minds.”
+
+“Our mind,” Malone said. “I hope.”
+
+“Very well,” Sir Kenneth said. “This means that some force is being
+directed in this way, toward us. And how do we know that all the
+deduction, all the careful case-building we have done, hasn’t been
+influenced by this group? That might mean, of course, that we are
+miles, or even light-years, from the solution.”
+
+Malone said: “Yeep.” The sound was echoed by Sir Kenneth, and the two
+halves of the coruscating mind of Kenneth J. Malone were once more
+one.
+
+_Your Majesty_, the minds thought, _I’d like to talk to you._
+
+Nothing happened. Evidently, Her Majesty was temporarily out of mental
+contact with him.
+
+“Hell,” Malone said. “Not to mention od’s blood.” He flipped on the
+visiphone and dialed Yucca Flats.
+
+The figure that appeared on the screen was that of a tall,
+solidly-built man with a red face and the uniform of a Beefeater. This
+Tower Warder had the British royal crest embroidered on his chest, and
+the letters: “E. R.”
+
+“Good evening, Sir Kenneth,” he said politely.
+
+Malone had sometimes wondered what it would be like to be on the
+Queen’s permanent, personal staff. Evidently, it soaked in so
+thoroughly that one began to stay in character all the time. The
+little old lady’s delusion was such a pleasant one that it was
+painlessly infectious.
+
+“I’d like to speak to Her Majesty, Colonel Fairfax,” Malone said.
+
+“Her Majesty,” Colonel Fairfax said with regret, “is asleep, sir. I
+understand that she has had rather a trying time, of late.”
+
+“Then I must ask you to wake her,” Malone said. “I don’t want to
+disturb her any more than you do, Colonel, but this is important.”
+
+“Her Majesty’s rest,” Colonel Fairfax said gently, “is also important,
+Sir Kenneth.”
+
+“This is more important,” Malone said. “I know how you feel, but it’s
+necessary to wake her.”
+
+The screen blanked out.
+
+Malone sighed and began to sing softly to himself while he waited:
+
+“The soldiers of the Queen are linked in friendly tether—
+And if she’s off her bean, we’ll all go nuts together....”
+
+Her Majesty appeared at this point, dressed in a silken robe bearing
+her crest and initials (E. R., rather than R. T., of course), and
+wearing a silken Mother Hubbard cap on her head. “Oh, dear,” she said
+instantly. “Are you still worried about them?”
+
+“The flashes?” Malone said. “That’s right. You tuned in on my mind
+right away, didn’t you?”
+
+“As soon as I got your message,” she said. “I like your little song,
+at least, I think I do.”
+
+Malone blushed faintly. “Sorry,” he said.
+
+“Oh, don’t be, Sir Kenneth,” Her Majesty said. “After all, I do allow
+my subjects a good deal of liberty; it is theirs to make use of.” She
+smiled at him. “Actually, I should have told you, Sir Kenneth. But it
+seemed so natural that I—that I forgot it.”
+
+_Oh, no_, Malone thought.
+
+“I’m afraid so,” Her Majesty said. “When I told you about the
+interference, your mind quite automatically began to build what I
+think of as a—as a defense against it. A shield, so to speak.”
+
+_Me?_ Malone thought.
+
+“Most certainly,” Her Majesty said. “You know, Sir Kenneth, you have a
+very strong mind.”
+
+“Oh, I don’t know,” Malone said aloud. “Sometimes I don’t feel so
+bright.”
+
+“I’m not talking about intelligence,” Her Majesty said. “The two
+properties are interconnected, of course, but they are not identical.
+After all ... well, never mind. But you have strength of will, Sir
+Kenneth, and strength of purpose. As a matter of fact, you have been
+building your strength in the last few days.”
+
+“Really?” Malone said, surprised.
+
+“It’s become more and more difficult,” Her Majesty said, “to see into
+the depths of your mind, during the past few days. The surface of your
+mind is as easy to read as ever, but it’s hard to see what’s going on
+in the depths.”
+
+“I’m not doing it deliberately,” Malone said.
+
+“In any case,” Her Majesty said, “this process has been going on ever
+since you knew that telepathy was possible, two years ago. But in the
+past forty-eight hours matters have accelerated tremendously.”
+
+“That sounds good,” Malone said. “Does it mean these mind-changers
+I’ve been thinking about can’t get through to me?”
+
+“What mind-changers?” the Queen said. “Oh. I see.” She paused. “Well,
+I can’t be positive about this, Sir Kenneth; it’s all so new, you
+know. All I can tell you is that there haven’t been any flashes of
+telepathic energy in your mind in the last forty-eight hours.”
+
+“Well,” Malone said doubtfully, “that’s something. And I am sorry I
+had to wake you, Your Majesty.”
+
+“Oh, that’s perfectly all right,” she said. “I know you’re working
+hard to restore order to the realm, and it is the duty of any
+Sovereign to give such aid as she can to her Royal subjects.”
+
+Malone cleared his throat. “I trust,” he said, “Your Majesty will ever
+find me a faithful servant.”
+
+Her Majesty smiled. “I’m sure I shall,” she said. “Good night, Sir
+Kenneth.”
+
+“Good night,” he said, and flipped off. At once, the phone chimed
+again.
+
+He flipped the switch on. “Malone here,” he said.
+
+Boyd’s face appeared on the screen. “Ken,” he said fervently, “I am
+very glad you’re still in town.”
+
+“Thanks,” Malone said politely. “But what about Mike Sand? Any
+information?”
+
+“Plenty,” Boyd said. “I damn near didn’t believe it.”
+
+“What do you mean, you didn’t believe it?” Malone said. “Isn’t the
+information any good?”
+
+“It’s good, all right,” Boyd said. “It’s great. He practically talked
+his head off to me. Gave me all his books, including secret sets. And
+I’ve put him under arrest as a material witness—at his own request.”
+
+“It sounds,” Malone said, “as if Mike Sand has had a sudden and
+surprising change of heart.”
+
+“Doesn’t it, though,” Boyd said. “We can crack the ITU wide open now,
+and I mean really wide open.”
+
+“Same pattern?” Malone said.
+
+“Of course it is,” Boyd said. “What does it sound like? Same pattern.”
+
+“Good,” Malone said. “Get on up here. I’ll talk to you later.”
+
+He cut off in a hurry, leaned back in his chair and started to think.
+At first, he thought of a cigar. Boyd, he figured, couldn’t be back in
+the office for some time, and nobody else would come in. He locked the
+door, drew out the cigar-laden box he kept in his desk in New York,
+and lit up with great satisfaction.
+
+When the cloud of smoke around his head was dense enough to cut with a
+knife, he went back to more serious subjects. He didn’t have to worry
+too much about his mind being spied on; if Her Majesty couldn’t read
+his deepest thoughts, and the mind-changers weren’t throwing any bolts
+of static in his direction, he was safe.
+
+Now, then, he told himself—and sneezed.
+
+He shook his head, cursed slightly, and went on.
+
+Now, then....
+
+There was an organization, spread all over the Western world, and with
+secret branches, evidently, in the Soviet Union. The organization had
+to be an old one, because it had to have trained telepaths of such a
+high degree of efficiency that they could evade Her Majesty’s probing
+without her even being aware of the evasion. And training took time.
+
+There was something else to consider, too. In order to organize to
+such a degree that they could wreak the efficient, complete havoc they
+were wreaking, the organization couldn’t be completely secret; there
+are always leaks, always suspicious events, and a secret society that
+covered all of those up would have no time for anything else.
+
+So the organization had to be a known one, a known group, masquerading
+as something else.
+
+So far, everything made sense. Malone took another deep, grateful puff
+on the cigar, and frowned. Where, he wondered, did he go from here?
+
+He reached for a pencil and a piece of paper. He headed the paper:
+_Organization._ Then he started putting down what he knew about it,
+and what he’d figured out.
+
+     1. Large
+     2. Old
+     3. Disguised
+
+It sounded just a little like Frankenstein’s Monster, so far. But what
+else did he know about it?
+
+After a second’s thought, he murmured: “Nothing,” and took another
+puff.
+
+But that wasn’t quite true.
+
+He knew one more thing about the organization. He knew they’d probably
+be immune to the confusion everybody else was suffering from. The
+organization would be—had to be—efficient. It would be composed of
+intelligent, superbly cooperative people, who could work together as a
+unit without in the least impairing their own individuality.
+
+He reached for the list again, put down:
+
+     4. Efficient
+
+And looked at it. Now it didn’t remind him quite so much of the
+Monster. But it didn’t look familiar, either. Who did he know, he
+thought, who was large, old, disguised and efficient?
+
+It sounded like an improbable combination. He set the list down again,
+clearing off some of the papers the PRS had sent him to make room for
+it.
+
+Then he stopped.
+
+The papers the PRS had sent him....
+
+And he’d gotten them so quickly, so efficiently....
+
+They were a large organization....
+
+And an old one....
+
+He tossed the cigar in the general direction of the ashtray, grabbed
+the phone and jabbed at buttons.
+
+The girl who answered the phone looked familiar. She did not look very
+old, but she was large and she had to be disguised, Malone thought.
+Nobody could naturally have that many teeth.
+
+“Psychical Research Society,” she said. “Oh, Mr. Malone, good
+evening.”
+
+“Sir Lewis,” Malone said. “Sir Lewis Carter. President. I want to talk
+to him. Hurry.”
+
+“Sir Lewis?” the girl said slowly. “Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Malone, but the
+office is closed now for the day. And Sir Lewis has gone already. It’s
+after six o’clock, Mr. Malone, and the office is closed.”
+
+“Home number,” Malone said desperately. “I’ve got to.”
+
+“Well, I can do that, Mr. Malone,” she said, “but it wouldn’t do you
+any good, really. Because he went away on his vacation, and when he
+goes on his vacation he never tells us where. You know? He won’t be
+back for two or three weeks.”
+
+“Oog,” Malone said, and thought for less than a second. “Miss
+Garbitsch,” he said. “Lou. Got to talk to her. Now.”
+
+“Oh, I can’t do that, either, Mr. Malone,” the toothy girl said. “All
+of the executive officers, they left already on their vacation. And
+that includes Miss Garbitsch, too. They just left a skeleton force
+here at the office.”
+
+“They’re all gone?” Malone said hollowly.
+
+“That’s right,” she said cheerfully. “As a matter of fact, I’m in
+charge now, and that’s why I’m staying so late. To sort of catch up on
+things. You know?”
+
+“It’s very important,” Malone said tensely. “You don’t know where any
+of them went? You don’t have any address?”
+
+“None at all,” she said. “I’m sorry, but that’s how it is. Maybe it’s
+strange, and maybe you’d ask questions, but I obey orders, and
+those’re my orders. To take over until they get back. They didn’t tell
+me where they went, and I didn’t ask.”
+
+“Great,” Malone said. He wanted to shoot himself.
+
+Lou was one of them. Of course she was; that was obvious now, when he
+thought about it. Lou was one of the secret group that was sabotaging
+practically everything.
+
+And now they’d all gone. For two weeks—or for good.
+
+The girl’s voice broke in on his thoughts.
+
+“Oh, Mr. Malone,” she said, “I’m sorry, but I just remembered. They
+left a note for you.”
+
+“A note?” Malone said.
+
+“Sir Lewis said you might call,” the girl said, “and he left a
+message. If you’ll hold on a minute I’ll read it to you.”
+
+Malone waited tensely. The girl found a slip of paper, blinked at it
+and read:
+
+“My dear Malone, I’m afraid you are perfectly correct in your
+deductions; and, as you can see, that leaves us no alternative. Sorry.
+Miss G. sends her apologies to you, as do I.” The girl looked up.
+“It’s signed by Sir Lewis,” she said. “Does that mean anything to you,
+Mr. Malone?”
+
+“I’m afraid it does,” Malone said bleakly. “It means entirely too
+much.”
+
+
+
+
+12
+
+
+After the great mass of teeth, vaguely surrounded by a face, had faded
+from Malone’s screen, he just sat there, looking at the dead, grey
+screen of the visiphone and feeling about twice as dead and at least
+three times as grey.
+
+Things, he told himself, were terrible. But even that sentence, which
+was a good deal more cheerful than what he actually felt, didn’t do
+anything to improve his mood. All of the evidence, after all, had been
+practically living on the tip of his nose for nearly twenty-four
+hours, and not only had he done nothing about it, but he hadn’t even
+seen it.
+
+Two or three times, for instance, he’d doubted the possibility of
+teleporting another human being. All his logic had told him it wasn’t
+so. But, he’d thought, he and Her Majesty had teleported Lou, and so,
+obviously, his logic was wrong.
+
+No, it wasn’t, he thought now. There _would_ be too much mental
+resistance, even if the person were unconscious. Teleportation of
+another human being _would_ be impossible.
+
+Unless, of course, the other human being was able to teleport on her
+own.
+
+True, she had been no more than semiconscious. She probably couldn’t
+have teleported on her own. But Malone and Her Majesty had, ever so
+kindly and ever so mistakenly, helped her, and Lou had managed to
+teleport to the plane.
+
+And that wasn’t all, he thought dismally. That was far from all.
+
+“Let’s take another for-instance,” he said savagely, in what he
+thought was a caricature of the Manelli voice. In order for all three
+to teleport, there had to be perfect synchronization.
+
+Otherwise, they’d have arrived either at different places, or at the
+same place but at different times.
+
+And perfect synchronization on a psionic level meant telepathy. At
+least two of the three had to be telepathic. Her Majesty was, of
+course. Malone wasn’t.
+
+So Lou had to be telepathic, too.
+
+Malone told himself bitterly to quit calling the girl Lou. After the
+way she’d deceived him, she didn’t deserve it. Her name was Luba
+Garbitsch, and from now on he was going to call her Luba Garbitsch. In
+his own mind, anyway.
+
+Facts came tumbling in on him like the side of a mountain, falling on
+a hapless traveler during a landslide. And, Malone told himself, he
+had never had less help in all of his ill-starred life.
+
+Her Majesty had never, never suspected that Luba Garbitsch was
+anything other than the girl she pretended to be. That was negative
+evidence, true, and taken alone it meant nothing at all. But when you
+added the other facts to it, it showed, with perfect plainness, that
+Luba Garbitsch was the fortunate possessor of a mind shield as tough,
+as strong and as perfect as any Malone, O’Connor or good old Cartier
+Taylor had ever even thought of dreaming up.
+
+And then, very suddenly, another fact arrived, and pushed the rest out
+into the black night of Malone’s bitter mind. He punched hard on the
+intercom button and got the desk of the agent-in-charge.
+
+“Now what’s wrong?” the A-in-C said. “Ghosts got loose? Or do you want
+some help with a beautiful blonde heiress?”
+
+“What would I be doing,” Malone snapped, “with a beautiful blonde
+heiress?”
+
+The agent-in-charge looked thoughtful. It was obvious that he had been
+saving his one joke up for several hours. “You might be holding her,”
+he suggested, “for ransom, of course.”
+
+“That’s not funny,” Malone said. “Nothing is funny any more.”
+
+“Oh, all right,” the A-in-C said. “You Washington boys are just too
+good for the rest of us. What’s on your mind?”
+
+“You’ve got a twenty-four-hour watch on Luba Garbitsch, haven’t you?”
+Malone said.
+
+“Sure we have,” the A-in-C said. “Boyd said—”
+
+“Yes, I know what he said,” Malone cut in. “Give me a check on those
+men. I want to find out where she is right now. Right this minute.”
+
+The agent-in-charge shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “It’s none of my
+business. Hang on a second.”
+
+The screen went blank, but it didn’t go silent. Each of the agents, on
+a stakeout job like the Garbitsch one, would be carrying personal
+communicators, and Malone could hear the voice of the agent-in-charge
+as he spoke to them.
+
+He couldn’t make out all the words, and it wasn’t important anyhow.
+He’d know soon enough, he kept telling himself; just as soon as the
+A-in-C came back and reported.
+
+It seemed like about twelve years before he did.
+
+“She’s all right,” he said. “Nothing to worry about; she’s probably
+working late at her office, that’s all. She hasn’t gone home yet.”
+
+“Want to bet?” Malone snapped.
+
+“Don’t tempt me,” the A-in-C said. “I wouldn’t take your money—it’s
+probably counterfeit, printed in Washington.”
+
+“I’ll give you ten to one,” Malone said.
+
+“Ten to one, I’ll take,” the A-in-C said rapidly. “Ten to one is like
+taking candy from a traffic cop. I’m no amateur, even if I am stuck
+away in dull little old New York—and I know the boys I’ve got on
+stakeout. I’ll check, and—”
+
+“Let me know when you do,” Malone said. “I’ve got some long-distance
+calls to make.”
+
+* * * * *
+
+Forty-five minutes later, he had all the news he needed. Spot checks
+on PRS offices on the West Coast, where it wasn’t closing time yet,
+showed that all the executive officers had suddenly felt the need of
+extended vacations to parts unknown.
+
+That, if not exactly cheering news, was still welcome; Malone had more
+backing for his theory.
+
+An overseas call to New Scotland Yard in London took a little more
+time, and several arguments with bored overseas operators who,
+apparently, had nothing better to do than to confuse the customers.
+But Malone finally managed to get Assistant Commissioner C. E. Teal,
+who promised to check on Malone’s inquiry at once.
+
+It seemed like years before he called back, and Malone leaped to the
+phone.
+
+“Yes?” he said.
+
+Teal, red-faced and apparently masticating a stick of gum, said: “I
+got C. I. D. Commander Gideon to follow up on that matter, Mr. Malone.
+It is rather late here, as you must realize—”
+
+“Yes?” Malone said. “And they’ve all gone?”
+
+“Why, no,” Teal said, surprised. “A spot check shows that most of the
+executives of the London branch of the Psychical Research Society are
+spending quiet evenings in their homes. Our Inspector Ottermole
+actually spoke to Dr. Carnacki, the head of the office here.”
+
+“Oh,” Malone said.
+
+“They haven’t skipped,” Teal went on. “Is this in connection with
+anything serious, Mr. Malone?”
+
+“Not yet,” Malone said. “But I’ll let you know at once if there are
+any further developments. Thanks very much, Mr. Teal.”
+
+“A pleasure, Mr. Malone,” Teal said. “A pleasure.” And then, still
+masticating, he switched off.
+
+And that, Malone told himself, was definitely that. Of course the
+British PRS hadn’t gone underground; why should they? The British
+police weren’t on to them, as Scotland Yard showed. And, no matter
+what opinions Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I might hold in the matter,
+the FBI had absolutely no jurisdiction in the British Isles.
+
+Malone buried his face in his hands, thought about a cigar and decided
+that even a cigar might make him feel worse. Where were they? What
+were they doing now? What did they plan to do?
+
+Where had they gone?
+
+“Out of the everywhere,” he said in a hollow, sepulchral voice, “into
+the here.”
+
+But where was the here?
+
+He tried to make up his mind whether or not that made sense.
+Superficially, it sounded like plain bad English, but he wasn’t sure
+of anything any more. Things were getting much too confused.
+
+There was a knock at the door.
+
+Malone, without any hope at all, called: “Come in,” and the door
+opened.
+
+The agent-in-charge came in, and dropped a dollar on Malone’s desk.
+
+“So you checked,” Malone said.
+
+“I checked,” the A-in-C said sadly. “The boys went through the entire
+damned building. Not a sign of her. Not even a trace.”
+
+“There wouldn’t be one,” Malone said, shoving the dollar back to
+waiting hands. “Take the money; I knew what would happen. It was a
+sucker bet.”
+
+“Well, I feel like the sucker, all right,” the A-in-C said. “I don’t
+know how she did it.”
+
+“I do,” Malone said quietly. “Teleportation.”
+
+The A-in-C whistled. “Well,” he said, “it was a great secret as long
+as it was FBI property. But now, friend, all hell is going to bust
+loose.”
+
+“It already has,” Malone said hollowly.
+
+“Great,” the A-in-C said. “What now?”
+
+“Now,” Malone said, “I am going to go back to Washington. Take care of
+poor little old New York for me.”
+
+He closed his eyes, and vanished.
+
+When he opened them, he was in his Washington apartment. He went over
+to the big couch and sat down, feeling that if he were going to curse
+he might as well be comfortable while he did it. But when the air was
+bright blue, some minutes later, he didn’t feel any better. Cursing
+was not the answer.
+
+Nothing seemed to be.
+
+What was his next move?
+
+Where did he go from here?
+
+The more he thought about it, the more his mind spun. He was, he
+realized, at an absolute, total, dead end.
+
+Oh, there were things he could do. Malone knew that very well. He
+could make a lot of noise and go through a lot of waste motion—that
+was what it would amount to. He could have all the homes of all the
+missing PRS members checked. That would result, undoubtedly, in the
+discovery that the PRS members involved weren’t in their homes. He
+could have their files impounded, which would clutter everything with
+a great many more pieces of paper, and none of the pieces of paper
+would do any good to him. In general, he could have the entire FBI
+chasing all over hell and gone—and finding nothing whatever.
+
+No, it would be a waste of time, he told himself. That much was
+certain.
+
+And, though he probably had enough evidence to get the FBI in motion,
+he had nowhere near enough to carry the case into court, much less
+make a try at getting the case to stand up in court. That was one
+thing he couldn’t do, even if he wanted to: issue warrants for arrest
+on any basis whatever.
+
+But Malone was an FBI agent, and his motto was: “There’s always a
+way.” No normal method of tracking down the PRS members, and finding
+their present whereabouts, was going to work. They’d been covering
+themselves for such an emergency, undoubtedly, for a good many years
+and, due to telepathy, they certainly knew enough not to leave any
+clues around, of any kind.
+
+But nobody, Malone told himself, was perfect. There were clues lying
+around somewhere, he was sure of that; there had to be. The problem
+was, simply, to figure out where to look, and what to look for.
+
+Somewhere, the clues were sitting quietly and waiting for him to find
+them. The thought cheered him slightly, but not very much. Instead, he
+went into the kitchen and started heating water for coffee. He thought
+there might be a long night ahead of him, and sighed gently. But there
+was no help for it. The work had to be done, and done quickly.
+
+But when eight cigars had been reduced to ash, and what seemed like
+several gallons of coffee had sloshed their way into Malone’s interior
+workings, his mind was as blank as a baby’s. The lovely, opalescent
+dawn began to show in the East, and Malone swore at it. Then, haggard,
+red-eyed, confused, violently angry, and not one inch closer to a
+solution, he fell into a fitful doze on his couch.
+
+* * * * *
+
+When he awoke the sun was high in the sky, and outside his window the
+cheerful sound of traffic floated in the air. Downstairs somebody was
+playing a television set too loudly, and the voice reached Malone’s
+semi-aware mind in a great tinny shout:
+
+“And now, the makers of Bon-Ton B-Complex Bolsters—the blanket of
+health—present Mother Kohler’s Chit-Chat Hour!”
+
+The invisible audience screamed and howled. Malone ripped out a
+particularly foul oath and sat up on the couch. “That,” he muttered,
+“is a fine thing to wake up to.” He focused his eyes, with only
+slight difficulty, on his watch. The time was exactly noon.
+
+“But first,” the announcer burbled downstairs, “a word from Mother
+Kohler herself, about the brand new special B-Complex _Irradiated_
+Bolster you can get at your neighborhood stores....”
+
+“Shut up,” Malone said. He had wasted a lot of time doing nothing but
+sleeping, he told himself. This was no time to be listening to
+television. He got up and found, to his vague surprise, that he felt a
+lot better and more clear-headed than he’d been feeling. Maybe the
+sleep had done him some good.
+
+He yawned, blinked and stretched, and then he padded into the
+bathroom, showered and shaved and put on fresh clothes. He thought
+about having a morning cup of coffee, but last night’s dregs appeared
+to have taken up permanent residence in his digestive tract, and he
+decided against it at last. He swallowed some orange juice and toast
+and then, heaving a great sigh of resignation and brushing crumbs off
+his shirt, he teleported himself over to his office.
+
+He was going to have to face Burris eventually, he knew.
+
+And now was just as good, or as bad, a time as any.
+
+Malone didn’t hesitate. He punched the button on his intercom for
+Burris’ office and then sat back, with his eyes closed, for the
+well-known voice.
+
+It didn’t come.
+
+Instead, Wolf, the director’s secretary, spoke up.
+
+“Burris isn’t in, Malone,” he said. “He had to fly to Miami. I can get
+a call through to him on the plane, if it’s urgent, but he’ll be
+landing in about fifteen minutes. And he did say he’d call this
+afternoon.”
+
+“Oh,” Malone said. “Sure. Okay. It isn’t urgent.” He was just as glad
+of the reprieve; it gave him one more chance to work matters through
+to a solution, and report success instead of failure. “But what’s
+going on in Miami?” he added.
+
+“Don’t you read the papers?” Wolf asked.
+
+Everybody, Malone reflected, seemed to be asking him that lately. “I
+haven’t had time,” he said.
+
+“The governor of Mississippi was assassinated yesterday, at Miami
+Beach,” Wolf said.
+
+“Ah,” Malone said. He thought about it for a second. “Frankly,” he
+said, “this does not strike me as an irreparable loss to the nation.
+Not even to Mississippi.”
+
+“You express my views precisely,” Wolf said.
+
+“How about the killer?” Malone said. “I gather they haven’t got him
+yet, or Burris wouldn’t be on his way down.”
+
+“No,” Wolf said. “The killer would be on his way here instead. They
+haven’t got him, Malone. It seems Governor Flarion was walking along
+Collins Avenue when somebody fired at him, using a high-powered rifle
+with, I guess, a scope sight.”
+
+“Professional,” Malone commented.
+
+“It looks like it,” Wolf said. “Nobody even heard the sniper’s shot;
+the governor just fell over, right there in the street. And by the
+time his bodyguards found out what had happened, it was impossible
+even to be sure just which way he was facing when the shot had been
+fired.”
+
+“And, as I remember Collins Avenue—” Malone started.
+
+“Right,” Wolf said. “Out where Governor Flarion was taking his stroll,
+there’s an awful lot of it to search. The boys are trying to find
+somebody who might have seen a man acting suspicious in any of the
+nearby buildings, or heard a shot, or seen anybody at all lurking or
+loitering anywhere remotely close to the scene.”
+
+“Lovely,” Malone said. “Sounds like a nice complicated job.”
+
+“You don’t know the half of it,” Wolf said. “There’s also the Miami
+Beach Chamber of Commerce. According to them, Flarion died of a heart
+attack, and not even in Miami Beach. The bullet and the body are
+supposed to be written off as just coincidences, to keep the fair name
+of Miami Beach unsullied.”
+
+“All I can say,” Malone offered, “is good luck. This is the saddest
+day in American history since the assassination of Huey P. Long.”
+
+“Agreed,” Wolf said. “Want me to tell Burris you called?”
+
+“Right,” Malone said. He flicked off.
+
+Now, he asked himself, how did the assassination of Governor Nemours
+P. Flarion fit in with anything? Granted, good old Nemours P. had been
+a horrible mistake, a paranoid, self-centered, would-be dictator whose
+talents as a rabble-rouser and a fearmonger had somehow managed to get
+him elected to a governorship. Certainly nobody felt particularly
+unhappy about his death. But he wouldn’t fit into the pattern. Malone
+reminded himself that that was one more thing he had to find out when
+he got the chance.
+
+The trouble lay in finding an opportunity, he thought—and then he
+corrected himself.
+
+Not _finding_ it—_making_ it. Nobody was going to hand him anything
+on a silver serving salver.
+
+He punched the intercom again and got the Records office.
+
+“Yes, sir?” a familiar voice said.
+
+“Potter?” Malone said. “This is Malone. I want facsimiles of
+everything we have on the Psychical Research Society, on Sir Lewis
+Carter, and on Luba Vasilovna Garbitsch. Both of those last are
+connected with the Society.”
+
+“Right,” Potter said. “They’ll be up at once.”
+
+Then he punched again, and asked for the latest copy of the Washington
+_Post_. He gave the article on Governor Flarion one quick glance, but
+it didn’t contain anything in the way of facts that he hadn’t already
+had from Wolf. After that, he left it and concentrated on the more
+prosaic, human-interest news, the smaller stories.
+
+     FIFTH SPLINTER GROUP FORMS IN DCA BATTLE
+
+That was an interesting one, he thought. The Daughters of Colonial
+Americans had about reached the point of diminishing returns in their
+battle over the claims of Rose Carswell Elder, a descendant of a Negro
+freedman named William Elder who had lived in Boston in 1776 and
+fought on the side of the Colonies during the Revolution. One more
+splinter group, Malone thought, and there’d be as many splinters as
+members. Rose Carswell Elder was pressing her claim for membership,
+and the ladies were replying by throwing crockery and hard words at
+each other.
+
+Then there was the Legion of American War Veterans. The headline on
+this one read:
+
+     LAWV OUSTS ‘ROWDIES’: AID MEETING CONTINUES
+
+The “rowdies,” Malone discovered, were a large minority group that
+wanted the good old days of electric canes, paper hats, whistles and
+pretty girls. “The Legion has grown up,” a spokesman told them. “This
+convention is being held to discuss the possibility of increased
+technological aid to India and Africa. There is no place for
+tomfoolery or high jinks.”
+
+The expulsion order had been carried by a record majority.
+
+And then there were two items, on different pages, that seemed to
+contradict each other. The first was a small headline on page
+fourteen:
+
+     RESIGNATIONS REACH NEW HIGH IN U.S. COLLEGE FACULTIES
+
+Teachers were apparently resigning all over the place, in virtually
+every department of virtually every college. That made sense. And the
+other item, on page three, made just as much sense:
+
+     HIGHER TAXES VOTED THROUGHOUT U.S.
+     FOR TEACHER INCOME RISE
+     State and Federal Aid Also Promised
+     in Drive to Raise Salaries Now
+
+Apparently, teachers were resigning just as they were about to get
+more money than they’d ever seen before. But Malone could fit that
+into the pattern easily enough; it was perfectly obvious, once he
+thought about it.
+
+Malone didn’t have time to go through much more of the paper; the
+facsimile records he’d been waiting for arrived, and he put the _Post_
+aside and concentrated on them instead. Maybe somewhere in the records
+was the clue he desperately needed.
+
+The PRS was widely spread, all right. It had branches in almost every
+major city in the United States, in Europe, South Africa, South
+America and Australia. There was even a small branch society in
+Greenland. True, the Communist disapproval of such non-materialistic,
+un-Marxian objectives as Psychical Research showed up in the fact that
+there were no registered branches in the Sino-Soviet bloc. But that,
+Malone thought, didn’t really matter. Maybe in Russia they called
+themselves the Lenin Study Group, or the Better Borshcht League. He
+was fairly sure, from what he’d experienced, that the PRS had some
+kind of organization even behind the Iron Curtain.
+
+Money didn’t seem to be much of a problem, either. Malone checked for
+the supporters of the organization and found a microfilmed list that
+ran into the hundreds of thousands of names, most of them ordinary
+people who seemed to be interested in spiritualism and the like, and
+who donated a few dollars apiece each year to the PRS. Besides this
+mass of small donations, of course, there were a few large ones, from
+independently wealthy men who gave support to the organization and
+seemed actively interested in its aims.
+
+It wasn’t an unusual picture; it was just an exceptionally big one.
+
+Malone sighed and went on to the personal dossiers.
+
+Sir Lewis Carter himself was a well-known astronomer and
+mathematician. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal
+Astronomical Society and the Royal Mathematical Society. He had been
+knighted for his contributions in higher mathematics only two years
+before he had come to live in the United States. Malone went over the
+papers dealing with his entry into the country carefully, but they
+were all in order and they contained absolutely no clues he could use.
+
+Sir Lewis’ books on political and historical philosophy had been
+well-received, and he had also written a novel, _But Some Are More
+Equal_, which, for a few weeks after publication, had managed to reach
+the bottom of the best-seller list.
+
+And that was that. Malone tried to figure out whether all this
+information did him any good at all, and he didn’t have to think for
+very long. The answer was no. He opened the next dossier.
+
+Luba Vasilovna Garbitsch had been born in New York. Her mother had
+been a woman of Irish descent named Mary O’Keefe, and had died in ’68.
+Her father, of course, had now been revealed as a Russian agent, and
+was at present making his home, such as it probably was, in good old
+Moscow.
+
+Malone sighed. Somewhere in the dossiers, he was sure, there was a
+clue, the basic clue that would tell him everything he needed to know.
+His prescience had never been so strong; he knew perfectly well that
+he was staring at the biggest, most startling and most complete
+disclosure of all. And he couldn’t see it.
+
+He stared at the folders for a long minute. What did they tell him?
+What was the clue?
+
+And then, very slowly, the soft light of a prodigal sun illuminated
+his mind.
+
+“Mr. Malone,” Malone said gently, “you are a damned fool. There are
+times when it is necessary to discard the impossible after you have
+seen that the obscure is the obvious.”
+
+He wasn’t sure whether that meant anything, or even whether he knew
+what he was saying. He was sure of only one thing: the final answer.
+
+And it _was_ obvious. Obvious as all hell.
+
+
+
+
+13
+
+
+There was, of course, only one thing to do, and only one place to go.
+Malone went downstairs without even stopping to wave farewell to the
+agent-in-charge, and climbed into the big, specially-built FBI Lincoln
+that waited for him.
+
+“Want a driver?” one of the mechanics asked.
+
+“No, thanks,” Malone said. “This one’s a solo job.”
+
+That was for sure. He drove out onto the streets and into the heavy
+late afternoon traffic of Washington, D. C. The Lincoln handled
+smoothly, but Malone didn’t press his luck among the rushing cars. He
+wasn’t in any hurry. He had all the time in the world, and he knew it.
+They—and, for once, Malone knew just who “they” were—would still be
+waiting for him when he got there.
+
+_If_ he got there, he thought suddenly, dodging a combination
+roadblock consisting of a green Plymouth making an illegal turn, a
+fourteen-year-old boy on a bicycle and a sweet young girl pushing a
+baby carriage. He managed to get past and wiped his forehead with one
+hand. He continued driving, even more carefully, until he was out of
+the city.
+
+It took quite a lot of time. Washington traffic was getting worse and
+worse with every passing month, and the pedestrians were as nonchalant
+as ever. As Malone turned a corner, a familiar face popped into view,
+practically in front of his car. He swerved and got by without
+committing homicide, and a cheerful voice said: “Thanks, sorry.”
+
+“It’s okay, Chester,” Malone said. The big man skipped back to the
+sidewalk and watched the car go by. Malone knew him slightly, a
+private eye who did some work on the fringes of Washington crime;
+basically a nice guy, but a little too active for Malone’s taste.
+
+For a second he thought of asking the man to accompany him, but the
+last thing Malone needed was muscle. What he wanted was brains, and he
+even thought he might be developing some of those.
+
+He was nearly sure of it by the time he finally did leave the city and
+get out onto the highway that went south into the depths of Virginia.
+And, while he drove, he began to use that brain, letting his reflexes
+take over most of the driving problems now that the Washington traffic
+tangle was behind him.
+
+He took all his thoughts from behind the shield that had sheltered
+them and arrayed them neatly before him. Everything was perfectly
+clear; all he had to do now was explain it.
+
+Malone had wondered, over the years, about the detectives in books.
+They always managed to wrap everything up in the last chapter—and
+that was all right. But they always had a whole crowd of suspects
+listening to them, too. And Malone knew perfectly well that he could
+never manage a set-up like that. People would be interrupting him.
+Things would happen. Dogs would rush in and start a fight on the
+floor. There would be earthquakes, or else somebody would suddenly
+faint and interrupt him.
+
+But now, at long last, he realized, he had his chance.
+
+Nobody, he thought happily, could interrupt him. And he could explain
+to his heart’s content.
+
+Because the members of the PRS were telepathic. And Malone, he thought
+cheerfully, was not.
+
+Somebody, he was sure, would be tuned in on him as he drove toward
+their Virginia hiding place. And he hoped that that somebody would
+alert everybody else, so they could all tune in and hear his grand
+final explanation of everything.
+
+_And a hearty good afternoon to everybody_, he thought. _A very hearty
+and happy and sunny good afternoon to all—and most especially to Miss
+Luba Garbitsch. I hope she’s the one who’s tuned in—or that somebody
+has alerted her by now, because I’d rather talk to her than to anyone
+else I can think of out there._
+
+_Nothing personal, you understand. It’s just that I’d like to show off
+a little. I don’t need to hide anything from you—as a matter of
+plain, simple fact, I can’t. Not with my shield down._
+
+He paused then, and, in his imagination, he could almost hear Lou’s
+voice.
+
+“I’m listening, Kenneth,” the voice said. “Go on.”
+
+_Well, then_, he thought. He fished around in his mind for a second,
+wondering exactly where to start. Then he decided, in the best
+traditions of the detective story, not to mention _Alice in
+Wonderland_, to start at the beginning.
+
+_The dear old Psychical Research Society_, he thought, _had been going
+along for a good many years now—since the 1880’s, as a matter of
+fact, or somewhere near there. That’s a long time and a lot of
+research. A lot of famous and intelligent men and women have belonged
+to the Society. And in all that time, they’ve worked hard, and worked
+sincerely, in testing every kind of psychic phenomenon. They’ve worked
+impartially and scientifically to find out whether a given unusual
+incident was explicable in terms of known natural laws, or was the
+result of some unknown force._
+
+_And it’s hardly surprising that, after about a hundred years of work,
+something finally came of it._
+
+“Not surprising at all,” he imagined Lou’s voice saying. “You’re
+making things very clear, Kenneth.”
+
+Or had that been “Sir Kenneth”? Malone wasn’t sure, but it didn’t
+really matter. He spun the car around a curve in the highway, smiled
+gently to himself, and went on.
+
+_Naturally, to the average man in the street, the Society was just a
+bunch of crackpots, and the more respected and famous the people who
+belonged to it, the happier he was; it just proved his superiority to
+them. He didn’t deal with crackpot notions, did he?_
+
+_No, the Society did. And nobody except the members paid much
+attention to what was going on._
+
+_I remember one of the book facsimiles you gave me, for instance. Some
+man, whose name I can’t recall, wrote a great “exposé” of the Society,
+in which he tried to prove that Sir Lewis Carter and certain other
+members were trying to take over the world and run it to suit
+themselves, making a sort of horrible dictatorship out of their power
+and position. At that, he wasn’t really far from the truth, though he
+had it turned around a little. But the book shows that he has no
+knowledge whatever of what psionics is, or how it works. He seems to
+me to be just a little afraid of it, which probably adds to his
+ignorance. And, as a result, he got a twisted idea of what the PRS is
+actually doing._
+
+He could almost hear Lou’s voice again. “Yes,” she was saying. “I
+remember the book. It was put in our reference library for its
+humorous aspects.”
+
+_That’s right_, Malone thought. _It would be only funny to you. But it
+would be frightening and terrible to an awful lot of people simply
+because they wouldn’t understand what the Society was all about._
+
+“All right,” Lou’s voice said helpfully. “And what _is_ it all about?”
+
+Malone settled back in the driver’s seat as the car continued to spin
+along the road. _It seems to me_, he thought carefully, _that any
+telepath has to go one of two ways. Either, like Her Majesty or the
+others we found when we discovered her two years ago, the telepath
+ends up insane—or perhaps commits suicide, which is simply one step
+further in retreat—or else he learns to understand and control his
+own powers, and to understand other human beings so well that, if he
+actually did control the world, everyone would benefit in the long
+run._
+
+_The difference between the two kinds is the difference between Her
+Majesty and the PRS._
+
+“That’s good thinking,” he could hear Lou say.
+
+_No, it isn’t_, he thought; _it’s no more than guessing, and it could
+be just as wild as you please. But there is one thing I do know: the
+way to get a better world, or anyhow the first step, is to clear the
+road ahead. And that means getting rid of the fools, idiots, maniacs,
+blockheads, morons, psychopaths, paranoids, timidity-ridden,
+fear-worshipers, fanatics, thieves, criminals and a whole lot more._
+
+“Get rid of them?” Lou’s voice said.
+
+_Well_, Malone thought, _I don’t mean they’ve got to be killed or
+driven out of the civilized world. You’ve just got to get them out of
+any place where their influence is heavily felt on society as a
+whole._
+
+“All right,” Lou’s voice said pleasantly. “And how could we go about
+that? Do we write nasty letters to the editor?”
+
+_There’s a much more effective way_, Malone thought. _There’s no
+trouble in getting rid of a man if you can make him expose himself.
+And you’ve managed that pretty well. You’ve thwarted their idiotic
+plans, made them stumble over their own fumble-mindedness, played on
+their neuroses, concocted errors for them to fight and, in general,
+rigged things in any possible way so that they’d quit, or get fired,
+or lose elections, or get arrested, or just generally get put out of
+circulation somehow._
+
+_It’s extremely effective—and it works very well._
+
+_Sometimes, you’ve only had to put the blocks to individuals.
+Sometimes whole nations have had to go. And sometimes it’s been
+in-between, and you’ve managed to foul up whole organizations with
+misplaced papers missent messages, error, and changed minds and
+everything else you can think of._
+
+_As a matter of fact, it sounds like fun._
+
+“Well,” he imagined Lou saying, “it is fun, in away. But it’s a deadly
+serious business, too.”
+
+_Sure it is_, Malone thought. _I think the first time that came home
+to me was when I saw what was happening in Russia, and compared it to
+what had been going on over here. Tom Boyd saw that, too, when I
+pointed it out to him—as you probably know if you were spying on my
+mind at the time._
+
+_Not that I mind that in the least._
+
+_Come more often, by all means._
+
+_But Tom, in case you weren’t listening, said: “Over here there are a
+lot of confused jerks and idiots.... And in Russia there’s a lot of
+confusion.”_
+
+_Now, that’s perfectly true, and it spells out the difference. Over
+here, you’ve been confusing the jerks and the idiots, getting rid of
+them so the system can work properly. Over in Russia, on the other
+hand, you’ve left the jerks and the idiots all alone to do their dirty
+work, and you’ve just added to the confusion where necessary, so that
+the system will break down of its own weight._
+
+“But, after all,” Lou said, “things look pretty bad over here, too.
+Look at the papers.”
+
+_Everybody_, Malone thought, _has been telling me to go and look at the
+newspapers. And when I do look at them I find all sorts of evidence of
+confusion. Teachers resigning, senators and representatives goofing up
+bills on Congress, gang wars cluttering up the streets with cadavers
+and making things tough for the Sanitation Department, factional fights
+in various organizations. Now, all of that looks pretty horrible in the
+papers, but do you know something? It isn’t horrible at all._
+
+_It’s pretty damn good, as a matter of fact._
+
+_The teachers who are resigning, for instance, are the nincompoops
+who’ve got to be pruned out so that competent teachers can come in.
+And, with the higher salaries, more and more competent men and women
+are going to be attracted to the job. The universities are going to be
+freer and better places to work in; they won’t be monopolies any
+more._
+
+“Monopolies?” Lou said.
+
+_In restraint of knowledge_, Malone thought. _The old monopoly was in
+restraint of trade, and legal action helped to kill that kind. The
+monopoly in restraint of knowledge took a little more killing, but
+you’re doing the job quite nicely. And not only in the schools._
+
+_The factional fights are having the same result. Look at the AAAM,
+for instance. That organization is a monopoly, pure and simple.
+Simple, anyhow. And what the factional fights are doing to it is just
+breaking up the monopoly and letting knowledge free again._
+
+_And then we come to Congress. Senators and representatives are having
+a terrible time, some of them. There’s a fight going on between
+Furbisher and Deeks because Deeks has discovered some evidence against
+Furbisher. Who’s having the terrible time?_
+
+_All of them?_
+
+_Nope. Furbisher is. Deeks isn’t._
+
+_And that’s the way it’s going all over. The useful, necessary
+legislation is going through Congress now without being cluttered up
+by stupid dam bills and water bills and other idiocies that simply
+clog the works._
+
+_And then, of course, there are the gang wars. Now, I feel as sorry
+for the Sanitation Department as anybody, but at least they’re
+cleaning the streets for good now. The boys who are dying off and
+getting sent to hospitals and jails are just the ones who should have
+been sent away long ago. Everybody knows that, but nobody can prove
+it._
+
+_Except the PRS._
+
+_And the PRS is busy doing just what it can about that proof._
+
+_And all it takes is a few of you. I don’t know how many—I don’t know
+how many of you there really are, for that matter. But it must be a
+fair number to stock all your branches with “top-level” executives and
+the lower-level men and women who really believe in the PRS blind, and
+do their best to keep it working._
+
+_There are probably a lot of ways it might work, but the simplest and
+best way I can think of is this one: there’s a clearing-house sort of
+set-up, and information comes in from various telepathic spies working
+for the PRS, about various projected activities of the imbecile
+contingent._
+
+_And, from this information, you figure out the best time and place
+for lightning to strike, and you select the kind of lightning it’s
+going to be. Here it’s a misplaced letter, there some “facts” that
+aren’t facts, and somewhere else a dropped package of secret records.
+Somebody goofs—and is exposed._
+
+_Maybe it works on the local-organization level. Maybe there are teams
+all over the country, all ready to synchronize their minds and jab
+somebody in the thought processes at just the right time, in just the
+right way, as soon as they get the word. That’s one way of doing it,
+maybe the best way._
+
+_There are others, but it doesn’t really matter how that end of it
+works. The important thing is that it does work._
+
+_And, when it works, it can certainly create quite a mess. Yes-sirree,
+Bob. Or Lou, as the case may be._
+
+_I sure hope somebody’s picking all this up, because I’d hate to have
+to explain it again when I get there._
+
+_Are you there, anybody?_
+
+Malone imagined he heard Lou’s voice. “Yes, Ken,” she said. “Yes, I’m
+here.”
+
+But, of course, there was no way for them to get through to him. They
+were telepathic, but Kenneth J. Malone wasn’t he told himself sadly.
+
+_Hello, out there_, he thought. _I hope you’ve been listening so far,
+because there isn’t going to be too much more. But there are a couple
+of things that still need to be cleared up. I’ve got some answers, but
+there are others I’m going to need._
+
+_There’s Russia, for instance. It does seem to me as if your teams in
+Russia, whatever they’re calling themselves, are having a lot more fun
+than the U. S. teams. For one thing they’ve got an easier job._
+
+_In this country, the teams are looking for ways to get rid of the
+blockheads, and there are a lot of them. In Russia, you don’t have to
+get rid of the blockheads. All you have to do is clear the road for
+them. And you can do that by fouling up the more intelligent people._
+
+“Intelligent people?” he could hear Lou say.
+
+_Intelligence doesn’t mean good sense_, Malone thought. _I don’t doubt
+that the men who are maintaining Russia’s power are intelligent men—
+but what they’re doing is bad for the world as a whole, in the long
+run._
+
+_So you foul them up, and leave the blockheads a clear field to run
+the country into the ground. And that’s easier than fouling up the
+blockheads._
+
+_Sure it is._
+
+_There are fewer intelligent, active people around than there are
+blockheads._
+
+_Always were._
+
+_And maybe there always will be—but not if the PRS can help it._
+
+_Oh, and by the way_, Malone thought. _You do know how I spotted you,
+don’t you? You were tuned in then, weren’t you?_
+
+_And I don’t mean just Lou. I mean all of you._
+
+_In a world of blind men, the man who can see stands out. In a world
+of the insane, the sane man stands out._
+
+_And in a world where organizations are regularly being confused and
+fouled up—either as whole organizations, or through your attempts to
+get rid of individual members—a smooth-running, efficient
+organization stands out like a sore thumb._
+
+_Frankly, it took me longer to see it than it should have._
+
+_But I’ve got the answer at last—the main answer. Though, as I say,
+there are some others I’d like to have._
+
+_Like, for instance, Russia. And exactly what did happen that night in
+Moscow._
+
+
+
+
+14
+
+
+At this point Malone suddenly became aware of a sound that was not
+coming from his own mind. It was coming from somewhere behind his car,
+and it was a very loud sound. It was, he discovered when he looked
+back, the siren of a highway patrolman on a motorcycle, coming toward
+him at imminent risk of life and limb and waving frantically with an
+unbelievably free hand.
+
+Malone glanced down at the speedometer. With a sigh, he realized that
+his reflexes had allowed him a little leeway, and that he was going
+slightly over the legal speed limit for this Virginia highway. He
+shook his head, eased up on the accelerator, and began to apply the
+brakes.
+
+By the time he had pulled over to the side of the road, the highway
+patrolman was coming to a halt behind the big Lincoln. Malone watched
+him check the number on the rear plate and then walk slowly around to
+the window on the driver’s side. “Can’t you hurry?” Malone muttered
+under his breath. “All this Virginian ease is okay in its place,
+but—” In the meanwhile he was getting out his identification, and by
+the time the patrolman reached him he had it in his hand.
+
+“I’m sorry,” he said.
+
+“Sorry?” the patrolman said, frowning. He had an open, boyish face
+with freckles and a pug nose. He looked like somebody’s kid brother,
+very dependable but just a little cute. “What for?” he said.
+
+Malone shrugged. “What else?” he said. “Speeding.”
+
+“Oh, that,” the patrolman said. “Why, don’t you worry about that.”
+
+“Don’t worry about it?” Malone said. This particular kid brother was
+obviously a little nuts, and should have been put away years ago. He
+ground his teeth silently, but he didn’t make any complaints. It was
+never wise, he knew, to irritate a traffic cop of any sort.
+
+“Sure not,” the patrolman said. “Why, we don’t pay any attention out
+here until a fella hits ten miles over the posted limit. That’s okay.”
+
+“Fine,” Malone said cheerily. “Then I can drive on?”
+
+“Now, just hold it a second there,” the patrolman said. “Let’s see
+your identification if you don’t mind.”
+
+Malone held it out wordlessly. The patrolman, obviously intent on
+finding out just what kind of paper the card was made of, who had
+printed it and whether there were any germs on it, gave it a long,
+careful scrutiny. Malone shifted slightly in his seat, counted to ten
+and managed to say nothing.
+
+Then the patrolman started reading the card aloud. “Kenneth J.
+Malone,” he said in a tone of some surprise. “Special Agent of the
+FBI.” He looked up. “That right?” he said. “What it says here?”
+
+“That’s right,” Malone said. “And you can have my autograph later.” He
+regretted the last sentence as soon as it was out of his mouth, but
+the patrolman didn’t seem to notice.
+
+“Then you’re the man, all right,” he said happily. “I caught your
+plate number as you went on by me, back there.”
+
+“Plate number?” Malone said. “What am I supposed to have done?” He’d
+overslept, he knew, but that was the only violation of even his
+personal code that he could think of. And it didn’t seem likely that
+the Virginia Highway Patrol was sending out its men to arrest people
+who overslept.
+
+“Why, Mr. Malone,” the patrolman said with honest surprise written all
+over his Norman Rockwell face, “as far as I know you didn’t do a thing
+wrong.”
+
+“But—”
+
+“They just told us to be on the watch for a black 1973 Lincoln with
+your number, and see if you were driving it. They did say you’d
+probably be driving it.”
+
+“Good,” Malone said. “And I am. And I’d like to continue doing so.” He
+paused and then added, “But what happened?”
+
+“Well,” the patrolman said, in exactly the manner of a man starting
+out to tell a long, interesting story about the Wars of the Spanish
+Succession, “well, sir, it seems FBI Headquarters in Washington, they
+got in touch with the Highway Patrol Headquarters, down in Richmond,
+and Highway Patrol Headquarters—”
+
+“Down in Richmond,” Malone muttered resignedly.
+
+“That’s right,” the patrolman said in a pleased voice. “Well, they
+called all the local barracks, and then we got the message on our
+radios.” He stopped, exactly as if he thought he had finished.
+
+Malone counted to ten again, made it twenty and then found that he was
+capable of speech. “What?” he said in a calm, patient voice, “was the
+message about?”
+
+“Well,” the patrolman said, “it seems some fella down in Washington,
+fella name of Thomas Boyd, they said it was, wants to talk to you
+pretty bad.”
+
+“He could have called me on the car phone,” Malone said in what he
+thought was a reasonable tone of voice. “He didn’t have to—”
+
+“There’s no call for yelling at me, Mr. Malone,” the patrolman said
+reproachfully. “I only obeyed my orders, which were to locate your
+black 1973 Lincoln and see if you were driving it, and give you a
+message. That’s all.”
+
+“It’s enough,” Malone muttered. “He didn’t have to send out the
+militia to round me up.”
+
+“Oh, no, Mr. Malone,” the patrolman said. “Not the militia. Highway
+Patrol. We don’t rightly have any connection with the militia at all.”
+
+“Glad to hear it,” Malone said. He picked up the receiver of the car
+phone and waited for the buzz that would show that he was connected
+with Communications Central in Washington.
+
+It didn’t come.
+
+“Oh, yes,” the patrolman said suddenly. “I suppose that’s why this Mr.
+Boyd, he couldn’t call you on the car telephone, Mr. Malone. The
+message we got, it also says that the fella at the FBI garage in
+Washington just forgot to plug in that phone there.”
+
+“Oh,” Malone said. “Well, thanks for telling me.”
+
+“You’re right welcome, Mr. Malone,” the patrolman said “You can plug
+it in now.”
+
+“I intend to,” Malone said through his teeth. He closed his eyes for a
+long second, and then opened them again. He saw the interested face of
+the patrolman looking down at him. Hurriedly, he turned away, felt
+underneath the dashboard until he found the dangling plug, and
+inserted it into its socket.
+
+The buzz now arrived.
+
+Malone heaved a great sigh and punched for Boyd’s office. Then he
+looked around.
+
+The patrolman was still standing at the car window. He was looking
+down at Malone with an interested, slightly blank expression.
+
+Malone thought of several things to say, and chose the most harmless.
+“Thanks a lot,” he told the patrolman. “I appreciate your stopping off
+to let me know.”
+
+“Oh, that’s all right, Mr. Malone,” the patrolman said. “That was my
+orders, to do that. And even if they weren’t, it was no trouble at
+all. Any time. I’d always be glad to do anything for the FBI.”
+
+“Boyd here,” a tinny voice from the phone said.
+
+Malone eyed the patrolman sourly. “Malone here,” he said. “What’s the
+trouble, Tom? I—No, wait a minute.”
+
+“Ken!” Boyd’s voice said. “I’ve been trying to—”
+
+“Hold it a second,” Malone said. He opened his mouth, and then he saw
+a car go by. The patrolman hadn’t seen it. Malone felt sorry for the
+driver, but not too sorry. “Say!” he said to the patrolman.
+
+“Yes, sir?” the patrolman said.
+
+“That boy was really going, wasn’t he?” Malone said. “He must have
+been doing at least ninety.”
+
+The patrolman jerked his head around to stare at the disappearing car.
+“Well—” he said, and then: “Yes, sir. Thank you, Mr. Malone. Thanks.
+I’ll see you later.” He raced for his machine, swung aboard and roared
+down the road, guiding with one hand and manipulating the controls of
+his radar set with the other.
+
+Malone waved him a cheery farewell, and got back to the phone.
+
+“Okay, Tom,” he said. “Go ahead.”
+
+“Who was that you were talking to?” Boyd asked.
+
+“Oh, just a motorcycle patrolman,” Malone said. “He wanted to be
+helpful, so I told him to go chase a Buick.”
+
+“Why a Buick?” Boyd said, interestedly.
+
+“Why not?” Malone said. “There happened to be one handy at the time.
+Now, what’s on your mind?”
+
+“I’ve been searching all over hell for you,” Boyd said. “I wish you’d
+just leave some word where you were going, and then I wouldn’t have
+to—”
+
+“Damn it,” Malone cut in. “Tom, just tell me what you want. In
+straightforward, simple language. It just took me ten minutes to pry a
+few idiotic facts out of a highway patrolman. Don’t make me go through
+it all over again with you.”
+
+“Okay, okay,” Boyd said. “Keep your pants on. But here’s the dope: I
+just flew in from New York, and I brought all the files on the case—
+the stuff you left in your office in New York, remember?”
+
+“Right,” Malone said. “Thanks.”
+
+“And I think we may be able to get the Big Cheese,” Boyd went on.
+
+“Manelli?” Malone said.
+
+“None other than the famous Cesare Antonio,” Boyd said. “It seems two
+of his most valued lieutenants were found in a garage in Queens,
+practically weighted down with machine-gun bullets.”
+
+Malone thought of Manelli, complaining sadly about the high overhead
+of murder. “And where does that get us?” he said.
+
+“Well,” Boyd said, “whoever did the job forgot to search the bodies.”
+
+“Oh-oh,” Malone said.
+
+“Very much oh-oh,” Boyd said. “They’re loaded down, not only with
+lead, but with paper. There are documents linking Manelli right up to
+the International Truckers’ Union—a direct tie-in with Mike Sand. And
+Sand now says he’s tied in with the Great Lakes Transport Union in
+Chicago.”
+
+“This sounds like a big one,” Malone said.
+
+“You have no idea,” Boyd said. “And in the middle of all this, Burris
+called.”
+
+“Burris?” Malone said.
+
+“That’s right,” Boyd said. “He wants me to go on down to Florida and
+take over the investigation of the Flarion assassination. So it looks
+as if I’m going to miss most of the fun.”
+
+“Too bad,” Malone said.
+
+“But maybe not all,” Boyd said. “It may tie in with the case we’re
+working on. At least, that’s what Burris thinks.”
+
+“Yes,” Malone said. “I can see why he thinks so. Did he have any
+message for me, by the way?”
+
+“Not exactly,” Boyd said.
+
+Malone blinked. “Not exactly?” he said. “What’s that supposed to
+mean?”
+
+“Well,” Boyd said, “he says he does have something to tell you, but
+it’ll wait until he sees you. Then, he says, he’ll tell you
+personally.”
+
+“Great,” Malone said.
+
+“Maybe it’s a surprise,” Boyd said. “Maybe you’re fired.”
+
+“I wouldn’t have the luck,” Malone said. “But if I get any leads on
+the Flarion job, I’ll let you know right away.”
+
+“Sure,” Boyd said. “Thanks. And—by the way, what are you doing now?”
+
+“Me?” Malone said. “I’m driving.”
+
+“Yes, I know,” Boyd said patiently. “To where, and why? Or is this
+another secret? Sometimes I think nobody loves me any more.”
+
+“Oh, don’t be silly,” Malone said. “The entire city of Miami Beach is
+awaiting your arrival with bated breath.”
+
+“But what are you doing?” Boyd said.
+
+Malone chose his words carefully. “I’m just checking a lead,” he said
+at last. “I don’t know if it’s going to pan out or not, but I thought
+I’d drive down to Richmond and check on a name I’ve got. I’ll call you
+about it in the morning, Tom, and let you know what the result is.”
+
+“Oh,” Boyd said. “Okay. Sure. So long, Ken.”
+
+“So long,” Malone said. He hung up the phone, put the car into gear
+again and roared off down U. S. Highway Number One. He didn’t feel
+entirely happy about the way things had gone; he’d been forced to lie
+to Tom Boyd, and that just wasn’t right.
+
+However, there was no help for it. It was actually better this way, he
+told himself hopefully. After all, the less Tom knew from now on, the
+better off he was going to be. The better off everyone would be.
+
+He went on through Fredericksburg without incident, but he didn’t
+continue on to Richmond. Instead, he turned off U. S. 1 when he
+reached a little town called Thornburg, which was smaller than he had
+believed a town could be and live. He began following a secondary road
+out into the countryside.
+
+The countryside, of course, was filled with country, in the shape of
+hills, birds, trees, flowers, grass and other distractions to the
+passing motorist. It took Malone quite a bit longer than he expected
+to find the place he was looking for, and he finally came to the sad
+conclusion that country estates are just as difficult to find as
+houses in Brooklyn. In both cases, he thought, there was the same
+frantic search down what seemed to be a likely route, the same
+disappointment when the route turned out to lead nowhere, and the same
+discovery that no one had ever heard of the place and, in fact,
+doubted very strongly whether it even existed.
+
+But he found it at last, rounding a curve in a narrow black-top road
+and spotting the house beyond a grove of trees. He recognized it
+instantly.
+
+He had seen it so often that he felt as if he knew it intimately.
+
+It was a big, rambling, Colonial-type mansion, painted a blinding and
+beautiful white, with a broad, pillared porch and a great carved front
+door. The front windows were curtained in rich purples, and before the
+house was a great front garden, and tall old trees. Malone
+half-expected Scarlett O’Hara to come tripping out of the house at any
+moment.
+
+Inside it, however, if Malone were right, was not the magnetic
+Scarlett. Inside the house were some of the most important members of
+the Psychical Research Society.
+
+But it was impossible to tell from the outside. Nothing moved on the
+well-kept grounds, and the windows didn’t show so much as the flutter
+of a purple curtain. There was no sound. No cars were parked around
+the house, nor, Malone thought as he remembered _Gone With the Wind,_
+were there any horses or carriages.
+
+The place looked deserted.
+
+Malone thought he knew better, but it took a few minutes for him to
+get up enough courage to go up the long driveway. He stared at the
+house. It was an old one, he knew, built long before the Civil War and
+originally commanding a huge plantation. Now, all that remained of
+that vast parcel of land was the few acres that surrounded the house.
+
+But the original family still inhabited it, proud of the house and of
+their part in its past. Over the years, Malone knew, they had kept it
+up scrupulously, and the place had been both restored and modernized
+on the inside without harming the classic outlines of the
+hundred-and-fifty-year-old structure.
+
+A fence surrounded the estate, but the front gate was swinging open.
+Malone saw it and took a deep breath. Now, he told himself, or never.
+He drove the Lincoln through the opening slowly, alert for almost
+anything.
+
+There was no disturbance. Thirty yards from the front door he pulled
+the car to a cautious stop and got out. He started to walk toward the
+building. Each step seemed to take whole minutes, and everything he
+had thought raced through his mind again.
+
+Nothing seemed to move anywhere, except Malone himself.
+
+Was he right? Were the PRS people really here? Or had he been led
+astray by them? Had he been manipulated as easily as they had
+manipulated so many others?
+
+That was possible. But it wasn’t the only possibility.
+
+Suppose, he thought, that he was perfectly right, and that the PRS
+members were waiting inside. And suppose, too, that he’d misunderstood
+their motives.
+
+Suppose they were just waiting for him to get a little closer.
+
+Malone kept walking.
+
+In just a few steps, he would be close enough so that a bullet aimed
+at him from the house hadn’t a real chance of missing him.
+
+And it didn’t have to be bullets, either. They might have set a trap,
+he thought, and were waiting for him to walk right into it. Then they
+would hold him prisoner while they devised ways to....
+
+To what? He didn’t know. And that was even worse; it called up
+horrible terrors from the darkest depths of Malone’s mind. He
+continued to walk forward, feeling about as exposed as a restaurant
+lamb chop caught with its panty down.
+
+He reached the steps that led up to the porch, and took them one at a
+time.
+
+He stood on the porch. A long second passed.
+
+He took a step toward the high, wide and handsome oaken door. Then he
+took another step, and another.
+
+What was waiting for him inside?
+
+He took a deep breath, and pressed the doorbell button.
+
+The door swung open immediately, and Malone involuntarily stepped
+back.
+
+The owner of the house smiled at him from the doorway. Malone let out
+his breath in one long sigh of relief.
+
+“I was hoping it would be you,” he said weakly. “May I come in?”
+
+“Why, certainly, Malone. Come on in. We’ve been expecting you, you
+know,” said Andrew J. Burris, director of the FBI.
+
+
+
+
+15
+
+
+Malone sat, quietly relaxed and almost completely at ease, in the
+depths of a huge, comfortable, old-fashioned Morris chair. Three
+similar chairs were clustered with his, around a squat, massive coffee
+table made of a single slab of dark wood set on short, curved legs.
+Malone looked around at the other three with a relaxed feeling of
+recognition: Andrew J. Burris, Sir Lewis Carter, and Luba Vasilovna
+Garbitsch.
+
+“That mind shield of yours,” Burris was saying, “is functioning very
+well. We weren’t entirely sure you had actually located us until you
+pulled into that driveway.”
+
+“I wasn’t entirely sure what I was locating,” Malone said.
+
+“And so it’s over,” Burris said with a satisfied air. “Everything’s
+over.”
+
+“And just beginning,” Sir Lewis put in. He drew a pipe from an inside
+pocket and began to fill it.
+
+“And, of course,” Burris said, “just beginning. Things do that; they
+go round and round in circles. It’s what makes everything so
+confusing.”
+
+“And so much fun,” Lou said, leaning back in her chair. She didn’t
+look hostile now, Malone thought; she looked like a cat, wary but
+content. He decided that he liked this Lou even better than the old
+one. Lou, at home among her psionic colleagues, was even more than
+he’d ever thought she could be.
+
+“More what?” she said suddenly. Burris jerked upright a trifle.
+
+“What’s more what?” he said. “Damn it, let’s stick to one thing or the
+other. As soon as this thing starts mixing talk and thought it
+confuses me.”
+
+“Never mind,” Lou said. She smiled across the table at Malone.
+
+Malone jerked a finger under his collar.
+
+“What made you decide to come here?” Sir Lewis said. He had the pipe
+lit now, and blew a cloud of fragrant smoke over the table.
+
+Malone wondered where to start. “One of the clues,” he said at last,
+“was the efficiency of the FBI. It hit me the same way the efficiency
+of the PRS had hit me, while I was looking at the batch of reports
+that had been run off so rapidly.”
+
+“Ah,” Sir Lewis said. “The dossiers.”
+
+“Dossiers?” Burris said.
+
+Sir Lewis puffed at his pipe. “Sorry,” he said. “I thought you had
+been tuned in for that.”
+
+“I was busy,” Burris said. “I can’t tune into everything. After all,
+I’ve only got one mind.”
+
+“And two hands,” Malone said at random.
+
+“At least,” Lou said. Their eyes met in a glance of perfect
+understanding.
+
+“What the hell do hands have to do with it?” Burris said.
+
+Sir Lewis shrugged. “Tune in and see,” he said. “It’s an old joke; but
+you’ll never really adjust to telepathy unless you practice.”
+
+“Damn it,” Burris said, “I practice. I’m always practicing. This and
+that and the other thing—after all, I am the director of the FBI.
+There’s a lot to be done.”
+
+Sir Lewis puffed at his pipe again. “At any rate,” he said smoothly,
+“Mr. Malone had requested some dossiers on us. On the PRS, myself, and
+Luba. They arrived very quickly. The efficiency of that arrival, and
+the efficiency he’d been noting about the FBI ever since he began work
+on this case, finally struck home to him.”
+
+“Ah,” Burris said. “You see? The FBI’s a full-time job. It’s got to be
+efficient.”
+
+“Of course,” Sir Lewis said soothingly.
+
+“Anyhow,” Malone said, “Sir Lewis is right. While every other branch
+of the government was having its troubles with the Great Confusion,
+the FBI was ticking along like a transistorized computer.”
+
+“A good start,” Sir Lewis said.
+
+“Darn good,” Burris said. “Malone, I knew I could depend on you.
+You’re a good man.”
+
+Malone swallowed hard. “Well, anyway,” he said after a pause, “when I
+saw that I began to remember a few other things. Starting with a
+couple of years ago, when we first found Her Majesty, remember?”
+
+“I’ll never forget it,” Burris said fervently. “She knighted me.
+Knight Commander of the Queen’s Own FBI. What a moment.”
+
+“Thrilling,” Malone said. “But you got to Yucca Flats for your
+knighting awfully quickly, a little too fast even for a modern plane.”
+
+“It had to be done,” Burris said. “Anyhow, I’ve never really liked
+planes. Basically unsafe. People crash in them.”
+
+“But you wouldn’t,” Malone said. “You could always teleport yourself
+out.”
+
+“Sure,” Burris said. “But that’s troublesome. Why bother? Anyhow, I’d
+been to Yucca Flats before, so I could teleport there—a little way
+down the road, where I could meet my car—without any trouble.”
+
+“Anyhow, that was one thing,” Malone said. “And then there was Her
+Majesty, when she pointed at that visiphone screen and accused you of
+being the telepathic spy. Remember?”
+
+“She wasn’t pointing at me,” Burris said. “She was pointing at the man
+in the next room. How about you doing some remembering?”
+
+“Sure she was,” Malone said. “But it was just a little coincidence.
+And I have a hunch she felt, subconsciously, that there was something
+not quite right about you.”
+
+“Maybe,” Burris conceded. “But that doesn’t answer my question.”
+
+“It doesn’t?” Malone said.
+
+“Now look, Malone,” Burris said. “None of this is proof. Not real
+proof. Not the kind the FBI has trained you to look for.”
+
+“But—”
+
+“What I want to know,” Burris said, “is why you came here, to my home?
+And in spite of everything you’ve said, that hasn’t been tied down.”
+
+Malone frowned. After a second’s thought he said, “Well.... All I know
+is that it just seemed obvious. That’s all.”
+
+“Indeed it is,” Sir Lewis said. “But one of the things we’ll have to
+teach you, my boy, is how to distinguish between a deduction from
+observed fact and a psionic intuition. You’ve been confusing them for
+some years now.”
+
+“I have?” Malone said.
+
+“Sure you have,” Burris said. “And, what’s more—”
+
+“Well, he’s no worse than you are, Andrew,” Lou said.
+
+Burris turned. “Me?” he said in a voice of withering scorn.
+
+“Certainly,” Lou said. “After all, you’ve never really become used to
+mixtures of thought and speech. And, what’s more, you’ve been using
+telepathy so long that when you try to communicate with nothing but
+words you only confuse yourself.”
+
+“And everybody else,” Sir Lewis added.
+
+“Hmpf,” Burris said. “I’m busy all the time. I haven’t got any extra
+time for practice.”
+
+Malone nodded, comparatively unsurprised. He’d wondered for years how
+a man so obviously unable to express himself clearly could run an
+organization like the FBI as well as he did. Having psionic abilities
+evidently led to drawbacks as well as advantages.
+
+“Actually,” he said, “my prescience made one mistake.”
+
+“Really?” Burris said, looking both worried and pleased about it.
+
+“I expected the place to be full of people,” Malone said. “I thought
+the elite corps of the PRS would be here.”
+
+“Oh,” Burris said, looking crestfallen.
+
+“Why, that was no mistake,” Sir Lewis said. “As a matter of fact, they
+are all here. But they’re quite busy at the moment; things are coning
+to a head, you know, and they must work quite undisturbed.”
+
+“And this,” Burris added, “is a good place for it. There are sixty
+rooms in this house. Sixty.”
+
+“That’s a lot of rooms,” Malone said politely.
+
+“A mansion,” Burris said. “A positive mansion. And my family has lived
+here ever since—”
+
+“I’m sure Ken isn’t very interested in your family just now,” Lou
+broke in.
+
+“My family,” Burris said with dignity, “is a very interesting family.”
+
+“I’m sure it must be,” Lou said demurely. Sir Lewis choked with
+laughter suddenly and began waving his pipe. After a minute, Malone
+joined in.
+
+“Damn it,” Burris said. “Let’s stick to one thing or the other. Did I
+say that?”
+
+“Twice,” Malone said.
+
+“Sixty rooms,” Burris said. “All built by my family. And local
+contractors, of course. That’s enough to house sixty rooms full of
+people. And that number of people is a large houseful, I should
+think.”
+
+“It sounds like a lot,” Malone said.
+
+“It is a lot,” Burris said. “All in my house. The house my family
+built.”
+
+“And we’re grateful for it,” Sir Lewis said soothingly. “We truly
+are.”
+
+“Good,” Burris said.
+
+“You must have had a large family,” Lou said.
+
+“A large family,” Burris said, “and many guests. Many, many guests.
+From all over. Including famous people. General Hood slept in this
+house, and he slept very well indeed.”
+
+“As a matter of fact,” Lou added, “he’s still sleeping. They call it
+being dead.”
+
+“That’s not funny,” Burris snapped.
+
+“Sorry,” Lou said. “It was meant to be.”
+
+“I—” Burris shut his mouth and glared.
+
+Malone was far away, thinking of the sixty rooms full of people,
+sitting quietly, their minds ranging into the distance, meshed
+together in small units. It was a picture that frightened and
+comforted him at the same time. He wasn’t sure he liked it, but he
+certainly didn’t dislike it, either.
+
+After all, he told himself confusedly, too many cooks save a stitch in
+time.
+
+He veered away from that sentence quickly. “Tell me,” he said, “were
+you receiving my broadcast on the way here?”
+
+Burris and Sir Lewis nodded. Lou started to nod, too, but stopped and
+looked surprised. “You mean you didn’t know we were?” she said.
+
+“How could I know?” Malone said. “After all, I was just tossing it out
+and hoping that somebody was on the listening end.”
+
+“But of course somebody was,” Lou said. “I was.”
+
+“Good,” Malone said. “But I still don’t see how I was supposed to know
+that you—”
+
+“I answered you, silly,” Lou said. “I kept on answering you.
+Remember?”
+
+Malone blinked, focused and then said, very slowly, “That was my
+imagination. Please tell me it was my imagination before I go nuts.”
+
+“Sorry,” Lou said. “It wasn’t.”
+
+“But that kind of thing,” Malone said, “it takes a tremendous amount
+of power, doesn’t it?”
+
+“Not when the receiver is a telepath,” Lou said sweetly.
+
+Malone nodded slowly. “That,” he said, “is exactly what I’m afraid of.
+Don’t tell me—”
+
+There was silence.
+
+“Well?” Malone said.
+
+“You said not to tell you,” Lou said instantly.
+
+“All right,” Malone said. “I rescind the order. Am I a telepath, or am
+I not?”
+
+Lou’s lips didn’t move. But then, they didn’t have to.
+
+The message came, unbidden, into Malone’s mind.
+
+_Of course you are. That was the whole reason for Andrew’s assigning
+you to this type of case._
+
+“My God,” Malone said softly.
+
+Sir Lewis laid down his pipe in a handy ashtray. “Of course,” he said,
+“you will find it difficult to pick up anyone but Lou, at first. The
+rapport between you two is really quite strong.”
+
+“Very strong indeed,” Lou murmured. Malone found himself beginning to
+blush.
+
+“It will be some time yet,” Sir Lewis went on, “before you can really
+call yourself a telepath, my boy.”
+
+“I’ll bet it will,” Malone said. “Before I can call myself a telepath
+I’m going to have to get thoroughly used to the idea. And that’s going
+to take a long, long time indeed.”
+
+“You only think that,” Sir Lewis said. “Actually, you’re used to the
+idea now. That was Andrew’s big job.”
+
+“His big job?” Malone said. “Now, wait a minute—”
+
+“You don’t think I picked you for our first psionics case out of thin
+air, do you?” Burris said. “Before anything else, you had to be forced
+to accept the fact that such things as telepaths really existed.”
+
+“Oh, they do,” Malone said. “They certainly do.”
+
+“There’s me, for instance,” Burris said. “But you had to be convinced.
+So I ordered you to go out and find one.”
+
+“Like the Bluebird of Happiness,” Malone said.
+
+Burris frowned. “What’s like the Bluebird of Happiness?” he said.
+
+“You are,” Malone said.
+
+“I am not,” Burris said indignantly. “Bluebirds eat worms. My God,
+Malone.”
+
+“But the Bluebird,” Malone said doggedly, “was right at home all the
+time, while everyone searched for it far away. And I had to go far
+away to find a telepath, when you were the one who ordered me to do
+it.”
+
+“Right,” Burris said. “So you went and found Her Majesty. And, when
+you did find her, she forced acceptance on you simply by being Her
+Majesty and proving to you, once and for all, that she could read
+minds.”
+
+“Great,” Malone said. “Of course, I could have got myself killed
+taking these lessons—”
+
+“We were watching you,” Burris said. “If anything had happened, we’d
+have been right on the spot.”
+
+“In time to bury the body,” Malone said. “I think that’s very
+thoughtful of you.”
+
+“We would have arrived in time to save you,” Burris said. “Don’t
+quibble. You’re alive, aren’t you?”
+
+“Well,” Malone said slowly, “if you’re not sure, I don’t know how I
+can convince you.”
+
+“There,” Burris said triumphantly. “You see?”
+
+Malone sighed wearily. “Okay,” he said. “So you sent me out to find a
+telepath and to prove to me that there were such things. And I did.
+And then what happened?”
+
+“You had a year,” Burris said, “to get used to the idea of somebody
+reading your mind.”
+
+“Thanks,” Malone said. “Of course, I didn’t know it was you.”
+
+“It was Her Majesty too,” Burris said. “Everybody.”
+
+“Good old Malone,” Malone said. “The human peep-show.”
+
+“Now, that’s what we mean,” Sir Lewis broke in. “Subconsciously, you
+disliked the idea of leaving your thoughts bare to anyone, even a
+sweet little old lady. To some extent, you still do. But that will
+pass.”
+
+“Goody,” Malone said.
+
+“The residue is simply not important,” Sir Lewis went on. “Your
+telepathic talents prove that.”
+
+“Oh, fine,” Malone said. “Here I am reading minds and teleporting and
+all sorts of things. What will the boys back at Headquarters think
+now?”
+
+“We’ll get to that,” Burris said. “But that first case did one more
+thing for you. Because you didn’t like the idea of leaving your mind
+open, you began to develop a shield. That allowed you some sort of
+mental privacy.”
+
+“And then,” Malone said, “I met Mike Fueyo and his little gang of
+teleporting juvenile delinquents.”
+
+“So that you could develop a psionic ability of your own,” Burris
+said. “That completed your acceptance. But it took a threat to
+solidify that shield. That was step three. When you discovered your
+mind was being tampered with—”
+
+“The shield started growing stronger,” Malone said. “Sure. Her Majesty
+told me that, though she didn’t know why.”
+
+“Right,” Burris said.
+
+“But, wait a minute,” Malone said. “How could I do all that without
+knowing it? How would I know that some of my thoughts were safe behind
+a shield if I didn’t know the shield existed and couldn’t even tell if
+my mind were being read?” He paused. “Does that make sense?” he asked.
+
+“It does,” Burris said, “but it shouldn’t.”
+
+“What?” Malone said.
+
+“Two years ago, you had the answer to that one,” Burris said. “Dr.
+O’Connor’s machine. Remember why it did detect when a person’s mind
+was being read?”
+
+“Oh,” Malone said. “Oh, sure. He said that any human being would know,
+subconsciously, whether his mind was being read.”
+
+“He did, indeed,” Burris said. “And then we came to the fourth step:
+to put you in rapport with some psionicist who could teach you how to
+control the shield, how to raise and lower it, you might say. To learn
+to accept other thoughts, as well as reject them. To learn to accept
+your full telepathic talent. That was Lou’s job.”
+
+“Lou’s ... job?” Malone said. He felt his own shield go up. The
+thoughts behind it weren’t pleasant. Lou had been ... well, hired to
+stay with him. She had pretended to like him; it was part of her job.
+
+That was perfectly clear now.
+
+Horribly clear.
+
+“You are now on your way,” Sir Lewis said, “to being a real
+psionicist.”
+
+“Fine,” Malone said dully. “But why me? Why not, oh, Wolfe Wolf? I’d
+think he’d have a better chance than I would.”
+
+“My secretary,” Burris said, “has talents enough of his own. But you,
+you’re something brand-new. It’s wonderful, Malone. It’s exciting.”
+
+“It’s a new taste thrill,” Malone murmured. “Try Bon-Ton B-Complex
+Bolsters. Learn to eat your blanket as well as sleep with it.”
+
+“What?” Burris said.
+
+“Never mind,” Malone said. “You wouldn’t understand.”
+
+“But I—”
+
+“I know you wouldn’t,” Malone said, “because I don’t.”
+
+Sir Lewis cleared his throat “My dear boy,” he said, “you represent a
+breakthrough. You are an adult.”
+
+“That,” Malone said testily, “is not news.”
+
+“But you are a telepathic adult,” Sir Lewis said. “Many of them are
+capable of developing it into a useful ability. Children who have the
+talent may accidentally develop the ability to use it, but that almost
+invariably results in insanity. Without proper guidance, a child is no
+more capable of handling the variety of impressions it receives from
+adult minds than it is capable of understanding a complex piece of
+modern music. The effort to make a coherent whole out of the
+impression overstrains the mind, so to speak, and the damage is
+permanent.”
+
+“So here I am,” Malone said, “and I’m not nuts. At least I don’t think
+I’m nuts.”
+
+“Because you are an adult,” Sir Lewis went on. “Telepathy seems to be
+almost impossible to develop in an adult, even difficult to test for
+it. A child may be tested comparatively simply; an adult, seldom or
+never.”
+
+He paused to relight his pipe.
+
+“However,” he went on, “the Psychical Research Society’s executive
+board discovered a method of bringing out the ability in a talented
+child as far back as 1931. All of us who are sane telepaths today owe
+our ability to that process, which was applied to us, in each case,
+before the age of sixteen.”
+
+“How about me?” Malone said.
+
+“You,” Sir Lewis said, “are the first adult ever to learn the use of
+psionic powers from scratch.”
+
+“Oh,” Malone said. “And that’s why Mike Fueyo, for instance, could
+learn to teleport, though his older sister couldn’t.”
+
+“Mike was an experiment,” Sir Lewis said. “We decided to teach him
+teleportation without teaching him telepathy. You saw what happened.”
+
+“Sure I did,” Malone said. “I had to stop it.”
+
+“We were forced to make you stop him,” Sir Lewis said. “But we also
+let him teach you his abilities.”
+
+“So I’m an experiment,” Malone said.
+
+“A successful experiment,” Sir Lewis added.
+
+“Well,” Malone said dully, “bully for me.”
+
+“Don’t feel that way,” Sir Lewis said. “We have—”
+
+He stopped suddenly, and glanced at the others. Burris and Lou stood
+up, and Sir Lewis followed them.
+
+“Sorry,” Sir Lewis said in a different tone. “There’s something
+important that we must take care of. Something quite urgent, I’m
+afraid.”
+
+“You can go on home, Malone,” Burris said. “We’ll talk later, but
+right now there’s a crisis coming and we’ve got to help. Leave the
+car. I’ll take care of it.”
+
+“Sure,” Malone said, without moving.
+
+Lou said, “Ken—” and stopped. Then the three of them turned and
+started up the long, curving staircase that led to the upstairs rooms.
+
+Malone sat in the Morris chair for several long minutes, wishing that
+he were dead. Nobody made a sound. He rubbed his hands over the soft
+leather and tried to tell himself that he was lucky, and talented, and
+successful.
+
+But he didn’t care.
+
+He closed his eyes at last, and took a deep breath.
+
+Then he vanished.
+
+
+
+
+16
+
+
+Two hours passed, somehow. Bourbon and soda helped them pass, Malone
+discovered; he drank two highballs slowly, trying not to think about
+anything, and kept staring around at the walls of his apartment
+without really seeing anything. He felt terrible.
+
+He made himself a third bourbon and soda and started in on it. Maybe
+this one would make him feel better. Maybe, he thought, he ought to
+break out the cigars and celebrate.
+
+But there didn’t seem to be very much to celebrate, somehow.
+
+He felt like a guinea pig being congratulated on having successfully
+resisted a germ during an experiment.
+
+He drank some more of the bourbon and soda. Guinea pigs didn’t drink
+bourbon and soda, he told himself. He was better off than a guinea
+pig. He was happier than a guinea pig. But he couldn’t imagine any
+guinea pig in the world, no matter how heartbroken, feeling any worse
+than Kenneth J. Malone.
+
+He looked up. There was another guinea pig in the room.
+
+Then he frowned. She wasn’t a guinea pig. She was one off the
+experimenters. She was the one the guinea pig was supposed to fall in
+love with, so the guinea pig could be nice and telepathic and all the
+other experimenters could congratulate themselves. But whoever heard
+of a scientist falling in love with a guinea pig? It was fate. And
+fate was awful. Malone had often suspected it, but now he was sure.
+Now he saw things from the guinea pig’s side, and fate was terrible.
+
+“But Ken,” the experimenter said. “It isn’t like that at all.”
+
+“It is, too,” Malone said. “It’s even worse, but that’ll have to wait.
+When I have some more to drink it will get worse. Watch and see.”
+
+“But Ken—” Lou hesitated, and then went on. “Don’t feel sad about
+being an experiment. We’re all experiments.”
+
+“I’m the guinea pig,” Malone said. “I’m the only guinea pig. You said
+so.”
+
+“No, Ken,” she said. “Remember, all of us in the PRS got early
+training when it was new and untried. Some of those methods weren’t as
+good as we now have them; that’s why a man like your boss sometimes
+tends to have a little trouble.”
+
+“Sure,” Malone said. “But I’m your guinea pig. You made me dance
+through hoops and do tricks and everything just for an experiment.
+That’s what.” He took another swallow of his drink. “See?” he said.
+“It’s getting worse already.”
+
+“No, it’s not,” Lou said. “It’s getting better, if you’ll only listen.
+I wasn’t given this job, Ken. I volunteered for it.”
+
+“That isn’t any better,” Malone said morosely.
+
+“I volunteered because I—because I liked you,” Lou said. “Because I
+wanted to work with you, wanted to be with you.”
+
+“It’s more experimenting,” Malone said flatly. “More guinea-pigging
+around.”
+
+“It isn’t, Ken,” Lou said. “Believe me. Look into my mind. Believe
+me.”
+
+Malone tried. A second passed....
+
+And then a long time passed, without any words at all.
+
+“Well, well,” Malone said at last. “If this is the life of a guinea
+pig, I’m all for it.”
+
+“I’m all for guinea pigs’ rights,” Lou said. “Life, Liberty and the
+Pursuit of Me.”
+
+“Agreed,” Malone said. “How about that crisis, by the way? Are you
+going to have to leave suddenly again?”
+
+Lou stretched lazily on the couch. “That’s all over with, thank God,”
+she said. “We had to get our agent out of Miami Beach, and cover his
+tracks at the same time.”
+
+“Tricky,” Malone said.
+
+“Very,” Lou said.
+
+“But—” Malone blinked. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Your agent? You
+mean you had Governor Flarion killed?”
+
+Lou nodded soberly. “We had to,” she said. “That paranoid mind of his
+had built up a shield we simply couldn’t get through. He had plans for
+making himself president, you know—and all the terrifying
+potentialities of an embryonic Hitler.” She grimaced. “We don’t like
+being forced to kill,” she said, “but sometimes we’ve got to.”
+
+Malone thought of his own .44 Magnum, and the times he had used it,
+and nodded very slowly.
+
+“There are still a couple of questions, though,” he said. “For
+instance, there’s that trip to Russia. Why _did_ you make it? Was it
+your father?”
+
+“Of course it was,” Lou said. “We had to get him back in and make sure
+he was safe.”
+
+“You mean that Vasili Garbitsch is a PSR member?” Malone said,
+stunned.
+
+“Well, really,” Lou said. “Did you think my father would really be a
+spy? We had to get him back to Russia; he was needed for work in the
+Kremlin. That’s why we nudged Boyd into making the arrest.”
+
+“And the others?” Malone said. “Brubitsch and Borbitsch?”
+
+“Real spies,” Lou said. “Bad ones, but real. Any more questions?”
+
+“Some,” Malone said. “Were you kidding about that drink in Moscow?”
+
+She shook her head. “I wish I had been,” she said. “But I was
+concentrating on Petkoff, who didn’t know a thing about the drugged
+drink. I didn’t catch anything else until after I’d swallowed it. And
+then it was too late.”
+
+“Good old Petkoff,” Malone said. “Always helpful. But he was right
+about one thing, anyway.”
+
+“What?” Lou said.
+
+“The FBI,” Malone said. “He told us it was a secret police
+organization. And, by God, in a way it is!”
+
+Lou grinned. Malone started to laugh outright. They found themselves
+very close and the laughter stopped, and there was some more time
+without words. When Malone broke free, he had a suddenly sobered
+expression on his face.
+
+“Hey,” he said. “What about Tom Boyd? He knows a lot but he hasn’t got
+any talents, as far as I know, and—”
+
+“He’ll be all right,” Lou said. “Andrew and the others have thought of
+that.”
+
+“But he knows an awful lot about the evidence I dug up.”
+
+“Andrew will give him a cover-up explanation they’re working out,” Lou
+said. “That will convince Boyd there’s nothing more to worry about. Of
+course, we may have to change his mind about a few things, but we can
+do that, probably through you, since you know him best. There’s
+nothing for you to worry over, Ken. Nothing at all.”
+
+“Good,” Malone said. He leaned over and kissed her. “Because I’m not
+in the least worried.”
+
+Lou sighed deeply, looking off into space.
+
+“Luba Malone,” she said. “It sounds nice. And, after all, my mother
+was Irish. At least it sounds better than Garbitsch.”
+
+“What doesn’t?” Malone said automatically. Then he blinked. “Hey,
+_I’m_ Malone!” he said. “How could you be Malone?”
+
+“Me?” Lou said. She caroled happily. “I’m Malone because I love you,
+love you with all my heart.”
+
+“That,” Malone said, “does it. A woman after my own heart.”
+
+Lou made a low curtsy.
+
+“And a woman of grace and breeding,” Malone said. “Eftsoons, if that
+means anything.”
+
+“You know,” Lou said, “I like you even better when you’re being Sir
+Kenneth. Especially when you’re talking to yourself.”
+
+“My innate gallantry and all my good qualities come out,” Malone said.
+
+“Yes,” Lou said. “Indeed they do. All over the place. It’s nice to go
+back to Elizabethan times, anyhow, in the middle of all these
+troubles.”
+
+“Oh, I don’t know,” Malone said. “There’s always been trouble. In the
+Middle Ages, it was witches. In the Seventeenth Century, it was
+demons. In the Nineteenth it was revolutions. In—”
+
+Lou cut him off with a kiss. When she broke away Malone raised his
+eyebrows.
+
+“I prithee,” he said, “interrupt me not. I am developing a scheme of
+philosophy. There have always been troubles. In the 1890’s there was a
+Depression and panic, and the Spanish-American War—”
+
+“All right, Sirrah,” Lou said. “And then what?”
+
+“Let’s see,” Malone said, reverting to 1973 for a second. “In 1903
+there was the airplane, and troubles abroad.”
+
+“Yes?” Lou said. “Do go on, Sirrah. Your liege awaits your slightest
+word.”
+
+“Hmm,” Malone said.
+
+“That, Milord, was a very slight word indeed,” Lou said. “What’s after
+1903?”
+
+Malone smiled and went back to the days of the First Elizabeth
+happily.
+
+“In 1914, it was enemy aliens,” said Sir Kenneth Malone.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUPERMIND ***
+
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@@ -0,0 +1,10575 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Supermind, by 
+Gordon Randall Garrett and Laurence Mark Janifer
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Supermind
+
+Author: Gordon Randall Garrett
+        Laurence Mark Janifer
+
+Release Date: August 16, 2007 [EBook #22342]
+
+Date Last Updated: October 2, 2007
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUPERMIND ***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+This etext was produced from the 1963 book publication of the story.
+Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the copyright on
+this publication was renewed.
+
+Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without
+note.
+
+The word "PLaza" (two capital letters) was correct usage to designate
+a telephone exchange at the time the story was written. It has been
+left as printed.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+Supermind
+
+Mark Phillips
+
+
+1
+
+In 1914, it was enemy aliens.
+
+In 1930, it was Wobblies.
+
+In 1957, it was fellow travelers.
+
+In 1971, it was insane telepaths.
+
+And, in 1973:
+
+"We don't know _what_ the hell it is," said Andrew J. Burris, Director
+of the FBI. He threw his hands in the air and looked baffled and
+confused.
+
+Kenneth J. Malone tried to appear sympathetic. "What what is?" he
+asked.
+
+Burris frowned and drummed his fingers on his big desk. "Malone," he
+said, "make sense. And don't stutter."
+
+"Stutter?" Malone said. "You said you didn't know what it was. What
+the hell it was. And I wanted to know what it was."
+
+"That's just it," Burris said. "I don't know."
+
+Malone sighed and repressed an impulse to scream. "Now wait a minute,
+Chief--" he started.
+
+Burris frowned again. "Don't call me Chief," he said.
+
+Malone nodded. "Okay," he said. "But if you don't know what it is, you
+must have some idea of what you don't know. I mean, is it larger than
+a breadbox? Does it perform helpful tasks? Is it self-employed?"
+
+"Malone," Burris sighed, "you ought to be on television."
+
+"But--"
+
+"Let me explain," Burris said. His voice was calmer now, and he spoke
+as if he were enunciating nothing but the most obvious and eternal
+truths. "The country," he said, "is going to hell in a handbasket."
+
+Malone nodded again. "Well, after all, Chief--"
+
+"Don't call me Chief," Burris said wearily.
+
+"Anything you say," Malone agreed peacefully. He eyed the Director of
+the FBI warily. "After all, it isn't anything new," he went on. "The
+country's always been going to hell in a handbasket, one way or
+another. Look at Rome."
+
+"Rome?" Burris said.
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "Rome was always going to hell in a handbasket,
+and finally it--" He paused. "Finally it did, I guess," he said.
+
+"Exactly," Burris said. "And so are we. Finally." He passed a hand
+over his forehead and stared past Malone at a spot on the wall. Malone
+turned and looked at the spot, but saw nothing of interest. "Malone,"
+Burris said, and the FBI agent whirled around again.
+
+"Yes, Ch--Yes?" he said.
+
+"This time," Burris said, "it isn't the same old story at all. This
+time it's different."
+
+"Different?" Malone said.
+
+Burris nodded. "Look at it this way," he said. His eyes returned to
+the agent. "Suppose you're a congressman," he went on, "and you find
+evidence of inefficiency in the government."
+
+"All right," Malone said agreeably. He had the feeling that if he
+waited around a little while everything would make sense, and he was
+willing to wait. After all, he wasn't on assignment at the moment, and
+there was nothing pressing waiting for him. He was even between
+romances.
+
+If he waited long enough, he told himself, Andrew J. Burris might say
+something worth hearing. He looked attentive and eager. He considered
+leaning over the desk a little, to look even more eager, but decided
+against it; Burris might think he looked threatening. There was no
+telling.
+
+"You're a congressman," Burris said, "and the government is
+inefficient. You find evidence of it. What do you do?"
+
+Malone blinked and thought for a second. It didn't take any longer
+than that to come up with the old, old answer. "I start an
+investigation," he said. "I get a committee and I talk to a lot of
+newspaper editors and magazine editors and maybe I go on television
+and talk some more, and my committee has a lot of meetings--"
+
+"Exactly," Burris said.
+
+"And we talk a lot at the meetings," Malone went on, carried away,
+"and get a lot of publicity, and we subpoena famous people, just as
+famous as we can get, except governors or presidents, because you
+can't--they tried that back in the Fifties, and it didn't work very
+well--and that gives us some more publicity, and then when we have all
+the publicity we can possibly get--"
+
+"You stop," Burris said hurriedly.
+
+"That's right," Malone said. "We stop. And that's what I'd do."
+
+"Of course, the problem of inefficiency is left exactly where it
+always was," Burris said. "Nothing's been done about it."
+
+"Naturally," Malone said. "But think of all the lovely publicity. And
+all the nice talk. And the subpoenas and committees and everything."
+
+"Sure," Burris said wearily. "It's happened a thousand times. But,
+Malone, that's the difference. It isn't happening this time."
+
+There was a short pause. "What do you mean?" Malone said at last.
+
+"This time," Burris said, in a tone that sounded almost awed, "they
+want to keep it a secret."
+
+"A secret?" Malone said, blinking. "But that's--that's not the
+American way."
+
+Burris shrugged. "It's un-congressman-like, anyhow," he said. "But
+that's what they've done. Tiptoed over to me and whispered softly that
+the thing has to be investigated quietly. Naturally, they didn't give
+me any orders--but only because they know they can't make one stick.
+They suggested it pretty strongly."
+
+"Any reasons?" Malone said. The whole idea interested him strangely.
+It was odd--and he found himself almost liking odd cases, lately. That
+is, he amended hurriedly, if they didn't get _too_ odd.
+
+"Oh, they had reasons, all right," Burris said. "It took a little
+coaxing, but I managed to pry some loose. You see, every one of them
+found inefficiency in his own department. And every one knows that
+other men are investigating inefficiency."
+
+"Oh," Malone said.
+
+"That's right," Burris said. "Every one of them came to me to get me
+to prove that the goof-ups in his particular department weren't his
+fault. That covers them in case one of the others happens to light
+into the department."
+
+"Well, it must be _somebody's_ fault," Malone said.
+
+"It isn't theirs," Burris said wearily, "I ought to know. They told
+me. At great length, Malone."
+
+Malone felt a stab of honest pity. "How many so far?" he asked.
+
+"Six," Burris said. "Four representatives, and two senators."
+
+"Only two?" Malone said.
+
+"Well," Burris said, "the Senate is so much smaller. And, besides, we
+may get more. As a matter of fact, Senator Lefferts is worth any six
+representatives all by himself."
+
+"He is?" Malone said, puzzled. Senator Lefferts was not one of his
+favorite people. Nor, as far as he knew, did the somewhat excitable
+senator hold any place of honor in the heart of Andrew J. Burris.
+
+"I mean his story," Burris said. "I've never heard anything like it--
+at least, not since the Bilbo days. And I've only heard about those,"
+he added hurriedly.
+
+"What story?" Malone said. "He talked about inefficiency--"
+
+"Not exactly," Burris said carefully. "He said that somebody was out
+to get him--him, personally. He said somebody was trying to discredit
+him by sabotaging all his legislative plans."
+
+"Well," Malone said, feeling that some comment was called for, "three
+cheers."
+
+"That isn't the point," Burris snapped. "No matter how we feel about
+Senator Lefferts or his legislative plans, we're sworn to protect him.
+And he says 'they' are out to get him."
+
+"They?" Malone said.
+
+"You know," Burris said, shrugging. "The great 'they.' The invisible
+enemies all around, working against him."
+
+"Oh," Malone said. "Paranoid?" He had always thought Senator Lefferts
+was slightly on the batty side, and the idea of real paranoia didn't
+come as too much of a surprise. After all, when a man was batty to
+start out with ... and he even _looked_ like a vampire, Malone thought
+confusedly.
+
+"As far as paranoia is concerned," Burris said, "I checked with one of
+our own psych men, and he'll back it up. Lefferts has definite
+paranoid tendencies, he says."
+
+"Well, then," Malone said, "that's that."
+
+Burris shook his head. "It isn't that simple," he said. "You see,
+Malone, there's some evidence that somebody _is_ working against him."
+
+"The American public, with any luck at all," Malone said.
+
+"No," Burris said. "An enemy. Somebody sabotaging his plans. Really."
+
+Malone shook his head. "You're crazy," he said.
+
+Burris looked shocked. "Malone, I'm the Director of the FBI," he said.
+"And if you insist on being disrespectful--"
+
+"Sorry," Malone murmured. "But--"
+
+"I am perfectly sane," Burris said slowly. "It's Senator Lefferts
+who's crazy. The only trouble is, he has evidence to show he's not."
+
+Malone thought about odd cases, and suddenly wished he were somewhere
+else. Anywhere else. This one showed sudden signs of developing into
+something positively bizarre. "I see," he said, wondering if he did.
+
+"After all," Burris said, in a voice that attempted to sound
+reasonable, "a paranoid has just as much right to be persecuted as
+anybody else, doesn't he?"
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "Everybody has rights. But what do you want me to
+do about that?"
+
+"About their rights?" Burris said. "Nothing, Malone. Nothing."
+
+"I mean," Malone said patiently, "about whatever it is that's going
+on."
+
+Burris took a deep breath. His hands clasped behind his head, and he
+looked up at the ceiling. He seemed perfectly relaxed. That, Malone
+knew, was a bad sign. It meant that there was a dirty job coming, a
+job nobody wanted to do, and one Burris was determined to pass off on
+him. He sighed and tried to get resigned.
+
+"Well," the FBI director said, "the only actual trouble we can
+pinpoint is that there seem to be a great many errors occurring in the
+paperwork. More than usual."
+
+"People get tired," Malone said tentatively.
+
+"But computer-secretary calculating machines don't," Burris said. "And
+that's where the errors are, in the computer-secretaries down in the
+Senate Office Building. I think you'd better start out there."
+
+"Sure," Malone said sadly.
+
+"See if there's any mechanical or electrical defect in any of those
+computers," Burris said. "Talk to the computer technicians. Find out
+what's causing all these errors."
+
+"Yes, sir," Malone said. He was still trying to feel resigned, but he
+wasn't succeeding very well.
+
+"And if you don't find anything--" Burris began.
+
+"I'll come right back," Malone said instantly.
+
+"No," Burris said. "You keep on looking."
+
+"I do?"
+
+"You do," Burris said. "After all, there has to be _something_ wrong."
+
+"Sure," Malone said, "if you say so. But--"
+
+"There are the interview tapes," Burris said, "and the reports the
+Congressmen brought in. You can go through those."
+
+Malone sighed. "I guess so," he said.
+
+"And there must be thousands of other things to do," Burris said.
+
+"Well--" Malone began cautiously.
+
+"You'll be able to think of them," Burris said heartily. "I know you
+will. I have confidence in you, Malone. Confidence."
+
+"Thanks," Malone said sadly.
+
+"You just keep me posted from time to time on what you're doing, and
+what ideas you get," Burris said. "I'm leaving the whole thing in your
+hands, Malone, and I'm sure you won't disappoint me."
+
+"I'll try," Malone said.
+
+"I know you will," Burris said warmly. "And no matter how long it
+takes, I know you'll succeed."
+
+"No matter how long it takes?" Malone said hesitantly.
+
+"That's right!" Burris said. "You can do it, Malone! You can do it."
+
+Malone nodded slowly. "I hope so," he said. "Well, I--Well, I'll start
+out right away, then."
+
+He turned. Before he could make another move Burris said, "Wait!"
+
+Malone turned again, hope in his eyes. "Yes, sir?" he said.
+
+"When you leave--" Burris began, and the hope disappeared. "When you
+leave," he went on, "please do one little favor for me. Just one
+little favor, because I'm an old, tired man and I'm not used to things
+any more."
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "Anything, Chief."
+
+"Don't call me--"
+
+"Sorry," Malone said.
+
+Burris breathed heavily. "When you leave," he said, "please, please
+use the door."
+
+"But--"
+
+"Malone," Burris said, "I've tried. I've really tried. Believe me.
+I've tried to get used to the fact that you can teleport. But--"
+
+"It's useful," Malone said, "in my work."
+
+"I can see that," Burris said. "And I don't want you to, well, to stop
+doing it. By no means. It's just that it sort of unnerves me, if you
+see what I mean. No matter how useful it is for the FBI to have an
+agent who can go instantaneously from one place to another, it
+unnerves me." He sighed. "I can't get used to seeing you disappear
+like an overdried soap bubble, Malone. It does something to me, here."
+He placed a hand directly over his sternum and sighed again.
+
+"I can understand that," Malone said. "It unnerved me, too, the first
+time I saw it. I thought I was going crazy, when that kid--Mike
+Fueyo--winked out like a light. But then we got him, and some FBI
+agents besides me have learned the trick." He stopped there, wondering
+if he'd been tactful. After all, it took a latent ability to learn
+teleportation, and some people had it, while others didn't. Malone,
+along with a few other agents, did. Burris evidently didn't, so he
+couldn't teleport, no matter how hard he tried or how many lessons he
+took.
+
+"Well," Burris said, "I'm still unnerved. So please, Malone, when you
+come in here, or go out, use the door. All right?"
+
+"Yes, sir," Malone said. He turned and went out. As he opened the
+door, he could almost hear Burris' sigh of relief. Then he banged it
+shut behind him and, feeling that he might as well continue with his
+spacebound existence, walked all the way to the elevator, and rode it
+downstairs to the FBI laboratories.
+
+The labs, highly efficient and divided into dozens of departments,
+covered several floors. Malone passed through the Fingerprint section,
+filled with technicians doing strange things to great charts and
+slides, and frowning over tiny pieces of material and photographs.
+Then came Forgery Detection, involving many more technicians, many
+more slides and charts and tiny pieces of things and photographs, and
+even a witness or two sitting on the white bench at one side and
+looking lost and somehow civilian. Identification Classified was next,
+a great barn of a room filled with index files. The real indexes were
+in the sub-basement; here, on microfilm, were only the basic
+divisions. A man was standing in front of one of the files, frowning
+at it. Malone went on by without stopping.
+
+Cosmetic Surgery Classification came next. Here there were more
+indexes, and there were also charts and slides. There was an agent
+sitting on a bench looking bored while two female technicians--
+classified as O&U for Old and Ugly in Malone's mind--fluttered around
+him, deciding what disguises were possible, and which of those was
+indicated for the particular job on hand. Malone waved to the agent,
+whom he knew very slightly, and went on. He felt vaguely regretful
+that the FBI couldn't hire prettier girls for Cosmetic Surgery, but
+the trouble was that pretty girls fell for the Agents, and vice versa,
+and this led to an unfortunate tendency toward only handsome and
+virile-looking disguises. The O&U division was unfortunate, he
+decided, but a necessity.
+
+Chemical Analysis (III) was next. The Chemical Analysis Section was
+scattered over several floors, with the first stages up above.
+Division III, Malone remembered, was devoted to nonpoisonous
+substances, like clay or sand found in boots or trouser cuffs, cigar
+ashes and such. They were placed on the same floor as Fingerprints to
+allow free and frequent passage between the sections on the problems
+of plastic prints, made in putty or like substances, and visible
+prints, made when the hand is covered with a visible substance like
+blood, ketchup or glue.
+
+Malone found what he was looking for at the very end of the floor. It
+was the Computer Section, a large room filled with humming, clacking
+and buzzing machines of an ancient vintage, muttering to themselves as
+they worked, and newer machines which were smaller and more silent.
+Lights were lighting and bells were ringing softly, relays were
+relaying and the whole room was a gigantic maze of calculating and
+control machines. What space wasn't filled by the machines themselves
+was filled by workbenches, all littered with an assortment of gears,
+tubes, spare relays, transistors, wires, rods, bolts, resistors and
+all the other paraphernalia used in building the machines and
+repairing them. Beyond the basic room were other, smaller rooms, each
+assigned to a particular kind of computer work.
+
+The narrow aisles were choked here and there with men who looked up as
+Malone passed by, but most of them gave him one quick glance and went
+back to work. A few didn't even do that, but went right on
+concentrating on their jobs. Malone headed for a man working all alone
+in front of a workbench, frowning down at a complicated-looking
+mechanism that seemed to have neither head nor tail, and prodding at
+it with a long, thin screwdriver. The man was thin, too, but not very
+long; he was a little under average height, and he had straight black
+hair, thick-lensed glasses and a studious expression, even when he was
+frowning. He looked as if the mechanism were a student who had cut too
+many classes, and he was being kind but firm with it.
+
+Malone managed to get to the man's side, and coughed discreetly. There
+was no response.
+
+"Fred?" he said.
+
+The screwdriver waggled a little. Malone wasn't quite sure that the
+man was breathing.
+
+"Fred Mitchell," he said.
+
+Mitchell didn't look up. Another second passed.
+
+"Hey," Malone said. Then he closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
+"Fred," he said in a loud, reasonable-sounding voice, "the State
+Department's translator has started to talk pig-Latin."
+
+Mitchell straightened up as if somebody had jabbed him with a pin. The
+screwdriver waved wildly in the air for a second, and then pointed at
+Malone. "That's impossible," Mitchell said in a flat, precise voice.
+"Simply impossible. It doesn't have a pig-Latin circuit. It can't
+possibly--" He blinked and seemed to see Malone for the first time.
+"Oh," he said. "Hello, Malone. What can I do for you?"
+
+Malone smiled, feeling a little victorious at having got through the
+Mitchell armor, which was almost impregnable when there was a job in
+hand. "I've been standing here talking to you for some time."
+
+"Oh, have you?" Mitchell said. "I was busy." That, obviously,
+explained that. Malone shrugged.
+
+"I want you to help me check over some calculators, Fred," he said.
+"We've had some reports that some of the government machines are out
+of kilter, and I'd like you to go over them for me."
+
+"Out of kilter?" Fred Mitchell said. "No, you can forget about it.
+It's absolutely unnecessary to make a check, believe me. Absolutely.
+Forget it." He smiled suddenly. "I suppose it's some kind of a joke,
+isn't it?" he said, just a trifle uncertainly. Fred Mitchell's world,
+while pleasant, did not include much humor, Malone knew. "It's
+supposed to be funny," he said in the same flat, precise voice.
+
+"It isn't funny," Malone said.
+
+Fred sighed. "Then they're obviously lying," he said, "and that's all
+there is to it. Why bother me with it?"
+
+"Lying, Fred?" Malone said.
+
+"Certainly," Fred said. He looked at the machinery with longing.
+
+Malone took a breath. "How do you know?" he said.
+
+Fred sighed. "It's perfectly obvious," he said in a patient tone.
+"Since the State Department translator has no pig-Latin circuit, it
+can't possibly be talking pig-Latin. I will admit that such a circuit
+would be relatively easy to build, though it would have no utility as
+far as I can see. Except, of course, for a joke." He paused. "Joke?"
+he said, in a slightly uneasy tone.
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "Joke."
+
+Mitchell looked relieved. "Very well, then," he began. "Since--"
+
+"Wait a minute," Malone said. "The pig-Latin is a joke. That's right.
+But I'm not talking about the pig-Latin."
+
+"You're not?" Mitchell asked, surprised.
+
+"No," Malone said.
+
+Mitchell frowned. "But you said--" he began.
+
+"A joke," Malone said. "You were perfectly right. The pig-Latin is a
+joke." He waited for Fred's expression to clear, and then added: "But
+what I want to talk to you about isn't."
+
+"It sounds very confused," Fred said after a pause. "Not at all the
+sort of thing that--that usually goes on."
+
+"You have no idea," Malone said. "It's about the political machines,
+all right, but it isn't anything as simple as pig-Latin." He
+explained, taking his time over it.
+
+When he had finished, Fred was nodding his head slowly. "I see," he
+said. "I understand just what you want me to do."
+
+"Good," Malone said.
+
+"I'll take a team over to the Senate Office Building," Fred said, "and
+check the computer-secretaries there. That way, you see, I'll be able
+to do a full running check on them without taking any one machine out
+of operation for too long."
+
+"Sure," Malone said.
+
+"And it shouldn't take long," Fred went on, "to find out just what the
+trouble is." He looked very confident.
+
+"How long?" Malone asked.
+
+Fred shrugged. "Oh," he said, "five or six days."
+
+Malone repressed an impulse to scream. "Days?" he said. "I mean--well,
+look, Fred, it's important. Very important. Can't you do the job any
+faster?"
+
+Fred gave a little sigh. "Checking and repairing all those machines,"
+he said, "is an extremely complex job. Sometimes, Malone, I don't
+think you realize quite how complex and how delicate a job it is to
+deal with such a high-order machine. Why--"
+
+"Wait a minute," Malone said. "Check and repair them?"
+
+"Of course," Fred said.
+
+"But I don't want them repaired," Malone said. Seeing the look of
+horror on Fred's face, he added hastily, "I only want a report from
+you on what's wrong, whether they are actually making errors or not.
+And if they are making errors, just what's making them do it. And just
+what kind of errors. See?"
+
+Fred nodded very slowly. "But I can't just leave them there," he said
+piteously. "In pieces and everything. It isn't right, Malone. It just
+isn't right."
+
+"Well, then," Malone said with energy, "you go right ahead and repair
+them, if you want to. Fix 'em all up. But you can do that after you
+make the report to me, can't you?"
+
+"I--" Fred hesitated. "I had planned to check and repair each machine
+on an individual basis."
+
+"The Congress can allow for a short suspension," Malone said. "Anyhow,
+they can now, or as soon as I get the word to them. Suppose you check
+all the machines first, and then get around to the repair work."
+
+"It's not the best way," Fred demurred.
+
+Malone discovered that it was his turn to sigh. "Is it the fastest?"
+he said.
+
+Fred nodded.
+
+"Then it's the best," Malone said. "How long?"
+
+Fred rolled his eyes to the ceiling and calculated silently for a
+second. "Tomorrow morning," he announced, returning his gaze to
+Malone.
+
+"Fine," Malone said. "Fine."
+
+"But--"
+
+"Never mind the buts," Malone said hurriedly. "I'll count on hearing
+from you tomorrow morning."
+
+"All right."
+
+"And if it looks like sabotage," Malone added, "if the errors aren't
+caused by normal wear and tear on the machines, you let me know right
+away. Phone me. Don't waste an instant."
+
+"I'll--I'll start right away," Fred said heavily. He looked sadly at
+the mechanism he had been working on, and put his screwdriver down
+next to it. It looked to Malone as if he were putting flowers on the
+grave of a dear departed. "I'll get a team together," Fred added. He
+gave the mechanism and screwdriver one last fond parting look, and
+tore himself away.
+
+Malone looked after him for a second, thinking of nothing in
+particular, and then turned in the opposite direction and headed back
+toward the elevator. As he walked, he began to feel more and more
+pleased with himself. After all, he'd gotten the investigation
+started, hadn't he?
+
+And now all he had to do was go back to his office and read some
+reports and listen to some interview tapes, and then he could go home.
+
+The reports and the interview tapes didn't exactly sound like fun,
+Malone thought, but at the same time they seemed fairly innocent. He
+would work his way through them grimly, and maybe he would even
+indulge his most secret vice and smoke a cigar or two to make the work
+pass more pleasantly. Soon enough, he told himself, they would be
+finished.
+
+Sometimes, though, he regretted the reputation he'd gotten. It had
+been bad enough in the old days, the pre-1971 days when Malone had
+thought he was just lucky. Burris had called him a Boy Wonder then,
+when he'd cracked three difficult cases in a row. Being just lucky had
+made it a little tough to live with the Boy Wonder label. After all,
+Malone thought, it wasn't actually as if he'd done anything.
+
+But since 1971 and the case of the Telepathic Spy, things had gotten
+worse. Much worse. Now Malone wasn't just lucky any more. Instead, he
+could teleport and he could even foretell the future a little, in a
+dim sort of way. He'd caught the Telepathic Spy that way, and when the
+case of the Teleporting Juvenile Delinquents had come up he'd been
+assigned to that one too, and he'd cracked it. Now Burris seemed to
+think of him as a kind of God, and gave him all the tough dirty jobs.
+
+And if he wasn't just lucky any more, Malone couldn't think of himself
+as a fearless, heroic FBI agent, either. He just wasn't the type. He
+was ... well, talented. That was the word, he told himself: talented.
+He had all these talents and they made him look like something
+spectacular to Burris and the other FBI men. But he wasn't, really. He
+hadn't done anything really tough to get his talents; they'd just
+happened to him.
+
+Nobody, though, seemed to believe that. He heaved a little sigh and
+stepped into the waiting elevator.
+
+There were, after all, he thought, compensations. He'd had some good
+times, and the talents did come in handy. And he did have his pick of
+the vacation schedule lately. And he'd met some lovely girls...
+
+And besides, he told himself savagely as the elevator shot upward, he
+wasn't going to do anything except return to his office and read some
+reports and listen to some tapes. And then he was going to go home and
+sleep all night, peacefully. And in the morning Mitchell was going to
+call him up and tell him that the computer-secretaries needed nothing
+more than a little repair. He'd say they were getting old, and he'd be
+a little pathetic about it; but it wouldn't be anything serious.
+Malone would send out orders to get the machines repaired, and that
+would be that. And then the next case would be something both normal
+and exciting, like a bank robbery or a kidnapping involving a gorgeous
+blonde who would be so grateful to Malone that...
+
+He had stepped out of the elevator and gone down the corridor without
+noticing it. He pushed at his own office door and walked into the
+outer room. The train of thought he had been following was very nice,
+and sounded very attractive indeed, he told himself.
+
+Unfortunately, he didn't believe it. His prescient ability,
+functioning with its usual efficient aplomb, told Malone that things
+would not be better, or simpler, in the morning. They would be worse,
+and more complicated.
+
+They would be quite a lot worse.
+
+And, as usual, that prescience was perfectly accurate.
+
+
+2
+
+The telephone, Malone realized belatedly, had had a particularly
+nasty-sounding ring. He might have known it would be bad news.
+
+As a matter of fact, he told himself sadly, he had known.
+
+"Nothing at all wrong?" he said into the mouthpiece. "Not with any of
+the computers?" He blinked. "Not even one of them?"
+
+"Not a thing," Mitchell said. "I'll be sending a report up to you in a
+little while. You read it; we put them through every test, and it's
+all detailed there."
+
+"I'm sure you were very thorough," Malone said helplessly.
+
+"Of course we were," Mitchell said. "Of course. And the machines
+passed every single test. Every one. Malone, it was beautiful."
+
+"Goody," Malone said at random. "But there's got to be something--"
+
+"There is, Malone," Fred said. "There is. I think there's definitely
+something odd going on. Something funny. I mean peculiar, not
+humorous."
+
+"I thought so," Malone put in.
+
+"Right," Fred said. "Malone, try and relax. This is a hard thing to
+say, and it must be even harder to hear, but--"
+
+"Tell me," Malone said. "Who's dead? Who's been killed?"
+
+"I know it's tough, Malone," Fred went on.
+
+"Is everybody dead?" Malone said. "It can't be just one person, not
+from that tone in your voice. Has somebody assassinated the entire
+senate? Or the president and his cabinet? Or--"
+
+"It's nothing like that, Malone," Fred said, in a tone that implied
+that such occurrences were really rather minor. "It's the machines."
+
+"The machines?"
+
+"That's right," Fred said grimly. "After we checked them over and
+found they were in good shape, I asked for samples of both the input
+and the output of each machine. I wanted to do a thorough job."
+
+"Congratulations," Malone said. "What happened?"
+
+Fred took a deep breath. "They don't agree," he said.
+
+"They don't?" Malone said. The phrase sounded as if it meant something
+momentous, but he couldn't quite figure out what. In a minute, he
+thought confusedly, it would come to him. But did he want it to?
+
+"They definitely do not agree," Fred was saying. "The correlation is
+erratic; it makes no statistical sense. Malone, there are two
+possibilities."
+
+"Tell me about them," Malone said. He was beginning to feel relieved.
+To Fred, the malfunction of a machine was more serious than the murder
+of the entire Congress. But Malone couldn't quite bring himself to
+feel that way about things.
+
+"First," Fred said in a tense tone, "it's possible that the
+technicians feeding information to the machines are making all kinds
+of mistakes."
+
+Malone nodded at the phone. "That sounds possible," he said. "Which
+ones?"
+
+"All of them," Fred said. "They're all making errors--and they're all
+making about the same number of errors. There don't seem to be any
+real peaks or valleys, Malone; everybody's doing it."
+
+Malone thought of the Varsity Drag and repressed the thought. "A bunch
+of fumblebums," he said. "All fumbling alike. It does sound unlikely,
+but I guess it's possible. We'll get after them right away, and--"
+
+"Wait," Fred said. "There is a second possibility."
+
+"Oh," Malone said.
+
+"Maybe they aren't mistakes," Fred said. "Maybe the technicians are
+deliberately feeding the machine with wrong answers."
+
+Malone hated to admit it, even to himself, but that answer sounded a
+lot more probable. Machine technicians weren't exactly picked off the
+streets at random; they were highly trained for their work, and the
+idea of a whole crew of them starting to fumble at once, in a big way,
+was a little hard to swallow.
+
+The idea of all of them sabotaging the machines they worked on, Malone
+thought, was a tough one to take, too. But it had the advantage of
+making some sense. People, he told himself dully, will do nutty things
+deliberately. It's harder to think of them doing the same nutty things
+without knowing it.
+
+"Well," he said at last, "however it turns out, we'll get to the
+bottom of it. Frankly, I think it's being done on purpose."
+
+"So do I," Fred said. "And when you find out just who's making the
+technicians do such things--when you find out who gives them their
+orders--you let me know."
+
+"Let you know?" Malone said. "But--"
+
+"Any man who would give false data to a perfectly innocent computer,"
+Fred said savagely, "would--would--" For a second he was apparently
+lost for comparisons. Then he finished: "Would kill his own mother."
+He paused a second and added, in an even more savage voice, "And then
+lie about it!"
+
+The image on the screen snapped off, and Malone sat back in his chair
+and sighed. He spent a few minutes regretting that he hadn't chosen,
+early in life, to be a missionary to the Fiji Islands, or possibly
+simply a drunken bum without any troubles, but then the report
+Mitchell had mentioned arrived. Malone picked it up without much
+eagerness, and began going through it carefully.
+
+It was beautifully typed and arranged; somebody on Mitchell's team had
+obviously been up all night at the job. Malone admired the work,
+without being able to get enthusiastic about the contents. Like all
+technical reports, it tended to be boring and just a trifle obscure to
+someone who wasn't completely familiar with the field involved. Malone
+and cybernetics were not exactly bosom buddies, and by the time he
+finished reading through the report he was suffering from an extreme
+case of ennui.
+
+There were no new clues in the report, either; Mitchell's phone
+conversation had covered all of the main points. Malone put the sheaf
+of papers down on his desk and looked at them for a minute as if he
+expected an answer to leap out from the pile and greet him with a glad
+cry. But nothing happened. Unfortunately, he had to do some more work.
+
+The obvious next step was to start checking on the technicians who
+were working on the machines. Malone determined privately that he
+would give none of his reports to Fred Mitchell; he didn't like the
+idea of being responsible for murder, and that was the least Fred
+would do to someone who confused his precious calculators.
+
+He picked up the phone, punched for the Records Division, and waited
+until a bald, middle-aged face appeared. He asked the face to send up
+the dossiers of the technicians concerned to his office. The face
+nodded.
+
+"You want them right away?" it said in a mild, slightly scratchy
+voice.
+
+"Sooner than right away," Malone said.
+
+"They're coming up by messenger," the voice said.
+
+Malone nodded and broke the connection. The technicians had, of
+course, been investigated by the FBI before they'd been hired, but it
+wouldn't do any harm to check them out again. He felt grateful that he
+wouldn't have to do all that work himself; he would just go through
+the dossiers and assign field agents to the actual checking when he
+had a picture of what might need to be checked.
+
+He sighed again and leaned back in his chair. He put his feet up on
+the desk, remembered that he was entirely alone, and swung them down
+again. He fished in a private compartment in his top desk drawer, drew
+out a cigar and unwrapped it. Putting his feet back on the desk, he
+lit the cigar, drew in a cloud of smoke, and lapsed into deep thought.
+
+Cigar smoke billowed around him, making strange, fantastic shapes in
+the air of the office. Malone puffed away, frowning slightly and
+trying to force the puzzle he was working on to make some sense.
+
+It certainly looked as though something were going on, he thought.
+But, for the life of him, he couldn't figure out just what it was.
+After all, what could be anybody's purpose in goofing up a bunch of
+calculators the way they had? Of course, the whole thing could be a
+series of accidents, but the series was a pretty long one, and made
+Malone suspicious to start with. It was easier to assume that the
+goof-ups were being done deliberately.
+
+Unfortunately, they didn't make much sense as sabotage, either.
+
+Senator Deeds, for instance, had sent out a ten-thousand-copy form
+letter to his constituents, blasting an Administration power bill in
+extremely strong language, and asking for some comments on the
+Deeds-Hartshorn Air Ownership Bill, a pending piece of legislation
+that provided for private, personal ownership, based on land title, to
+the upper stratosphere, with a strong hint that rights of passage no
+longer applied without some recompense to the owner of the air.
+Naturally, Deeds had filed the original with a computer-secretary to
+turn out ten thousand duplicate copies, and the machine had done so,
+folding the copies, slipping them into addressed envelopes and sending
+them out under the Senator's franking stamp.
+
+The addresses on the envelopes, however, had not been those of the
+Senator's supporters. The letter had been sent to ten thousand
+stockholders in major airline companies, and the Senator's head was
+still ringing from the force of the denunciatory letters, telegrams
+and telephone calls he'd been getting.
+
+And then there was Representative Follansbee of South Dakota. A set of
+news releases on the proposed Follansbee Waterworks Bill contained the
+statement that the artificial lake which Follansbee proposed in the
+Black Hills country "be formed by controlled atomic power blasts, and
+filled with water obtained from collecting the tears of widows and
+orphans."
+
+Newsmen who saw this release immediately checked the bill. The wording
+was exactly the same. Follansbee claimed that the "widows and orphans"
+phrase had appeared in his speech on the bill, and not in the proposed
+bill itself. "It's completely absurd," he said, with commendable calm,
+"to consider this method of filling an artificial lake."
+Unfortunately, the absurdity was now contained in the bill, which
+would have to go back to committee for redefinition, and probably
+wouldn't come up again in the present session of Congress. Judging
+from the amount of laughter that had greeted the error when it had
+come to light, Malone privately doubted whether any amount of
+redefinition was going to save it from a landslide defeat.
+
+Representative Keller of Idaho had made a speech which contained so
+many errors of fact that newspaper editorials, and his enemies on the
+floor of Congress, cut him to pieces with ease and pleasure. Keller
+complained of his innocence and said he'd gotten his facts from a
+computer-secretary, but this didn't save him. His re-election was a
+matter for grave concern in his own party, and the opposition was,
+naturally, tickled. They would not, Malone thought, dare to be tickled
+pink.
+
+And these were not the only casualties. They were the most blatant
+foul-ups, but there were others, such as the mistake in numbering of a
+House Bill that resulted in a two-month delay during which the
+opposition to the bill raised enough votes to defeat it on the floor.
+Communications were diverted or lost or scrambled in small ways that
+made for confusion--including, Malone recalled, the perfectly horrible
+mixup that resulted when a freshman senator, thinking he was talking
+to his girlfriend on a blanked-vision circuit, discovered he was
+talking to his wife.
+
+The flow of information was being blocked by bottlenecks that suddenly
+existed where there had never been bottlenecks before.
+
+And it wasn't only the computers, Malone knew. He remembered the
+reports the senators and representatives had made. Someone forgot to
+send an important message here, or sent one too soon over there. Both
+courses were equally disturbing, and both resulted in more snarl-ups.
+Reports that should have been sent in weeks before arrived too late;
+reports meant for the eyes of only one man were turned out in
+triplicate and passed all over the offices of Congress.
+
+Each snarl-up was a little one. But, together, they added up to
+inefficiency of a kind and extent that hadn't been seen, Malone told
+himself with some wonder, since the Harding administration fifty years
+before.
+
+And there didn't seem to be anyone to blame anything on.
+
+Malone thought hopefully of sabotage, infiltration and mass treason,
+but it didn't make him feel much better. He puffed out some more smoke
+and frowned at nothing.
+
+There was a knock at the door of his office.
+
+Speedily and guiltily, he swung his feet off the desk and snatched the
+cigar out of his mouth. He jammed it into a deep ashtray and put the
+ashtray back into his desk drawer. He locked the drawer, waved
+ineffectively at the clouds of smoke that surrounded him, and said in
+a resigned voice: "Come in."
+
+The door opened. A tall, solidly-built man stood there, wearing a
+fringe of beard and a cheerful expression. The man had an enormous
+amount of muscle distributed more or less evenly over his chunky body,
+and a pot-belly that looked as if he had swallowed a globe of the
+world. In addition, he was smoking a cigarette and letting out little
+puffs of smoke, rather like a toy locomotive.
+
+"Well, well," Malone said, brushing feebly at the smoke that still
+wreathed him faintly. "If it isn't Thomas Boyd, the FBI's answer to
+Nero Wolfe."
+
+"And if the physique holds true, you're Sherlock Holmes, I suppose,"
+Boyd said.
+
+Malone shook his head, thinking sadly of his father and the cigar.
+"Not exactly," he said. "Not ex--" And then it came to him. It wasn't
+that he was ashamed of smoking cigars like his father, exactly, but
+cigars just weren't right for a fearless, dedicated FBI agent. And he
+had just thought of a way to keep Boyd from knowing what he'd been
+doing. "That's a hell of a cigarette you're smoking, by the way," he
+said.
+
+Boyd looked at it. "It is?" he said.
+
+"Sure is," Malone said, hoping he sounded sufficiently innocent.
+"Smells like a cigar or something."
+
+Boyd sniffed the air for a second, his face wrinkled. Then he looked
+down at his cigarette again. "By God," he said, "you're right, Ken. It
+_does_ smell like a cigar." He came over to Malone's desk, looked
+around for an ashtray and didn't find one, and finally went to the
+window and tossed the cigarette out into the Washington breeze. "How
+are things, anyhow, Ken?" he said.
+
+"Things are confused," Malone said. "Aren't they always?"
+
+Boyd came back to the desk and sat down in a chair at one side of it.
+He put his elbow on the desk. "Sure they are," he said. "I'm confused
+myself, as a matter of fact. Only I think I know where I can get some
+help."
+
+"Really?" Malone said.
+
+Boyd nodded. "Burris told me I might be able to get some information
+from a certain famous and highly respected person," he said.
+
+"Well, well," Malone said. "Who?"
+
+"You," Boyd said.
+
+"Oh," Malone said, trying to look disappointed, flattered and modest
+all at the same time. "Well," he went on after a second, "anything I
+can do--"
+
+"Burris thought you might have some answers," Boyd said.
+
+"Burris is getting optimistic in his old age," Malone said. "I don't
+even have many questions."
+
+Boyd nodded. "Well," he said, "you know this California thing?"
+
+"Sure I do," Malone said. "You're looking into the resignation out
+there, aren't you?"
+
+"Senator Burley," Boyd said. "That's right But Senator Burley's
+resignation isn't all of it, by any means."
+
+"It isn't?" Malone said, trying to sound interested.
+
+"Not at all," Boyd said. "It goes a lot deeper than it looks on the
+surface. In the past year, Ken, five senators have announced their
+resignations from the Senate of the United States. It isn't exactly a
+record--"
+
+"It sounds like a record," Malone said.
+
+"Well," Boyd said, "there was 1860 and the Civil War, when a whole lot
+of senators and representatives resigned all at once."
+
+"Oh," Malone said. "But there isn't any Civil War going on now. At
+least," he added, "I haven't heard of any."
+
+"That's what makes it so funny," Boyd said. "Of course, Senator Burley
+said it was ill health, and so did two others, while Senator Davidson
+said it was old age."
+
+"Well," Malone said, "people do get old. And sick."
+
+"Sure," Boyd said. "The only trouble is--" He paused. "Ken," he said,
+"do you mind if I smoke? I mean, do you mind the smell of cigars?"
+
+"Mind?" Malone said. "Not at all." He blinked. "Besides," he added,
+"maybe this one won't smell like a cigar."
+
+"Well, the last one did," Boyd said. He took a cigarette out of a pack
+in his pocket, and lit it. He sniffed. "You know," he said, "you're
+right. This one doesn't."
+
+"I told you," Malone said. "Must have been a bad cigarette. Spoiled or
+something."
+
+"I guess so," Boyd said vaguely. "But about these retirements--the FBI
+wanted me to look into it because of Burley's being mixed up with the
+space program scandal last year. Remember?"
+
+"Vaguely," Malone said. "I was busy last year."
+
+"Sure you were," Boyd said. "We were both busy getting famous and well
+known."
+
+Malone grinned. "Go on with the story," he said.
+
+Boyd puffed at his cigarette. "Anyhow, we couldn't find anything
+really wrong," he said. "Three senators retiring because of ill
+health, one because of old age. And Farnsworth, the youngest, had a
+nervous breakdown."
+
+"I didn't hear about it," Malone said.
+
+Boyd shrugged "We hushed it up," he said. "But Farnsworth's got
+delusions of persecution. He apparently thinks somebody's out to get
+him. As a matter of fact, he thinks _everybody's_ out to get him."
+
+"Now that," Malone said, "sounds familiar."
+
+Boyd leaned back a little more in his chair. "Here's the funny thing,
+though," he said. "The others all act as if they're suspicious of
+everybody who talks to them. Not anything obvious, you understand.
+Just worried, apprehensive. Always looking at you out of the corners
+of their eyes. That kind of thing."
+
+Malone thought of Senator Lefferts, who was also suffering from
+delusions of persecution, delusions that had real evidence to back
+them up. "It does sound funny," he said cautiously.
+
+"Well, I reported everything to Burris," Boyd went on. "And he said
+you were working on something similar, and we might as well pool our
+resources."
+
+"Here we go again," Malone said. He took a deep breath, filling his
+nostrils with what remained of the cigar odor in the room, and felt
+more peaceful. Quickly, he told Boyd about what had been happening in
+Congress. "It seems pretty obvious," he finished, "that there is some
+kind of a tie-up between the two cases."
+
+"Maybe it's obvious," Boyd said, "but it is just a little bit odd. Fun
+and games. You know, Ken, Burris was right."
+
+"How?" Malone said.
+
+"He said everything was all mixed up," Boyd went on. "He told me the
+country was going to Rome in a handbasket, or something like that."
+
+Wondering vaguely if Burris had really been predicting mass religious
+conversions, Malone nodded silently.
+
+"And he's right," Boyd said. "Look at the newspapers. Everything's
+screwy lately."
+
+"Everything always is screwy," Malone said.
+
+"Not like now," Boyd said. "So many big-shot gangsters have been
+killed lately we might as well bring back Prohibition. And the labor
+unions are so busy with internal battles that they haven't had time to
+go on strike for over a year."
+
+"Is that bad?" Malone said.
+
+Boyd shrugged. "God knows," he said. "But it's sure confusing as all
+hell."
+
+"And now," Malone said, "with all that going on--"
+
+"The Congress of the United States decides to go off its collective
+rocker," Boyd finished. "Exactly." He stared down at his cigarette for
+a minute with a morose and pensive expression on his face. He looked,
+Malone thought, like Henry VIII trying to decide what to do about all
+these here wives.
+
+Then he looked up at Malone. "Ken," he said in a strained voice,
+"there seem to be a lot of nutty cases lately."
+
+Malone considered. "No," he said at last. "It's just that when a nutty
+one comes along, we get it."
+
+"That's what I mean," Boyd said. "I wonder why that is."
+
+Malone shrugged. "It takes a thief to catch a thief," he said.
+
+"But these aren't thieves," Boyd said. "I mean, they're just nutty."
+He paused. "Oh," he said.
+
+"And two thieves are better than one," Malone said.
+
+"Anyhow," Boyd said with a small, gusty sigh, "it's company."
+
+"Sure," Malone said.
+
+Boyd looked for an ashtray, failed again to find one, and walked over
+to flip a second cigarette out onto Washington. He came back to his
+chair, sat down, and said, "What's our next step, Ken?"
+
+Malone considered carefully. "First," he said finally, "we'll start
+assuming something. We'll start assuming that there is some kind of
+organization behind all this, behind all the senators' resignations
+and everything like that."
+
+"It sounds like a big assumption," Boyd said.
+
+Malone shook his head. "It isn't really," he said. "After all, we
+can't figure it's the work of one person: it's too widespread for
+that. And it's silly to assume that everything's accidental."
+
+"All right," Boyd said equably. "It's an organization."
+
+"Trying to subvert the United States," Malone went on. "Reducing
+everything to chaos. And that brings in everything else, Tom. That
+brings in the unions and the gang wars and everything."
+
+Boyd blinked. "How?" he said.
+
+"Obvious," Malone said. "Strife brought on by internal confusion,
+that's what's going on all over. It's the same pattern. And if we
+assume an organization trying to jam up the United States, it even
+makes sense." He leaned back and beamed.
+
+"Sure it makes sense," Boyd said. "But who's the organization?"
+
+Malone shrugged.
+
+"If I were doing the picking," Boyd said, "I'd pick the Russians. Or
+the Chinese. Or both. Probably both."
+
+"It's a possibility," Malone said. "Anyhow, if it's sabotage, who else
+would be interested in sabotaging the United States? There's some
+Russian or Chinese organization fouling up Congress, and the unions,
+and the gangs. Come to think of it, why the gangs? It seems to me that
+if you left the professional gangsters strong, it would do even more
+to foul things up."
+
+"Who knows?" Boyd said. "Maybe they're trying to get rid of American
+gangsters so they can import some of their own."
+
+"That doesn't make any sense," Malone said, "but I'll think about it.
+In the meantime, we have one more interesting question."
+
+"We do?" Boyd said.
+
+"Sure we do," Malone said. "The question is: how?"
+
+Boyd said: "Mmm." Then there was silence for a little while.
+
+"How are the saboteurs doing all this?" Malone said. "It just doesn't
+seem very probable that _all_ the technicians in the Senate Office
+Building, for instance, are spies. It makes even less sense that the
+labor unions are composed mostly of spies. Or, for that matter, the
+Mafia and the organizations like it. What would spies be doing in the
+Mafia?"
+
+"Learning Italian," Boyd said instantly.
+
+"Don't be silly," Malone said. "If there were that many spies in this
+country, the Russians wouldn't have to fight at all. They could _vote_
+the Communists into power, and by a nice big landslide, too."
+
+"Wait a minute," Boyd said. "If there aren't so many spies, then how
+is all this getting done?"
+
+Malone beamed. "That's the question," he said. "And I think I have an
+answer."
+
+"You do?" Boyd said. After a second he said: "Oh, no."
+
+"Suppose you tell me," Malone said.
+
+Boyd opened his mouth. Nothing emerged. He shut it. A second passed
+and he opened it again. "Magic?" he said weakly.
+
+"Not exactly," Malone said cheerfully. "But you're getting warm."
+
+Boyd shut his eyes. "I'm not going to stand for it," he announced.
+"I'm not going to take any more."
+
+"Any more what?" Malone said. "Tell me what you have in mind."
+
+"I won't even consider it," Boyd said. "It haunts me. It gets into my
+dreams. Now, look, Ken, I can't even see a pitchfork any more without
+thinking of Greek letters."
+
+Malone took a breath. "Which Greek letter?" he said.
+
+"You know very well," Boyd said. "What a pitchfork looks like. _Psi._
+And I'm not even going to think about it."
+
+"Well," Malone said equably, "you won't have to. If you'd rather start
+with the Russian-spy end of things, you can do that."
+
+"What I'd rather do," Boyd said, "is resign."
+
+"Next year," Malone said instantly. "For now, you can wait around
+until the dossiers come up--they're for the Senate Office Building
+technicians, and they're on the way. You can go over them, and start
+checking on any known Russian agents in the country for contacts. You
+can also start checking on the dossiers, and in general for any
+hanky-panky."
+
+Boyd blinked. "Hanky-panky?" he said.
+
+"It's a perfectly good word," Malone said, offended. "Or two words.
+Anyhow, you can start on that end, and not worry about anything else."
+
+"It's going to haunt me," Boyd said.
+
+"Well," Malone said, "eat lots of ectoplasm and get enough sleep, and
+everything will be fine. After all, I'm going to have to do the real
+end of the work, the psionics end. I may be wrong, but--"
+
+He was interrupted by the phone. He flicked the switch and Andrew J.
+Burris' face appeared on the screen.
+
+"Malone," Burris said instantly, "I just got a complaint from the
+State Department that ties in with your work. Their translator has
+been acting up."
+
+Malone couldn't say anything for a minute.
+
+"Malone," Burris went on. "I said--"
+
+"I heard you," Malone said. "And it doesn't have one."
+
+"It doesn't have one what?" Burris said.
+
+"A pig-Latin circuit," Malone said. "What else?"
+
+Burris' voice was very calm. "Malone," he said, "what does pig-Latin
+have to do with anything?"
+
+"You said--"
+
+"I said one of the State Department translators was acting up," Burris
+said. "If you want details--"
+
+"I don't think I can stand them," Malone said.
+
+"Some of the Russian and Chinese releases have come through with the
+meaning slightly altered," Burris went on doggedly. "And I want you to
+check on it right away. I--"
+
+"Thank God," Malone said.
+
+Burris blinked. "What?"
+
+"Never mind," Malone said. "Never mind. I'm glad you told me, Chief.
+I'll get to work on it right away, and--"
+
+"You do that, Malone," Burris said. "And for God's sake stop calling
+me Chief! Do I look like an Indian? Do I have feathers in my hair?"
+
+"Anything," Malone said grandly, "is possible." He broke the
+connection in a hurry.
+
+
+3
+
+The summer sun beat down on the white city of Washington, D. C, as if
+it had mistaken its instructions slightly and was convinced that the
+city had been put down somewhere in the Sahara. The sun seemed
+confused, Malone thought. If this were the Sahara, obviously there was
+no reason whatever for the Potomac to be running through it. The sun
+was doing its best to correct this small error, however, by exerting
+even more heat in a valiant attempt to dry up the river.
+
+Its attempt was succeeding, at least partially. The Potomac was still
+there, but quite a lot of it was not in the river bed any more.
+Instead, it had gone into the air, which was so humid by now that
+Malone was willing to swear that it was splashing into his lungs at
+every inhalation. Resisting an impulse to try the breaststroke, he
+stood in the full glare of the straining sun, just outside the Senate
+Office Building. He looked across at the Capitol, just opposite,
+squinting his eyes manfully against the glare of its dome in the
+brightness.
+
+The Capitol was, at any rate, some relief from the sight of Thomas
+Boyd and a group of agents busily grilling two technicians. That was
+going on in the Senate Office Building, and Malone had come over to
+watch the proceedings. Everything had been set up in what Malone
+considered the most complicated fashion possible. A big room had been
+turned into a projection chamber, and films were being run off over
+and over. The films, taken by hidden cameras watching the
+computer-secretaries, had caught two technicians red-handed punching
+errors into the machines. Boyd had leaped on this evidence, and he and
+his crew were showing the movies to the technicians and questioning
+them under bright lights in an effort to break down their resistance.
+
+But it didn't look as though they were going to have any more success
+than the sun was having, turning Washington into the Sahara. After
+all, Malone told himself, wiping his streaming brow, there were no
+Pyramids in Washington. He tried to discover whether that made any
+sense, but it was too much work. He went back to thinking about Boyd.
+
+The technicians were sticking to their original stories that the
+mistakes had been honest ones. It sounded like a sensible idea to
+Malone; after all, people did make mistakes. And the FBI didn't have a
+single shred of evidence to prove that the technicians were engaged in
+deliberate sabotage. But Boyd wasn't giving up. Over and over he got
+the technicians to repeat their stories, looking for discrepancies or
+slips. Over and over he ran off the films of their mistakes, looking
+for some clue, some shred of evidence.
+
+Even the sight of the Capitol, Malone told himself sadly, was better
+than any more of Boyd's massive investigation techniques.
+
+He had come out to do some thinking. He believed, in spite of a good
+deal of evidence to the contrary, that his best ideas came to him
+while walking. At any rate, it was a way of getting away from four
+walls and from the prying eyes and anxious looks of superiors. He
+sighed gently, crammed his hat onto his head and started out.
+
+Only a maniac, he reflected, would wear a hat on a day like the one he
+was swimming through. But the people who passed him as he trudged
+onward to no particular destination didn't seem to notice; they gave
+him a fairly wide berth, and seemed very polite, but that wasn't
+because they thought he was nuts, Malone knew. It was because they
+knew he was an FBI man.
+
+That was the result of an FBI regulation. All agents had to wear hats.
+Malone wasn't sure why, and his thinking on the matter had only
+dredged up the idea that you had to have a hat in case somebody asked
+you to keep something under it. But the FBI was firm about its
+rulings. No matter what the weather, an agent wore a hat. Malone
+thought bitterly that he might just as well wear a red, white and blue
+luminous sign that said _FBI_ in great winking letters, and maybe a
+hooting siren too. Still, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was not
+supposed to be a secret organization, no matter what occasional
+critics might say. And the hats, at least as long as the weather
+remained broiling, were enough proof of that for anybody.
+
+Malone could feel water collecting under his hat and soaking his head.
+He removed the hat quickly, wiped his head with a handkerchief and
+replaced the hat, feeling as if he had become incognito for a few
+seconds. The hat was back on now, feeling official but terrible, and
+about the same was true of the fully-loaded Smith & Wesson .44
+Magnum revolver which hung in his shoulder holster. The harness chafed
+at his shoulder and chest and the weight of the gun itself was an
+added and unwelcome burden.
+
+But even without the gun and the hat, Malone did not feel exactly
+chipper. His shirt and undershirt were no longer two garments, but
+one, welded together by seamless sweat and plastered heavily and not
+too skillfully to his skin. His trouser legs clung damply to calves
+and thighs, rubbing as he walked, and at the knees each trouser leg
+attached and detached itself with the unpleasant regularity of a wet
+bastinado. Inside Malone's shoes, his socks were completely awash, and
+he seemed to squish as he walked. It was hard to tell, but there
+seemed to be a small fish in his left shoe. It might, he told himself,
+be no more than a pebble or a wrinkle in his sock. But he was willing
+to swear that it was swimming upstream.
+
+And the forecast, he told himself bitterly, was for continued warm.
+
+He forced himself to take his mind off his own troubles and get back
+to the troubles of the FBI in general, such as the problem at hand. It
+was an effort, but he frowned and kept walking, and within a block he
+was concentrating again on the _psi_ powers.
+
+_Psi_, he told himself, was behind the whole mess. In spite of Boyd's
+horrified refusal to believe such a thing, Malone was sure of it.
+Three years ago, of course, he wouldn't have considered the notion
+either. But since then a great many things had happened, and his
+horizons had widened. After all, capturing a double handful of totally
+insane, if perfectly genuine telepaths, from asylums all over the
+country, was enough by itself to widen quite a few stunned horizons.
+And then, later, there had been the gang of juvenile delinquents. They
+had been perfectly normal juvenile delinquents, stealing cars and
+bopping a stray policeman or two. It happened, though, that they had
+solved the secret of instantaneous teleportation, too. This made them
+just a trifle unusual.
+
+In capturing them, Malone, too, had learned the teleportation secret.
+Unlike Boyd, he thought, or Burris, the idea of psionic power didn't
+bother him much. After all, the psionic spectrum (if it was a spectrum
+at all) was just as much a natural phenomenon as gravity or magnetism.
+
+It was just a little hard for some people to get used to.
+
+And, of course, he didn't fully understand _how_ it worked, or _why_.
+This put him in the position, he told himself, of an Australian
+aborigine. He tried to imagine an Australian aborigine in a hat on a
+hot day, decided the aborigine would have too much sense, and got back
+off the subject again.
+
+However, he thought grimly, there was this Australian aborigine. And
+he had a magnifying glass, which he'd picked up from the wreck of some
+ship. Using that--assuming that experience, or a friendly missionary,
+taught him how--he could manage to light a fire, using the sun's
+thermonuclear processes to do the job. Malone doubted that the
+aborigine knew anything about thermonuclear processes, but he could
+start a fire with them.
+
+As a matter of fact, he told himself, the aborigine didn't understand
+oxidation, either. But he could use that fire, when he got it going.
+In spite of his lack of knowledge, the aborigine could use that nice,
+hot, burning fire...
+
+Hurriedly, Malone pried his thoughts away from aborigines and heat,
+and tried to focus his mind elsewhere. He didn't understand psionic
+processes, he thought; but then, nobody did, really, as far as he
+knew. But he could use them.
+
+And, obviously, somebody else could use them too.
+
+Only what kind of force was being used? What kind of psionic force
+would it take to make so many people in the United States goof up the
+way they were doing?
+
+That, Malone told himself, was a good question, a basic and an
+important question. He was proud of himself for thinking of it.
+
+Unfortunately, he didn't have the answer.
+
+But he thought he knew a way of getting one.
+
+It was perfectly true that nobody knew much about how psionics worked.
+For that matter, nobody knew very much about how gravity worked. But
+there was still some information, and, in the case of psionics, Malone
+knew where it was to be found.
+
+It was to be found in Yucca Flats, Nevada.
+
+It was, of course, true that Nevada would probably be even hotter than
+Washington, D. C. But there was no help for that, Malone told himself
+sadly; and, besides, the cold chill of the expert himself would
+probably cool things off quite rapidly. Malone thought of Dr. Thomas
+O'Connor, the Westinghouse psionics expert and frowned. O'Connor was
+not exactly what might be called a friendly man.
+
+But he did know more about psionics than anyone else Malone could
+think of. And his help had been invaluable in solving the two previous
+psionic cases Malone had worked on.
+
+For a second he thought of calling O'Connor, but he brushed that
+thought aside bravely. In spite of the heat of Yucca Flats, he would
+have to talk to the man personally. He thought again of O'Connor's
+congealed personality, and wondered if it would really be effective in
+combating the heat. If it were, he told himself, he would take the man
+right back to Washington with him, and plug him into the
+air-conditioning lines.
+
+He sighed deeply, thought about a cigar and decided regretfully
+against it, here on the public street where he would be visible to
+anyone. Instead, he looked around him, discovered that he was only a
+block from a large, neon-lit drugstore and headed for it. Less than a
+minute later he was in a phone booth.
+
+The operators throughout the country seemed to suffer from heat
+prostration, and Malone was hardly inclined to blame them. But, all
+the same, it took several minutes for him to get through to Dr.
+O'Connor's office, and a minute or so more before he could convince a
+security-addled secretary that, after all, he would hardly blow
+O'Connor to bits over the long-distance phone.
+
+Finally the secretary, with a sigh of reluctance, said she would see
+if Dr. O'Connor were available. Malone waited in the phone booth,
+opening the door every few seconds to breathe. The booth was
+air-conditioned, but remained for some mystical reason an even ten
+degrees above the boiling point of Malone's temper.
+
+Finally Dr. O'Connor's lean, pallid face appeared on the screen. He
+had not changed since Malone had last seen him. He still looked, and
+acted, like one of Malone's more disliked law professors.
+
+"Ah," the scientist said in a cold, precise voice. "Mr. Malone. I am
+sorry for our precautions, but you understand that security must be
+served."
+
+"Sure," Malone said.
+
+"Being an FBI man, of course you would," Dr. O'Connor went on, his
+face changing slightly and his voice warming almost to the boiling
+point of nitrogen. It was obvious that the phrase was Dr. O'Connor's
+idea of a little joke, and Malone smiled politely and nodded. The
+scientist seemed to feel some friendliness toward Malone, though it
+was hard to tell for sure. But Malone had brought him some fine
+specimens to work with--telepaths and teleports, though human, being
+no more than specimens to such a very precise scientific mind--and he
+seemed grateful for Malone's diligence and effort in finding such
+fascinating objects of study.
+
+That Malone certainly hadn't started out to find them made, it
+appeared, very little difference.
+
+"Well, then," O'Connor said, returning to his normal, serious tone.
+"What can I do for you, Mr. Malone?"
+
+"If you have the time, Doctor," Malone said respectfully, "I'd like to
+talk to you for a few minutes." He had the absurd feeling that
+O'Connor was going to tell him to stop by after class, but the
+scientist only nodded.
+
+"Your call is timed very well," he said. "As it happens, Mr. Malone, I
+do have a few seconds to spare just now."
+
+"Fine," Malone said.
+
+"I should be glad to talk with you," O'Connor said, without looking
+any more glad than ever.
+
+"I'll be right there," Malone said. O'Connor nodded again, and blanked
+out. Malone switched off and took a deep, superheated breath of phone
+booth air. For a second he considered starting his trip from outside
+the phone booth, but that was dangerous--if not to Malone, then to
+innocent spectators. Psionics was by no means a household word, and
+the sight of Malone leaving for Nevada might send several citizens
+straight to the wagon. Which was not a place, he thought judiciously,
+for anybody to be on such a hot day.
+
+He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second. In that time he
+reconstructed from memory a detailed, three-dimensional, full-color
+image of Dr. O'Connor's office in his mind. It was perfect in detail;
+he checked it over mentally and then, by a special effort of will, he
+gave himself the psychic push that made the transition possible.
+
+When he opened his eyes, he was in O'Connor's office, standing in
+front of the scientist's wide desk. He hoped nobody had been looking
+into the phone booth at the instant he had disappeared, but he was
+reasonably sure he'd been unobserved. People didn't go around peering
+into phone booths, after all, and he had seen no one.
+
+O'Connor looked up without surprise. "Ah," he said. "Sit down, Mr.
+Malone." Malone looked around for the chair, which was an
+uncomfortably straight-backed affair, and sat down in it gingerly.
+Remembering past visits to O'Connor, he was grateful for even the
+small amount of relaxation the hard wood afforded him. O'Connor had
+only recently unbent to the point of supplying a spare chair in his
+office for visitors, and, apparently, especially for Malone. Perhaps,
+Malone thought, it was more gratitude for the lovely specimens.
+
+Malone still felt uncomfortable, but tried bravely not to show it. He
+felt slightly guilty, too, as he always did when he popped into
+O'Connor's office without bothering to stay space-bound. By law, after
+all, he knew he should check in and out at the main gate of the huge,
+ultra-top-secret Government reservation whenever he visited Yucca
+Flats. But that meant wasting a lot of time and going through a lot of
+trouble. Malone had rationalized it out for himself that way, and had
+gotten just far enough to do things the quick and easy way and not
+quite far enough to feel undisturbed about it. After all, he told
+himself grimly, anything that saved time and trouble increased the
+efficiency of the FBI, so it was all to the good.
+
+He swallowed hard. "Dr. O'Connor--" he began.
+
+O'Connor looked up again. "Yes?" he said. He'd had plenty of practice
+in watching people appear and disappear, between Malone and the
+specimens Malone had brought him; he was beyond surprise or shock by
+now.
+
+"I came here to talk to you," Malone began again.
+
+O'Connor nodded, a trifle impatiently. "Yes," he said. "I know that."
+
+"Well--" Malone thought fast. Presenting the case to O'Connor was
+impossible; it was too complicated, and it might violate governmental
+secrecy somewhere along the line. He decided to wrap it up in a
+hypothetical situation. "Doctor," he said, "I know that all the
+various manifestations of the _psi_ powers were investigated and named
+long before responsible scientists became interested in the subject."
+
+"That," O'Connor said with some reluctance, "is true." He looked sad,
+as if he wished they'd waited on naming some of the psionic
+manifestations until he'd been born and started investigating them.
+Malone tried to imagine a person doing something called O'Connorizing,
+and decided he was grateful for history.
+
+"Well, then--" he said.
+
+"At least," O'Connor cut in, "it is true in a rather vague and general
+way. You see, Mr. Malone, any precise description of a psionic
+manifestation must wait until a metalanguage has grown up to encompass
+it; that is, until understanding and knowledge have reached the point
+where careful and accurate description can take place."
+
+"Oh," Malone said helplessly. "Sure." He wondered if what O'Connor had
+said meant anything, and decided that it probably did, but he didn't
+want to know about it.
+
+"While we have not yet reached that point," O'Connor said, "we are
+approaching it in our experiments. I am hopeful that, in the near
+future--"
+
+"Well," Malone cut in desperately, "sure. Of course. Naturally."
+
+Dr. O'Connor looked miffed. The temperature of the room seemed to drop
+several degrees, and Malone swallowed hard and tried to look
+ingratiating and helpful, like a student with nothing but A's on his
+record.
+
+Before O'Connor could pick up the thread of his sentence, Malone went
+on: "What I mean is something like this. Picking up the mental
+activity of another person is called telepathy. Floating in the air is
+called levitation. Moving objects around is psychokinesis. Going from
+one place to another instantaneously is teleportation. And so on."
+
+"The language you use," O'Connor said, still miffed, "is extremely
+loose. I might go so far as to say that the statements you have made
+are, essentially, meaningless as a result of their lack of rigor."
+
+Malone took a deep breath. "Dr. O'Connor," he said, "you know what I
+mean, don't you?"
+
+"I believe so," O'Connor said, with the air of a king granting a
+pardon to a particularly repulsive-looking subject in the lowest
+income brackets.
+
+"Well, then," Malone said. "Yes or no?"
+
+O'Connor frowned. "Yes or no what?" he said.
+
+"I--" Malone blinked. "I mean, the things have names," he said at
+last. "All the various psionic manifestations have names."
+
+"Ah," O'Connor said. "Well. I should say--" He put his fingertips
+together and stared at a point on the white ceiling for a second.
+"Yes," he said at last.
+
+Malone breathed a sigh of relief. "Good," he said. "That's what I
+wanted to know." He leaned forward. "And if they all do have names,"
+he went on, "what is it called when a large group of people are forced
+to act in a certain manner?"
+
+O'Connor shrugged. "Forced?" he said.
+
+"Forced by mental power," Malone said.
+
+There was a second of silence.
+
+"At first," O'Connor said, "I might think of various examples: the
+actions of a mob, for example, or the demonstrations of the Indian
+Rope Trick, or perhaps the sale of a useless product through
+television or through other advertising." Again his face moved, ever
+so slightly, in what he obviously believed to be a smile. "The usual
+name for such a phenomenon is 'mass hypnotism,' Mr. Malone," he said.
+"But that is not, strictly speaking, a _psi_ phenomenon at all.
+Studies in that area belong to the field of mob psychology; they are
+not properly in my scope." He looked vastly superior to anything and
+everything that was outside his scope. Malone concentrated on looking
+receptive and understanding.
+
+"Yes?" he said.
+
+O'Connor gave him a look that made Malone feel he'd been caught
+cribbing during an exam, but the scientist said nothing to back up the
+look. Instead he went on: "I will grant that there may be an
+amplification of the telepathic faculty in the normal individual in
+such cases."
+
+"Good," Malone said doubtfully.
+
+"Such an amplification," O'Connor went on, as if he hadn't heard,
+"would account for the apparent--ah--mental linkage that makes a mob
+appear to act as a single organism during certain periods of--ah--
+stress." He looked judicious for a second, and then nodded. "However,"
+he said, "other than that, I would doubt that there is any psionic
+force involved."
+
+Malone spent a second or two digesting O'Connor's reply.
+
+"Well," he said at last, "I'm not sure that's what I meant. I mean,
+I'm not sure I meant to ask that question." He took a breath and
+decided to start all over. "It's not like a mob," he said, "with
+everybody all doing the same thing at the same time. It's more like a
+group of men, all separated, without any apparent connections between
+any of the men. And they're all working toward a common goal. All
+doing different things, but all with the same objective. See?"
+
+"Of course I do," O'Connor said flatly. "But what you're suggesting--"
+He looked straight at Malone. "Have you had any experience of this
+... phenomenon?"
+
+"Experience?" Malone said.
+
+"I believe you have had," O'Connor said. "Such a concept could not
+have come to you in a theoretical manner. You must be involved with an
+actual situation very much like the one you describe."
+
+Malone swallowed. "Me?" he said.
+
+"Mr. Malone," O'Connor said. "May I remind you that this is Yucca
+Flats? That the security checks here are as careful as anywhere in the
+world? That I, myself, have top-security clearance for many special
+projects? You do not need to watch your words here."
+
+"It's not security," Malone said. "Anyhow, it's not only security. But
+things are pretty complicated."
+
+"I assure you," O'Connor said, "that I will be able to understand even
+events which you feel are complex."
+
+Malone swallowed again, hard. "I didn't mean--" he started.
+
+"Please, Mr. Malone," O'Connor said. His voice was colder than usual.
+Malone had the feeling that he was about to take the extra chair away.
+"Go on," O'Connor said. "Explain yourself."
+
+Malone took a deep breath. He started with the facts he'd been told by
+Burris, and went straight through to the interviews of the two
+computer-secretary technicians by Boyd and Company.
+
+It took quite awhile. By the time he had finished, O'Connor wasn't
+looking frozen any more; he'd apparently forgotten to keep the freezer
+coils running. Instead, his face showed frank bewilderment, and great
+interest. "I never heard of such a thing," he said. "Never. Not at any
+time."
+
+"But--"
+
+O'Connor shook his head. "I have never heard of a psionic
+manifestation on that order," he said. It seemed to be a painful
+admission. "Something that would make a random group of men co-operate
+in that manner--why, it's completely new."
+
+"It is?" Malone said, wondering if, when it was all investigated and
+described, it might be called O'Connorizing. Then he wondered how
+anybody was going to go about investigating it and describing it, and
+sank even deeper into gloom.
+
+"Completely new," O'Connor said. "You may take my word." Then, slowly,
+he began to brighten again, with all the glitter of newly-formed ice.
+"As a matter of fact," he said, in a tone more like his usual one, "as
+a matter of fact, Mr. Malone, I don't think it's possible."
+
+"But it happened," Malone said. "It's still happening. All over."
+
+O'Connor's lips tightened. "I have given my opinion," he said. "I do
+not believe that such a thing is possible. There must be some other
+explanation."
+
+"All right," Malone said agreeably. "I'll bite. What is it?"
+
+O'Connor frowned. "Your levity," he said, "is uncalled-for."
+
+Malone shrugged. "I didn't mean to be--" He paused. "Anyhow, I didn't
+mean to be funny," he went on. "But I would like to have another idea
+of what's causing all this."
+
+"Scientific theories," O'Connor said sternly, "are not invented on the
+spur of the moment. Only after long, careful thought."
+
+"You mean you can't think of anything," Malone said.
+
+"There must be some other explanation," O'Connor said. "Naturally,
+since the facts have only now been presented to me, it is impossible
+for me to display at once a fully-constructed theory."
+
+Malone nodded slowly. "Okay," he said. "Have you got any hints, then?
+Any ideas at all?"
+
+O'Connor shook his head. "I have not," he said. "But I strongly
+suggest, Mr. Malone, that you recheck your data. The fault may very
+well lie in your own interpretations of the actual facts."
+
+"I don't think so," Malone said.
+
+O'Connor grimaced. "I do," he said firmly.
+
+Malone sighed, very faintly. He shifted in the chair and began to
+realize, for the first time, just how uncomfortable it really was. He
+also felt a little chilly, and the chill was growing. That, he told
+himself, was the effect of Dr. O'Connor. He no longer regretted
+wearing his hat. As a matter of fact, he thought wistfully for a
+second of a small, light overcoat.
+
+O'Connor, he told himself, was definitely not the warm, friendly type.
+
+"Well, then," he said, conquering the chilly feeling for a second,
+"maybe there's somebody else. Somebody who knows something more about
+psionics, and who might have some other ideas about--"
+
+"Please, Mr. Malone," O'Connor said. "The United States Government
+would hardly have chosen me had I not been uniquely qualified in my
+field."
+
+Malone sighed again. "I mean, maybe there are some books on the
+subject," he said quietly, hoping he sounded tactful. "Maybe there's
+something I could look up."
+
+"Mr. Malone." The temperature of the office, Malone realized, was
+definitely lowering. O'Connor's built-in freezer coils were working
+overtime, he told himself. "The field of psionics is so young that I
+can say, without qualification, that I am acquainted with everything
+written on the subject. By that, of course, I mean scientific works. I
+do not doubt that the American Society for Psychical Research, for
+instance, has hundreds of crackpot books which I have never read, or
+even heard of. But in the strictly scientific field, I must say
+that--"
+
+He broke off, looking narrowly at Malone with what might have been
+concern, but looked more like discouragement and boredom.
+
+"Mr. Malone," he said, "are you ill?"
+
+Malone thought about it. He wasn't quite sure, he discovered. The
+chill in the office was bothering him more and more, and as it grew he
+began to doubt that it was all due to the O'Connor influence. Suddenly
+a distinct shudder started somewhere in the vicinity of his shoulders
+and rippled its way down his body.
+
+Another one followed it, and then a third.
+
+"Mr. Malone," O'Connor said.
+
+"Me?" Malone said. "I'm--I'm all right."
+
+"You seem to have contracted a chill," O'Connor said.
+
+A fourth shudder followed the other three.
+
+"I--guess so," Malone said. "I d-d--I do s-seem to be r-r-rather
+chilly."
+
+O'Connor nodded. "Ah," he said. "I thought so. Although a chill is
+certainly odd at seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit." He looked at the
+thermometer just outside the window of his office, then turned back to
+Malone. "Pardon me," he said. "Seventy-one point six."
+
+"Is--is that all it is?" Malone said. Seventy-one point six degrees,
+or even seventy-two, hardly sounded like the broiling Nevada desert
+he'd expected.
+
+"Of course," O'Connor said. "At nine o'clock in the morning, one would
+hardly expect great temperatures. The desert becomes quite hot during
+the day, but cools off rapidly; I assume you are familiar with the
+laws covering the system."
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "S-sure."
+
+The chills were not getting any better. They continued to travel up
+and down his body with the dignified regularity of Pennsylvania
+Railroad commuter trains.
+
+O'Connor frowned for a second. It was obvious that his keen scientific
+eye was sizing up the phenomenon, and reporting events to his keen
+scientific brain. In a second or less, the keen scientific brain had
+come up with an answer, and Dr. O'Connor spoke in his very keenest
+scientific voice.
+
+"I should have warned you," he said, without an audible trace of
+regret. "The answer is childishly simple, Mr. Malone. You left
+Washington at noon."
+
+"Just a little before noon," Malone said. Remembering the burning sun,
+he added: "High noon. Very high."
+
+"Just so," O'Connor said. "And not only the heat was intense; the
+humidity, I assume, was also high."
+
+"Very," Malone said, thinking back. He shivered again.
+
+"In Washington," O'Connor said, "it was noon. Here it is nine o'clock,
+and hardly as warm. The atmosphere is quite arid, and about twenty
+degrees below that obtaining in Washington."
+
+Malone thought about it, trying to ignore the chills. "Oh," he said at
+last. "And all the time I thought it was you."
+
+"What?" O'Connor leaned forward.
+
+"Nothing," Malone said hastily. "Nothing at all."
+
+"My suggestion," O'Connor said, putting his fingertips together again,
+"is that you take off your clothes, which are undoubtedly damp, and--"
+
+Naturally, Malone had not brought any clothes to Yucca Flats to change
+into. And when he tried to picture himself in a spare suit of Dr.
+O'Connor's, the picture just wouldn't come. Besides, the idea of doing
+a modified striptease in, or near, the O'Connor office was thoroughly
+unattractive.
+
+"Well," he said slowly, "thanks a lot, Doctor, but no thanks. I really
+have a better idea."
+
+"Better?" O'Connor said.
+
+"Well, I--" Malone took a deep breath and shut his eyes.
+
+He heard Dr. O'Connor say: "Well, Mr. Malone, goodbye. And good luck."
+
+Then the office in Yucca Flats was gone, and Malone was standing in
+the bedroom of his own apartment, on the fringes of Washington, D.C.
+
+
+4
+
+He walked over to the wall control and shut off the air-conditioning
+in a hurry. He threw open a window and breathed great gulps of the
+hot, humid air from the streets. In a small corner at the back of his
+mind, he wondered why he was grateful for the air he had suffered
+under only a few minutes before. But that, he reflected, was life. And
+a very silly kind of life, too, he told himself without rancor.
+
+In a few minutes he left the window, somewhat restored, and headed for
+the shower. When it was running nicely and he was under it, he started
+to sing. But his voice didn't sound as much like the voice of Lauritz
+Melchior as it usually did, not even when he made a brave, if
+foolhardy stab at the Melchior accent. Slowly, he began to realize
+that he was bothered.
+
+He climbed out of the shower and started drying himself. Up to now, he
+thought, he had depended on Dr. Thomas O'Connor for edifying,
+trustworthy and reasonably complete information about psionics and
+_psi_ phenomena in general. He had looked on O'Connor as a sort of
+living version of an extremely good edition of the Britannica, always
+available for reference.
+
+And now O'Connor had failed him. That, Malone thought, was hardly
+fair. O'Connor had no business failing him, particularly when there
+was no place else to go.
+
+The scientist had been right, of course, Malone knew. There was no
+other scientist who knew as much about psionics as O'Connor, and if
+O'Connor said there were no books, then that was that: there were no
+books.
+
+He reached for a drawer in his dresser, opened it and pulled out some
+underclothes, humming tunelessly under his breath as he dressed. If
+there was no one to ask, he thought, and if there were no books...
+
+He stopped with a sock in his hand, and stared at it in wonder.
+O'Connor hadn't said there were no books. As a matter of fact, Malone
+realized, he'd said exactly the opposite.
+
+There were books. But they were "crackpot" books. O'Connor had never
+read them. He had, he said, probably never even heard of many of them.
+
+"Crackpot" was a fighting word to O'Connor. But to Malone it had all
+the sweetness of flattery. After all, he'd found telepaths in insane
+asylums, and teleports among the juvenile delinquents of New York.
+"Crackpot" was a word that was rapidly ceasing to have any meaning at
+all in Malone's mind.
+
+He realized that he was still staring at the sock, which was black
+with a pink clock. Hurriedly, he put it on, and finished dressing. He
+reached for the phone and made a few fast calls, and then teleported
+himself to his locked office in FBI Headquarters, on East 69th Street
+in New York. He let himself out, and strolled down the corridor. The
+agent-in-charge looked up from his desk as Malone passed, blinked, and
+said, "Hello, Malone. What's up now?"
+
+"I'm going prowling," Malone said. "But there won't be any work for
+you, as far as I can see."
+
+"Oh?"
+
+"Just relax," Malone said. "Breathe easy."
+
+"I'll try to," the agent-in-charge said, a little sadly. "But every
+time you show up, I think about that wave of red Cadillacs you
+started. I'll never feel really secure again."
+
+"Relax," Malone said. "Next time it won't be Cadillacs. But it might
+be spirits, blowing on ear-trumpets. Or whatever it is they do."
+
+"Spirits, Malone?" the agent-in-charge said.
+
+"No, thanks," Malone said sternly. "I never drink on duty." He gave
+the agent a cheery wave of his hand and went on out to the street.
+
+The Psychical Research Society had offices in the Ravell Building, a
+large structure composed mostly of plate glass and anodized aluminum
+that looked just a little like a bright blue transparent crackerbox
+that had been stood on end for purposes unknown. Having walked all the
+way down to this box on 56th Street, Malone had recovered his former
+sensitivity range to temperature and felt pathetically grateful for
+the coolish sea breeze that made New York somewhat less of an
+unbearable Summer Festival than was normal.
+
+The lobby of the building was glittering and polished, as if human
+beings could not possibly exist in it. Malone took an elevator to the
+sixth floor, stepped out into a small, equally polished hall, and
+hurriedly looked off to his right. A small door stood there, with a
+legend engraved in elegantly small letters. It said:
+
+     _The Psychical Research Society_
+                  _Push_
+
+Malone obeyed instructions. The door swung noiselessly open, and then
+closed behind him.
+
+He was in a large square-looking room which had a couch and chair set
+at one corner, and a desk at the far end. Behind the desk was a brass
+plate, on which was engraved:
+
+     _The Psychical Research Society_
+               _Main Offices_
+
+To Malone's left was a hall that angled off into invisibility, and to
+the left of the desk was another one, going straight back past doors
+and two radiators until it ran into a right-angled turn and also
+disappeared.
+
+Malone took in the details of his surroundings almost automatically,
+filing them in his memory just in case he ever needed to use them.
+
+One detail, however, required more than automatic attention. Sitting
+behind the desk, her head just below the brass plaque, was a redhead.
+She was, Malone thought, positively beautiful. Of course, he could not
+see the lower two-thirds of her body, but if they were half as
+interesting as the upper third and the face and head, he was willing
+to spend days, weeks or even months on their investigation. Some jobs,
+he told himself, feeling a strong sense of duty, were definitely worth
+taking time over.
+
+She was turned slightly away from Malone, and had obviously not heard
+him come in. Malone wondered how best to announce himself, and
+regretfully gave up the idea of tiptoeing up to the girl, placing his
+hands over her eyes, kissing the back of her neck and crying:
+"Surprise!" It was elegant, he felt, but it just wasn't _right_.
+
+He compromised at last on the old established method of
+throat-clearing to attract her attention. He was sure he could take it
+from there, to an eminently satisfying conclusion.
+
+He tiptoed on the deep-pile rug right up to her desk. He took a deep
+breath.
+
+And the expected happened.
+
+He sneezed.
+
+The sneeze was loud and long, and it echoed through the room and
+throughout the corridors. It sounded to Malone like the blast of a
+small bomb, or possibly a grenade. Startled himself by the volume of
+sound he had managed to generate, he jumped back.
+
+The girl had jumped, too, but her leap had been straight upward, about
+an inch and a half. She came down on her chair and reached up a hand.
+The hand wiped the back of her neck with a slow, lingering motion of
+complete loathing. Then, equally slowly, she turned.
+
+"That," she said in a low, sweet voice, "was a hell of a dirty trick."
+
+"It was an accident," Malone said. "The Will of God."
+
+"God has an exceedingly nasty mind," the girl said. "Something, by the
+way, which I have often suspected." She regarded Malone darkly. "Do
+you always do that to strangers? Is it some new sort of perversion?"
+
+"I have never done such a thing before," Malone said sternly.
+
+"Oh," the girl said. "An experimenter. Avid for new sensations.
+Probably a jaded scion of a rich New York family." She paused. "Tell
+me," she said, "is it fun?"
+
+Malone opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He shut it, thought for
+a second and then tried again. He got as far as: "I--" before Nemesis
+overtook him. The second sneeze was even louder and more powerful than
+the first had been.
+
+"It must be fun," the girl said acidly, producing a handkerchief from
+somewhere and going to work on her face. "You just can't seem to wait
+to do it again. Would it do any good to tell you that the fascination
+with this form of greeting is not universal? Or don't you care?"
+
+"Damn it," Malone said, goaded, "I've got a cold."
+
+"And you feel you should share it with the world," the girl said. "I
+quite understand. Tell me, is there anything I can do for you? Or has
+your mission been accomplished?"
+
+"My mission?" Malone said.
+
+"Having sneezed twice at me," the girl said, "do you feel satisfied?
+Will you vanish softly and silently away? Or do you want to sneeze at
+somebody else?"
+
+"I want the president of the Society," Malone said. "According to my
+information, his name is Sir Lewis Carter."
+
+"And if you sneeze at him," the girl said, "yours is going to be mud.
+He isn't much on novelty."
+
+"I--"
+
+"Besides which," she said, "he's extremely busy. And I don't think
+he'll see you at all. Why don't you go and sneeze at somebody else?
+There must be lots of people who would consider themselves honored to
+be noticed, especially in such a startling way. Why don't you try and
+find one somewhere? Somewhere very far away."
+
+Malone was beyond speech. He fumbled for his wallet, flipped it open
+and showed the girl his identification.
+
+"My, my," she said. "And hasn't the FBI anything better to do? I mean,
+can't you go and sneeze at counterfeiters in their lairs, or wherever
+they might be?"
+
+"I want to see Sir Lewis Carter," Malone said doggedly.
+
+The girl shrugged and picked up the phone on the desk. It was a
+blank-vision device, of course; many office intercoms were. She
+dialed, waited and then said, "Sir Lewis, please." Another second went
+by. Then she spoke again. "Sir Lewis," she said, "this is Lou, at the
+front desk. There's a man here named Malone, who wants to see you."
+
+She waited a second. "I don't know what he wants," she told the phone.
+"But he's from the FBI." A second's pause. "That's right, the FBI,"
+she said. "All right, Sir Lewis. Right away." She hung up the phone
+and turned to watch Malone warily.
+
+"Sir Lewis," she said, "will see you. I couldn't say why. But take the
+side corridor to the rear of the suite. His office has his name on it,
+and I won't tell you you can't miss it because I have every faith that
+you will. Good luck."
+
+Malone blinked. "Look," he said. "I know I startled you, but I didn't
+mean to. I--" He started to sneeze, but this time he got his own
+handkerchief out in time and muffled the explosion slightly.
+
+"Good work," the girl said approvingly. "Tell me, Mr. Malone, have you
+been toilet-trained, too?"
+
+There was nothing at all to say to that remark, Malone reflected as he
+wended his way down the side corridor. It seemed endless, and kept
+branching off unexpectedly. Once he blundered into a large open room
+filled with people at desks. A woman who seemed to have a great many
+teeth and rather bulbous eyes looked up at him. "Can I help you?" she
+said in a fervent whine.
+
+"I sincerely hope not," Malone said, backing away and managing to find
+the corridor once more. After what seemed like a long time, and two
+more sneezes, he found a small door which was labeled in capital
+letters:
+
+     THE PSYCHICAL RESEARCH SOCIETY
+             SIR LEWIS CARTER
+                PRESIDENT
+
+Malone sighed. "Well," he muttered, "they certainly aren't hiding
+anything." He pushed at the door, and it swung open.
+
+Sir Lewis was a tall, solidly-built man with a kindly expression. He
+wore grey flannel trousers and a brown tweed jacket, which made an
+interesting color contrast with his iron-grey hair. His teeth were
+clenched so firmly on the bit of a calabash pipe with a meerschaum
+bowl that Malone wondered if he could ever get loose. Malone shut the
+door behind him, and Sir Lewis rose and extended a hand.
+
+Malone went to the desk and reached across to take the hand. It was
+firm and dry. "I'm Kenneth Malone," Malone said.
+
+"Ah, yes," Sir Lewis said. "Pleased to meet you. Always happy, of
+course, to do whatever I can for your FBI. Not only a duty, so to
+speak, but a pleasure. Sit down. Please do sit down."
+
+Malone found a chair at the side of the desk, and sank into it. It was
+soft and comfortable. It provided such a contrast to O'Connor's
+furnishings that Malone began to wish it was Sir Lewis who was
+employed at Yucca Flats. Then he could tell Sir Lewis everything about
+the case.
+
+Now, of course, he could only hedge and try to make do without stating
+very many facts. "Sir Lewis," he said, "I trust you'll keep this
+conversation confidential."
+
+"Naturally," Sir Lewis said. He removed the pipe, stared at it, and
+replaced it.
+
+"I can't give you the full details," Malone went on, "but the FBI is
+presently engaged in an investigation which requires the specialized
+knowledge your organization seems to have."
+
+"FBI?" Sir Lewis said. "Specialized investigation?" He seemed pleased,
+but a trifle puzzled. "Dear boy, anything we have is at your disposal,
+of course. But I quite fail to see how you can consider us--"
+
+"It's rather an unusual problem," Malone said, feeling that that was
+the understatement of the year. "But I understand that your records go
+back nearly a century."
+
+"Quite true," Sir Lewis murmured.
+
+"During that time," Malone said, "the Society investigated a great
+many supposedly supernatural or supernormal incidents."
+
+"Many of them," Sir Lewis said, "were discovered to be fraudulent, I'm
+afraid. The great majority, in fact."
+
+"That's what I'd assume," Malone said. He fished in his pockets, found
+a cigarette and lit it. Sir Lewis went on chewing at his unlit pipe.
+"What we're interested in," Malone said, "is some description of the
+various methods by which these frauds were perpetrated."
+
+"Ah," Sir Lewis said. "The tricks of the trade, so to speak?"
+
+"Exactly," Malone said.
+
+"Well, then," Sir Lewis said. "The luminous gauze, for instance, that
+passes for ectoplasm; the various methods of table-lifting; control of
+the Ouija board--things like that?"
+
+"Not quite that elementary," Malone said. He puffed on the cigarette,
+wishing it was a cigar. "We're pretty much up to that kind of thing.
+But had it ever occurred to you that many of the methods used by phony
+mind-reading acts, for instance, might be used as communication
+methods by spies?"
+
+"Why, I believe some have been," Sir Lewis said. "Though I don't know
+much about that, of course; there was a case during the First World
+War--"
+
+"Exactly," Malone said. He took a deep breath. "It's things like that
+we're interested in," he said, and spent the next twenty minutes
+slowly approaching his subject. Sir Lewis, apparently fascinated, was
+perfectly willing to unbend in any direction, and jotted down notes on
+some of Malone's more interesting cases, murmuring: "Most unusual,
+most unusual," as he wrote.
+
+The various types of phenomena that the Society had investigated came
+into the discussion, and Malone heard quite a lot about the Beyond,
+the Great Summerland, Spirit Mediums and the hypothetical existence of
+fairies, goblins and elves.
+
+"But, Sir Lewis--" he said.
+
+"I make no claims personally," Sir Lewis said. "But I understand that
+there is a large and somewhat vocal group which does make rather
+solid-sounding claims in that direction. They say that they have seen
+fairies, talked with goblins, danced with the elves."
+
+"They must be very unusual people," Malone said, understating heavily.
+
+"Oh," Sir Lewis said, without a trace of irony, "they certainly are."
+
+Talk like this passed away nearly a half-hour, until Malone finally
+felt that it was the right time to introduce some of his real
+questions. "Tell me, Sir Lewis," he said. "Have you had many instances
+of a single man, or a small group of men, controlling the actions of a
+much larger group? And doing it in such a way that the larger group
+doesn't even know it is being manipulated?"
+
+"Of course I have," Sir Lewis said. "And so have you. They call it
+advertising."
+
+Malone flicked his cigarette into an ashtray. "I didn't mean exactly
+that," he said. "Suppose they're doing it in such a way that the
+larger group doesn't even suspect that manipulation is going on?"
+
+Sir Lewis removed his pipe and frowned at it. "I may be able to give
+you a little information," he said slowly, "but not much."
+
+"Ah?" Malone said, trying to sound only mildly interested.
+
+"Outside of mob psychology," Sir Lewis said, "and all that sort of
+thing, I really haven't seen any record of a case of such a thing
+happening. And I can't quite imagine anyone faking it."
+
+"But you have got some information?" Malone said.
+
+"Certainly," Sir Lewis said. "There is always spirit control."
+
+"Spirit control?" Malone blinked.
+
+"Demoniac intervention," Sir Lewis said. "'My name is Legion,' you
+know."
+
+Sir Lewis Legion, Malone thought confusedly, was a rather unusual
+name. He took a breath and caught hold of his revolving mind. "How
+would you go about that?" he said, a little hopelessly.
+
+"I haven't the foggiest," Sir Lewis admitted cheerfully. "But I will
+have it looked up for you." He made a note. "Anything else?"
+
+Malone tried to think. "Yes," he said at last. "Can you give me a
+condensed report on what is known--and I mean _known_--on telepathy
+and teleportation?"
+
+"What you want," Sir Lewis said, "are those cases proven genuine, not
+the ones in which we have established fraud, or those still in doubt."
+
+"Exactly," Malone said. If he got no other use out of the data, it
+would provide a measuring-stick for the Society. The general public
+didn't know that the Government was actually using psionic powers, and
+the Society's theories, checked against actual fact, would provide a
+rough index of reliability to use on the Society's other data.
+
+But spirits, somehow, didn't seem very likely. Malone sighed and stood
+up.
+
+"I'll have copies made of all the relevant material," Sir Lewis said,
+"from our library and research files. Where do you want the material
+sent? I do want to warn you of its bulk; there may be quite a lot of
+it."
+
+"FBI Headquarters, on 69th Street," Malone said. "And send a statement
+of expenses along with it. As long as the bill's within reason, don't
+worry about itemizing; I'll see that it goes through Accounting
+myself."
+
+Sir Lewis nodded. "Fine," he said. "And, if you should have any
+difficulties with the material, please let me know. I'll always be
+glad to help."
+
+"Thanks for your co-operation," Malone said. He went to the door, and
+walked on out.
+
+He blundered back into the same big room again, on his way through the
+corridors. The bulbous-eyed woman, who seemed to have inherited a full
+set of thirty-two teeth from each of her parents, gave him a friendly
+if somewhat crowded smile, but Malone pressed on without a word. After
+awhile, he found the reception room again.
+
+The girl behind the desk looked up. "How did he react?" she said.
+
+Malone blinked. "React?" he said.
+
+"When you sneezed at him," she said. "Because I've been thinking it
+over, and I've got a new theory. You're doing a survey on how people
+act when encountering sneezes. Like Kinsey."
+
+This girl--Lou something, Malone thought, and with difficulty
+refrained from adding "Gehrig"--had an unusual effect, he decided. He
+wondered if there were anyone in the world she couldn't reduce to
+paralyzed silence.
+
+"Of course," she went on, "Kinsey was dealing with sex, and you
+aren't. At least, you aren't during business hours." She smiled
+politely at Malone.
+
+"No," he said helplessly, "I'm not."
+
+"It is sneezing, then," she said. "Will I be in the book when it's
+published?"
+
+"Book?" Malone said, feeling more and more like a rather low-grade
+moron.
+
+"The book on sneezing, when you get it published," she said. "I can
+see it now: _The Case of Miss X, a Receptionist_."
+
+"There isn't going to be any book," Malone said.
+
+She shook her head. "That's a shame," she said. "I've always wanted to
+be a Miss X. It sounds exciting."
+
+"X," Malone said at random, "marks the spot."
+
+"Why, that's the sweetest thing that's been said to me all day," the
+girl said. "I thought you could hardly talk, and here you come out
+with lovely things like that. But I'll bet you say it to all the
+girls."
+
+"I have never said it to anybody before," Malone said flatly. "And I
+never will again."
+
+The girl sighed. "I'll treasure it," she said. "My one great moment.
+Goodbye, Mr.--Malone, isn't it?"
+
+"Ken," Malone said. "Just call me Ken."
+
+"And I'm Lou," the girl said. "Goodbye."
+
+An elevator arrived and Malone ducked into it. Louie? he thought.
+Louise? Luke? Of course, there was Sir Lewis Carter, who might be
+called Lou. Was he related to the girl?
+
+No, Malone thought wildly. Relations went by last names. There was no
+reason for Lou to be related to Sir Lewis. They didn't even look
+alike. For instance, he had no desire whatever to make a date with Sir
+Lewis Carter, or to take him to a glittering nightclub, or to make him
+any whispered propositions. And the very idea of Sir Lewis Carter
+sitting on the Malone lap was enough to give him indigestion and spots
+before the eyes.
+
+Sternly, he told himself to get back to business. The elevator stopped
+at the lobby and he got out and started down the street, feeling that
+consideration of the lady known as Lou was much more pleasant. After
+all, what did he have to work with, as far as his job was concerned?
+
+So far, two experts had told him that his theory was full of lovely
+little holes. Worse than that, they had told him that mass control of
+human beings was impossible, as far as they knew.
+
+And maybe it was impossible, he told himself sadly. Maybe he should
+just junk his whole theory and think up a new one. Maybe there was no
+psionics involved in the thing at all, and Boyd and O'Connor were
+right.
+
+Of course, he had a deep-seated conviction that psionics was somewhere
+at the root of everything, but that didn't necessarily mean anything.
+A lot of people had deep-seated convictions that they were beetles, or
+that the world was flat And then again, murderers often suffered as a
+result of deep-seated convictions of one sort or another.
+
+On the other hand, maybe he had invented a whole new psionic theory
+or, at least, observed some new psionic facts. Maybe they would call
+the results Malonizing, instead of O'Connorizing. He tried to picture
+a man opening a door and saying: "Come out quick, Mr. Frembits is
+Malonizing again."
+
+It didn't sound very plausible. But, after all, he did have a
+deep-seated conviction. He tried to think of a shallow-seated
+conviction, and failed. Didn't convictions ever stand up, anyhow, or
+lie down?
+
+He shook his head, discovered that he was on 69th Street, and headed
+for the FBI Headquarters. His convictions, he had found, were
+sometimes an expression of his precognitive powers; he determined to
+ride with them, at least for awhile.
+
+By the time he came to the office of the agent-in-charge, he had
+figured out the beginnings of a new line of attack.
+
+"How about the ghosts?" the agent-in-charge asked as he passed.
+
+"They'll be along," Malone said. "In a big bundle, addressed to me
+personally. And don't open the bundle."
+
+"Why not?" the agent-in-charge asked.
+
+"Because I don't want the things to get loose and run around saying
+boo to everybody," Malone said brightly, and went on.
+
+He opened the door of his private office, went inside and sat down at
+the desk there. He took his time about framing a thought, a single,
+clear, deliberate thought:
+
+_Your Majesty, I'd like to speak to you._
+
+He hardly had time to finish it. A flash of color appeared in the
+room, just a few feet from his desk. The flash resolved itself into a
+tiny, grandmotherly-looking woman with a coronal of white hair and a
+kindly, twinkling expression. She was dressed in the full court
+costume of the First Elizabethan period, and this was hardly
+surprising to Malone. The little old lady believed, quite firmly, that
+she was Queen Elizabeth I, miraculously preserved over all these
+centuries. Malone, himself, had practically forgotten that the woman's
+real name was Rose Thompson, and that she had only been alive for
+sixty-five years or so. For most of that time, she had been insane.
+
+For all of that time, however, she had been a genuine telepath. She
+had been discovered during the course of Malone's first psionic case,
+and by now she had even learned to teleport by "reading" the process
+in Malone's mind.
+
+"Good afternoon, Sir Kenneth," she said in a regal, kindly voice. She
+was mad, he knew, but her delusion was nicely kept within bounds. All
+of her bright world hinged on the single fact that she was unshakably
+certain of her royalty. As long as the FBI catered to that notion--
+which included a Royal dwelling for her in Yucca Flats, and the
+privilege of occasionally knighting FBI agents who had pleased her
+unpredictable fancy--she was perfectly rational on all other points.
+She co-operated with Dr. O'Connor and with the FBI in the
+investigation of her psionic powers, and she had given her Royal word
+not to teleport except at Malone's personal request.
+
+"I'd like to talk to you," Malone said, "Your Majesty."
+
+There was an odd note in the Queen's voice, and an odd, haunted
+expression on her face. "I've been hoping you'd ask me to come," she
+said.
+
+"I had a hunch you were following me telepathically," Malone said.
+"Can you give me any help?"
+
+"I--I really don't know," she said. "It's something new, and something
+disturbing. I've never come across anything like it before."
+
+"Like what?" Malone asked.
+
+"It's the--" She made a gesture that conveyed nothing at all to
+Malone. "The--the static," she said at last.
+
+Malone blinked. "Static?" he said.
+
+"Yes," she said. "You're not telepathic, so I can't tell you what it's
+really like. But--well, Sir Kenneth, have you ever seen disturbance on
+a TV screen, when there's some powerful electric output nearby? The
+bright, senseless snowstorms, the meaningless hash?"
+
+"Sure," Malone said.
+
+"It's like that," she said. "It's a sudden, meaningless, disturbing
+blare of telepathic energy."
+
+The telephone rang once. Malone ignored it.
+
+"What's causing these disturbances?" he asked.
+
+She shook her head. "I don't know, Sir Kenneth. I don't know," she
+said. "I can't pick up a person's mind over a distance unless I know
+him, and I can't see what's causing this at all. It's--frankly, Sir
+Kenneth, it's rather terrifying."
+
+The phone rang again.
+
+"How long have you been experiencing this disturbance?" Malone asked.
+He looked at the phone.
+
+"The telephone isn't important," Her Majesty said. "It's only Sir
+Thomas, calling to tell you he's arrested three spies, and that
+doesn't matter at all."
+
+"It doesn't?"
+
+"Not at all," Her Majesty said. "What does matter is that I've only
+been picking up these flashes since you were assigned to this new
+case, Sir Kenneth. And..." She paused.
+
+"Well?" Malone said.
+
+"And they only appear," Her Majesty said, "when I'm tuned to _your_
+mind!"
+
+
+5
+
+Malone stared. He tried to say something but he couldn't find any
+words. The telephone rang again and he pushed the switch with a sense
+of relief. The beard-fringed face of Thomas Boyd appeared on the
+screen.
+
+"You're getting hard to find," Boyd said. "I think you're letting fame
+and fortune go to your head."
+
+"I left word at the office that I was coming here," Malone said
+aggrievedly.
+
+"Sure you did," Boyd said. "How do you think I found you? Am I
+telepathic? Do I have strange powers?"
+
+"Wouldn't surprise me in the least," Malone said. "Now, about those
+spies--"
+
+"See what I mean?" Boyd said. "How did you know?"
+
+"Just lucky, I guess," Malone murmured. "But what about them?"
+
+"Well," Boyd said, "we picked up two men working in the Senate Office
+Building, and another one working for the State Department."
+
+"And they are spies?" Malone said. "Real spies?"
+
+"Oh, they're real enough," Boyd said. "We've known about 'em for
+years, and I finally decided to pick them up for questioning. God
+knows, but maybe they have something to do with all this mess that's
+bothering everybody."
+
+"You haven't the faintest idea what you mean," Malone said. "Mess is
+hardly the word."
+
+Boyd snorted. "You go on getting yourself confused," he said, "while
+some of us do the real work. After all--"
+
+"Never mind the insults," Malone said. "How about the spies?"
+
+"Well," Boyd said, a trifle reluctantly, "they've been working as
+janitors and maintenance men, and of course we've made sure they
+haven't been able to get their hands on any really valuable
+information."
+
+"So they've suddenly turned into criminal masterminds," Malone said.
+"After being under careful surveillance for years."
+
+"Well, it's possible," Boyd said defensively.
+
+"Almost anything is possible," Malone said.
+
+"Some things," Boyd said carefully, "are more possible than others."
+
+"Thank you, Charles W. Aristotle," Malone said. "I hope you realize
+what you've done, picking up those three men. We might have been able
+to get some good lines on them, if you'd left them where they were."
+
+There is an old story about a general who went on an inspection tour
+of the front during World War I, and, putting his head incautiously up
+out of a trench, was narrowly missed by a sniper's bullet. He turned
+to a nearby sergeant and bellowed: "Get that sniper!"
+
+"Oh, we've got him spotted, sir," the sergeant said. "He's been there
+for six days now."
+
+"Well, then," the general said, "why don't you blast him out of
+there?"
+
+"Well, sir, it's this way," the sergeant explained. "He's fired about
+sixty rounds since he's been out there, and he hasn't hit anything
+yet. We're afraid if we get rid of him they'll put up somebody who
+_can_ shoot."
+
+This was standard FBI policy when dealing with minor spies. A great
+many had been spotted, including four in the Department of Fisheries.
+But known spies are easier to keep track of than unknown ones. And, as
+long as they're allowed to think they haven't been spotted, they may
+lead the way to other spies or spy networks.
+
+"I thought it was worth the risk," Boyd said. "After all, if they have
+something to do with the case--"
+
+"But they don't," Malone said.
+
+"Damn it," Boyd exploded, "let me find out for myself, will you?
+You're spoiling all the fun."
+
+"Well, anyhow," Malone said, "they don't."
+
+"You can't afford to take any chances," Boyd said. "After all, when I
+think about William Logan, I tell myself we'd better take care of
+every lead."
+
+"Well," Malone said finally, "you may be right. And then again, you
+may be normally wrong."
+
+"What is that supposed to mean?" Boyd said.
+
+"How should I know?" Malone said. "I'm too busy to go around and
+around like this. But since you've picked the spies up, I suppose it
+won't do any harm to find out if they know anything."
+
+Boyd snorted again. "Thank you," he said, "for your kind permission."
+
+"I'll be right down," Malone said.
+
+"I'll be waiting," Boyd said. "In Interrogation Room 7. You'll
+recognize me by the bullet hole in my forehead and the strange South
+American poison, hitherto unknown to science, in my esophagus."
+
+"Very funny," Malone said. "Don't give up the ship."
+
+Boyd switched off without a word. Malone shrugged at the blank screen
+and pushed his own switch. Then he turned slowly back to Her Majesty,
+who was standing, waiting patiently, at the opposite side of the desk.
+Interference, he thought, located around him...
+
+"Why yes," she said. "That's exactly what I did say."
+
+Malone blinked. "Your Majesty," he said, "would you mind terribly if I
+asked you questions before you answered them? I know you can see them
+in my mind, but it's simpler for me to do things the normal way, just
+now."
+
+"I'm sorry," she said sincerely. "I do agree that matters are confused
+enough already. Please go on."
+
+"Thank you, Your Majesty," Malone said. "Well, then. Do you mean that
+_I'm_ the one causing all this mental static?"
+
+"Oh, no," she said. "Not at all. It's definitely coming from somewhere
+else, and it's beamed at you, or beamed around you."
+
+"But--"
+
+"It's just that I can only pick it up when I'm tuned to your mind,"
+she said.
+
+"Like now?" Malone said.
+
+She shook her head. "Right now," she said, "there isn't any. It only
+happens every once in awhile, every so often, and not continuously."
+
+"Does it happen at regular intervals?" Malone asked.
+
+"Not as far as I've been able to tell," Her Majesty said. "It just
+happens, that's all. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to
+it. Except that it did start when you were assigned to this case."
+
+"Lovely," Malone said. "Perfectly lovely. And what is it supposed to
+mean?"
+
+"Interference," she said. "Static. Jumble. That's all it means. I just
+don't know any more than that, Sir Kenneth; I've never experienced
+anything like it in my life. It really does disturb me."
+
+That, Malone told himself, he could believe. It must be an experience,
+he told himself, like having someone you were looking at suddenly
+dissolve into a jumble of meaningless shapes and lights.
+
+"That's a very good analogy," Her Majesty said. "If you'll pardon me
+speaking before you've voiced your thought."
+
+"Not at all," Malone said. "Go right ahead."
+
+"Well, then," Her Majesty said. "The analogy you use is a good one.
+It's just as disturbing and as meaningless as that."
+
+"And you don't know what's causing it?" Malone said.
+
+"I don't know," she said.
+
+"Nor what the purpose of it is?" he said.
+
+Her Majesty shook her head slowly. "Sir Kenneth," she said, "I don't
+even know whether or not there _is_ any purpose."
+
+Malone sighed deeply. Nothing in the case seemed to make any sense. It
+wasn't that there were no clues, or no information for him to work
+with. There were a lot of clues, and there was a lot of information.
+But nothing seemed to link up with anything else. Every new fact was a
+bright, shiny arrow pointing nowhere in particular.
+
+"Well, then--" he started.
+
+The intercom buzzed. Malone jabbed ferociously at the button. "Yes?"
+he said.
+
+"The ghosts are here," the agent-in-charge's voice said.
+
+Malone blinked. "What?" he said.
+
+"You said you were going to get some ghosts," the agent-in-charge
+said. "From the Psychical Research Society, in a couple of large
+bundles. And they're here now. Want me to exorcise 'em for you?"
+
+"No," Malone said wearily. "Just send them in to join the crowd. Got a
+messenger?"
+
+"I'll send them down," the agent-in-charge said. "About one minute."
+
+Malone nodded, realized the man couldn't see him, said: "Fine," and
+switched off. He looked at his watch. A little over half an hour had
+passed since he had left the Psychical Research Society offices. That,
+he told himself, was efficiency.
+
+Not that the books would mean anything, he thought. They would just
+take their places at the end of the long row of meaningless,
+disturbing, vicious facts that cluttered up his mind. He wasn't an FBI
+agent any more; he was a clown and a failure, and he was through. He
+was going to resign and go to South Dakota and live the life of a
+hermit. He would drink goat's milk and eat old shoes or something, and
+whenever another human being came near he would run away and hide.
+They would call him Old Kenneth, and people would write articles for
+magazines about The Twentieth Century Hermit.
+
+And that would make him famous, he thought wearily, and the whole
+circle would start all over again.
+
+"Now, now, Sir Kenneth," Queen Elizabeth said. "Things aren't quite
+that bad."
+
+"Oh, yes, they are," Malone said. "They're even worse."
+
+"I'm sure we can find an answer to all your questions," Her Majesty
+said.
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "Even I can find an answer. But it isn't the
+right one."
+
+"You can?" Her Majesty said.
+
+"That's right," Malone said. "My answer is: to hell with everything."
+
+* * * * *
+
+Malone's Washington offices didn't look any different. He sighed and
+put the two big packages from the Psychical Research Society down on
+his desk, and then turned to Her Majesty.
+
+"I wanted you to teleport along with me," he said, "because I need
+your help."
+
+"Yes," she said. "I know."
+
+He blinked. "Oh. Sure you do. But let me go over the details."
+
+Her Majesty waved a gracious hand. "If you like, Sir Kenneth," she
+said.
+
+Malone nodded. "We're going on down to Interrogation Room 7 now," he
+said. "Next door to it, there's an observation room, with a one-way
+panel in the wall. You'll be able to see us, but we won't be able to
+see you."
+
+"I really don't require an observation panel," Her Majesty said. "If I
+enter your mind, I can see through your eyes."
+
+"Oh, sure," Malone said. "But the observation room was built for more
+normal people--saving your presence, Your Majesty."
+
+"Of course," she said.
+
+"Now," Malone went on, "I want you to watch all three of the men we're
+going to bring in, and dig everything you can out of their minds."
+
+"Everything?" she said.
+
+"We don't know what might be useful," Malone said. "Anything you can
+find. And if you want any questions asked--if there's anything you
+think I ought to ask the men, or say to them--there's a non-vision
+phone in the observation room. Just lift the receiver. That
+automatically rings the one in the interrogation room and I'll pick it
+up. Understand?"
+
+"Perfectly, Sir Kenneth," she said.
+
+"Okay, then," Malone said. "Let's go." They headed for the door.
+Malone stopped as he opened it. "And by the way," he said.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"If you get any more of those disturbances, let me know."
+
+"At once," Her Majesty promised.
+
+They went on down the hall and took the elevator down to Interrogation
+Room 7, on the lowest level. There was no particular reason for
+putting the interrogation section down there, except that it tended to
+make prisoners more nervous. And a nervous prisoner, Malone knew, was
+very possibly a confessing prisoner.
+
+Malone ushered Her Majesty through the unmarked door of the
+observation chamber, made sure that the panel and phone were in
+working order, and went out. He stepped into Interrogation Room 7
+trying hard to look bored, businesslike and unbeatable. Boyd and four
+other agents were already there, all standing around and talking
+desultorily in low tones. None of them looked as if they had a
+moment's worry in their lives. It was all part of the same technique,
+of course, Malone thought. Make the prisoner feel resistance is
+useless, and you've practically got him working for you.
+
+The prisoner was a hulking, flabby fat man in work coveralls. He had
+black hair that spilled all over his forehead, and tiny button eyes.
+He was the only man in the room who was sitting down, and that was
+meant to make him feel even more inferior and insecure. His hands were
+clasped fatly in his lap, and he was staring down at them in a
+regretful manner. None of the agents paid the slightest attention to
+him. The general impression was that something really tough was coming
+up, but that they were in no hurry for it. They were willing to wait
+for the third degree, it seemed, until the blacksmith had done a
+really good job with the new spikes for the Iron Maiden.
+
+The prisoner looked up apprehensively as Malone shut the door. Malone
+paid no attention to him, and the prisoner unclasped his hands, rubbed
+them on his coveralls and then reclasped them in his lap. His eyes
+fell again.
+
+Boyd looked up too. "Hello, Ken," he said. He tapped a sheaf of papers
+on the single table in the room. Malone went over and picked them up.
+
+They were the abbreviated condensations of three dossiers. All three
+of the men covered in the dossiers were naturalized citizens, but all
+had come in as "political refugees" from Hungary, from Czechoslovakia,
+and from East Germany. Further checking had turned up the fact that
+all three were actually Russians. They had been using false names
+during their stay in the United States, but their real ones were
+appended to the dossiers.
+
+The fat one in the interrogation room was named Alexis Brubitsch. The
+other two, who were presumably waiting separately in other rooms, were
+Ivan Borbitsch and Vasili Garbitsch. The collection sounded, to
+Malone, like a seedy musical-comedy firm of lawyers: Brubitsch,
+Borbitsch and Garbitsch. He could picture them dancing gaily across a
+stage while the strains of music followed them, waving legal forms and
+telephones and singing away.
+
+Brubitsch did not, however, look very gay. Malone went over to him
+now, walking slowly, and looked down. Boyd came and stood next to him.
+
+"This is the one who won't talk, eh?" Malone said, wondering if he
+sounded as much like Dick Tracy as he thought he did. It was a
+standard opening, meant to make the prisoner think his fellows had
+already confessed.
+
+"That's him," Boyd said.
+
+"Mmm," Malone said, trying to look as if he were deciding between the
+rack and the boiling oil. Brubitsch fidgeted slightly, but he didn't
+say anything.
+
+"We didn't know whether we had to get this one to talk, too," Boyd
+said. "What with the others, and all. But we did think you ought to
+have a look at him." He sounded very bored. It was obvious from his
+tone that the FBI didn't care in the least if Alexis Brubitsch never
+opened his mouth again, in what was likely to be a very short
+lifetime.
+
+"Well," Malone said, equally bored, "we might be able to get a few
+corroborative details."
+
+Brubitsch swallowed hard. Malone ignored him.
+
+"Now, just look at him," Boyd said. "He certainly doesn't _look_ like
+the head of a spy ring, does he?"
+
+"Of course he doesn't," Malone said. "That's probably why the Russians
+used him. They figured nobody would ever look twice at a fat slob like
+this. Nobody would ever suspect him of being the head man."
+
+"I guess you're right," Boyd said. He yawned, which Malone thought was
+overacting a trifle. Brubitsch saw the yawn, and one hand came up to
+jerk at his collar.
+
+"Who'd ever think," Malone said, "that he plotted those killings in
+Redstone--all three of them?"
+
+"It is surprising," Boyd said.
+
+"But, then," Malone said, "we know he did. There isn't any doubt of
+that."
+
+Brubitsch seemed to be turning a pale green. It was a fascinating
+color, unlike any other Malone had ever seen. He watched it with
+interest.
+
+"Oh, sure," Boyd said. "We've got enough evidence from the other two
+to send this one to the chair tomorrow, if we want to."
+
+"More than enough," Malone agreed.
+
+Brubitsch opened his mouth, shut it again and closed his eyes. His
+lips moved silently.
+
+"Tell me," Boyd said conversationally, leaning down to the fat man.
+"Did your orders on that job come from Moscow, or did you mastermind
+it all by yourself?"
+
+Brubitsch's eyes stirred, then snapped open as if they'd been pulled
+by a string. "Me?" he said in a hoarse bass voice. "I know nothing
+about this murder. What murder? I know nothing about it."
+
+There were no such murders, of course. But Malone was not ready to let
+Brubitsch know anything about that. "Oh, the ones you shot in
+Redstone," he said in an offhand way.
+
+"The what?" Brubitsch said. "I shot people? Never."
+
+"Oh, sure you did," Boyd said. "The others say you did."
+
+Brubitsch's head seemed to sink into his neck. "Borbitsch and
+Garbitsch, they tell you about a murder? It is not true. Is a lie."
+
+"Really?" Malone said. "We think it's true."
+
+"Is a lie," Brubitsch said, his little eyes peering anxiously from
+side to side. "Is not true," he went on hopefully. "I have alibi."
+
+"You do?" Boyd said. "For what time?"
+
+"For time when murder happened," Brubitsch said. "I was someplace
+else."
+
+"Well, then," Malone said, "how do you know when the murders were
+done? They were kept out of the newspapers." That, he reflected, was
+quite true, since the murders had never happened. But he watched
+Brubitsch with a wary eye.
+
+"I know nothing about time," Brubitsch said, jerking at his collar. "I
+don't know when they happened."
+
+"Then how can you have an alibi?" Boyd snapped.
+
+"Because I didn't do them!" Brubitsch said tearfully. "If I didn't,
+then I _must_ have alibi!"
+
+"You'd be surprised," Malone said. "Now, about these murders--"
+
+"Was no murder, not by me," Brubitsch said firmly. "Was never any
+killing of anybody, not even by accident."
+
+"But your two friends say--" Boyd began.
+
+"My two friends are not my friends," Brubitsch said firmly. "If they
+tell you about murder and say it was me, they are no friends. I did
+not murder anybody, I have alibi. I did not even murder anybody a
+little bit. They are no friends. This is terrible."
+
+"There," Malone said reflectively, "I agree with you. It's positively
+awful. And I think we might as well give it up. After all, we don't
+need your testimony. The other two are enough; they'll get maybe ten
+years apiece, but you're going to get the chair."
+
+"I will not sit down," Brubitsch said firmly. "I am innocent. I am
+innocent like a small child. Does a small child commit a murder? It is
+ridiculous."
+
+Boyd picked up his cue with ease. "You might as well give us your side
+of the story, then," he said easily. "If you didn't commit any
+murders--"
+
+"I am a small child," Brubitsch announced.
+
+"Okay," Boyd said. "But if you didn't commit any murders, just what
+_have_ you been doing since you've been in this country as a Soviet
+agent?"
+
+"I will say nothing," Brubitsch announced. "I am a small child. It is
+enough." He paused, blinked, and went on, "I will only tell you this:
+no murders were done by our group in any of our activities."
+
+"And what were your activities?" Malone asked.
+
+"Oh, many things," Brubitsch said. "Many, many things. We--"
+
+The telephone rang loudly, and Malone scooped it up with a practiced
+hand. "Malone here," he said.
+
+Her Majesty's voice was excited. "Sir Kenneth!" she said. "I just got
+a tremendous burst of static!"
+
+Malone blinked. _Is my mind acting up again?_ he thought, knowing she
+would pick it up. _Am I being interfered with?_
+
+He didn't feel any different. But then, how was he supposed to feel?
+
+"It's not _your_ mind, Sir Kenneth," Her Majesty said. "Not this time.
+It's _his_ mind. That sneaky-thinking Brubitsch fellow."
+
+_Brubitsch?_ Malone thought. _Now what is that supposed to mean?_
+
+"I don't know, Sir Kenneth," Her Majesty said. "But get on back to
+your questioning. He's ready to talk now."
+
+"Okay," Malone said aloud. "Fine." He hung up and looked back to the
+Russian sitting on his chair. Brubitsch was ready to talk, and that
+was one good thing, anyhow. But what was all the static about?
+
+What was going on?
+
+"Now, then," Malone said. "You were telling us about your group
+activities."
+
+"True," Brubitsch said. "I did not commit any murders. It is possible
+that Borbitsch committed murders. It is maybe even possible that
+Garbitsch committed murders. But I do not think so."
+
+"Why not?" Boyd said.
+
+"They are my friends," Brubitsch said. "Even if they tell lies. They
+are also small children. Besides, I am not even the head of the
+group."
+
+"Who is?" Malone said.
+
+"Garbitsch," Brubitsch said instantly. "He worked in the State
+Department, and he told us what to look for in the Senate Office
+Building."
+
+"What were you supposed to look for?" Boyd said.
+
+"For information," Brubitsch said. "For scraps of paper, or things we
+overheard. But it was very bad, very bad."
+
+"What do you mean, bad?" Malone said.
+
+"Everything was terrible," Brubitsch said mournfully. "Sometimes
+Borbitsch heard something and forgot to tell Garbitsch about it.
+Garbitsch did not like this. He is a very inflamed person. Once he
+threatened to send Borbitsch to the island of Yap as a spy. That is a
+very bad place to go to. There are no enjoyments on the island of Yap,
+and no ones likes strangers there. Borbitsch was very sad."
+
+"What did you do with your information?" Boyd said.
+
+"We remembered it," Brubitsch said. "Or, if we had a scrap of paper,
+we saved it for Garbitsch and gave it to him. But I remember once that
+I had some paper. It had a formula on it. I do not know what the
+formula said."
+
+"What was it about?" Malone said.
+
+Brubitsch gave a massive shrug. "It was about an X and some numbers,"
+he said. "It was not very interesting, but it was a formula, and
+Garbitsch would have liked it. Unfortunately, I did not give it to
+him."
+
+"Why not?" Boyd said.
+
+"I am ashamed," Brubitsch said, looking ashamed. "I was lighting a
+cigarette in the afternoon, when I had the formula. It is a very
+relaxing thing to smoke a cigarette in the afternoon. It is soothing
+to the soul." He looked very sad. "I was holding the piece of paper in
+one hand," he said. "Unfortunately, the match and the paper came into
+contact. I burned my finger. Here." He stuck out a finger toward
+Malone and Boyd, who looked at it without much interest for a second.
+"The paper is gone," he said. "Don't tell Garbitsch. He is very
+inflamed."
+
+Malone sighed. "But you remember the formula," he said. "Don't you?"
+
+Brubitsch shook his massive head very slowly. "It was not very
+interesting," he said. "And I do not have a mathematical mind."
+
+"We know," Malone said. "You are a small child."
+
+"It was terrible," Brubitsch said. "Garbitsch was not happy about our
+activities."
+
+"What did Garbitsch do with the information?" Boyd said.
+
+"He passed it on," Brubitsch said. "Every week he would send a
+short-wave message to the homeland, in code. Some weeks he did not
+send the message."
+
+"Why not?" Malone said.
+
+"The radio did not work," Brubitsch said simply. "We received orders
+by short-wave, but sometimes we did not receive the orders. The radio
+was of very poor quality, and some weeks it refused to send any
+messages. On other weeks, it refused to receive any messages."
+
+"Who was your contact in Russia?" Boyd said.
+
+"A man named X," Brubitsch said. "Like in the formula."
+
+"But what was his real name?" Malone said.
+
+"Who knows?" Brubitsch said. "Does it matter?"
+
+"What else did you do?" Boyd said.
+
+"We met twice a week," Brubitsch said. "Sometimes in Garbitsch's home,
+sometimes in other places. Sometimes we had information. At other
+times, we were friends, having a social gathering."
+
+"Friends?" Malone said.
+
+Brubitsch nodded. "We drank together, talked, played chess. Garbitsch
+is the best chess player in the group. I am not very good. But once we
+had some trouble." He paused. "We had been drinking Russian liquors.
+They are very strong. We decided to uphold the honor of our country."
+
+"I think," Malone murmured sadly, "I know what's coming."
+
+"Ah?" Brubitsch said, interested. "At any rate, we decided to honor
+our country in song. And a policeman came and talked to us. He took us
+down to the police station."
+
+"Why?" Boyd said.
+
+"He was suspicious," Brubitsch said. "We were singing the
+_Internationale_, and he was suspicious. It is unreasonable."
+
+"Oh, I don't know," Boyd said. "What happened then?"
+
+"He took us to the police station," Brubitsch said, "and then after a
+little while he let us go. I do not understand this."
+
+"It's all right," Malone said. "I do." He drew Boyd aside for a
+second, and whispered to him: "The cops were ready to charge these
+three clowns with everything in the book. We had a hell of a time
+springing them so we could go on watching them. I remember the
+stir-up, though I never did know their names until now."
+
+Boyd nodded, and they returned to Brubitsch, who was staring up at
+them with surly eyes.
+
+"It is a secret you are telling him," Brubitsch said. "That is not
+right."
+
+"What do you mean, it's not right?" Malone said.
+
+"It is wrong," Brubitsch went on. "It is not the American way."
+
+He went on, with some prodding, to tell about the activities of the
+spy ring. It did not seem to be a very efficient spy ring; Brubitsch's
+long sad tale of forgotten messages, mixed orders, misplaced documents
+and strange mishaps was a marvel and a revelation to the listening
+officers. "I've never heard anything like it," one of them whispered
+in a tone of absolute wonder. "They're almost working on our side."
+
+Over an hour later, Malone turned wearily away from the prisoner. "All
+right, Brubitsch," he said. "I guess that pretty much covers things
+for the moment. If we want any more information, though--"
+
+"Call on me," Brubitsch said sadly. "I am not going anyplace. And I
+will give you all the information you desire. But I did not commit any
+murders."
+
+"Goodbye, small child," Malone said, as two agents led the fat man
+away. The other two left soon afterward, and Malone and Boyd were
+alone.
+
+"Think he was telling the truth?" Boyd said.
+
+Malone nodded. "Nobody," he said, "could make up a story like that."
+
+"I suppose so," Boyd said, and the phone rang. Malone picked it up.
+
+"Well?" he asked.
+
+"He was telling the truth, all right," Her Majesty said. "There are a
+few more details, of course, like the girl Brubitsch was involved
+with, Sir Kenneth. But she doesn't seem to have anything to do with
+the spy ring, and besides, she isn't a very nice person. She always
+wants money."
+
+"Sounds perfectly lovely," Malone said. "As a matter of fact, I think
+I know her. I know a lot of girls who always want money. It seems to
+be in fashion."
+
+"You don't know this one, Sir Kenneth," Her Majesty said, "and
+besides, she wouldn't be a good influence on you."
+
+Malone sighed. "How about the static explosions?" he said. "Pick up
+any more?"
+
+"No," she said. "Just that one."
+
+Malone nodded at the receiver. "All right," he said. "We're going to
+bring in the second one now. Keep up the good work."
+
+He hung up.
+
+"Who've you got in the observation room?" Boyd asked.
+
+"Queen Elizabeth I," Malone said. "Her Royal Majesty."
+
+"Oh," Boyd said without surprise. "Well, was Brubitsch telling the
+truth?"
+
+"He wasn't holding back anything important," Malone said, thinking
+about the girl. It would be nice to meet a bad influence, he thought
+mournfully. It would be nice to go somewhere with a bad influence (a
+bad influence, he amended, with a good figure) and forget all about
+his job, about the spies, about telepathy, teleportation, psionics and
+everything else. It might be restful.
+
+Unfortunately, it was impossible.
+
+"What's this business about a static explosion?" Boyd said.
+
+"Don't ask silly questions," Malone said. "A static explosion is a
+contradiction in terms. If something is static, it doesn't move--
+whoever heard of a motionless explosion?"
+
+"If it is a contradiction in terms," Boyd said, "they're your terms."
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "But I don't know what they mean. I don't even
+know what I mean."
+
+"You're in a bad way," Boyd said, looking sympathetic.
+
+"I'm in a perfectly terrible way," Malone said, "and it's going to get
+worse. You wait and see."
+
+"Of course I'll wait and see," Boyd said. "I wouldn't miss the end of
+the world for anything. It ought to be a great spectacle." He paused.
+"Want them to bring in the next one?"
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "What have we got to lose but our minds? And who
+is the next one?"
+
+"Borbitsch," Boyd said. "They're saving Garbitsch for a big finish."
+
+Malone nodded wearily. "Onward," he said, and picked up the phone. He
+punched a number, spoke a few words and hung up.
+
+A minute later, the four FBI agents came back, leading a man. This one
+was tall and thin, with the expression of a gloomy, degenerate and
+slightly nauseated bloodhound. He was led to the chair and he sat down
+in it as if he expected the worst to start happening at once.
+
+"Well," Malone said in a bored, tired voice. "So this is the one who
+won't talk."
+
+
+6
+
+Midnight.
+
+Kenneth J. Malone sat at his desk, in his Washington office,
+surrounded by piles of papers covering the desk, spilling off onto the
+floor and decorating his lap. He was staring at the papers as if he
+expected them to leap up, dance round him and shout the solution to
+all his problems at him in trained choral voices. They did nothing at
+all.
+
+Seated cross-legged on the rug in the center of the room, and looking
+like an impossible combination of the last Henry Tudor and Gautama
+Buddha, Thomas Boyd did nothing either. He was staring downward, his
+hands folded on his ample lap, wearing an expression of utter, burning
+frustration. And on a nearby chair sat the third member of the
+company, wearing the calm and patient expression of the gently-born
+under all vicissitudes: Queen Elizabeth I.
+
+"All right," Malone said into the silence. "Now let's see what we've
+got."
+
+"I think we've got cerebral paresis," Boyd said. "It's been coming on
+for years."
+
+"Don't be funny," Malone said.
+
+Boyd gave a short, mirthless bark. "Funny?" he said. "I'm absolutely
+hysterical with joy and good humor. I'm out of my mind with
+happiness." He paused. "Anyway," he finished, "I'm out of my mind.
+Which puts me in good company. The entire FBI, Brubitsch, Borbitsch,
+Garbitsch, Dr. Thomas O'Connor and Sir Lewis Carter--we're all out of
+our minds. If we weren't, we'd all move away to the moon."
+
+"And drink to forget," Malone added. "Sure. But let's try and get some
+work done."
+
+"By all means, Sir Kenneth," Her Majesty said. Boyd had not included
+her in his list of insane people, and she looked slightly miffed. It
+was hard for Malone to tell whether she was miffed by the mention of
+insanity, or at being left out.
+
+"Let's review the facts," Malone said. "This whole thing started with
+some inefficiency in Congress."
+
+"And some upheavals elsewhere," Boyd said. "Labor unions, gangster
+organizations."
+
+"Just about all over," Malone said. "And though we've found three
+spies, it seems pretty obvious that they aren't causing this."
+
+"They aren't causing much of anything," Boyd said. "Except a lot of
+unbelieving laughter further up the FBI line. I don't think anybody is
+going to believe our reports of those interviews."
+
+"But they're true," Her Majesty said.
+
+"Sure they're true," Boyd said. "That's the unbelievable part. They
+read like farce, and not very good farce at that."
+
+"Oh, I don't know," Malone said. "I think they're pretty funny."
+
+"Shall we get back to the business at hand?" Her Majesty said gently.
+
+"Ah," Malone said. "Anyhow, it isn't the spies. And what we now have
+is confusion even worse compounded."
+
+"Confounded," Boyd said. "John Milton. _Paradise Lost_, I heard it
+somewhere."
+
+"I don't mean confounded," Malone said. "I mean confusion. Anyhow, the
+Russian espionage rings in this country seem to be in as bad a state
+as the Congress, the labor unions, the syndicates, and all the rest.
+And all of them seem to have some sort of weird tie-in to these
+flashes of telepathic interference. Right, Your Majesty?"
+
+"I believe so, Sir Kenneth," she said. The old woman looked tired and
+confused. Somehow, a lot of the brightness seemed to have gone out of
+her life. "That's right," she said. "I didn't realize there was so
+much of it going on. You see, Sir Kenneth, you're the only one I can
+pick up at a distance who has been having these flashes. But now that
+I'm here in Washington, I can feel it going on all around me."
+
+"It may not have anything to do with everything else," Boyd said.
+
+Malone shook his head. "If it doesn't," he said, "it's the weirdest
+coincidence I've ever even dreamed about, and my dreams can be pretty
+strange. No, it's got to be tied in. There's some kind of mental
+static that is somehow making all these people goof up."
+
+"But why?" Boyd said. "What is it being done for? Just fun?"
+
+"God only knows," Malone said. "But we're going to have to find out."
+
+"In that case," Boyd said, "I suggest lots and lots of prayers."
+
+Her Majesty looked up. "That's a fine idea," she said.
+
+"But God helps those," Malone said, "who help themselves. And we're
+going to help ourselves. Mostly with facts."
+
+"All right," Boyd said. "So far, all the facts have been a great
+help."
+
+"Well, here's one," Malone said. "We got one flash each from
+Brubitsch, Borbitsch and Garbitsch while we were questioning them. And
+in each case, that flash occurred just before they started to blab
+everything they knew. Before the flash, they weren't talking. They
+were behaving just like good spies and keeping their mouths shut.
+After the flash, they couldn't talk fast enough."
+
+"That's true," Boyd said reflectively. "They did seem to give up
+pretty fast, even for amateurs."
+
+Malone nodded. "So the question is this," he said. "Just what happens
+during those crazy bursts of static?"
+
+He looked expectantly at Her Majesty, but she shook her head sadly. "I
+don't know," she said. "I simply don't know. It's just noise to me,
+meaningless noise." She put her hands slowly over her face. "People
+shouldn't do things like that to their Sovereign," she said in a
+muffled voice.
+
+Malone got up and went over to her. She wasn't crying, but she wasn't
+far from it. He put an arm around her thin shoulders. "Now, look, Your
+Majesty," he said in gentle tones, "this will all clear up. We'll find
+out what's going on, and we'll find a way to put a stop to it."
+
+"Sure we will," Boyd said. "After all, Your Majesty, Sir Kenneth and I
+will work hard on this."
+
+"And the Queen's own FBI," Malone said, "won't stop until we've
+finished with this whole affair, once and for all."
+
+Her Majesty brought her hands down from her face, very slowly. She was
+forcing a smile, but it didn't look too well. "I know you won't fail
+your Queen," she said. "You two have always been the most loyal of my
+subjects."
+
+"We'll work hard," Malone said. "No matter how long it takes."
+
+"Because, after all," Boyd said in a musing, thoughtful tone, "it is a
+serious crime, you know."
+
+The words seemed to have an effect on Her Majesty, like a tonic. For a
+second her face wore an expression of Royal anger and indignance, and
+the accustomed strength flowed back into her aged voice. "You're quite
+correct, Sir Thomas!" she said. "The security of the Throne and the
+Crown are at stake!"
+
+Malone blinked. "What?" he said. "Are you two talking about something?
+What crime is this?"
+
+"An extremely serious one," Boyd said in a grave voice. He rose
+unsteadily to his feet, planted them firmly on the carpet, and
+frowned.
+
+"Go on," Malone said, fascinated. Her Majesty was watching Boyd with
+an intent expression.
+
+"The crime," Boyd said, "the very serious crime involved, is that of
+Threatening the Welfare of the Queen. The criminal has committed the
+crime of Causing the Said Sovereign, Baselessly, Reasonlessly and
+Without Consent or Let, to Be in a State of Apprehension for Her Life
+or Her Well-Being. And this crime--"
+
+"Aha," Malone said. "I've got it. The crime is--"
+
+"High treason," Boyd intoned.
+
+"High treason," Her Majesty said with satisfaction and fire in her
+voice.
+
+"Very high treason," Malone said. "Extremely high."
+
+"Stratospheric," Boyd agreed. "That is, of course," he added, "if the
+perpetrators of this dastardly crime are Her Majesty's subjects."
+
+"My goodness," the Queen said. "I never thought of that. Suppose
+they're not?"
+
+"Then," Malone said in his most vibrant voice, "it is an Act of War."
+
+"Steps," Boyd said, "must be taken."
+
+"We must do our utmost," Malone said. "Sir Thomas--"
+
+"Yes, Sir Kenneth?" Boyd said.
+
+"This task requires our most fervent dedication," Malone said. "Please
+come with me."
+
+He went to the desk. Boyd followed him, walking straight-backed and
+tall. Malone bent and removed from a drawer of the desk a bottle of
+bourbon. He closed the drawer, poured some bourbon into two handy
+water-glasses from the desk, and capped the bottle. He handed one of
+the water-glasses to Boyd, and raised the other one aloft.
+
+"Sir Thomas," Malone said, "I give you Her Majesty, the Queen!"
+
+"To the Queen!" Boyd echoed.
+
+They downed their drinks and turned, as one man, to hurl the glasses
+into the wastebasket.
+
+In thinking it over later, Malone realized that he hadn't considered
+anything about that moment silly at all. Of course, an outsider might
+have been slightly surprised at the sequence of events, but Malone was
+no outsider. And, after all, it was the proper way to treat a Queen,
+wasn't it?
+
+And...
+
+When Malone had first met Her Majesty, he had wondered why, although
+she could obviously read minds, and so knew perfectly well that
+neither Malone nor Boyd believed she was Queen Elizabeth I, she
+insisted on an outward show of respect and dedication. He'd asked her
+about it at last, and her reply had been simple, reasonable and to the
+point.
+
+According to her--and Malone didn't doubt it for an instant--most
+people simply didn't think their superiors were all they claimed to
+be. But they acted as if they did, at least while in the presence of
+those superiors. It was a common fiction, a sort of handy oil on the
+wheels of social intercourse.
+
+And all Her Majesty had ever insisted on was the same sort of
+treatment.
+
+"Bless you," she'd said, "I can't help the way you _think_, but, as
+Queen, I do have some control over the way you _act_."
+
+The funny thing, as far as Malone was concerned, was that the two
+parts of his personality were becoming more and more alike. He didn't
+actually believe that Her Majesty was Queen Elizabeth I, and he hoped
+fervently that he never would. But he did have a great deal of respect
+for her, and more affection than he had believed possible at first.
+She was the grandmother Malone had never known; she was good, and
+kind, and he wanted to keep her happy and contented. There had been
+nothing at all phony in the solemn toast he had proposed, nor in the
+righteous indignation he had felt against anyone who was giving Her
+Majesty even a minute's worth of discomfort.
+
+And Boyd, surprisingly enough, seemed to feel the same way. Malone
+felt good about that; Her Majesty needed all the loyal supporters she
+could get.
+
+But all of this was later. At the time, Malone was doing nothing
+except what came naturally. Nor, apparently, was Boyd. After the
+glasses had been thrown, with a terrifying crash, into the metal
+wastebasket, and the reverberations of that second had stopped ringing
+in their ears, a moment of silence had followed.
+
+Then Boyd turned, briskly rubbing his hands. "All right," he said.
+"Let's get back to work."
+
+Malone looked at the proud, happy look on Her Majesty's face; he saw
+the glimmer of a tear in the corner of each eye. But he gave no
+indication that he had noticed anything at all out of the ordinary.
+
+"Fine," he said. "Now, getting on back to the facts, we've established
+something, anyhow. Some agency is causing flashes of telepathic static
+all over the place. And those flashes are somehow connected with the
+confusion that's going on all around us. Somehow, these flashes have
+an effect on the minds of people."
+
+"And we know at least one manifestation of that effect," Boyd said.
+"It makes spies blab all their secrets when they're exposed to it."
+
+"These three spies, anyhow," Malone said.
+
+"If spies is the right word," Boyd said.
+
+"Okay," Malone said. "And now we've got another obvious question."
+
+"It seems to me we've got about twelve," Boyd said.
+
+"I mean, who's doing it?" Malone said. "Who is causing these
+telepathic flashes?"
+
+"Maybe it's just happening," Boyd said. "Out of thin air."
+
+"Maybe," Malone said. "But let's go on the assumption that there's a
+human cause. The other way, we can't do a thing except sit back and
+watch the world go to hell."
+
+Boyd nodded. "It doesn't seem to be the Russians," he said. "Although,
+of course, it might be a Red herring."
+
+"What do you mean?" Malone said.
+
+"Well," Boyd said, "they might have known we were on to Brubitsch,
+Borbitsch and Garbitsch--" He stopped. "You know," he said, "every
+time I say that name I have to reassure myself that we're not all
+walking around in the world of Florenz Ziegfeld."
+
+"Likewise," Malone said. "But go on."
+
+"Sure," Boyd said. "Anyhow, they might have set the three of them up
+as patsies, just in case we stumbled on to this mess. We can't
+overlook this possibility."
+
+"Right," Malone said. "It's faint, but it is a possibility. In other
+words, the agency behind the flashes might be Russian, and it might
+not be Russian."
+
+"That clears that up nicely," Boyd said. "Next question?"
+
+"The next one," Malone said grimly, "is, what's behind the flashes?
+Some sort of psionic power is causing them, that much is obvious."
+
+"I'll go along with that," Boyd said. "I have to go along with it. But
+don't think I like it."
+
+"Nobody likes it," Malone said. "But let's go on. O'Connor isn't any
+help; he washes his hands of the whole business."
+
+"Lucky man," Boyd said.
+
+"He says that it can't be happening," Malone said, "and if it is we're
+all screwy. Now, right or wrong, that isn't an opinion that gives us
+any handle to work with."
+
+"No," Boyd said reflectively. "A certain amount of comfort, to be
+sure, but no handles."
+
+"Sir Lewis Carter, on the other hand--" Malone said. He fumbled
+through some of the piles of paper until he had located the ones the
+president of the Psychical Research Society had sent. "Sir Lewis
+Carter," he went on, "does seem to be doing some pretty good work. At
+least, some of the more modern stuff he sent over looks pretty solid.
+They've been doing quite a bit of research into the subject, and their
+theories seem to be all right, or nearly all right, to me. Of course,
+I'm not an expert."
+
+"Who is?" Boyd said. "Except for O'Connor, of course."
+
+"Well, somebody is," Malone said. "Whoever's doing all this, for
+instance. And the theories do seem okay. In most cases, for instance,
+they agree with O'Connor's work, though they're not in complete
+agreement."
+
+"I should think so," Boyd said. "O'Connor wouldn't recognize an astral
+plane if TWA were putting them into service."
+
+"I don't mean that sort of thing," Malone said. "There's lots about
+astral bodies and ghosts, ectoplasm, Transcendental Yoga, theosophy,
+deros, the Great Pyramid, Atlantis, Mu, norns, and other such
+ridiculous pets. That's just silly, as far as I can see. But what they
+have to say about parapsychology and psionics as such does seem to be
+reasonably accurate."
+
+"I suppose so," Boyd said tiredly.
+
+"Okay, then," Malone said. "Did anybody notice anything in that pile
+of stuff that might conceivably have any bearing whatever on our
+problems?"
+
+"I did," Boyd said. "Or I think I did."
+
+"You both did," Her Majesty said. "And so did I, when I looked through
+it. But I didn't bother with it. I dismissed it."
+
+"Why?" Malone said.
+
+"Because I don't think it's true," she said. "However, my opinion is
+really only an opinion." She smiled around at the others.
+
+Malone picked up a thick sheaf of papers from one of the piles of his
+desk. "Let's get straight what it is we're talking about," he said.
+"All right?"
+
+"Anything's all right with me," Boyd said. "I'm easy to please."
+
+Malone nodded. "Now, this writer--what's his name?" he said. He
+glanced at the copy of the cover page. _"Minds and Morons,"_ he read.
+"By Cartier Taylor."
+
+"Great title," Boyd said. "Does he say which is which?"
+
+"Let's get back to serious business," Malone said, giving Boyd a
+single look. There was silence for a second, and then Malone said, "He
+mentions something, in the book, that he calls 'telepathic
+projection.' As far as I understand what he's talking about, that's
+some method of forcing your thoughts on another person." He glanced
+over at the Queen. "Now, Your Majesty," he said, "you don't think it's
+true--and that may only be an opinion, but it's a pretty informed one.
+It seems to me as if Taylor makes a good case for this 'telepathic
+projection' of his. Why don't you think so?"
+
+"Because," Her Majesty said flatly, "it doesn't work."
+
+"You've tried it?" Boyd put in.
+
+"I have," she said. "And I have had no success with it at all. It's a
+complete failure."
+
+"Now, wait a minute," Boyd said. "Just a minute."
+
+"What's the matter?" Malone said. "Have you tried it, and made it
+work?"
+
+Boyd snorted. "Fat chance," he said. "I just want to look at the
+thing, that's all." He held out his hand, and Malone gave him the
+sheaf of papers. Boyd leafed through them slowly, stopping every now
+and again to consult a page, until he found what he was looking for.
+"There," he said.
+
+"There what?" Malone said.
+
+"Listen to this," Boyd said. "'For those who draw the line at demonic
+possession, I suggest trying telepathic projection. Apparently, it is
+possible to project one's own thoughts directly into the mind of
+another--even to the point of taking control of the other's mind.
+Hypnotism? You tell me, and we'll both know. Ever since the orthodox
+scientists have come around to accepting hypnotism, I'm been chary of
+it. Maybe there really is an astral body or a soul that a person has
+stashed about him somewhere--something that he can send out to take
+control of another human being. But I, personally, prefer the
+telepathic projection theory. All you have to do is squirt your
+thoughts across space and spray them all over the other fellow's
+brain. Presto-bingo, he does pretty much what you want him to do.'"
+
+"That's the quote I was thinking of," Malone said.
+
+"Of course it is," Her Majesty said. "But it really doesn't work. I've
+tried it."
+
+"How have you tried it?" Malone said.
+
+"There were many times, Sir Kenneth," Her Majesty said, "when I wanted
+someone to do something particular for me or for some other person.
+After all, you must remember that I was in a hospital for a long time.
+Of course, that represents only a short segment of my life-span, but
+it seemed long to me."
+
+Malone, who was trying to view the years from age fifteen to age
+sixty-odd as a short segment of anybody's lifetime, remembered with a
+shock that this was not Rose Thompson speaking. It was Queen Elizabeth
+I, who had never died.
+
+"That's right, Sir Kenneth," she said kindly. "And in that hospital,
+there were a number of times when I wanted one of the doctors or
+nurses to do what I wanted them to. I tried many times, but I never
+succeeded."
+
+Boyd nodded his head. "Well--" he began.
+
+"Oh, yes, Sir Thomas," Her Majesty said. "What you're thinking is
+certainly possible. It may even be true."
+
+"What _is_ he thinking?" Malone said.
+
+"He thinks," Her Majesty said, "that I may not have the talent for
+this particular effect--and perhaps I don't. But, talent or not, I
+know what's possible and what isn't. And the way Mr. Taylor describes
+it is simply silly, that's all. And unladylike. Imagine any
+self-respecting lady 'squirting' her thoughts about in space!"
+
+"Well," Malone said carefully, "aside from its being unladylike--"
+
+"Sir Kenneth," Her Majesty said, "you are not telepathic. Neither is
+Sir Thomas."
+
+"I'm nothing," Boyd said. "I don't even exist."
+
+"And it is very difficult to explain to the non-telepath just what Mr.
+Taylor is implying," Her Majesty went on imperturbably. "Before you
+could inject any thoughts into anyone else's mind, you'd have to be
+able to see into that mind. Is that correct?"
+
+"I guess so," Malone said.
+
+"And in order to do that, you'd have to be telepathic," Her Majesty
+said. "Am I correct?"
+
+"Correct," Malone said.
+
+"Well, then," Her Majesty said with satisfaction, and beamed at him.
+
+A second passed.
+
+"Well, then, what?" Malone said in confusion.
+
+"Telepathy," Her Majesty said patiently, "is an extremely complex
+affair. It involves a sort of meshing with the mind of this other
+person. It has nothing, absolutely nothing, in common with this simple
+'squirting' of thoughts across space, as if they were orange pips you
+were trying to put into a wastebasket. No, Sir Kenneth, I cannot
+believe in what Mr. Taylor says."
+
+"But it's still possible," Malone said.
+
+"Oh," Her Majesty said, "it's certainly possible. But I should think
+that if any telepaths were around, and if they were changing people's
+minds by 'squirting' at them, I would know it."
+
+Malone frowned. "Maybe you would at that," he said. "I guess you
+would."
+
+"Not to mention," Boyd put in, "that if you were going to control
+everything we've come across like that you'd need an awful lot of
+telepathic operators."
+
+"That's true," Malone admitted. "And the objections seem to make some
+sense. But what else is there to go on?"
+
+"I don't know," Boyd said. "I haven't the faintest idea. And I'm
+rapidly approaching the stage where I don't care."
+
+"Well," Malone said, heaving a sigh, "let's keep looking."
+
+He bent down and picked up another sheaf of copies from the Psychical
+Research Society.
+
+"After all," he said, without much hope, "you never know."
+
+* * * * *
+
+Malone looked around the office of Andrew J. Burris as if he'd never
+seen it before. He felt tired, and worn out, and depressed; it had
+been a long night, and here it was morning and the head of the FBI was
+giving him instructions. It was, Malone told himself, a hell of a
+life.
+
+"Now, Malone," Burris said, "this is a very ticklish situation. You've
+got to handle it with great care."
+
+"I can see that," Malone said apprehensively. "It certainly looks
+ticklish. And unusual."
+
+"Well, we don't want any trouble," Burris said. "We have enough
+trouble now."
+
+"Sometimes I think we have too much," Malone said.
+
+"That's our job," Burris said, looking grim.
+
+Malone blinked. "What is?" he said.
+
+"Having trouble," Burris said.
+
+There was a short silence. Malone broke it. "Anyhow," he said, "you
+feel we have enough trouble, so we're trying to make things easy for
+everybody."
+
+Burris nodded. "I've talked with the president," he said, "and he
+feels this is the best way to handle matters."
+
+Malone tried to imagine Burris explaining the incredible complexities
+of the situation to the president, and was torn between relief that he
+hadn't been there and a curious wish to have heard the scrambled
+conversation that must have taken place. "The way it seems to me," he
+said cautiously, "shipping those spies back to Russia is a worse
+punishment than sending them to the federal pen."
+
+"Maybe it is," Burris said. "Maybe it is. How would you feel if you
+were being sent to jail?"
+
+"Innocent," Malone said instantly.
+
+"But that isn't the point," Burris went on. "You see, Malone, we don't
+really have much damaging evidence against those spies, except for
+their confessions. During all the time we were watching them, we took
+care that they never did come up with anything dangerous; we weren't
+fishing for them but for their superiors, for the rest of the
+network."
+
+"There doesn't seem to be any more network," Malone said. "Not in this
+country, anyhow."
+
+"Sure," Burris said. "We know that now, thanks to the confessions, and
+to Her Majesty. But we can't prosecute on that sort of evidence. You
+know what a good defense attorney could do with unsupported
+confessions--and even if we wanted to take the lid off telepathy for
+the general public, it would be absolute hell bringing it into court."
+
+"So," Malone said, "we can't put them in prison, even if we want to."
+
+"Oh, I didn't say that," Burris said hastily. "We could probably win,
+even against a good defense. But they wouldn't get much time in
+prison, and we'd only end up deporting them in any case."
+
+Malone fished for a cigarette, lit it and blew out smoke. "So we're
+going to save the taxpayers some money," he said. "That'll be nice for
+a change."
+
+"That's right," Burris said, beaming. "We're going to save Federal
+funds by shipping them back to their motherland now. After all, they
+did take out their naturalization papers under false names, and their
+declarations are chockfull of false information. So all it takes is a
+court order to declare their citizenships null and void, and hand all
+three of them back to the Soviets."
+
+"A nice, simple housecleaning," Malone said. "All open and
+above-board. And the confessions will certainly stand up in a
+deportation hearing."
+
+"No question of it," Burris said. "But the reason I called you here,
+Malone, is that there's still one thing bothering me."
+
+Malone blew out some more smoke, thought wistfully about cigars, and
+said: "What? Everything seems simple enough to me."
+
+Burris frowned and leaned back in his chair. "It's this notion of
+yours, Malone," he said.
+
+"Notion?"
+
+"About going over there," Burris said. "Now, I can understand your
+wanting some facts on Moscow, current background and all that sort of
+thing. So far, everything makes sense."
+
+"Fine," Malone said warily.
+
+"But, after all, Malone," Burris said, "we do have such a thing as the
+Central Intelligence Agency. They send us reports. That's what they're
+for. And why you want to ignore the reports and make a trip over there
+to walk around and see for yourself--"
+
+"It's because of everything that's happening," Malone said.
+
+Burris looked puzzled. "What?" he said.
+
+"Because of all the confusion," Malone said. "Frankly, I can't trust
+the CIA, or any other branch of the government. I've got to see for
+myself."
+
+Burris considered this for a second. "It's going to look very
+peculiar," he said.
+
+Malone shrugged. "Everything looks peculiar," he said. "A little more
+won't hurt anything. And if I do turn up anything we can use, the
+whole trip will be worth it."
+
+"But sending an FBI man along with Brubitsch, Borbitsch and Garbitsch
+is a little strange," Burris said. "Not to mention Her Majesty."
+
+"There is that," Malone said. "I wonder what our Red friends are going
+to think of the Queen."
+
+"God knows," Burris said. "If they take her seriously, they're liable
+to call her some sort of capitalist deviationist."
+
+"And if they don't take her seriously?" Malone said.
+
+"Then they're going to wonder why she's _pretending_ to be a
+capitalist deviationist," Burris said.
+
+Malone flicked his cigarette at an ashtray. "You can't win," he said.
+
+"Frankly," Burris said, "I wouldn't allow Her Majesty to go along
+under any circumstances--except that there is an excuse for having an
+older woman around."
+
+"There is?" Malone said.
+
+Burris nodded. "As a chaperone," he said.
+
+"Now, wait a minute," Malone said. "Brubitsch, Borbitsch and
+what's-his-name don't need a chaperone."
+
+"I didn't say it was for them," Burris said.
+
+"Me?" Malone asked in a tone of absolute wonder. "Now, Chief, I don't
+need a chaperone. I'm a grown man. I know my way around. And the idea
+of having Her Majesty along to chaperone me is going to make
+everything look even stranger. After all, Chief--"
+
+"Malone," Burris said, in a voice of steel.
+
+"Sorry," Malone mumbled. "But, really, I'm not some young, innocent
+girl in a Victorian novel."
+
+"No," Burris said, a trifle sadly, "you're not. But there is one going
+along on the trip with the rest of you."
+
+"There is?" Malone said. "Who is she? Rebecca?"
+
+"Her name's Luba," Burris said. "Luba Garbitsch."
+
+"Garbitsch's wife?" Malone said.
+
+Burris shook his head. "His daughter," he said. "And don't tell me
+there isn't any such name as Luba. I know there isn't. But what would
+you pick to go with Garbitsch?"
+
+"Wastepaper basket," Malone said instantly. "Grapefruit rinds. Lemon
+peels. Coffee grounds."
+
+"Damn it, Malone," Burris said, "this is serious."
+
+"Well," Malone said, "it doesn't sound serious. What are we doing,
+deporting the entire family?"
+
+"I suppose we could," Burris said, "if we really wanted to get
+complicated about it. What with Garbitsch's false declaration, I
+haven't the faintest idea what his daughter's status would be--but she
+_was_ born here, Malone, and as far as we can tell she's perfectly
+loyal to the United States."
+
+"Fine," Malone said. "So you're sending her to Russia. This is making
+less and less sense, you know."
+
+Burris rubbed a hand over his face. "Malone," he said in a quiet,
+patient voice, "why don't you wait for me to finish? Then everything
+will make sense. I promise."
+
+"Well, all right," Malone said doubtfully. "Luba Garbitsch is going
+along to Russia, in spite of the fact that she's perfectly loyal."
+
+"True," Burris said. "You see, Malone, she loves her traitorous old
+daddy just the same. Family affection. Very touching."
+
+"And if he's going to Moscow--"
+
+"She wants to go along," Burris said. "That's right."
+
+"And you're going to send her along," Malone said, "out of the
+goodness of your kindly old heart. Just like Santa Claus. Or the
+Easter bunny."
+
+Burris looked acutely uncomfortable. "Now, Malone," he said. "It's not
+exactly that, and you know it."
+
+"It isn't?" Malone said, trying to look surprised.
+
+Burris shook his head. "If we send Luba Garbitsch along," he said,
+"that gives us a good excuse for Her Majesty. As a chaperone."
+
+"Are you sure," Malone asked slowly, "that anybody with a name like
+Luba Garbitsch could plausibly need a chaperone? Even in a den of
+vice? Because somehow it doesn't sound right: Luba Garbitsch,
+chaperoned by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I."
+
+"Well," Burris said, "it won't be the Queen. I mean, she won't be
+known as the Queen."
+
+"Incognito?" Malone said.
+
+Burris shrugged. "In away," he said. "What do you think would be a
+good name for her to travel under?"
+
+Malone considered. "I don't know," he said at last. "But no more
+Lubas."
+
+"I was thinking," Burris said carefully. "How about Rose Thompson?"
+
+There was a long silence.
+
+"I don't know whether she'll go for the idea," Malone said. "But I'll
+try it."
+
+"You can do it, Malone," Burris said instantly. "I know you can. I
+just know it."
+
+"Your faith," Malone said with a sigh, "is going to be too much for me
+one of these days."
+
+Burris shrugged. "Just take it easy, Malone," he said. "You said you
+wanted to have Her Majesty over there to read a few minds, and you've
+got her. But remember, don't get involved in anything complicated.
+Don't start any fireworks."
+
+"I hope not," Malone said.
+
+"Stay out of political arguments," Burris said.
+
+Malone blinked. "What do you think I'm going to do?" he said. "Bring
+along a soapbox?"
+
+"You never know," Burris said. "Just keep quiet, and don't go prowling
+around where you're not wanted."
+
+"That," Malone said decisively, "would keep me out of Russia
+entirely."
+
+"Damn it," Burris said, "you know what I mean. We don't want any
+international incidents, understand?"
+
+"Yes, sir," Malone said.
+
+Burris nodded. "All right, then," he said. "Your plane leaves from the
+airport in an hour. You'd better go and talk to Her Majesty first."
+
+"Right," Malone said.
+
+"And I hope you know what you're doing," Burris said.
+
+_So do I,_ Malone thought privately. Aloud, he said, "I just want to
+get the feel of things over there, that's all, sir. I won't cause any
+more trouble than an ordinary tourist."
+
+"Malone," Burris said, "don't be an ordinary tourist. They're
+empty-headed morons and they do make trouble. Be an invisible tourist.
+Be nice to everybody. Be polite and kind. Don't step on any toes, no
+matter whose and no matter why."
+
+"Yes, sir," Malone said.
+
+"Remember, they're going to know who you are," Burris said.
+
+"It's not as if we could keep it a secret."
+
+"Yes, sir," Malone said. "I'll remember."
+
+"All right." Burris extended his hand. "Good luck, Malone," he said,
+with a deeper feeling of sincerity than Malone had experienced from
+him in months.
+
+Malone shook the hand. "Thank you, sir," he said.
+
+* * * * *
+
+A little less than an hour later, Malone sat on the steps of the
+landing ramp that led up to the open door of the big Air Force
+transport plane on the runway. The plane was waiting, and so was
+Malone. He didn't feel confident, or even excited. He felt just a
+little bit frightened. Burris' complicated warnings had had some
+effect, and Malone was fighting down a minor case of the shakes.
+
+Next to him, her face wreathed in happy smiles, sat a smartly-dressed
+grey-haired woman in her sixties. She wore an unobtrusive tailored
+suit and a light jacket, and she looked as if she might be one of the
+elder matrons of the society set, very definitely an upper-crust type.
+In spite of the normality of her clothing, Her Majesty looked every
+inch a Queen, Malone thought.
+
+"And that, Sir Kenneth, is only natural," she said sweetly. "Even when
+traveling incognito, one must retain one's dignity. And I don't object
+at all to using the name of Rose Thompson in a good cause; it was used
+for so many years it almost feels like part of me."
+
+"I shouldn't be at all surprised," Malone said mildly.
+
+A voice from above and behind him interrupted his worried thoughts.
+"Mr. Malone!" it said. "Mr. Malone?"
+
+Malone screwed his head around and looked up. An Air Force colonel was
+standing in the doorway of the plane, looking down with a stern,
+worried expression. "Yes?" Malone said. "What is it?"
+
+"Takeoff, Mr. Malone," the colonel said. "We're due to go in fifteen
+minutes, and our clearance has been established."
+
+"Fine," Malone said.
+
+"But your passengers," the colonel said. "Where are they?"
+
+Malone tried to look calm, cool and collected. "They'll be here," he
+said. "Don't worry about a thing." Privately, he hoped he was right.
+Boyd hadn't shown up yet, and Boyd was bringing the musical-comedy spy
+trio. It wasn't, Malone thought, that Boyd was usually late. But with
+Brubitsch, Borbitsch and Garbitsch in tow, almost anything could
+happen, he thought. He hoped fervently that it wouldn't.
+
+"It won't," Her Majesty said. "At least, it hasn't so far. They're all
+in a car, and they're driving right here. Boyd is thinking that he
+ought to be here within five minutes."
+
+Malone nodded, wiping his forehead. "Five minutes, Colonel," he called
+back to the figure at the door. The colonel nodded efficiently at him,
+turned and disappeared inside the plane. Malone looked at his watch.
+The second hand was going around awfully fast, he thought. He wondered
+if it were possible for time to speed up while he waited, so that by
+the time Boyd arrived he would be an old, old man. He felt about eight
+years older already, he told himself, and a minute hadn't even passed.
+
+He forced his eyes away from the moving second hand. Looking at it, he
+knew, would only make him more nervous. Maybe there was some scenery
+around that he could stare at. He raised his eyes and looked out
+toward the gates that led to the interior of the air terminal.
+
+Scenery, he told himself in sudden wonder, was no word for it.
+
+He stared. He wanted to blink, but at the same time he felt that it
+would be a shame to close his eyes for even a tenth of a second. He
+held his eyelids apart by main force and went right on staring.
+
+The girl walking toward him across the field was absolutely beautiful.
+She seemed to make everything light up and start singing. Malone was
+sure that, somewhere, he could hear birds plugging their favorite
+numbers, and the soft rustle of the wind through pine branches. He
+could feel the soft caress of the wind on his face, and he could smell
+the odor of lilacs and honeysuckles and violets and whatever all those
+other flowers were. They had all different colors and shapes, and he
+couldn't remember many of their names, but he could tell they were all
+around him. They had to be all around him. Especially all the red
+ones.
+
+The girl had red hair that tossed gently in the wind. The bottom
+two-thirds of her figure, Malone was happy to note, was not only as
+good as the top third but a good deal better. It took him several
+seconds to reach this conclusion, because at first he was willing to
+swear that he had never seen such a beautiful girl before.
+
+But, he told himself with a shade of apprehension, he had.
+
+As she approached, he stood up. "Well, well," he said brightly. "If it
+isn't the Lady That's Known as Lou. Did the Psychical Research Society
+give you the day off, or are you here to see about a misplaced broom?"
+
+The girl beamed at him. "My, my," she said. "How are you?"
+
+"Fine," Malone said. "And--"
+
+"And how are the others?" she said.
+
+Malone blinked. "Others?" he said.
+
+She nodded. "Grumpy, Sleepy, Happy, Dopey, Bashful and Doc," she said.
+
+Malone opened his mouth, shut it again, and thought for a second.
+"Now, wait a minute," he said at last. "That's not fair. I--"
+
+"Oh," she said. "And I nearly forgot. I owe you one from last time:
+_gesundheit_."
+
+"And many happy returns," Malone said. "Seriously, what are you doing
+out here?"
+
+"Talking," the girl said. "To you. Or hadn't you noticed?"
+
+"I mean in general," Malone said desperately.
+
+"In general," she said agreeably, "I'm here to take a little trip."
+
+"Oh," Malone said. "By plane?"
+
+She smiled sweetly and shook her head. "Not at all," she said. "I'm
+waiting for the next scheduled broomstick."
+
+Malone took a deep breath. "When does your plane leave?" he said
+doggedly.
+
+"In ten minutes or so," she said.
+
+"Then you'd better hurry and get on," he said.
+
+She nodded. "That's what I thought," she said.
+
+A second passed.
+
+"Did you want to say something?" Malone said uncomfortably.
+
+She shook her head. "Not particularly," she said.
+
+"Well, then--"
+
+"The time _is_ growing short," she said.
+
+"Isn't it, though?" Malone said, feeling a little mystified. "Well,
+now. Goodbye. I'll see you soon."
+
+"Goodbye," she said.
+
+Another second passed.
+
+"Your plane--" Malone started.
+
+"How about yours?" she said.
+
+"I'm all right," Malone said nervously. "But if your plane's leaving
+in ten minutes you'd better get on it."
+
+"I intend to," she said, without moving.
+
+"Well--" Malone started.
+
+"As soon as you quit blocking the ramp," she said. "Would you mind
+terribly if I climbed over your head? Because I do have to get on
+board."
+
+"Now wait a minute," Malone said. "This isn't your plane."
+
+"How do you know?" she said. "Do you own it? Are you flying it away?"
+
+"Well," Malone said helplessly, "it's my plane, and there's nobody
+going on it but--"
+
+He paused. A great light seemed to burst in his mind, shedding a
+perfectly horrible glow over the wreck of his mental processes. "You
+know," he said in a tentative tone, "we never have been properly
+introduced. I only know your name is Lou."
+
+"That's what people call me," the girl said. "For short. I'm Luba
+Garbitsch."
+
+"And I'm Kenneth Malone," Malone said. "Kenneth J. Malone. Of the
+FBI."
+
+She nodded. "Yes," she said. "I know."
+
+"Your father--"
+
+"My father is going to Russia," she said, "and I am going along with
+him."
+
+"Oh," Malone said. "Sure. Sure. Oh."
+
+There was a longer silence.
+
+"Can I get on board now?" Luba said.
+
+"There isn't any hurry," Malone said. "We're still waiting for--for
+passengers. And this is one of them." He turned and indicated the
+Queen. "This is Her--Rose Thompson. She'll be traveling along with
+us."
+
+Her Majesty was wearing a broad, broad grin, Malone noticed nervously
+as he turned. Undoubtedly she had been tuned in to the whole
+conversation, and knew just what had gone on in both minds. But she
+only said, "I'm very pleased to meet you, my dear."
+
+Lou blinked, smiled and stretched out her hand. "Well, then," she
+said. "Hello. And let's all have a happy trip."
+
+"By all means," Malone said. "And the trip seems to be about to
+start."
+
+He could hear the tramping of a lot of feet coming across the field
+toward them. He looked and saw that the feet were all neatly attached
+to bodies, two to a body. There were Thomas Boyd's feet, the assorted
+twelve feet of six FBI agents, and three pairs that belonged to Alexis
+Brubitsch, Ivan Borbitsch and Vasili Garbitsch. Brubitsch looked even
+fatter than ever, Borbitsch even thinner. Garbitsch was of an
+indeterminate middling shape; he had grey hair and a pair of
+pince-nez, and he walked a trifle unevenly, like a duck, with his
+hands clasped low in front of him. He was looking down at the ground
+as the crowd shoved him along.
+
+When the crowd neared the steps, Luba went over to him. Garbitsch
+looked up, with a pleasant, somehow wistful smile on his face. "Hello,
+Luba, my child," he said.
+
+Luba smiled, too. "Hello, Dad," she said. "All ready to go?"
+
+"Certainly I am ready," he said. "I am all packed. We take off in a
+few minutes. And you, Luba, my child?"
+
+"Fine, Dad," she said.
+
+She looked down. "They've got handcuffs on you," she said. "Why,
+that's--"
+
+Garbitsch shrugged. He looked even more wistful. "A formality," he
+said. "It makes no difference."
+
+"Okay," Boyd said suddenly. "We've got to get out of here pretty soon,
+and you'll be taking off. Let's break it up. Miss Thompson, you and
+Luba go aboard. Malone, you follow with the others."
+
+Malone rounded up Brubitsch, Borbitsch and Garbitsch and followed the
+ladies aboard.
+
+He came back to the door then, and stuck his head out. "The keys," he
+said.
+
+Boyd stared. "What?"
+
+"The keys to the handcuffs," Malone said. "I'll need 'em."
+
+"You're going to take them off when they get to Russia?" Boyd said.
+
+Malone shook his head. "No," he said. "Now."
+
+"But--"
+
+"I think we'll have plenty of warning if they decide to try anything,
+Tom," Malone said quietly. "Her Majesty, after all, is keeping them
+under surveillance."
+
+Without another word, Boyd tossed up the keys. Malone caught and
+pocketed them. "I'll be back as soon as possible," he said.
+"Meanwhile, you can keep digging on other stuff--what we've discussed
+and anything it seems to lead into."
+
+"Right," Boyd said. "Stay out of trouble, Ken. So long."
+
+Malone nodded and ducked back into the plane. He unlocked the
+handcuffs, and Brubitsch and Borbitsch immediately went and sat down
+mournfully together at the back of the plane. Malone looked for Lou,
+but she was already seated--with Her Majesty, naturally. He sighed
+briefly and sat down, at last, next to the wistful Garbitsch.
+
+"It will be nice to see Russia again," Garbitsch said. "I hardly hoped
+to do so."
+
+The plane shuddered, roared and took off. Then it settled down to its
+normal state of unnatural quiet. Malone sat back and tried to relax.
+
+It was impossible.
+
+
+7
+
+Red Square was, somehow, disappointing. It was crowded with men and
+women, all looking very Russian in an undefined sort of way, and the
+big glass windows sparkled from every side. "I know it's silly," Luba
+said in a baffled voice, "but, somehow, I always expected Red Square
+to be red."
+
+"And why should that be?" the MVD man next to her said. He was a burly
+man with a sour expression, as if he had eaten too many onions the day
+before.
+
+"Well," Malone said, "it is Red Square, after all."
+
+"But red is symbolic only," the MVD man said surlily. "Is not color.
+Only symbol of glorious Russia."
+
+"I suppose so," Luba said. "But it's still disappointing."
+
+"You expect, perhaps, that we recruit our glorious Red Army from
+American Indian tribes?" the MVD man said sourly. "You are
+literal-minded bourgeois intellectual. This is not good thing to be."
+
+"Somehow," Malone mused, "I didn't think it was."
+
+"But this is different," Luba said. "The Red Army is made up of
+Russians. But this is just a square. You could paint it."
+
+"After all," Malone offered, "the White House is white, isn't it?"
+
+"White is cowardly color," the MVD man pointed out with satisfaction.
+
+"Never mind that," Malone said. "We call it a white house, and it is a
+white house. You call this a red square, and it isn't even pink. Not
+even a little bit pink. It's just--just--"
+
+"Just building-colored," Luba put in. Malone turned to her and
+executed a small bow.
+
+"Thank you," he said.
+
+"Think nothing of it," Luba said.
+
+"Oh, don't worry," Malone said. "I will."
+
+The MVD man hissed like a teakettle and both heads swung round to look
+at him again. Her Majesty, who had been admiring some dresses in a
+shop window, also turned. "My goodness," she said. "That's a terrible
+wheeze. Do you take something for it?"
+
+"Is not wheeze," the MVD man said. "Is noise representing impatience
+with arrogance and stupidity of capitalist warmonger conversation."
+
+"Arrogance?" Luba said.
+
+"Stupidity?" Malone said.
+
+Her Majesty drew herself to her full height. "We do not monger war,"
+she said. "Not in the least. We are not mongers."
+
+The MVD man looked at her, blinked, sighed and looked away. "This
+color discussion," he said, "it is very silly. Look at the Blue Ridge
+Mountains, in your country. Are they blue?"
+
+"Well--" Malone said.
+
+"What color, for example, is the Golden Gate Bridge?" the MVD man
+continued, with heavy sarcasm. "Is not even a gate. Is a bridge. Is
+not golden. But you say we disappoint. No. You disappoint."
+
+There seemed to be no immediate answer to that, so Malone didn't try
+for one. Instead, he went back to looking at the Square, and beyond it
+to where the inverted turnips of the Kremlin gleamed in the moonlight.
+The turnips were very pretty, if a little odd for building-tops. But
+Red Square, in spite of all its historic associations, seemed to be a
+little dull. The buildings were just buildings, and the streets were
+filled with Russians. They were not bomb-throwing Russians, bearded
+Russians or even "Volga Boatman"-singing Russians. They were just
+ordinary, dull Russians of every sort, shade, race, color and previous
+condition of servitude.
+
+It was just about what he'd expected after the trip. That hadn't been
+exciting either, he told himself. There had been no incident of any
+kind. None of the three spies seemed to be exactly overjoyed about
+being sent back to good old Mother Russia, but none seemed inclined to
+make much fuss about the matter, either. Malone had blandly told them
+that they were being deported, instead of tried, because there was no
+evidence that was worth the expense of a trial. And, besides that, he
+had particularly emphasized that the FBI did not believe any of the
+stories the three men had told.
+
+"They just don't match up," he said. "You all told different stories,
+and there's too much disagreement between them. Frankly, we don't
+believe any of them--not yet, we don't. But mark my words. We'll find
+out the truth some day."
+
+He'd thought it was a good speech, and Her Majesty had agreed with
+him. It had its desired effect, since the plane was the first place
+the three had had a chance to meet since their arrest. "Each one knows
+that he told the truth," Her Majesty said, "but nobody knows what the
+other two said."
+
+"That's what I figured," Malone said. "They didn't have a chance to
+talk to each other."
+
+"And so each one is lying his head off to the others," Her Majesty
+said, "and telling them all about how he, too, lied gloriously and
+bravely in defense of the Motherland. It's really very funny."
+
+"Well," Malone said, "it makes them happy. And why not?"
+
+Luba, too, had chatted with her father quite a lot of the time. Her
+Majesty reported that none of this conversation could possibly be
+understood as dangerous or harmful. It was just simple conversation.
+
+Of course, Luba and her father hadn't talked all the time, and Malone
+did have a chance to get a few words in edgewise. Her Majesty made no
+report on those conversations, but Malone was comfortably aware that
+they did not belong in the harmless class. His relationship with the
+girl seemed, he told himself happily, to be improving slightly. Now
+and again, he even won a round from her.
+
+As the American plane crossed the border, it was picked up by an
+escort of Russian fighter craft, which stuck with them all the way
+into Moscow. The fighters didn't do anything; they were just there,
+Malone figured, for insurance. But they made him nervous when he
+looked out the window. The trip from the border to Moscow seemed to
+take a long time.
+
+Then, at the airfield, a group of MVD men had almost elbowed the
+American Embassy delegation out of the way in greeting the
+disembarking little band. There was a lot of palaver, in Russian,
+English and various scrambled mixtures which nobody understood. The
+American delegation greeted Malone, Luba and Her Majesty formally, and
+the MVD concentrated on Brubitsch, Borbitsch and Garbitsch. The three
+spies were hustled away, apparently to MVD Headquarters, without much
+fuss. Luba said goodbye to her father calmly enough, and Vasili
+Garbitsch seemed almost entirely unaffected by his surroundings. As
+the plane touched ground, he had said: "Ah, the soil of Mother
+Russia," but, outside of a goodbye or two, those were his last words
+before leaving.
+
+One MVD man stayed behind, even after the American delegation had
+left. His name, he explained, was Vladimir Josefovitch Petkoff. "It
+will be my pleasure to show your group the many historic and
+interesting sights of Moskva," he announced to Malone.
+
+"Pleasure?" Malone said. Petkoff was tall and heavy, and wore a row of
+medals that strung out across his chest like a newspaper headline.
+
+"My duty," Petkoff said flatly, "is my pleasure. That is how we
+arrange matters in Russia."
+
+And so the tour had started, with Red Square. Malone told himself he
+didn't really mind if it weren't red, but he did think it could at
+least look sinister. Unfortunately, the Square did not seem
+particularly willing to oblige.
+
+"So this is Red Square," Malone said, after a long silence.
+
+"You do not sound interested," Petkoff said in what sounded like a
+vaguely ominous voice. "Because it is not painted in capitalistic and
+obvious colors, it bores you?"
+
+"Not exactly," Malone said. "But when you've seen one Square, you've
+seen them all, is how I feel about it. There must be somewhere else to
+sight-see."
+
+"Somewhere?" Petkoff said. "There is everywhere. This is Moskva, the
+capital and the greatest city in Mother Russia. That is what we are
+told to say." He lowered his voice. "Personally," he added, "I come
+from Leningrad. I prefer it. But in Moskva one talks only of Moskva."
+
+"I know just how you feel," Malone assured him. "I've been to San
+Francisco."
+
+"Well, then," Petkoff said, almost smiling at him. "What is there you
+would like to see?"
+
+Malone fished in his pocket for an American cigarette. He'd brought a
+carton with him, having once tried Russian makes. They seemed to be
+mostly cardboard, both the long filter and the tobacco. He lit the
+cigarette and thought for a second. "I don't suppose," he said
+cautiously, "that we could take a look around inside the Kremlin,
+could we?"
+
+"Aha," Petkoff said. "I see what is in your mind."
+
+"You do?" Malone said, startled.
+
+"Naturally," Petkoff said. "You wish to see the tomb of Lenin. It is
+famous throughout the world."
+
+Malone considered that for a minute. "Somehow," he said cautiously,
+"the coffin of Lenin doesn't exactly sound like a gay start for
+sight-seeing."
+
+Petkoff looked pleased instantly. "I understand," he said. "Truly I
+understand. You, too, feel sad over the death of the great Lenin. How
+beautiful! How cultured!"
+
+Malone wondered whether or not to disillusion the man, and decided
+against it. "Well, something like that," he said vaguely.
+
+"I'll tell you what: is there a restaurant around here where we could
+get something to eat?"
+
+"To eat?" Petkoff said, still looking pleased. "You wish to eat?"
+
+"Well," Malone said, "I'm rather hungry, and I guess the ladies must
+be, too."
+
+"What?" Luba said, returning to the group. She had joined Her Majesty
+in viewing the display of dresses. The Queen came scurrying over, too,
+through the silent and jostling Russian crowds.
+
+"I was suggesting a restaurant," Malone said.
+
+"Best idea anybody's had all day," Lou said. Her Majesty graciously
+consented to agree, and Petkoff beamed like the rising sun.
+
+"My friends," he said. "My very fine friends--although you are
+capitalistic bourgeois intellectuals, thrown aside by the path of
+progress--in Moskva we have the finest restaurants in all the world."
+
+"How about ... oh, Leningrad?" Malone said in a low voice.
+
+"In Leningrad," Petkoff admitted, "the restaurants are better. But in
+Moskva, the restaurants are very good indeed. Much better than one
+might expect, if one knows Leningrad."
+
+"Well," Malone said, "I suppose we've just got to put up with Moscow."
+
+They went back to the corner, and hailed the long, black,
+sleek-looking limousine that had brought them in from the airport. The
+two silent men in the front seat of the gleaming Volga sedan were
+waiting patiently. Malone, Her Majesty and Lou got into the back,
+Petkoff in front. The two men were as still as statues--and rather
+unpleasant-looking statues, Malone thought--until Petkoff snapped
+something in Russian. Then one of them, at the wheel, said: _"Da,
+Tovarishch."_
+
+The car started down the Moscow streets.
+
+Her Majesty was silent and somewhat abstracted during the ride, just
+as she had been during the entire trip so far. She was, Malone knew,
+prying into every mind she could touch. He smiled inwardly when he
+thought about that.
+
+The MVD, all unbeknownst to itself, was busily carrying around and
+protecting the single most dangerous spy in Moscow.
+
+Nobody else spoke, either, until the car was moving along at a good
+clip. Petkoff began some small talk then, but it wasn't very
+interesting until he finally managed to edge it around to the subject
+he really wanted to talk about.
+
+"By the way, Mr. Malone," he said, in a voice that sounded as if
+Petkoff were trying to establish an offhand manner, and not succeeding
+in the least. "It was thoughtful, very thoughtful, of American
+government, to return to us those men. Very kind."
+
+Malone's expression conveyed nothing but the sheerest good will.
+"Well, you know how it is," he said. "Anything we can do to preserve
+peace and amity between our countries--we'll do it. You know that.
+Getting along, coexistence, that sort of thing. Oh, we're glad to
+oblige."
+
+"I am sure," Petkoff said darkly. "You realize, of course, that they
+are criminals? Deserters from Red Army, embezzlers. Embezzlers of
+money."
+
+Wondering vaguely what else you could be an embezzler of, Malone
+nodded. "That's what your ambassador in Washington said, when we told
+him about the deportation order."
+
+"But Dad's not an embezzler," Luba broke in. "Or a deserter, either.
+He--"
+
+"We have the records," Petkoff said.
+
+"But--"
+
+"Ordinarily, Mr. Malone," Petkoff said pointedly, "we do not find it
+the policy of the American government to send back political
+refugees."
+
+"Now, listen," Lou said. "If you think you can shut me up--"
+
+"That is exactly what I think," Petkoff said. "Let me assure you that
+no offense has been intended."
+
+Lou opened her mouth and started to say something. Then she shut it
+again. "Well," she said, "I guess this isn't the time to argue about
+it. I'm sorry, Mr. Petkoff."
+
+The MVD man beamed back at her. "Call me Vladimir," he said.
+
+Malone broke in hastily. "You see, Major," he said, "these men are all
+embezzlers, as you've said yourself. We have the word of your
+government on that."
+
+Petkoff took his eyes off Lou with what seemed real reluctance. "Oh,"
+he said. "Yes. Of course you do."
+
+"Therefore," Malone said smoothly, "the three are criminals and not
+political refugees."
+
+"Indeed," Petkoff said blandly. "Very interesting. Your government has
+done a good deal of thinking in this matter."
+
+"Sure we have," Malone said. "After all, we don't want to cause any
+trouble."
+
+"No," Petkoff said, and frowned. "Of course not."
+
+"Naturally," Malone said.
+
+After that, there was silence for almost a full minute. Then Major
+Petkoff turned to Malone again with a frown. "Wait," he said.
+
+"Wait?" Malone said.
+
+"The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics," Petkoff said, "has no
+extradition treaty with your capitalist warmongering country."
+
+"We're not warmongers," Her Majesty put in. Both men ignored her.
+
+"True," Malone admitted.
+
+"Then there was no reason to send these men back to us," Petkoff said.
+
+"Oh, no," Malone said. "There was a very good reason. You see, we
+didn't want them in our country, either."
+
+"But--"
+
+"And when we found that they'd lied on their naturalization papers,
+why, naturally, we took immediate steps. The only steps we could take,
+as a matter of fact."
+
+"The only steps?" Petkoff said. "You could have preferred charges.
+This was not done. Why was it not done?"
+
+"That," Malone said, sidestepping neatly, "is a matter of governmental
+policy, Major Petkoff. And I can't provide any final answer."
+
+"Ah?" Petkoff said.
+
+"But, after all, a trial would not make sense," Malone said, now
+busily attacking from the side. "You see, at first we thought they
+were espionage agents."
+
+"A foolish conclusion," Petkoff said uneasily.
+
+Malone nodded. "That's what we finally realized," he said. "We
+questioned them, but their stories were nonsense, absolute nonsense.
+Of course, we had no idea of what foreign government might have
+employed them."
+
+"Of course not," Petkoff said, shifting slightly in his seat. The car
+took a wide curve and swayed slightly, and Malone found himself nearly
+in Lou's lap. The sensation was so pleasant that all conversation was
+delayed for a couple of seconds, until the car had righted itself.
+
+"So," Malone went on when he had straightened out, "we decided to save
+ourselves the expense of a trial."
+
+"Very natural," Petkoff said. The slight delay had apparently allowed
+him to recover his own mental balance. "The capitalist countries think
+only of money."
+
+"Sure," Malone said agreeably. "Well, anyhow, that's the way it was.
+There was no point, really, in putting them in prison--what for? What
+good could it do us?"
+
+"Who knows?" Petkoff said.
+
+"Exactly," Malone said. "So, since all we wanted to do was get rid of
+them, and since we had an easy way to do that, why, we took it, that's
+all, and shipped them here."
+
+"I see," Petkoff said. "And the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is
+properly grateful."
+
+"My goodness," Her Majesty put in, apparently out of an irrepressible
+sense of fun. "Maybe we'll get medals."
+
+"Medals," Petkoff said sternly, "are not given to capitalist
+agitators."
+
+"We are not agitated," Her Majesty said, and folded her hands in her
+lap, looking quite satisfied with herself.
+
+Petkoff thought for a second. "And why," he said, "did you feel that
+such elaborate precautions were necessary in returning these men to
+us?"
+
+Malone shrugged. "Well, we couldn't have them just running around all
+over the world, could we?" he said. "We felt that here they'd be
+properly housed and fed, in their own homeland, even if they didn't
+get a job."
+
+"They will be properly taken care of," Petkoff prophesied darkly.
+
+"Now, wait a minute--" Lou began, and then stopped. "Sorry," she said.
+
+Malone felt sorry for her, but there was nothing he could say to make
+things any better. "Exactly," he told Petkoff with what he hoped was a
+smile.
+
+"Ah, well," Petkoff said. "My friend and colleague, we should cease
+this shoptalk. Shoptalk?"
+
+"Quite correct," Malone said.
+
+"I have studied English a long time," Petkoff said. "It is not a
+logical language."
+
+"You're doing very well," Malone said. Petkoff gave him a military
+duck of the head.
+
+"I appreciate your compliments," he said. "But I fear we are boring
+the ladies."
+
+The major had timed his speech well. At that moment, the ornate Volga
+pulled up to a smooth stop before a large, richly decorated building
+that glowed brightly under the electric lights of a large sign. The
+sign said something incomprehensible in Cyrillic script. Under it, the
+building entrance was gilded and carved into fantastic rococo shapes.
+Malone stared at the sign, and was about to ask a question about it
+when Petkoff spoke.
+
+"Trotkin's," he said. "The finest restaurant in all the world--in
+Moskva, this is what they say of it."
+
+"I understand," Malone said.
+
+"Come," Petkoff said grandly, and got out of the car. One of the two
+silent men leaped out and opened the back door, and Her Majesty, Lou
+and Malone climbed out and stood blinking on the sidewalk under the
+sign.
+
+Petkoff leaned over and said something to the driver. The second
+silent man got back into the car, and it drove away down the street,
+turned a corner and disappeared. The party of four started toward the
+entrance of the restaurant.
+
+The door swung open before Major Petkoff reached it. A doorman was
+holding it, and bowing to each of the four as they passed. He was
+dressed in Victorian livery, complete to knee-breeches and lace, and
+Malone thought this was rather odd for the classless Russian society.
+But the doorman was only the opening note of a great symphony.
+
+Inside, there were tables and chairs--or at least, Malone told
+himself, that's what he thought they were. They were massive wood
+affairs, carved into tortuous shapes and gilded or painted in all
+sorts of colors that glittered madly under the barrage of several
+electric chandeliers.
+
+The chandeliers hung from a frescoed ceiling, and looked much too
+heavy. They swayed and tinkled in time to the music that filled the
+room, but for a second Malone looked past them at the ceiling. It
+appeared to represent some sort of Russian heaven, at the end of the
+Five-Year Plan. There were officers and ladies eating grapes,
+waltzing, strolling on white puffy clouds, singing, drinking, making
+love. There was an awful lot of activity going on up on the ceiling,
+and it wasn't until Malone lowered his gaze that he realized that none
+of this activity had been exaggerated.
+
+True, there were no white puffy clouds, and he couldn't immediately
+locate a bunch of grapes anywhere. But there were the musicians, in
+the same Victorian outfits as the doorman: three fiddlers, a cellist,
+and a man who played piano. "Just like in night-clubs in bourgeois
+Paris," Petkoff said, following Malone's gaze with every evidence of
+pride.
+
+Between the musicians and Malone were a lot of tables and chairs and
+ancient, proud-looking waiters who appeared to have been hired when
+Trotkin's had opened--and that, Malone thought, had been a long, long
+time ago. He felt like those two ladies, whose names he couldn't
+remember, who said they'd slipped back in time. Officers and their
+ladies, the men in glittering uniforms, the ladies in ball dresses of
+every imaginable shade, cut, material and degree of exposure, were
+waltzing around the room looking very polite and old-world. Others
+were sitting at the tables, where candles fluttered, completely
+useless in the electric glare. The noise was something terrific, but,
+somehow, it was all very well-bred.
+
+The headwaiter was suddenly next to them. He hadn't walked there, at
+least not noticeably; he appeared to have perfected the old-world
+manner of the silent servant. Or, of course, Malone thought, the man
+might be a teleport.
+
+"Ah, Major Petkoff," he said, in a silken voice. "It is so good to see
+you again. And your friends?"
+
+"Americans," Petkoff said. "They have come to see the glorious Soviet
+Union."
+
+"Ah," the headwaiter said. "Your usual table, Major?"
+
+Petkoff nodded. The headwaiter led the party through the dancers,
+snaking slowly along until they reached a large table near the
+musicians and at the edge of the dance floor. Her Majesty
+automatically took the seat nearest the musicians, which she imagined
+to be the head of the table. Lou sat at her left hand, and Malone at
+her right, his back against a wall. Petkoff took the foot of the
+table, called a waiter over, and ordered for the party. He did a
+massive job of it, with two waiters, at last, taking down what seemed
+to be his entire memoirs, plus the list of all soldiers in the Red
+Army below the rank of Grand Exalted Elk, or whatever it might have
+been. Malone had no idea what the major was ordering, except that it
+sounded extensive and very, very Russian.
+
+Finally the waiter went on his way. Major Petkoff turned to Malone and
+smiled. "Naturally," he said, "we will begin with vodka, _nyet_?"
+
+Malone considered saying _nyet,_ but he didn't feel that this was the
+time or the place. Besides, he told himself grimly, it would be a sad
+day when a Petkoff could drink a Malone under the table. His proudest
+heritage from his father was an immense capacity, he told himself. Now
+was his chance to test it.
+
+"And, naturally, a little caviar to go with it," Petkoff added.
+
+"Certainly," Malone said, as if caviar were the most common thing in
+the world in his usual Washington saloons.
+
+It wasn't long before the waiter reappeared, bringing four glasses and
+three bottles of vodka chilled in an ice-bucket, like a bouquet of
+champagne. Petkoff bowed him out after one bottle had been opened, set
+the glasses up and began to pour.
+
+"Oh, goodness," Her Majesty started to say.
+
+"None for me, thanks," Lou chimed in.
+
+"Oh, yes," Her Majesty said. "I don't think I'll have any either. An
+old lady has to be very careful of her system, you know."
+
+"You do not look like an old lady," Petkoff said gallantly.
+"Middle-aged, perhaps, to be cruel. But certainly not old. Not over
+... oh, perhaps forty."
+
+Her Majesty smiled politely at him. Malone began to wonder if it had
+been gallantry, after all. From what he'd seen of the Russian women,
+it was likely, after all, that Petkoff really thought Her Majesty
+wasn't much over forty at that.
+
+"You're very flattering, Major," Her Majesty said. "But I assure you
+that I'm a good deal older than I look."
+
+Malone tried to tell himself that no one else had noticed the stifled
+gulp that had followed that remark. It had been his own stifled gulp.
+And his face, he felt sure, had aged one hundred and twelve years
+within a second or so. He waited for Her Majesty to tell Major Petkoff
+just how old she really was...
+
+But she said nothing else. After a second she turned and smiled at
+Malone.
+
+"Thanks," he said.
+
+"Oh, you're quite welcome," she said.
+
+Petkoff frowned at both of them, shrugged, and readied the bottle.
+"Well, then," he said. "It seems as if the drinking will be done by
+men--and that is right. Vodka is the drink for men."
+
+He had filled his own glass full of the cold, clear liquid. Now he
+filled Malone's. He stood, glass in hand. Malone also climbed to his
+feet.
+
+"To the continued friendship of our two countries!" Petkoff said. He
+raised his glass for a second, then downed the contents. Malone
+followed suit. The vodka burned its merry way into his stomach. They
+sat.
+
+A waiter arrived with a large platter. "Ah," Petkoff said, turning.
+"Try some of this caviar, Mr. Malone. You will find it the finest in
+the world."
+
+Malone, somehow, had never managed to develop a taste for caviar. He
+was willing to admit, if pressed, that this made him an uncultured
+slob, but caviar always made him think of the joke about the country
+bumpkin who thought it was marvelous that you could soften up buckshot
+just by soaking it in fish oil.
+
+Now, though, he felt he had to be polite, and he tried some of the
+stuff. All things considered, it wasn't quite as bad as he'd thought
+it was going to be. And it did make a pretty good chaser for the
+vodka.
+
+Her Majesty also helped herself to some caviar. "My goodness," she
+said. "This reminds me of the old days."
+
+Malone waited, once again, with bated breath. But, though Her Majesty
+may have been crazy, she wasn't stupid. She said nothing more.
+
+Petkoff, meanwhile, refilled the glasses and looked expectantly at
+Malone. This time it was his turn to propose the toast. He thought for
+a second, then stood up and raised his glass.
+
+"To the most beautiful woman in all the world," he said, feeling just
+a little like a character in _War and Peace_. "Luba Vasilovna
+Garbitsch."
+
+"Ah," Petkoff said, smiling approvingly. Malone executed a little bow
+in Lou's direction and followed Petkoff in downing the drink. Two more
+glasses of vodka wended their tortuous ways into the interior.
+
+"Tell me, colleague," Petkoff said as be spooned up some more caviar,
+"how are things in the United States?"
+
+Malone shot a glance at Her Majesty, but she was concentrating on
+something else, and her eyes seemed far away. "Oh, all right," he said
+at last.
+
+"Of course, you must say so," Petkoff murmured. "But, as one colleague
+to another, tell me: how much longer do you think it will be before
+the proletarian uprising in your country?"
+
+There were a lot of answers to that, Malone told himself. But he chose
+one without too much difficulty. "Well, that's hard to judge," he
+said. "I'd hate to make any prediction. I don't have enough
+information."
+
+"Not enough information?" Petkoff said. "I don't understand."
+
+Malone shrugged. "Since our proletariat," he said, "have shown no sign
+of wanting any rebellion at all, how can I predict when they're going
+to rebel?"
+
+Petkoff gave him an unbelieving smile. "Well," he said. "We must have
+patience, eh, colleague?"
+
+"I guess so," Malone said, watching Petkoff pour more vodka.
+
+By the time the meal came, Malone was feeling a warm glow in his
+interior, but no real fogginess. The dance floor had been cleared by
+this time, and a group of six costumed professionals glided out and
+took places. The musicians broke out into a thunderous and bumpy
+piece, and the dancers began some sort of Slavic folk dance that
+looked like a combination of a _kazotska_ and a shivaree. Malone
+watched them with interest. They looked like good dancers, but they
+seemed to be plagued with clumsiness; they were always crashing into
+one another. On the other hand, Malone thought, maybe it was part of
+the dance. It was hard to tell.
+
+The dinner was as extensive as anything Malone had ever dreamed of:
+_borshcht_, beef Stroganoff, smoked fish, vegetables in gigantic
+tureens, ices and cheeses and fruits. And always, between the courses,
+during the courses and at every available moment, there was vodka.
+
+The drinking didn't bother him too much. But the food was too much.
+Unbelieving, he watched Petkoff polish off a large red apple, a pear
+and a small wedge of white, creamy-looking cheese at the end of the
+towering meal. Her Majesty was staring, too, in a very polite manner.
+Lou simply looked glassy-eyed and overstuffed. Malone felt a good deal
+of sympathy for her.
+
+Petkoff finished the wedge of cheese and ripped off a belch of
+incredible magnitude and splendor. Malone felt he should applaud, but
+managed to restrain himself. Her Majesty looked startled for a second,
+and then regained her composure. Only Lou seemed to take the event as
+a matter of course, which set Malone to wondering about her home-life.
+Somehow he couldn't picture her wistful little father ever producing a
+sound of such awesome magnitude.
+
+"My dear colleague," Petkoff was saying. Malone turned to him and
+tried to look interested. "There is one thing I have wondered for many
+years."
+
+"Really?" Malone said politely.
+
+"That is right," Petkoff said. "For years, there has never been a
+change of name in your organization of secret police."
+
+"We're not secret police," Malone said.
+
+Petkoff gave a massive shrug. "Naturally," he said, "one must say
+this. But surely, one tires of being called FBI all the time."
+
+"One does?" Malone said. "I don't know. It gives a person a sort of
+sense of security."
+
+"Ah," Petkoff said. "But take us, for instance. We pride ourselves on
+our ability to camouflage ourselves. GPU, and then OGPU--which were, I
+understand, subject for many capitalist jokes."
+
+Malone tried to look as if he couldn't imagine such a thing. "I
+suppose they might have been," he said.
+
+"Then we were NKVD," Petkoff said, "and now MVD. And I understand,
+quite between us, Mr. Malone, that there is talk of further change."
+
+There was a sudden burst of applause. Malone wondered what for, looked
+at the dance floor and realized that the six Slavic dancers were
+taking bows. As he watched, one of them slipped and nearly fell. The
+musicians obliged with a final series of chords and the dancers
+trotted away. A waltz began, and couples from the tables began
+crowding the floor.
+
+"How can you manage the proletariat," Petkoff asked, "if you do not
+keep them confused?"
+
+"We don't, exactly," Malone said. "They more or less manage us."
+
+"Ha," Petkoff said, dismissing this with a wave of his hand.
+"Propaganda." And then he, too, turned to watch the dancers. The waltz
+was finishing, and a fox-trot had begun. "With your permission, Mr.
+Malone," he said, rising, "I should like to ask so-lovely Miss
+Garbitsch to dance with me."
+
+Malone glanced at the girl. She gave him a quick smile, with just a
+hint of nervousness or strain in it, and turned to Petkoff. "I'd be
+delighted, Major," she said. Malone shut his own mouth. As the girl
+rose, he got to his feet and gave the couple a small, Victorian bow.
+Petkoff and Lou walked to the floor, and Malone, sitting down again,
+watched enviously as he took her in his arms and began to guide her
+expertly across the floor in time to the music.
+
+Malone sighed. Some men, he told himself, had all the luck. But, of
+course, Lou had to be polite, too. She didn't really like Petkoff, he
+told himself; she was just being diplomatic. And he had made some
+progress with her on the plane, he thought.
+
+He looked over at Her Majesty, but the Queen was staring abstractedly
+at a crystal chandelier. Malone sighed again, took a little caviar and
+washed it down with vodka. The vodka felt nice and warm, he thought
+vaguely. Vodka was good. It was too bad that the people who made such
+good vodka had to be enemies. But that was the way things were, he
+told himself philosophically.
+
+Terrible. That's how things were.
+
+The fox-trot went to its conclusion. Malone saw Petkoff, chatting
+animatedly with Lou, lead her off to a small bar at the opposite side
+of the room. "Some people," he muttered, "have too much luck. Or too
+much diplomacy."
+
+Her Majesty was tugging at his arm. That, Malone thought, was going to
+be more bad news.
+
+It was.
+
+"Sir Kenneth," she said softly, "do you realize that this place is
+full of MVD men? Of course you don't; I haven't told you yet."
+
+Malone opened his mouth, shut it again, and thought in a hurry. If the
+place were full of MVD men, that meant they probably had it bugged.
+And that meant several things, all of them unpleasant. Her Majesty
+shouldn't have said anything--she shouldn't have shown any nervousness
+or anxiety in the first place, she shouldn't have known there were so
+many MVD men in the second place--because there was no way for her to
+know, except through her telepathy, a little secret Malone did not
+want the Russians to find out about. And she should definitely, most
+definitely, not have called him "Sir Kenneth."
+
+"Oh," Her Majesty said. "I am sorry, Sir--er--Mr. Malone. You're quite
+right, you know."
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "Well. My goodness." He thought of something to
+say, and said it at once. "Of course there are MVD men here. This is
+just the place for good old MVD men to come when they go off duty. A
+nice, relaxing place full of fun and dancing and food and vodka..."
+And he was thinking, at the same time: _Are they doing anything odd?_
+
+"Russian, you know," Her Majesty said, almost conversationally, "is an
+extremely difficult language. It takes a great deal of practice to
+learn to think in it really fluently."
+
+"Yes, I should think it would," Malone said absently. _You mean you
+haven't been able to pick up what these people are thinking?_
+
+"Oh, one can get the main outlines," Her Majesty went on, "but a
+really full knowledge is nearly impossible. Though, of course, it
+isn't quite as bad as all that. A man who speaks both languages, like
+our dear Major Petkoff, for instance--so charming, so full of _joie de
+vivre_--could be an invaluable assistant to anyone interested in
+learning exactly how Russians really think." She smiled nervously. Her
+face was suddenly set and strained. "I find that--"
+
+She stopped then, very suddenly. Her eyes widened, and her right hand
+reached out to grasp Malone's arm more strongly than he had thought
+she ever could. "Sir Kenneth!" Her voice, all restraint gone, was a
+hissing whisper. Malone started to say something, but Her Majesty went
+on, her eyes wide. "Do something quickly!" she said.
+
+"What?" Malone said.
+
+"They've put something in Lou's drink!" Her Majesty hissed.
+
+Malone was on his feet before she'd finished, and he took a step
+across the room.
+
+"She's already swallowed it!" the Queen said. "Do something! Quickly!"
+
+The dancers on the floor were no concern of his, Malone told himself
+grimly. He didn't decide to move; he was on his way before any thought
+filtered through into his mind. Officers and their ladies looked after
+him with shocked stupor as he plowed his way across the dance floor,
+using legs, elbows, shoulders and anything else that allowed him free
+passage. Sometimes the dancers managed to get out of his way.
+Sometimes they didn't. It was all the same to Kenneth J. Malone.
+
+Her Majesty followed in his wake, silent and stricken, scurrying after
+him like a small destroyer following a battleship, or like a
+ball-carrying grandmother following up her interference.
+
+Malone caught sight of Lou, standing at the bar. In that second, she
+seemed to realize for the first time that something was wrong. She
+pushed herself violently away from the bar, and looked frantically
+around, her mouth opening to call. Petkoff was a blur next to her;
+Malone didn't look at him clearly. Lou took a step...
+
+And two men with broken, lumpy faces came through a door somewhere in
+the rear of the restaurant, closer to her than Malone. Petkoff
+suddenly swam into sight; he was standing very still and looking
+entirely baffled.
+
+Malone pushed through a pair of dancers, ignored their glares and the
+man's hissed insult, which he didn't understand anyhow, and found his
+view suddenly blocked by a large expanse of dark grey.
+
+It was somebody's chest, in a uniform. Malone shifted his gaze half an
+inch and saw a row of gold buttons. He looked upward.
+
+There, towering above him, was a face. It stared down, looking heavy
+and cruel and stupid. Malone, his legs still carrying him forward,
+bounced off the chest and staggered back a step or two. He heard a
+hissed curse behind him, and realized without thinking about it that
+he had managed to collide with the same pair of dancers again. He
+didn't look around to see them. Instead, he looked ahead, at the giant
+who blocked his path.
+
+The man was about six feet six inches tall, a great Mongol who weighed
+about a sixth of a ton. But he didn't look fat; he looked strong
+instead, and enormously massive. Malone sidestepped, and the Mongol
+moved slightly to block him. To one side, Malone saw Her Majesty
+scurrying by. The Mongol was apparently more interested in Malone than
+in trying to stop sweet little old ladies. Malone saw Her Majesty
+heading for the bar, and forgot about her for the second.
+
+The Mongol shifted again to block Malone's forward progress.
+
+"What seems to be such great hurry, _Tovarishch_?" he said in a voice
+that sounded like an earthquake warning. "Have you no culture? Why you
+run across floor in such impolite manner?"
+
+The man might have been blocking his way because of Lou, or might
+simply want to teach an uncultured _Amerikanski_ a lesson. Malone
+couldn't tell which, and it didn't seem to matter. He whirled and
+reached for a glass of vodka standing momentarily unattended on a
+nearby table.
+
+He tossed the vodka at the giant's eyes, and scooted around the
+mountain of flesh before it erupted with a volcanic succession of
+Russian curses that shook the room with their volume and sincerity.
+
+But Lou and Her Majesty were nowhere in sight. Major Petkoff was
+staring, and Malone followed his line of sight.
+
+A door in the rear of the restaurant was just closing. Behind it
+Malone saw Her Majesty and Lou, disappearing from sight.
+
+Malone knocked over a waiter and headed for Petkoff. "What's going on
+here?" he bellowed over the crash of dishes and the rising wave of
+Russian profanity.
+
+Petkoff shrugged magnificently. "I have no ideas, colleague," he said.
+"I have no ideas."
+
+"But she--"
+
+"Miss Garbitsch was taken suddenly ill," Petkoff said.
+
+"Damn sudden," Malone growled.
+
+"Her friend, Miss Thompson, has taken her to the ladies' room,"
+Petkoff said. He gestured, narrowly missing a broken, lumpy face
+Malone had seen before.
+
+"You are under arrest," the face said. Its partner peered over
+Petkoff's shoulder.
+
+"I?" Petkoff said.
+
+"Not you," the face said. "Him." He started for Malone and Petkoff
+threw out both arms.
+
+"Hold!" he said. "My orders are to see that this man is not molested."
+
+The guests had suddenly and silently melted away. Malone backed off a
+step, looking for something to stage a fight with.
+
+"On the other hand, Comrade," one of the lumpy-faced men said, "we
+have orders also."
+
+"My orders--" Petkoff began.
+
+"Your orders do not exist," the other lumpy man said. "We are to
+arrest this man. Our orders say so."
+
+"You are fools," Petkoff said. He spread his arms wider, blocking both
+of them. Malone edged back against the bar, feeling behind him for a
+bottle or maybe a bungstarter. Instead, his hand touched a sleeve.
+
+A voice behind him bellowed: "Cease!"
+
+The two lumpy-faced men goggled. Petkoff did not move.
+
+Malone turned, and saw a tall, thin civilian with dark glasses.
+"Cease," the civilian repeated. "It is the girl we are to arrest! The
+girl!"
+
+"This is not a girl," one of the lumpy men said. "Sir. We are to
+arrest this man. Our orders say distinctly--"
+
+"Never mind your orders!" Petkoff said. "Go and reduce your orders to
+shreds and stuff them up your nostrils and die of suffocation! My
+orders say--"
+
+"The girl!" the civilian said. "Where is the girl?"
+
+Malone darted forward. Petkoff caught him neatly with one arm as he
+went by. "Until we decide what to do," the MVD man said, "you stay
+here." Malone bucked against him, but could get nowhere. "Meanwhile,"
+Petkoff said, "I am for letting you go."
+
+"I appreciate it," Malone said through his teeth. "How about proving
+it?"
+
+"If you let him go," a lumpy man said, "you will answer to our group
+head."
+
+Petkoff tightened his hold protectively. Meanwhile, the civilian was
+climbing up into a stratospheric rage.
+
+"You are dolts, imbeciles, worms without brains and walking bellies
+filled with carrion!" he said magnificently. "I have orders which I am
+sworn to carry out!"
+
+"You are not alone," Petkoff said.
+
+Malone took another try at a getaway, and failed.
+
+"We take precedence," a lumpy man said. "We can talk later. Arrest
+comes first."
+
+"But who?" the civilian snapped. "I insist--"
+
+"There shall be no arrest!" Petkoff screamed. "No one is to be
+arrested at all!"
+
+"I swear by the bones of Stalin that my orders state--" the tall man
+began.
+
+"The bones of Stalin are with us!" a lumpy man said. "Go and die in a
+kennel filled with fleas and old newspaper! Go and freeze to the
+likeness of an obscene statue of a bourgeois deity! Go and hang by the
+ears from a monument four thousand feet high in the center of the
+great desert!"
+
+Inspired, the other lumpy man screamed "Charge!" and came for Petkoff
+and the civilian. Petkoff whirled, letting go of Malone in order to
+beat back this wave of maddened attackers, and Malone took the
+advantage. He ducked free under Petkoff's left arm and started around
+the gesticulating, screaming, fighting group for the door at the back
+of the restaurant. He took exactly four steps.
+
+Then he stopped. The Mongol, his eyes red with a combination of vodka
+and bull-roaring rage, was charging toward him, his hands outflung and
+his fingers grasping at the air. "Warmonger!" he was shouting.
+"Capitalist slave-owner! Leprous and ancient cannibal without culture!
+You have begun a war you can not finish!"
+
+"Ha!" Malone said, feeling inadequate to the occasion. As the Mongol
+charged, he felt a wave of intense pragmatism come over him. He
+reached back toward the bar, grabbed a bottle of vodka and tossed
+several glassfuls into the giant's face. The Mongol, deluged and
+screaming, clawed wildly at his eyes and spun round several times,
+cursing Malone and all his kin for the next twenty-seven generations,
+and grabbing thin air in his attempt to reach the _Amerikanski_.
+
+All of the customers appeared to have discovered urgent engagements
+elsewhere. There was little for the Mongol to collide with except
+empty tables and chairs. But he did manage to swipe one of the
+lumpy-faced men on the side of the head with one flail of his arms.
+The lumpy-faced man said "Yoop!" and went staggering away into
+Petkoff, who spun him around and threw him away in the general
+direction of the bandstand. The diversion provided Malone with just
+enough time to start moving again.
+
+Four uniformed men were making their way toward the ladies' room from
+the opposite side of the restaurant. They were carrying a stretcher,
+which seemed pitifully inadequate for the carnage Malone had just
+left.
+
+He blocked their path. "Where are you going?" he said.
+
+"You are American?" one of them said. "I speak English good, no?"
+
+Behind him, Malone heard a yowl and a crunch, as of a body striking
+wood. It sounded as if somebody had fetched up against the bar. "You
+speak English fine," he said, feeling wildly out of place. "Have you
+been taking lessons?"
+
+"Me?" the man said. "It is no time for talk. We got to get lady for
+hospital."
+
+"Lady?" Malone said. "For hospital?"
+
+"Miss Garbitsch her name is," the stretcher-man said, trying to get
+past Malone. The FBI agent shifted slightly, blocking the path. "We
+wait outside one revolution--"
+
+"One what?"
+
+"When hands revolve once," the man said. "One hour. Now we get call so
+we take her to hospital."
+
+It sounded suspicious to Malone. He heard more yells behind him, and
+they sounded a little closer. The sound of running men came to his
+ears. "Well," he said happily, "goodbye all."
+
+The stretcher-bearer said, "Vot?" Malone shoved him backward into the
+approaching mob, grabbed the stretcher away from the other three men,
+who were acting a little dazed, and swung it in a wide arc. He caught
+an MVD man in the stomach, and the man doubled up with a weird
+whistling groan, turned slightly in agony, and hit another MVD man
+with his bowed head. The second man fell; Malone heard more crashes
+and screaming, but he didn't find out any details. Instead, he threw
+the stretcher at the milling mob and turned, already in motion, racing
+for the ladies' room.
+
+He had no notion of what he was going to do when he got there, or what
+he was going to find. Her Majesty and Lou were in there, all right,
+but how were they going to get out without being arrested, clubbed,
+disemboweled or taken to a Russian hospital for God alone knew what
+novel purposes?
+
+His mind was still a little foggy from the vast amounts of vodka he
+had poured down, and he wasn't in the least sure that teleportation
+would even work. He tried to figure out whether Her Majesty had
+already carried Lou off that way--but he doubted it. Lou was quite a
+burden for the old woman. And besides, he wasn't at all sure whether
+it was possible to teleport a human being. A lump of inanimate matter
+is one thing; an intelligent woman with a mind of her own is
+definitely something else.
+
+It seemed to take forever for him to reach the door, and he was
+panting heavily when he reached for it. Suddenly, another hand shot in
+front of his, turning the doorknob. Malone looked up.
+
+It was impossible to figure out where she had come from, or what she
+thought she was doing, but a bulging, slightly intoxicated Russian
+matron with bluish hair piled high on her head, a rusty orange dress
+and altogether too many jewels scattered here and there about her
+ample person, stood regarding him with a mixture of scorn, surprise
+and shock.
+
+Malone crowded her aside without a thought and jerked the door open.
+Behind her he could see the melee still continuing, though it looked
+by now as if the Russians weren't very sure who they were supposed to
+be fighting. The Mongol's great head rose for a second above the
+storm, shouting something unintelligible, and dropped again into the
+crowd.
+
+Malone focused on the matron, who was standing with her mouth open
+staring at him.
+
+"Madam," he said with stern dignity, "wait your turn!"
+
+He ducked inside and slammed the door behind him. There was a small
+knob to bolt the door with, and he used it. But it wasn't going to
+hold long, he knew. If the mob outside ever got straightened out, the
+door would go down like a piece of cardboard, bolt or no bolt.
+Undoubtedly the gigantic Mongol could do the job with one hand tied
+behind his back.
+
+Malone turned around and put his own back to the door. Women were
+looking up and making up their minds whether or not to scream. Time
+stood absolutely still, and nobody seemed to be moving--not even the
+two directly before him: a frightened-looking little old lady, who was
+trying to hold up a semiconscious redhead.
+
+And, somewhere behind him, he knew, was a howling mob of thoroughly
+maddened Russians.
+
+
+8
+
+The door rattled against Malone's back as a hand twisted the knob and
+shook it. He braced himself for the next assault, and it came: the
+shudder of a heavy body slamming up against it. Miraculously, the door
+held, at least for the moment. But the roars outside were growing
+louder and louder as the second team came up.
+
+Where was the Mongol? he wondered. But there was no time for idle
+contemplation. The scene inside the room demanded his immediate
+attention.
+
+He was in the anteroom, a gilded and decorated parlor filled with
+overstuffed chairs and couches. There was a door at the far side of
+the room, and a woman suddenly came out of it holding a pocketbook in
+one hand and a large powder-puff in the other. She saw Malone and
+reacted instantly.
+
+Her scream seemed to be a signal. The two other women sitting on
+couches screamed, too, and jumped up with their hands to their faces.
+Malone shouted something unintelligible but very loud at them and
+brandished a fist menacingly. They shrieked again and ran for the
+interior room.
+
+Malone heard the roaring outside, and pressed his back tighter against
+the door. Then, suddenly, he broke away from it and ran over to Her
+Majesty and Lou. He looked down. Lou was apparently completely
+unconscious by this time, and there was a peaceful look on her face.
+The Queen looked down at her, then up at Malone.
+
+"I'm sorry, Sir Kenneth," she said, "but we really haven't time for
+romantic thoughts just now."
+
+Malone passed a hand over his brow. "We haven't got time for
+anything," he said. "You can see what's going on outside."
+
+"My goodness," Her Majesty said. "Oh, yes. My goodness, yes."
+
+"Okay," Malone said. "We've got to teleport out, if we can--and if we
+can take Lou with us."
+
+"I don't know, Sir Kenneth," the Queen said.
+
+"We've got to try," Malone said grimly, looking down. There was a
+crash as something hit the door. It shuddered, creaked, and held.
+Malone took a breath. Lou was too beautiful to leave behind, no matter
+what.
+
+"I'll mesh my mind with yours," Her Majesty said, "so we'll be
+synchronized."
+
+"Right," Malone said. "The plane. Let's go."
+
+There was another crash, but he hardly heard it. He closed his eyes
+and tried to visualize the interior of the plane that was waiting for
+them at the airfield. He wasn't sure he could do it; the vodka might
+have clouded his mental processes just enough to make teleporting
+impossible. He concentrated. The crash came again, and a shout. He
+almost had it ... he almost had it...
+
+The last sound he heard was the splintering of the door, and a great
+shout that was cut off in the middle.
+
+Malone opened his eyes.
+
+"We made it," he said softly. "And I wonder what the MVD is going to
+think."
+
+Her Majesty took a deep breath. "My goodness," she said. "That _was_
+exciting, wasn't it?"
+
+"Not half as exciting as it's going to be if we don't hurry now,"
+Malone said. "If you know what I mean."
+
+"I do," Her Majesty said.
+
+"That's good," Malone said at random. "I don't." He helped the Queen
+ease the unconscious body of Luba Garbitsch into one of the padded
+seats, and Malone pushed a switch. The seat gave a tiny squeak of
+protest, and then folded back into a flat bedlike arrangement. Lou was
+arranged on this comfortable surface, and Malone took a deep breath.
+"Take care of her for a minute, Your Majesty," he said.
+
+"Of course," the Queen said.
+
+Malone nodded. "I'm going to see who's up front," he said. He walked
+through the corridors of the plane and rapped authoritatively on the
+door of the pilot's cabin. A second passed, and he raised his hand to
+knock again.
+
+It never reached the door, which opened very suddenly. Malone found
+himself facing a small black hole.
+
+It was the muzzle and the bore of the barrel of an M-2 .45 revolver,
+and it was pointing somewhere in the space between Malone's eyes.
+Behind the gun was a hard-eyed air force colonel with a grim
+expression.
+
+"You know," Malone said pleasantly, "they're good guns, but they
+really can't compare to the .44 Magnum."
+
+The pilot blinked, and his gun wavered just a little. "What?" he said.
+
+"Well," Malone said, "if you'd only join the FBI, like me, you'd have
+a .44 Magnum, and you could compare the guns."
+
+The pilot blinked again. "You're--"
+
+"Malone," Malone said. "Kenneth J. Malone, FBI. My friends call me
+Snookums, but don't try it. Why not let's put the gun away and be
+friends?"
+
+"Oh," the colonel said weakly. "Mr.--sure. I'm sorry, Mr. Malone.
+Didn't recognize you for a second there."
+
+"Perfectly all right," Malone said. The gun was still pointing at him,
+and in spite of the fact that he felt pleasantly like Philip Marlowe,
+or maybe the Saint, he was beginning to get a little nervous. "The
+gun," he said.
+
+The colonel stared at it for a second, then reholstered it in a hurry.
+"I am sorry," he said. "But we've been worried about Russians coming
+aboard. I've got my copilot and navigator outside, guarding the plane,
+and they were supposed to let me know if anybody came in. When they
+didn't let me know, and you knocked, I assumed you were Russians. But,
+of course, you--"
+
+Conversation came to a sudden dead stop.
+
+"About these Russians--" Malone said desperately. But the pilot's eyes
+got a little glazed. He wasn't listening.
+
+"Now, wait a minute," he said. "Why _didn't_ they notify me?"
+
+"Maybe they didn't see me," Malone said. "I mean us."
+
+"But--"
+
+"I'm not very noticeable," Malone said hopefully, trying to look small
+and undistinguished. "They could just have ... not noticed me. Okay?"
+He gave the pilot his most friendly smile.
+
+"They'd have noticed you," the pilot said. "If they're still out
+there. If nothing's happened to them." He leaned forward. "Did you see
+them, Malone?"
+
+Malone shrugged. "How would I know?" he said.
+
+"How would you--" The pilot seemed at a loss for words. Malone waited
+patiently, trying to look as if everything were completely and
+perfectly normal. "Mr. Malone," the pilot said at last, "how _did_ you
+get aboard this aircraft?"
+
+He didn't wait for an answer, and Malone was grateful for that.
+Instead, he stepped over to a viewport and looked out. On the field,
+two air force officers were making lonely rounds about the plane.
+Fifty yards farther away, a squad of Russian guards also patrolled the
+brightly-lit area. There was nothing else in sight.
+
+"There isn't any way you could have done it," the pilot said without
+turning.
+
+"That's the FBI for you," Malone said. "We've got our little trade
+secrets, you know." Somehow, the pilot's back looked unconvinced.
+"Disguise," Malone added. "We're masters of disguise."
+
+The pilot turned very slowly. "Now what the hell would you disguise
+yourself as?" he said. "A Piper Cub?"
+
+"It's a military secret," Malone said hurriedly.
+
+The pilot didn't say anything for what seemed a long time. "A military
+secret?" he asked at last, in a hushed voice. "And you can't tell me?
+You're a civilian, and I'm a colonel in the United States Air Force,
+and you can't tell me a military secret?"
+
+Malone didn't hesitate a second. "Well, Colonel," he said cheerfully,
+"that's the way things are."
+
+The pilot threw up his hands. "It's none of my business," he said
+loudly. "I'm not even going to think about it. Because if I do, you'll
+have a mad pilot on your hands, and you wouldn't like that, would
+you?"
+
+"I would hate it," Malone said sincerely, "like hell. Particularly
+since I've got a sick woman aboard."
+
+"Disguised," the pilot offered, "as Lenin, I suppose."
+
+Malone shook his head. "I'm not kidding now," he said. "She is sick,
+and I want a doctor for her."
+
+"Why didn't you bring one with you?" the pilot said. "Or wasn't the
+disguise big enough for three?"
+
+"Four," Malone said. "We've got three now; me and Miss Garbitsch and
+Miss Thompson. Lou--Miss Garbitsch is the one who's sick. But I want a
+doctor from the American Embassy."
+
+"I think we could all use one," the pilot said judiciously. "But you'd
+better tell me what's the matter with the girl."
+
+Malone gave him a brief and highly censored version of the melee at
+Trotkin's, particularly omitting the details of the final escape from
+the MVD men.
+
+When he had finished, the pilot gave a long, low whistle. "You have
+been having fun," he said. "Can I go on your next adventure, or is it
+only for accredited Rover Boys?"
+
+"You have to buy a pin and a special compass that works in the dark,"
+Malone said. "I don't think you'd like it. How about that doctor?"
+
+The pilot nodded wearily. "I'll send my navigator over to the airfield
+phone," he said. "As a matter of fact, I'll tell him to tell the
+doctor I'm the one who's sick, so the Russians don't get suspicious.
+It may even be true."
+
+"Just so he gets here," Malone said. The pilot was flagging his
+navigator through the viewport as Malone went out, closing the door
+gently behind him. He went back down the plane corridor to Her Majesty
+and Lou.
+
+Lou was still lying on the makeshift bed, her eyes closed. She looked
+more beautiful and defenseless than ever, and Malone wanted to do
+something big and terrible to all the Russians who had tried to take
+her away or dope her. With difficulty, he restrained himself. "How is
+she?" he asked.
+
+"She seems to be all right," the Queen said. "The substance they put
+in her drink doesn't appear to have had any other effect than putting
+her to sleep and making her a little sick--and that was a good thing."
+
+"Oh, sure," Malone said. "That was fine."
+
+"Well," Her Majesty said, "she did get rid of quite a bit of the drug
+in the ladies' room." She smiled, just a trifle primly. "I think
+she'll be all right," she said.
+
+"There's a doctor on the way, anyhow," Malone said, staring down at
+her. He tried to think of something he could do for her--fan her, or
+bring her water, or cool her fevered brow. But she didn't look very
+fevered. She just looked helpless and beautiful. He felt sorry for all
+the nasty things he had said to her, and all the nasty things she had
+said to him. If she got well--and of course she was going to get well,
+he told himself firmly--things would be different. They'd be sweet and
+kind to each other all the time, and do nice things for each other.
+
+And she was definitely going to get well. He wouldn't even think about
+anything else. She was going to be fine again, and very soon. Why, she
+was hardly hurt at all, he told himself, hardly hurt at all.
+
+"Sir Kenneth," Her Majesty said. "I've been thinking: while we were
+about it, why didn't we just teleport all the way back home?"
+
+Malone turned. "Because," he said, "we'd have had the devil of a time
+explaining just how we managed to do it."
+
+"Oh," she said. "I see. Of course."
+
+"This teleportation gimmick is supposed to be a secret," Malone went
+on. "We don't want to let out anything more about it than we have to.
+As it is, there's going to be some fierce wondering among the Russians
+about how we got out of that restaurant."
+
+"Obviously," the Queen said, entirely unexpectedly, "a bourgeois
+capitalistic trick."
+
+"Obviously," Malone agreed. "But we don't want to start up any more
+questions than we have to."
+
+"And how about the plane itself?" Her Majesty went on. "Do you think
+they'll let us take off?"
+
+"I don't know how they can stop us," Malone said.
+
+"You don't?"
+
+"Well, they don't want to cause any incidents now," Malone said. "At
+least, I don't think they do. If they could have captured us--me, or
+Lou, or both of us, depending on which side of the argument you want
+to take--anyhow, if they could have grabbed us on their own home
+grounds, they'd have had an excuse. Lou got sick, they'd say, and they
+just took her to the hospital. They wouldn't have to call it an arrest
+at all."
+
+"Oh, I see," Her Majesty said. "But now we're not on their home
+grounds."
+
+"Not so long as we stay in this plane, we're not," Malone said. "And
+we're going to stay here until we take off."
+
+Her Majesty nodded.
+
+"I wish I knew what they thought they were doing, though," Malone
+mused. "They certainly couldn't have held us for very long, no matter
+how they worked things."
+
+"I know what was on their minds," Her Majesty said. "At least partly.
+It was all so confused it was difficult to get anything really
+detailed or complete."
+
+"There," Malone said fervently, "I agree with you."
+
+"The whole trouble was," the Queen said, "that nobody knew about
+anybody else."
+
+"I'd gathered something like that," Malone said. "But what exactly was
+it all about?"
+
+"Well," the Queen said, "Major Petkoff was supposed to tell Lou, in
+effect, that if she didn't agree to do espionage work for the Soviet
+Union, things would go hard with her father."
+
+"Nice," Malone said. "Very friendly gentleman."
+
+"Well," the Queen continued, "he was supposed to tell her about that
+at the bar, when he had her alone. But she got that drugged drink
+before he could begin to say anything."
+
+"Then who drugged it?" Malone said. "Lou?"
+
+The Queen shrugged. "Someone else," she said. "Major Petkoff didn't
+know anything about the drugged drink."
+
+"A nice surprise for him, anyhow," Malone said.
+
+"It was a surprise for everybody," the Queen said. "You see, the
+drugged drink was meant to get her to the hospital, where they'd have
+her alone for a long time and could really put some pressure on her."
+
+"And then," Malone said, "there were the men who wanted to arrest me.
+And the ones who wanted to take Lou to jail. And the mad Mongol who
+just wanted to fight, I guess."
+
+"There were so many different things, all going on at once," the Queen
+said.
+
+Malone nodded. "There seems to be quite a lot of confusion in the
+Soviet Union, too," he said. "That does not sound to me like an
+efficient operation."
+
+"It wasn't, very," the Queen said. "You see, they have Garbitsch now,
+but they can't do anything to him because they can't get to Lou. And
+it doesn't do them any good to do anything to her father, unless she
+knows about it first."
+
+"It sounds," Malone said, "as if the USSR is going along the same
+confused road as the good old United States."
+
+The Queen nodded agreement. "It's terrible," she said. "I get those
+same flashes of telepathic static, too."
+
+"You do?" Malone said, leaning forward.
+
+"Just the same," the Queen said. "Whatever is operating in the United
+States is operating over here, too."
+
+Malone sat down in a seat on the aisle. "Everything," he announced,
+"is now perfectly lovely. The United States is being confused and
+mixed up by somebody, and the Somebody looked like a Russian spy. But
+now Russia is being confused, too."
+
+"Do you think there are some American spies working here?" the Queen
+said.
+
+"If they're using psionics," Malone said, "as they obviously are--and
+I don't know about them, Burris doesn't know about them, O'Connor
+doesn't know about them and nobody else I can find knows about them--
+then they don't exist. That's flat."
+
+"How about outer space?" the Queen said. "I mean, spies from outer
+space trying to take over the Earth."
+
+"It's a nice idea," Malone said sourly. "I wish they'd hurry up and do
+it."
+
+"Then you don't think--"
+
+"I don't know what to think," Malone said. "There's some perfectly
+simple explanation for all this. And somewhere, in all the running
+around and looking here and there I've been doing, I've got all the
+facts I need to come up with that answer."
+
+"Oh, my," the Queen said. "That's wonderful."
+
+"Sure it is," Malone said. "There's only one trouble, as a matter of
+fact. I don't know what the explanation is, and I don't know which
+facts are important and which ones aren't."
+
+There was a short silence.
+
+"I wish Tom Boyd were here," Malone said wistfully.
+
+"Really?" the Queen said. "Why?"
+
+"Because," Malone said, "I feel like hearing some really professional
+cursing."
+
+* * * * *
+
+Three-quarters of an hour passed, each and every minute draped in some
+black and gloomy material. Malone sat in his seat, his head supported
+by both hands, and stared at the back of the seat ahead of him. No
+great messages were written on it. The Queen, respecting his need for
+silent contemplation, sat and watched Lou and said nothing at all.
+
+It was always possible, of course, Malone thought, that he would fall
+asleep and dream of an answer. That kind of thing kept happening to
+detectives in books. Or else a strange man in a black trenchcoat would
+sidle up to him and hand him a slip of paper. The words: "Five
+o'clock, watch out, the red snake, doom," would be written on the
+paper and these words would provide him with just the clues he needed
+to solve the whole case. Or else he would go and beat somebody up, and
+the exercise would stimulate his brain and he would suddenly arrive at
+the answer in a blinding flash.
+
+Wondering vaguely if a blinding flash were anything like a dungeon,
+because people kept being in them and never seemed to come out, Malone
+sighed. Detectives in books were great, wonderful people who never had
+any doubts or worries. Particularly if they were with the FBI. Only
+Kenneth J. Malone was different.
+
+Maybe someday, he thought, he would be a real detective, instead of
+just having a few special gifts that he hadn't really worked for,
+anyhow. Maybe someday, in the distant future, he would be the equal of
+Nick Carter.
+
+Right now, though, he had a case to solve. Nick Carter wasn't around
+to help.
+
+And Kenneth J. Malone, FBI, was getting absolutely nowhere.
+
+Finally, his reverie was broken by the sounds of argument outside the
+plane door. There were voices speaking both English and Russian, very
+loudly. Malone went to the door and opened it. A short, round,
+grey-haired man who looked just a little like an over-tired bear who
+had forgotten to sleep all winter almost fell into his arms. The man
+was wearing a grey overcoat that went nicely with his hair, and
+carrying a small black bag.
+
+Malone said: "Oog," replaced the man on his own feet and looked past
+him at the group on the landing ramp outside. The navigator was there,
+arguing earnestly with two men in the uniform of the MVD.
+
+"Damn it," the navigator said, "you can't come in here. Nobody comes
+in but the doctor. This is United States territory."
+
+The MVD men said something in Russian.
+
+"No," the navigator said. "Definitely no."
+
+One of the MVD men spat something that sounded like an insult.
+
+The navigator shrugged. "I don't understand Russian," he told them.
+"All I know is one word. No. _Nyet_ Definitely, absolutely irrevocably
+_nyet_."
+
+_"Sikin sin Amerikanyets!"_
+
+The MVD men turned, as if they'd been a sister act, and went down the
+steps. The navigator followed them, wiping his forehead and breathing
+deeply. Malone shut the door.
+
+"Well, well, well," the doctor said, in a burbling sort of voice.
+"Somehow, we thought it might be you. Anyhow, the ambassador did."
+
+"Really?" Malone said, trying to sound surprised.
+
+"Oh, yes," the doctor assured him. "You have raised something of a
+stench in and around good old Moscow, you know."
+
+"I'm innocent," Malone said.
+
+The doctor nodded. "Undoubtedly," he said judiciously. "Who isn't? And
+where, by the way, is the girl?"
+
+"Over there." Malone pointed. News apparently traveled with great
+speed in Moscow, MVD and censorship notwithstanding. At any rate, he
+thought, it traveled with great speed to the ears of the Embassy
+staff.
+
+The doctor lifted Lou's limp wrist to time her pulse, his lips pursed
+and his eyes focused on a far wall.
+
+"What have you heard?" Malone said.
+
+"The MVD boys are extremely worried," the doctor said. "Extremely." He
+didn't let go of the wrist, a marvel of which Malone had never grown
+tired. Doctors always seemed to be able, somehow, to examine a patient
+and carry on a conversation about totally different things, without
+even showing the strain. This one was no exception. Malone watched in
+awe.
+
+"According to the reports we got from them," the doctor said, "you
+wandered off from _Trotkin's_ without your escort."
+
+"Well," Malone said at random, "I didn't think to leave them a
+farewell note. I hope they don't think I disliked their company."
+
+"Officially," the doctor said, lifting Lou's left eyelid and gazing
+thoughtfully into the blue iris thus exposed, "they're afraid you're
+lost, and they were apologetic as all hell about it to the
+ambassador." The iris appeared to lose its fascination; the doctor
+dropped the eyelid and fished in his black bag, which he had put on
+the seat next to Lou.
+
+"And unofficially?" Malone asked.
+
+"Unofficially," the doctor said, "we've got news of a riot at
+_Trotkin's_ tonight, in which you seem to have been involved. Mr.
+Malone, you must be quite a barroom brawler when you're at home."
+
+"Frankly," Malone said, "I'm a little out of practice. And I hope I
+never have the chance to get back _into_ practice."
+
+The doctor nodded, removing a stethoscope from the bag and applying it
+to Lou's chest. He waited a second, frowned and then took the plugs
+out of his ears. "I know just what you mean," he said. "You might be
+interested to know the first unofficial score of that little match."
+
+"Score?" Malone said.
+
+The doctor nodded again. "Three concussions," he said, "one possible
+skull fracture, a broken arm, two bitten hands, and a large and varied
+assortment of dental difficulties and plain hysteria. No dead,
+however. I really don't understand why not."
+
+"Well," Malone said, "nobody wanted to create an international
+incident."
+
+"Hmf," the doctor said. "I see. Or I think I do, which is as far as I
+care to go in the matter. The Russians suspect, by the way, that
+you've managed to get aboard the plane. They do know, of course, about
+the girl, and when the pilot called for me they put two and two
+together. In spite of his story about being sick. What they can't
+figure out is how you managed to _get_ aboard the plane."
+
+"Neither can I," Malone said at random. The doctor gave him a single
+bright stare.
+
+"Well," he said at last, "I suppose you know your own business best.
+By the way, my examination accords pretty well with our unofficial
+information about the girl--that she was given some sort of drug in a
+drink. Is that what happened?"
+
+Malone nodded. "As far as we know," he said. "She did get rid of a lot
+of it within a few minutes, though."
+
+"Good," the doctor said. "Very sensible."
+
+"Sense had nothing to do with it," Malone said.
+
+"In any case," the doctor went on doggedly, "there can't be too much
+left in her system. Her pulse is good, she's breathing easily and
+there don't seem to be any complications, so I should doubt strongly
+that there's been much damage done. Besides all which, of course, the
+Russians would hardly have wanted to hurt her; what they gave her
+would probably have done little more harm even if she'd ingested it
+all, and kept it down."
+
+"Good," Malone said sincerely.
+
+"I'll give you some pills," the doctor said, fishing in his bag again,
+"and you can give them to her when she wakes up."
+
+"Is that all?" Malone said, vaguely disappointed.
+
+The doctor eyed him keenly. "Well," he said, "I could give her an
+injection, but I'd be a little afraid to. If it had a synergistic
+action with the drug, she might be worse off than before."
+
+"Oh," Malone said. "By all means. Just the pills."
+
+"I'm glad you agree," the doctor said. "Oh, and about leaving--"
+
+"Yes?" Malone said. "We want to get out of here in a hurry, if we
+can."
+
+"I think you can," the doctor said. "The ambassador mentioned that
+he'd try to arrange it with the Russians. I don't know what he'll tell
+them--but then, that's why he's an ambassador, and I'm a doctor." He
+straightened up and handed Malone an envelope containing three green
+capsules. "Give her these if she wakes up with a headache," he said.
+"If she feels all right, just forget all about them."
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "And thanks, Doctor. Tell the ambassador we'd
+appreciate it if he got us out of here as soon as possible."
+
+"Certainly," the doctor said. "After all, I might as well take on the
+job of a diplomatic courier."
+
+Malone nodded. "Well," he said, "goodbye, Mr. Courier."
+
+The doctor went to the door, opened it and turned.
+
+"Absolutely," he said, "Mr. Ives."
+
+
+9
+
+Lou didn't wake up until the plane was dropping toward the Washington
+airfield, and when she did awaken it was as if she had merely come out
+of an especially deep sleep. Malone was standing over her, which was
+far from a coincidence; he had been waiting and watching virtually
+every minute since takeoff.
+
+During his brief periods of rest, Her Majesty had taken over, and she
+was now peacefully asleep at the back of the plane, looking a little
+more careworn, but just as regal as ever. She looked to Malone as if
+she had weathered a small revolution against her rule, but had managed
+to persuade the populace (by passing out cookies to the children,
+probably) that all was, in the last analysis, for the best in this
+best of all possible worlds. She looked, he thought, absolutely
+wonderful.
+
+So did Lou. She blinked her eyes open and moved one hand at her side,
+and then she came fully awake. "Well," she said. "And a bright hello
+to you, Sleuth. If it's not being too banal, where am I?"
+
+"It is," Malone said, "but you're in an airplane, coming into
+Washington. We ought to be there in a few minutes."
+
+Lou shook her head slowly from side to side. "I have never heard any
+news that sounded better in my entire life," she said. "How long ago
+did we leave Moscow?"
+
+"Our trip to Beautiful Moskva," Malone said, "ended right after they
+tried to get you to the hospital, by giving you a drugged drink. Do
+you remember that?"
+
+"I remember it, all right," she said. "I'm never going to forget that
+moment."
+
+"How do you feel?" Malone said.
+
+"Fine," Lou said. "And how are _you_?"
+
+"Me?" Malone said. "I'm all right. I've _been_ all right. Don't worry
+about _me_."
+
+"Well, one never knows," Lou said. "With your cold and all."
+
+"I think that's better," Malone said hastily. "But you're sure you
+feel fine?"
+
+Lou nodded. "A little tired, maybe, but that's all." She paused. "I
+remember Miss Thompson taking me to the ladies' room. I got pretty
+sick. But from there on, I'm not sure what happened."
+
+"I came in," Malone said, "and got you out."
+
+"How brave!" Lou said.
+
+"Not very," Malone said casually. "After all, what could happen to me
+in a ladies' room?"
+
+"You'd be surprised," Lou murmured. "And you came and got me, and took
+me to the plane and all. And I--" She hesitated, and for a second she
+looked very small and wistful. "Do you--do you think they'll do
+anything to Dad?" she said.
+
+"I don't see why," Malone said confidently. "After all, the only thing
+he did wrong was to get caught, and that's an occupational risk if
+you're in the spy business. Lots of people get caught. Happens all the
+time. Don't worry about it."
+
+"I--all right," she said. "I won't, then."
+
+"Good," Malone said. He fished in his pocket. "I've got some pills
+here," he said, "in case you have a headache. The doctor said I could
+give them to you if you had a headache, but otherwise I should just
+forget about them."
+
+Lou smiled. "I think you'd better just forget about them," she said.
+
+Malone's hand came out of his pocket empty. "I just want to make sure
+you're okay," he said. "Probably very silly. Of course you're okay."
+
+"Of course I am," she said. "But I don't think you're silly." She
+smiled again, a very warm smile. Malone took a deep breath and
+discovered that he hadn't been breathing at all regularly for several
+minutes. Lou's smile increased a trifle in intensity and he stopped
+breathing all over again. "All things considered," she said, "I think
+you're pretty wonderful, Ken."
+
+Malone's voice sounded to him as if it were coming from a great
+distance. He wondered if the strange feeling in his stomach were the
+pangs of love, or the descent of the plane. Then he realized that he
+didn't care. "Well, well," he said airily. "Well, well, well. Frankly,
+Lou, I'm inclined to agree with you. Though I'm not sure about the
+qualification."
+
+"Fine thing," she said. "Tell a man he's wonderful and he just nods
+his head as if he knew it all along."
+
+Malone swallowed hard. "Maybe I did," he said. "And how did you come
+to this startling conclusion?"
+
+It was Lou who broke the light mood of their speech first. "Look,
+Ken," she said seriously, "I'm the daughter of an enemy spy. You know
+that. You're an FBI agent."
+
+"So what?" he said.
+
+"So," she said, "you don't treat me like the daughter of a spy. You
+treat me just like anybody else."
+
+"I do not," Malone said instantly.
+
+"All right," she said, and shrugged. "But I'm sure none of this is in
+the FBI manual for daughters of convicted spies."
+
+"Now, you look," Malone said. "Just what do you think this is? The
+McCarthy era? Any way I treat you, it has nothing to do with your
+father. He's a spy, and we caught him and we sent him back to Moscow.
+That's our job. But all this about the sins of the fathers being
+visited on the heads of the children, even unto the seventh
+generation--this is just plain silly. You're you; you're not your
+father. You haven't done anything--why should I treat you as if you
+have?"
+
+"How do you know I'm not a spy, too?" she said.
+
+"Because," Malone said flatly, "I know."
+
+"Really?" she said softly. "Do you really?"
+
+Malone opened his mouth, shut it and then started again. "Strictly
+speaking," he said carefully, "I don't know. But we're in the United
+States now, where a person is considered innocent until proven
+guilty."
+
+"And that," Lou said, "is all you're going on, I suppose."
+
+"Not all," Malone said.
+
+"I didn't think so," Lou said, still smiling.
+
+"Don't ask me how," Malone said, "but we're pretty sure you knew
+nothing about your father's activities. Forget it."
+
+Lou looked suddenly slightly disappointed. Malone wondered why. Of
+course, there was one more reason, and maybe she'd thought of that.
+"It does make it easier," he said, "that you happen to be a beautiful
+girl."
+
+She smiled again, and started to say something, but she never got the
+chance. The landing gear of the aircraft bumped gently against the
+runway, and the ship rolled slowly in to a stop.
+
+A second passed. From the back of the plane a voice said: "Are we back
+in Washington, S--Mr. Malone?"
+
+"That's right, Miss Thompson," Malone told the Queen.
+
+"And Miss Garbitsch--"
+
+"I'm fine, Miss Thompson," Luba said. She swung her feet around to the
+deck.
+
+"Wait a minute," Malone said. "Do you think you ought to get up?"
+
+Lou's smile seemed to reduce him to small, very hot ashes. "Ken," she
+said, "the doctor said I was fine, so what are you worrying about? I
+can get up. I'll be all right."
+
+"Oh, okay," he said, and stepped back. Her Majesty had already left
+the plane. Lou got up, and wavered just a little. Malone held out his
+arms, and found her in them before he had thought about it.
+
+A long time seemed to pass. Malone wasn't sure whether he was standing
+still because he wanted to, or because he was absolutely incapable of
+motion. Lou didn't seem in any hurry to break away, either.
+
+Then she put her arms around his neck.
+
+"Sleuth," she said, "don't you ever follow up a hint?"
+
+"Hint?" Malone said.
+
+"Damn it," Lou said in a soft, sweet voice, "kiss me, Ken."
+
+Malone had no answer to that--at least, no verbal answer.
+
+One didn't seem to be needed.
+
+When he finally came up for air, he said: "Lou..."
+
+"Yes, Ken?"
+
+"Lou, where are you going from here?"
+
+Lou stepped back a pace. "What?" she said.
+
+"I mean, back to New York?" Malone said. "Or someplace else? I mean--
+well, what are you going to do?"
+
+"Oh," Lou said. "Oh, yes. I'll be going back to New York. After all,
+Ken, I do have a living to make, such as it is, and Sir Lewis is
+expecting me."
+
+"I don't know," Malone said, "but it still sounds funny. A girl like
+you working for--well, for the Psychical Research people. Ghosts and
+ectoplasm and all that."
+
+Lou stepped back another pace. "Now, wait a minute," she said. "You
+seemed to need their information, all right."
+
+"But that was--oh, well," Malone said. "Never mind. Maybe I'm silly.
+It really doesn't matter."
+
+"I guess it doesn't, now," she said. "Except that it does mean I've
+got to leave for New York almost at once."
+
+"Can you cut out that 'almost'?" Malone said. "Because I've got to be
+there myself, and right away. If you hurry, we can get the same
+plane."
+
+"That would be great," she said.
+
+"Okay, then," Malone said. "Don't you worry about a thing, I'll take
+care of reservations and everything."
+
+"My, my," Lou said. "What it must be like to have all that pull and
+influence."
+
+"What?" Malone said.
+
+Lou grinned. "Nothing," she said. "Nothing."
+
+"Then it's all settled. I'll take care of the reservations, and we'll
+go in together," Malone said.
+
+"Fair enough," Lou said, "my fine feathered Fed."
+
+* * * * *
+
+Actually, it took Malone nearly three hours to get everything set in
+Washington for his New York departure. He had to make a verbal report
+to Andrew J. Burris first, and that consumed quite a lot of time,
+since Burris was alternately shocked, horrified, gleeful and confused
+about the whole trip, and spent most of his time interrupting Malone
+and crying out for God's vengeance, mercy, justice or understanding.
+
+Then Malone had to dictate a longer report for the written record.
+This didn't take quite as long, since there were no interruptions, but
+by the time it was over he felt as if he were going out to become a
+Carthusian monk. He felt, as he rubbed his raw throat, that it
+wouldn't be a bad idea at all to take a nice vow of silence for
+awhile. He could write people little notes, and they would all treat
+him kindly and gently. He would be pointed out to strangers, and
+people would try to do him favors.
+
+Unfortunately, he couldn't take the vow at once. During his absence,
+his desk log showed, several calls had come in, all of which had to be
+taken care of at once. Some of them dealt with evidence or statements
+from old cases, some were just nuisances. The most urgent was from Dr.
+O'Connor at Yucca Flats.
+
+"If you're not too busy," O'Connor said in his icily polite tone, "I
+would like to have Miss Thompson back as soon as possible." He sounded
+as if Malone had borrowed his scalpel.
+
+"I'll see what I can do," Malone said carefully.
+
+"There is a new series of tests," O'Connor said, "on which I am now at
+work; the assistance of Miss Thompson would be invaluable to me at
+this time."
+
+After he'd hung up, Malone called Her Majesty at her Washington hotel.
+She was very glad of the chance to return to Yucca Flats, she said.
+There, Malone knew, she would be able to return to her accustomed
+dignity as Queen of the Greater English Commonwealth, a district
+which, in her mind, seemed to include the greater part of the Western
+world. On her present mission, she was plain Miss Thompson and, though
+the idea of going about incognito had its charms, it became a little
+dull after awhile. The adventuring was fine, although a little rougher
+than she'd thought it would be; the sight of the Queen's Own FBI in
+action was still a powerful attraction for Her Majesty. But the peace
+and quiet and dignity of Her Own Royal Palace won out without too much
+trouble.
+
+"Of course," Malone said, "you'll be on call in case I need you."
+
+"I am always in touch with my subjects," Her Majesty said with
+dignity, "and most especially with you, Sir Kenneth. I shall so
+remain."
+
+And then there was a little paperwork to take care of. By the time
+Malone had finished, he would have been glad to teleport to New York
+on his own. But on reflection he decided that he would much rather
+travel with Lou, and hurried down to the airport.
+
+By the time the plane landed at La Guardia, and they'd taken
+a 'copter to the East Side Terminal and a taxi to the big
+blue-aluminum-and-glass Ravell Building, Malone had reached a new
+decision. It would be nothing short of wonderful, he felt, if he
+could spend the rest of his life traveling around with Luba Garbitsch.
+
+Of course, that name was something of a handicap. It was hardly a
+romantic one. He wondered, very briefly, whether or not "Luba Malone"
+were an improvement. But he buried the thought before it got any
+further. Enough, he told himself firmly, was enough.
+
+"It's been a nice trip," Lou said. She, too, sounded subdued, as if
+she were thinking about something terribly serious.
+
+"Great," Malone said happily. "A wonderful trip."
+
+"I enjoyed being with you," Lou said.
+
+"Me, too," Malone said. He paid off the taxi-driver and they got out
+at the corner. Malone went to the newsstand there and picked up a copy
+of the _Post_.
+
+"That," Lou said over his shoulder, "is one whole hell of a headline."
+
+It filled the entire page, four lines of thick black capitals:
+
+     JUDGE
+     DROPS
+     UNION
+     SUIT!
+
+"Well, well," Malone said. "Let's see what this is all about." He
+flipped to page three. Lou craned her neck over his shoulder and they
+read the start of the story together.
+
+     DISTRICT COURT RULES UNION HAS NO CASE
+
+     New York [AP], August 23. Judge James Lefkowitz
+     of the New York Supreme Court ruled today that
+     the International Truckers' Brotherhood had no
+     grounds for their suit against the United Transport
+     Corp. and its officers. The action, a bitterly
+     fought contest, involved a complaint by the
+     Brotherhood that UTC had violated their contract
+     with the Brotherhood by hiring "unqualified drivers"
+     to work for the corporation.
+
+     In a statement made immediately after the ruling,
+     Judge Lefkowitz said: "It is obvious that a man with
+     a state-certified chauffeur's license is not an
+     'unqualified driver.'"
+
+     Effects of this ruling are thought to be
+     far-reaching. Comment from the international
+     Truckers' Brotherhood...
+
+There was more to it, a lot more, but Malone didn't feel like reading
+it. It sounded just as confused as he expected news to sound these
+days, but it also sounded a little dull. He could feel Lou's breathing
+against his ear as he read, and he lost interest in the paper almost
+at once.
+
+"My, my," she said. "And I expected a real expos� of a story, after
+that headline."
+
+"This is an expos�," Malone said. "But I'm not sure what of."
+
+"It sounds pretty confused," Lou said.
+
+"Everything seems to, these days," Malone said. "Including any story
+of what's been happening during the last little while."
+
+"Agreed," Lou said. "Without argument."
+
+"Listen," Malone said suddenly. "Would it help if I went up and told
+Sir Lewis that there's no mark against your record?"
+
+"Mark?" Lou said. "Against my record?"
+
+"Well," Malone said, "I mean--well, he isn't the sort of man who'd
+fire somebody, because of--because of something like this?"
+
+"You mean because I know an FBI man?" Lou said.
+
+"I--"
+
+"Never mind," she said. "I know what you mean. And he won't. He'll
+understand." She came round to face him, and patted his cheek.
+"Thanks," she said. "Thanks a lot, anyway."
+
+"If there's anything I can do--"
+
+"There won't be," Lou said. "You'll call me, though, about tonight?"
+
+"Sure I will," Malone said. He hoped that the tentative date he'd made
+with her for that evening wouldn't be broken up because of a sudden
+onslaught of work. "I'll let you know before five, for sure."
+
+"Fine," Lou said. "I'll wait to hear from you."
+
+She turned to walk away.
+
+"Hey," Malone said. "Wait a minute."
+
+"What?" she said, turning again.
+
+Malone looked judicious. "I think," he said weightily, "that,
+considering all the fun we've had, and all the adventuring and
+everything else, the least you could do would be to kiss me goodbye."
+
+"On Fifth Avenue?"
+
+"No," Malone said. He tapped his lips. "Here."
+
+She laughed, bent closer and pecked him on the cheek. Then, before he
+could say anything else, she was gone.
+
+
+10
+
+On the way to FBI Headquarters on 69th Street, he read the _Post_ a
+little more carefully. The judge and his union suit weren't the only
+things that were fouled up, he saw. Things were getting pretty bad all
+over.
+
+One story dealt with the recent factional fights inside the American
+Association for the Advancement of Medicine. A new group, the United
+States Medical-Professional Society, appeared to be forming as a
+competitor to the AAAM, and Malone wasn't quite so sure, when he
+thought about it, that this news was as bad as it appeared on the
+surface. Fights between doctors, of course, were reasonably rare, at
+least on the high hysterical level the story appeared to pinpoint. But
+the AAAM had held a monopoly in the medical field for a long time;
+maybe it was about time some competition showed itself. From what he
+could find out in the story, the USMPS seemed like a group of fairly
+sensible people.
+
+But that was one of the few rays of light Malone could discern amid
+the encircling bloom of the news. The gang wars had reached a new
+high; the _Post_ was now publishing what it called a Daily Scoreboard,
+which consisted in this particular paper of six deaths, two
+disappearances and ten hospitalizations. The six deaths were evenly
+scattered throughout the country: two in New York, one each in Chicago
+and Detroit, and two more in San Francisco. The disappearances were in
+Los Angeles and in Miami, and the hospitalizations were pretty much
+all over.
+
+The unions had been having trouble, too. Traditional forms of
+controversy appeared to have gone out the window, in favor of
+startling disclosures, beatings, wild cries of foul and great masses
+of puzzling evidence. How, for instance, Malone wondered, had the
+president of Local 7574 of the Fishermen's Fraternal Brotherhood
+managed to mislay a pile of secret records, showing exactly how the
+membership was being bilked of dues, on a Boston subway train? But,
+somehow, he had, and the records were now causing shakeups, denials
+and trouble among the fishermen.
+
+Of course, the news was not all bad. There were always the comic
+strips. Pogo was busily staving off an approaching wedding between
+Albert Alligator and a new character named Tranquil Portly, who
+appeared to be a brown bear. He was running into some resistance,
+though, from a wolflike character who planned to abscond with Albert's
+cigars while Albert was honeymooning. This character, Don Coyote by
+name, looked like a trouble-maker, and Malone vowed to keep a careful
+eye on him.
+
+And then there were other headlines:
+
+     FUSION POWER SOON COMMERCIALLY
+     AVAILABLE SAYS AEC HEAD
+     Sees Drastic Cut in Power Rates
+
+     UN POLICE CONTINGENT OKAYED:
+     MILLION MEN TO FORM 1ST GROUP
+     Member Countries Pledge $20
+     Billion in Support Moneys
+
+     OFFICIAL STATES: "WE'RE AHEAD AFTER 17 YEARS!"
+     US Space Program Tops Russian Achievements
+
+     ARMED FORCES TO TOUGHEN TRAINING PROGRAM IN 1974
+     Gen. Foote: "Our aim is to train fighting men,
+     not to run a country club."
+
+     GOVERNMENT TO SAVE $1 BILLION ANNUALLY?
+     Senator Hits Duplication of Effort in Government,
+     Vows Immediate Reform
+
+Malone read that one a little more carefully, because it looked, at
+first sight, like one of the bad-news items. There had been
+government-spending reforms before, almost all of which had resulted
+in confusion, panic, loss of essential services--and twice as many men
+on the payroll, since the government now had to hire useless
+efficiency experts, accountants and other such supernumerary workers.
+
+But this time, the reform looked as if it might do some good. Of
+course, he told himself sadly, it was still too early to tell.
+
+The senator involved was Deeks, of Massachusetts, who was also in the
+news because of a peculiar battle he had had with Senator Furbisher of
+Vermont. Congress, Malone noted, was still acting up. Furbisher
+claimed that the moneys appropriated for a new Vermont dam were really
+being used for the dam. But Deeks had somehow come into possession of
+several letters written by a cousin of Furbisher's, detailing some of
+the graft that was going on in the senator's home state. Furbisher was
+busily denying everything, but his cousin was just as busy confessing
+all to anybody who would listen. It was building up into an extremely
+interesting fracas, and, Malone thought, it would have been even
+funnier than Pogo except that it was happening in the Congress of the
+United States.
+
+He heaved a sigh, folded up the paper and entered the building that
+housed the New York contingent of the FBI.
+
+Boyd was waiting in his office when he arrived.
+
+"Well, there, Kenneth," he said. "And how are all our little Slavic
+brothers?"
+
+"Unreasonable," Malone said, "and highly unpleasant."
+
+"You refer, no doubt," Boyd said, "to the _Meeneestyerstvoh
+Vnootrenikh Dyehl_?"
+
+_"Gesundheit,"_ Malone said kindly.
+
+"The MVD," Boyd said. "I've been studying for days to pull it on you
+when you got back."
+
+Malone nodded. "Very well, then," he said in a stately, orotund tone.
+"Say it again."
+
+"Damn it," Boyd said, "I _can't_ say it again."
+
+"Cheer up," Malone said. "Maybe some day you'll learn. Meantime,
+Thomas, did you get the stuff we talked about?"
+
+Boyd nodded. "I think I got enough of it," he said. "Anyhow, there is
+a definite trend developing. Come on into the private office, and I'll
+show you."
+
+There, on Boyd's massive desk, were several neat piles of paper.
+
+"It looks like enough," Malone said. "As a matter of fact, it looks
+like too much. Haven't we been through all this before?"
+
+"Not like this, we haven't," Boyd said. "Information from all over,
+out of the everywhere, into the here." He picked up a stack of papers
+and handed them to Malone.
+
+"What's this?" Malone said.
+
+"That," Boyd said, "is a report on the Pacific Merchant Sailors'
+Brotherhood."
+
+"Goody," Malone said doubtfully.
+
+Boyd came over, pulling at his beard thoughtfully, and took the top
+few sheets out of Malone's hands. "The report," he said, looking down
+at the sheets, "includes the checks we made on the office of the
+president of the Brotherhood, as well as the Los Angeles local and the
+San Francisco local."
+
+"Only two?" Malone said. "That seems as if you've been lying down on
+the job."
+
+"They're the top two in membership," Boyd said. "But listen to this:
+the president and three of his underlings resigned day before
+yesterday, and not quite in time. The law--by which I mean us, and a
+good many other people--is hot on their tails. It seems somebody
+accidentally mixed up a couple of envelopes."
+
+"Sounds like a case for the Post Office," Malone said brightly.
+
+"Not these envelopes," Boyd said. "There was a letter that was
+supposed to go to the head of the San Francisco local, dealing with a
+second set of books--not the ones used for tax purposes, but the real
+McCoy. The letter didn't get to the San Francisco man. Instead, it
+went to the attorney general of the state of California."
+
+"Lovely," Malone said. "Meanwhile, what was San Francisco doing?"
+
+Boyd smiled. "San Francisco was getting confused," he said. "Like
+everybody else. The San Francisco man got a copy of an affidavit
+dealing with merchant-ship tonnage. That was supposed to go to the
+attorney general."
+
+"Good work," Malone said. "So when the Frisco boys woke up to what was
+happening--"
+
+"They called the head man, and he put two and two together, resigned
+and went into hiding. Right now, he's probably living an undercover
+life as a shoe salesman in Paris, Kentucky."
+
+"And, after all," Malone added, "why not? It's a peaceful life."
+
+"The attorney general, of course, impounded the second set of books,"
+Boyd went on. "A grand jury is hearing charges now."
+
+"You know," Malone said reflectively, "I almost feel sorry for the
+man. Almost, but not quite."
+
+"I see what you mean," Boyd said. "It is a hell of a thing to happen."
+
+"On the other hand--" Malone leafed through the papers in a hurry,
+then put them back on Boyd's desk with a sigh of relief. "I've got the
+main details now," he said. "I can go through the thing more
+thoroughly later. Anything else?"
+
+"Oh, lots," Boyd said. "And all in the same pattern. The FPM, for
+instance, literally dropped one in our laps."
+
+"Literally?" Malone said. "What was the Federation of Professional
+Musicians doing in your lap?"
+
+"Not mine," Boyd said hastily. "Not mine. But it seems that some
+secretary put a bunch of file folders on the windowsill of their
+second-floor offices, and they fell off. At the same time, an agent
+was passing underneath, slipped on a banana peel and sat down on the
+sidewalk. Bingo, folders in lap."
+
+"Wonderful," Malone said. "The hand of God."
+
+"The hand of something, for sure," Boyd said. "Those folders contain
+all the ammunition we've ever needed to get after the FPM. Kickbacks,
+illegal arrangements with nightclubs, the whole works. We're putting
+it together now, but it looks like a long, long term ahead for our
+friends from the FPM."
+
+And Boyd went to his desk, picked up a particularly large stack of
+papers. "This," he said, "is really hot stuff."
+
+"What do you call the others?" Malone said. "Crime on ice?"
+
+"The new show at the Winter Garden," Boyd said blithely. "Don't miss
+it if you can."
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "So what's so hot?"
+
+Boyd smiled. "The police departments of seven major cities," he said.
+"They're all under attack either by the local prosecuting attorney or
+the state's attorney general. It seems there's a little graft and
+corruption going on."
+
+"This," Malone said, "is not news."
+
+"It is to the people concerned," Boyd said. "Four police chiefs have
+resigned, along with great handfuls of inspectors, captains and
+lieutenants. It's making a lovely wingding all over the country, Ken."
+
+"I'll bet," Malone said.
+
+"And I checked back on every one," Boyd went on. "Your hunch was
+absolutely right, Ken. The prosecuting attorneys and the attorneys
+general are all new men--all the ones involved in this stuff. Each one
+replaced a previous incumbent in a recent election. In two cases, the
+governor was new, too--elected last year."
+
+"That figures," Malone said. "What about the rest?"
+
+Boyd's grandiose wave of a hand took in all the papers on the desk.
+"It's all the same," he said. "They all follow a pattern, Ken, _the_
+pattern. The one you were looking for."
+
+Malone blinked. "I'll be damned," he said. "I'll be doubly damned."
+
+"And how about the Russians?" Boyd said.
+
+"You mean the _Meeneestyerstvoh Vnootrenikh Dyehl_?" Malone said.
+
+"Now," Boyd said, "I'll be damned. And after I practiced for days."
+
+"Ah," Malone said. "But I was _there_. The Russians are about as mixed
+up as a group of Transylvanian villagers with two vampires to track
+down and not enough flambeaux for all. Here, for instance, is just one
+example: the conflicting sets of orders that were given about me and
+Her Majesty and L--Miss Garbitsch."
+
+Briefly, he outlined what had happened.
+
+"Sounds like fun," Boyd said.
+
+"They were so busy arguing with each other," Malone finished, "that I
+have a feeling we hardly needed the teleportation to escape. It would
+just have taken longer, that's all." He paused. "By the way, Tom,
+about the stakeout--"
+
+"Luba Garbitsch is being protected as if she were Fort Knox," Boyd
+said. "If any Soviet agent tries to approach her with a threat of any
+kind, we'll have him nabbed before he can say Ivan Robinovitch."
+
+"Or," Malone suggested, "_Meeneestyerstvoh_--"
+
+"If we waited for that one," Boyd said, "we might have to wait all
+day." He paused. "But who's doing it?" he went on. "That's still the
+question. Martians? Venerians? Or is that last one Venusians?"
+
+"Aphrodisiacs," Malone suggested diplomatically.
+
+"Thank you, no," Boyd said politely. "I never indulge while on duty."
+
+"Thomas," Malone said, "you are a Rover Boy First-Class."
+
+"Good," Boyd said. "But, meanwhile, who is doing all this? Would you
+prefer Evil Beings from the Planet Ploor?"
+
+"I would not," Malone said firmly.
+
+"But I have a strange feeling," Boyd said, "that, in spite of all the
+evidence to the contrary, you do not hold with the Interplanetary
+Alien Theory."
+
+"Frankly," Malone said, "I'm not sure of anything. Not really. But I
+do want to know why, if it's interplanetary aliens doing this stuff,
+they're picking such a strange way of going about it."
+
+"Strange?" Boyd said. "What's strange about it? You wouldn't expect
+Things from Ploor to come right out and _tell_ us what they want,
+would you? It's against custom. It may even be against the law."
+
+"Well, maybe," Malone said. "But it is pretty strange. The difference
+between what's happening in Russia and what's happening here--"
+
+"What difference?" Boyd said. "Everybody's confused. Here, and over
+there. It all looks the same to me."
+
+"Well, it isn't," Malone said. "Take a look at the paper, for
+instance." He tossed the _Post_ at Boyd, who caught it with a
+spasmodic clutching motion and reassembled it slowly.
+
+"Why throw things?" Boyd said. "You sore or something?"
+
+"I guess I am," Malone said. "But not at you. It's--somebody or
+something. Person or persons unknown."
+
+"Or Ploorians," Boyd said.
+
+"Whatever," Malone said. "But take a look at the paper and see if you
+see what I see." He paused. "Does that mean anything?" he said.
+
+"Probably," Boyd said. "We'll figure it out later." He leafed through
+the newspaper slowly, pulling thoughtfully at his beard from time to
+time. Malone watched him in breathless silence.
+
+"See it?" he said at last.
+
+Boyd looked up and, very slowly, nodded. "You're right, Ken," he said
+in a quiet voice. "You're absolutely right. It's as plain as the nose
+on your face."
+
+"And that," Malone said, "sounds like an insult. It's much plainer
+than that. Suppose you tell me."
+
+Boyd considered. "Over here," he said at last, "there are a lot of
+confused jerks and idiots. Right?"
+
+"Correct," Malone said.
+
+"And in Russia," Boyd went on, "there's a lot of confusion. Right?"
+
+"Sure," Boyd said. "It's perfectly clear. I wonder why I didn't see it
+before."
+
+"That's it!" Malone cried. "That's the difference!"
+
+"Sure," Boyd said. "It's perfectly clear. I wonder why I didn't see it
+before."
+
+"Because you weren't looking for it," Malone said. "Because nobody
+was. But there's one more check I want to make. There's one area I'm
+not sure of, simply because I don't have enough to go on."
+
+"What area is that?" Boyd said. "It seems to me we did a pretty good
+job--"
+
+"The Mafia," Malone said. "We know they're having trouble, but--"
+
+"But we don't know what kind of trouble," Boyd finished. "Right you
+are."
+
+Malone nodded. "I want to talk to Manelli," he said. "Can we set it
+up?"
+
+"I don't see why not," Boyd said. "The A-in-C can give us the latest
+on him. You want me with you?"
+
+"No," Malone said after some thought. "No. You go and see Mike Sand,
+heading up the International Truckers' Union. We know he's tied up
+with the Syndicate, and maybe you can get some information from him.
+You know what to dig for?"
+
+"I do now," Boyd said. He reached for the intercom phone.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Cesare Antonio Manelli was a second-generation Prohibition mobster,
+whose history can most easily be described by reference to the various
+affairs of State which coincided with his development. Thus:
+
+When Cesare was a small toddler of uncertain gait and chubby visage,
+the Twenty-First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States
+canceled out not only the Eighteenth Amendment, but the thriving
+enterprises conducted by Manelli, Sr., and many of his friends.
+
+When Cesare was a young schoolboy, poring over the multiplication
+tables, his father and his father's friends were busy dividing. They
+were dividing, to put it more fully, husbands from families as a means
+of requesting ransom, and money from banks as a means of getting the
+same cash without use of the middleman, or victim. This was the period
+of the Great Readjustment, and the frenzied search among gangland's
+higher echelons for a substitute for bootlegging.
+
+And when Cesare was an innocent high-schooler, sporting a Paleolithic
+switchblade knife and black leather jacket, his father and his
+father's friends had reached a new plateau. They consolidated into a
+Syndicate, and began to concentrate on gambling and the whole,
+complex, profitable network of unions.
+
+And then World War II had come along, and it was time for Cesare to do
+his part. Bidding a fond farewell to his father and such of his
+father's friends as had survived the disagreements of Prohibition, the
+painful legal processes of the early Thirties and the even more
+painful consolidations of the years immediately before the war, young
+Cesare went off to foreign lands, where he distinguished himself by
+creating and running the largest single black-market ring in all of
+Southern Europe.
+
+Cesare had followed in his father's footsteps. And, before his sudden
+death during a disagreement in Miami, Giacomo "Jack the Ripper"
+Manelli was proud of his son.
+
+"Geez," he often said. "Whattakid, huh? Whattakid!"
+
+At the war's end, young Cesare, having proven himself a man, took unto
+himself a nickname and a shotgun. He did not have to use the shotgun
+very much, after the first few lessons; soon he was on his way to the
+top.
+
+There was nowhere for Cesare "Big Cheese" Antonio Manelli to go,
+except up.
+
+Straight up.
+
+Now, in 1973, he occupied a modestly opulent office on Madison Avenue,
+where he did his modest best to pretend to the world at large that he
+was only a small cog--indeed, an almost invisible cog--in a large
+advertising machine. His best was, for all practical purposes, good
+enough.
+
+Though it was common knowledge among the spoil-sport law enforcement
+officers who cared to look into the matter that Manelli was the real
+owner of the agency, there was no way to prove this. He didn't even
+have a phone under his own name. The only way to reach him was by
+going through his front man in the agency, a blank-faced, truculent
+Arab named Atif Abdullah Aoud.
+
+According to the agent-in-charge of the New York office, Malone had
+his choice of two separate methods of getting to Manelli. One, more
+direct, was to walk in, announce that he was an agent of the FBI, and
+insist on seeing Manelli. If he had a search warrant, the A-in-C told
+him, he might even get in. But, even if he did, he would probably not
+get anything out of Manelli.
+
+The second and more diplomatic way was to call up Atif Abdullah Aoud
+and arrange for an appointment.
+
+Malone made his decision in a flash. He flipped on the phone and
+punched for a PLaza exchange.
+
+The face that appeared on the screen was that of a fairly pretty, if
+somewhat vapid, brunette. "Rodger, Willcoe, O'Vurr and Aoud, good
+afternoon," she said.
+
+Malone blinked.
+
+"Who is calling, please?" the girl said. She snapped gum at the screen
+and Malone winced and drew away.
+
+"This is Kenneth J. Malone," he said from what he considered a safe
+distance. "I want to talk to Mr. Aoud."
+
+"Mr. Aoud?" she said in a high, unhelpful whine.
+
+"That's right," Malone said patiently. "You can tell him that there
+may be some government business coming his way."
+
+"Oh," she said. "But Mr. Aoud isn't in."
+
+Mr. Aoud wasn't in. Mr. Aoud was out. Malone turned that over in his
+mind a few times, and decided to try and forget it just as quickly as
+possible. "Then," he said, "let me talk to one of the other partners."
+
+"Partners?" the girl said. She popped her gum again. Malone moved back
+another inch.
+
+"You know," he said. "The other people he works with. Rodger, or
+Willcoe, or O'Vurr."
+
+"Oh," the girl said. "Them."
+
+"That's right," Malone said patiently.
+
+"How about Mr. Willcoe?" the girl said after a second of deep and
+earnest thought. "Would he do?"
+
+"Why not let's try him and see?" Malone said.
+
+"Okay," the girl said brightly. "Let's." She flashed Malone a dazzling
+smile, only slightly impeded by the gum, and flipped off. Malone
+stared at the blank screen for a few seconds, and then the girl's
+voice said, invisibly: "Mr. Willcoe will speak to you now, Mr. Melon.
+Thank you for waiting."
+
+"I'm not--" Malone started to say, and then the face of Frederick
+Willcoe appeared on the screen.
+
+Willcoe was a thin, wrinkle-faced man with very pale skin. He seemed
+to be in his sixties, and he looked as if he had just lost an
+all-night bout with Count Dracula. Malone looked interestedly for
+puncture marks, but failed to find any.
+
+"Ah," Willcoe said, in a voice that sounded like crinkled paper. "Mr.
+Melon. Good afternoon."
+
+"I'm not Mr. Melon," Malone said testily.
+
+Willcoe looked gently surprised, like a man who has discovered that
+his evening sherry contains cholesterol. "Really?" he said. "Then I
+must be on the wrong line. I beg your pardon."
+
+"You're not on the wrong line," Malone said. "I am Mr. Melon in a
+way." That didn't sound very clear when he got it out, so he added:
+"Your secretary got my name wrong. She thinks I'm Mr. Melon--Kenneth
+J. Melon."
+
+"But you're not," Willcoe said.
+
+Malone resisted an impulse to announce that he was really Lamont
+Cranston. "I'm Kenneth J. Malone," he said.
+
+"Ah," Willcoe said. "Quite amusing. Imagine my mistaking you for a Mr.
+Melon, when you're really Mr. Malone." He paused, and his face got
+even more wrinkled. "But I don't know you under either name," he said.
+"What do you want?"
+
+"I want to talk to Mr. Manelli," Malone said.
+
+"But Mr. Aoud--"
+
+"Mr. Aoud," Malone said, wondering if it sounded as silly to Willcoe
+as it did to him, "isn't in. So I thought you might be able to arrange
+an appointment for this afternoon."
+
+Willcoe bit his lip. "Mr. Manelli isn't in just now," he said.
+
+"Yes," Malone said. "I didn't think he would be. That's why I want to
+arrange an appointment for later, when he _will_ be in."
+
+"Does Mr. Manelli know you?" Willcoe said suspiciously, the wrinkles
+deepening again.
+
+"He knows my boss," Malone said carefully. "You just tell him that
+this is something that ought to be worth time and money to him. His
+time, and his money."
+
+"Hmm," Willcoe said. "I see. Would you wait a moment, Mr. Mel--Mr.
+Malone?"
+
+The screen blanked out immediately. The wait this time was slightly
+longer.
+
+And the next face that appeared on the screen was that of Cesare "Big
+Cheese" Antonio Manelli, the nearly invisible cog.
+
+For a cog, the face was not a bad one. It was strong and well-muscled,
+and it had dark, wavy hair running along the top. At the sides of the
+face, the hair was greying slightly, and behind the grey two large
+ears stuck out. Manelli's nose was a long, faintly aquiline affair and
+his eyes were very pleasant and candid. They were light grey.
+
+"Aha," Manelli said. "You are Mr. Malone, right?" His voice was
+guttural, but it was obvious that he was trying for control. "I regret
+announcing that I was out, Mr. Malone," he said. "But a man in my
+position--I like privacy, Mr. Malone, and I try to keep privacy for
+myself. Let me request you to answer a question, Mr. Malone: do I know
+you, Mr. Malone?"
+
+"Not personally," Malone said. "I--"
+
+"But I'm supposed to know your boss," Manelli said. "I don't know him,
+either, so far."
+
+Malone shrugged. "I'm sure you do," he said, and dropped the name
+almost casually: "Andrew J. Burris."
+
+Manelli raised his eyebrows. "So that's who you are," he said. "I
+ought to have known, Mr. Malone. And you want to talk to me a little
+bit, right?"
+
+"That's right," Malone said.
+
+"But this is no way to act, Mr. Malone," Manelli said reproachfully.
+"After all, we understand each other, you and me. What you should do,
+you should come in through channels, in the correct way, so everything
+it would be open and above the board."
+
+"Through channels?" Malone said.
+
+Manelli regarded him with a pitying glance. "You must be new on your
+job, Mr. Malone," he said. "Because there is an entire system built
+up, and you don't know about it. The way things work, we sit around
+and we don't see people. And then somebody comes and presents his
+credentials, you might say--search warrants, for instance, or
+subpoenas. And then we know where we are."
+
+Malone shook his head. "This isn't that kind of call," he said. "It's
+more a friendly type of call."
+
+"Mr. Malone," Manelli said. The reproach was stronger in his voice.
+"You must be very new at your job."
+
+"Nevertheless," Malone said.
+
+Manelli hesitated only a second. "Because I like you," he said, "and
+to teach you how things operate around here, I could do you a favor."
+
+"Good," Malone said patiently.
+
+"In an hour," Manelli said. "My place. Here."
+
+The screen blanked out before Malone could even say goodbye.
+
+Malone got up, went out to the corridor, and decided that, since he
+had time to kill, he might as well walk on down to Manelli's office.
+That, he told himself, would give him time to decide what he wanted to
+say.
+
+He toyed at first with the idea of a nice bourbon and soda in a
+Madison Avenue bar, but he discarded that idea in a hurry. It was
+always possible for him to get into a tight spot and have to teleport
+his way out, and he didn't want to be fuzzy around the edges in case
+that happened. _Trotkin's_ had showed him that, under enough stress,
+he could manage the job with quite a lot of vodka in him. But there
+was absolutely no sense, he told himself sadly, in taking chances.
+
+He started off downtown along Fifth. Soon he was standing in front of
+the blue-and-crystal tower of the Ravell Building.
+
+That made up his mind for him. He checked his watch, mentally flipped
+a coin and then cheated a little to make the answer come out right. He
+went inside and stepped into an elevator.
+
+"Six," he said with decision.
+
+Lou was sitting at the Psychical Research Society desk, talking to the
+tweedy Sir Lewis Carter. Malone waved at Carter, decided that
+conversation with Lou was out, and started to walk away. Then he
+realized that he couldn't have Carter thinking he was crazy. He had to
+figure out something to tell the man--and in a hurry, too.
+
+Carter smiled and gestured to him. "Ah, Mr. Malone," he said. "I'm
+glad you brought our Lou home safely. I've heard a little about your--
+ah--escapade. Astounding, really."
+
+"Not for the FBI," Malone said modestly. "We've been through too
+much."
+
+"But--"
+
+"No, really," Malone said. "We never call anything astounding any
+more."
+
+"I can well imagine," Carter said. "Is there anything I can do for
+you?"
+
+Malone thought fast. He had to have something, and he didn't have much
+time. "Why--uh--" he said, and then it came to him. "Yes, as a matter
+of fact you can," he said.
+
+"Glad to be of service," Carter said. "I'm sure we can do anything you
+request."
+
+"Have you got any more data on telepathic projection?" Malone said.
+
+Sir Lewis Carter frowned. "Telepathic projection?" he said.
+
+"The stuff--the phenomenon Cartier Taylor mentioned," Malone said, "in
+_Minds and Morons_. I think it was page eighty-four."
+
+"Oh," Carter said. "Oh, yes. Of course. Well, Mr. Malone, we'll see
+what we can do for you."
+
+Malone sighed. "Thanks," he said mournfully. "I guess--I guess that's
+all, then." He smiled at Lou, and turned the smile into a terrifying
+scowl when his eye caught Carter's. "Oh," Malone said. "So long. So
+long, everybody."
+
+"Ken--"
+
+This was not, he told himself sadly, either the time or the place.
+"Goodbye, Sir Lewis," he said. "Goodbye, Lou."
+
+The elevator opened its doors and received him.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Exactly fifty-nine minutes after Cesare Manelli had hung up on him,
+Malone showed up in the stately and sumptuous suite that belonged, for
+a stiff fee every month, to the firm of Rodger, Willcoe, O'Vurr and
+Aoud. The girl at the desk was his old Spearmint friend.
+
+"Mr. Manelli," Malone said. "I've got an appointment. My name is
+Malone and his is Manelli. He works here." That, he told himself, was
+an understatement; but at least he had a chance of getting his point
+across.
+
+"Oh," the girl said. Her gum popped. "Certainly. Right away, Mr.
+Maloney."
+
+Malone opened his mouth, then shut it again. It just wasn't worth the
+trouble, he thought.
+
+The girl did things with a switchboard, then turned to him again. "Mr.
+Manelli's office is right down there in back," she said, pointing
+vaguely. "Think you can find it, Mr. Maloney?"
+
+"I'll try," Malone promised. He went down the long corridor and
+stopped at an unmarked door. It was at least an even chance, he told
+himself, and opened the door.
+
+The room inside appeared to be mostly desk. The gigantic slab of wood
+sat against the far wall of the room, in the right-hand corner and
+spreading over toward the center. It appeared, in the soft half-light
+of the room, to be waiting for somebody to walk into its lair. Malone
+was sure, at first sight, that this desk ate people; it was just the
+type: big and dark and glowering and massive.
+
+There wasn't anybody seated behind it, which reinforced his belief.
+The desk had eaten its master. Now it was out of control and they
+would have to have it shot. Malone took a deep breath and tried not to
+veer.
+
+Then he heard a voice.
+
+"Sit down, Mr. Malone," the voice said. "How about you having a drink
+while we talk? If this is going to be so friendly."
+
+The voice didn't belong to the desk. It belonged, unmistakably, to Big
+Cheese himself. Malone turned and saw him, sitting in the left-hand
+corner of the room behind a low table. There was another empty chair
+facing Manelli, and Malone went over and sat in it.
+
+"A drink?" he said. "Okay. Sure."
+
+"Bourbon and soda, isn't it?" Manelli said. He stood up.
+
+"Your research department gets fast answers," Malone said. "Bourbon
+and soda it is."
+
+"After all," Manelli said, shrugging slightly, "a person in my
+position, he has to make sure he knows what is what, and all the time.
+It's routine, what you call S. O. P. Standard Operating Procedure,
+they call it."
+
+"I'm sure they do," Malone murmured politely.
+
+"And besides," Manelli said, "you are a well-known type. I thought I
+knew the name when old Fred mentioned it, or I would never talk to
+you. You know how it is."
+
+Malone nodded. "Well," he said, as Manelli went over to a small
+portable bar at the back of the room and got busy, "we're being frank,
+anyway."
+
+"And why shouldn't we be frank, Mr. Malone?" Manelli said. "It's a
+nice, friendly conversation, and what have we got on our minds?"
+
+For the first time, as he turned, Malone got a glimpse of something
+behind the structured and muscular face. There was panic there, just a
+tiny seed under iron control, but it showed in the eyes and in the
+muscles of the cheek.
+
+"Just a nice, friendly conversation," Malone said. Manelli brought the
+drinks over and set them on the table.
+
+"Take your pick," he said. "That's not what a good host should do, ask
+the guest to pick one, like a game; but I got into the habit. People
+get nervous about arsenic in the drinks. Which is silly."
+
+"Sure it is," Malone agreed. He picked up the left-hand glass and
+regarded it carefully. "If you wanted to kill me, you'd need a motive
+and an opportunity, and you don't have either at the moment. Besides,
+you'd make sure to be far away when it happened." He hoped he sounded
+confident. He took a sip of the drink, but it tasted like bourbon and
+soda.
+
+"Mr. Malone," Manelli said, "you say these things about me, and it
+hurts. It hurts me, right here." He pressed a hand over the checkbook
+side of his jacket. "I'm a legitimate businessman, and no different
+from any other legitimate businessman. You can't prove anything else."
+
+"I know I can't," Malone said. "But I want to talk to you about your
+real business."
+
+"This is my real business," Manelli said. "The advertising agency. I
+work here. Advertising is in my blood. And I don't understand the
+least little bit why you have to do things to me all the time."
+
+"Do things?" Malone said. "What did I do?"
+
+"Now, Mr. Malone," Manelli said. He took a swallow of his drink. "You
+said let's be frank, so I'm frank. Why not you?"
+
+"I don't know what you're talking about," Malone said, telling part of
+the truth.
+
+Manelli took another swallow of his drink, fished in a jacket pocket
+and brought out two cigars. "Smoke, Mr. Malone?" he said. "The very
+best, from Havana, Cuba. Cost me a dollar and a half each."
+
+Malone looked with longing at the cigar. But it was okay for Manelli
+to smoke cigars, he thought bitterly. Manelli was a gangster, and who
+cared how he looked? Malone was an FBI man, and FBI men didn't smoke
+cigars. Particularly Havana cigars. That, he told himself with
+regretful firmness, was that.
+
+"No, thanks," he said. "I never smoke on duty."
+
+Manelli shrugged and put one cigar away. He lit the other one and
+dense clouds of smoke began to rise in the room. Malone breathed
+deeply.
+
+"I understand you've been having troubles," he said.
+
+Manelli nodded. "Now, you see, Mr. Malone?" he said. "You tell me you
+don't know what's happening, but you know I got troubles. How come,
+Mr. Malone? How come?"
+
+"Because you have got troubles," Malone said. "But I have nothing to
+do with them." He hesitated, thought of adding: "Yet," and decided
+against it.
+
+"Now, Mr. Malone," Manelli said. "You know better than that."
+
+"I do?" Malone said.
+
+Manelli sighed, took another swallow of his drink and dragged deeply
+on the cigar. "Let's take a for-instance," he said. "Now, you
+understand my business is advertising, Mr. Malone?"
+
+"It's in your blood," Malone said, involuntarily.
+
+"Right," Manelli said. "But I think about things. I like to figure
+things out. In a sort of a theoretical way, like a for-instance.
+Understand?"
+
+"What sort of theoretical story are you going to tell me?" Malone
+said.
+
+Manelli leaned back in his chair. "Let's take, for instance, some
+numbers runners who had some trouble the other day, got beat up and
+money taken from them. Maybe you read about it in the papers."
+
+"I haven't been following the papers much," Malone said.
+
+"That's all right," Manelli said grandly. "Maybe it wasn't _in_ the
+papers. But anyhow, I figured out maybe that happened. I had nothing
+to do with this, Mr. Malone; you understand that? But I figured out
+how maybe it happened."
+
+"How?" Malone said.
+
+Manelli took another puff on his cigar. "Maybe there was an error at a
+racetrack--we could say Jamaica, for instance, just for laughs. And
+maybe two different totals were published for the pari-mutuel numbers,
+and both got given out. So the numbers runners got all fouled up, so
+they got beat up and money taken from them."
+
+"It could have happened that way," Malone said.
+
+"I figure maybe the FBI had something to do with this," Manelli said.
+
+"We didn't," Malone said. "Frankly."
+
+"And that's not all," Manelli said. "Let's say at Jamaica one day
+there was a race."
+
+"All right," Malone said agreeably. "That doesn't require a whole lot
+of imagination."
+
+"And let's say," Manelli went on, "that the bookies--if there are any
+bookies in this town; who knows?--that they got the word about who
+came in, win, place and show."
+
+"Sounds natural," Malone said.
+
+"Sure it does," Manelli said. "But there was a foul-up someplace,
+because the win animal was disqualified and nobody heard about it
+until after a lot of payoffs were made. That costs money." He stopped.
+"I mean it would cost money, if it happened," he finished.
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "Certainly would."
+
+"And you tell me it's not the FBI?" Manelli said.
+
+"That's right," Malone said. "As a matter of fact, we're investigating
+things like these confusions and inefficiencies all over."
+
+Manelli finished his drink in one long, amazed swallow. "Now, wait a
+minute," he said. "Let's say for a joke, like, for laughs, that I am
+some kind of a wheel in these things, in bookies and numbers boys and
+like that."
+
+"Let's call it a syndicate," Malone said. "Just for laughs."
+
+"Okay, then," Manelli said, with a suspicious gaze at Malone.
+"Whatever you call it, a man like me today, he wouldn't be some
+two-bit chiseler without brains. He would be a businessman, a
+smooth-operating smart businessman. Right?"
+
+"Right," Malone said. "And what I want to know is: how's business?"
+
+"You're kidding?" Manelli said.
+
+"I'm not kidding," Malone said. "I mean it. The FBI's investigating
+mix-ups just like the ones you're telling me about. We want to stop
+them."
+
+Manelli blinked. "You know, Mr. Malone," he said softly, "I heard
+about government interference in private enterprise, but don't you
+think this is a little too far out?"
+
+Malone shrugged. "That's what I'm here for," he said. "Take it or
+leave it."
+
+"Just so it's understood," Manelli said, "that we're talking about
+imaginary things. Theoretical."
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "Imagine away."
+
+"Well," Manelli said slowly, "you heard about this wrecked night-club
+in Florida? It happened maybe a month ago, in Miami?"
+
+"I heard about it," Malone said.
+
+"This is just a for-instance, you know," Manelli said. "But suppose
+there was a roulette wheel in that club. Just a wheel."
+
+"Okay," Malone said.
+
+"And suppose the wheel was rigged a little bit," Manelli said. "Not
+seriously, just a little bit."
+
+"Fine," Malone said. "This is going to explain a wrecked club?"
+
+"Well, sure," Manelli said. "Because something went wrong with the
+machinery, or maybe the operator goofed up. And number seven came up
+eight times in a row."
+
+"Good old lucky seven," Malone said.
+
+"So there was a riot," Manelli said. "Because some people had money on
+the number, and some people got suspicious, and like that. And there
+was a riot."
+
+"And the club got wrecked," Malone said. "That's what I call bad
+luck."
+
+"Luck?" Manelli said. "What does luck have to do with roulette?
+Somebody goofed, that's all."
+
+"Oh," Malone said. "Sure."
+
+"And that's the way it's been going," Manelli said. He puffed on his
+cigar, put it in a nearby ashtray, and blew out a great Vesuvian spout
+of smoke.
+
+"Too bad," Malone said sympathetically.
+
+"It's all over," Manelli said. "Mistakes and people making the
+mistakes, goofing up here and there and everyplace. There have been
+guys killed because they made mistakes, and nobody can afford guys
+being killed all the time."
+
+"It does run into expense," Malone said.
+
+"And time, and hiring guys to do the killing, and then they goof up,
+too," Manelli said. "It's terrible. Some guys have even been killed
+without they made any mistakes at all. Just by accident, sort of."
+
+"Well," Malone said carefully, "you can depend on the government to do
+everything in its power to straighten things out."
+
+Manelli frowned. "You mean that, Mr. Malone?"
+
+"Of course I do," Malone said honestly. He hadn't, he reminded
+himself, promised to help Manelli. He had only promised to straighten
+things out. And he could figure out what that might mean later, when
+he had the time.
+
+"All I say is, it's funny," Manelli said. "It's crazy."
+
+"That's the way it is," Malone said.
+
+Manelli looked at him narrowly. "Mr. Malone," he said at last, "maybe
+you mean it at that. Maybe you do."
+
+"Sure I do," Malone said. "After all, the government is supposed to
+help its citizens."
+
+Manelli shook his head. "Mr. Malone," he said, "you can call me
+Cesare. Everybody does."
+
+"No, they don't," Malone said. "They call you Cheese. I've got a
+research staff too."
+
+"So call me Cheese," Manelli said. "I don't mind."
+
+"There's only one little trouble," Malone said. "If I called you
+Cheese, you'd call me Ken. And word would get around."
+
+"I see what you mean," Manelli said.
+
+"I don't think either one of us wants his associates to think we're
+friends," Malone said.
+
+"I guess not," Manelli said. "It would cause uneasiness."
+
+"And a certain lack of confidence," Malone said. "So suppose I go on
+calling you Mr. Manelli?"
+
+"Fine," Manelli said. "And I'll call you Mr. Malone, like always."
+
+Malone smiled and stood up. "Well, then," he said, "good-bye, Mr.
+Manelli."
+
+Manelli rose, too. "Goodbye, Mr. Malone," he said. "And good luck, if
+you really mean what you said."
+
+"Oh, I do," Malone said.
+
+"Because things are terrible," Manelli said. "And they're getting
+worse every day. You should only know."
+
+"Don't worry," Malone said. "Things will be straightened out pretty
+soon." He hoped, as he went out the door and down the corridor, that
+he was telling the truth there, at least. He'd sounded fairly
+confident, he thought, but he didn't feel quite so confident. The
+secretary was busy on the switchboard when he came out into the
+anteroom, and he went by without a greeting, his mind busy, churning
+and confused.
+
+He felt as if his head were on just a little crooked. Or as if, maybe,
+he had a small hole in it somewhere and facts were leaking out onto
+the sidewalk.
+
+If he only looked at the problem in the right way, he told himself, he
+would see just what was going on.
+
+But what was the right way?
+
+"That," Malone murmured as he hailed a cab for the ride back to 69th
+Street, "is the big, sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. And how much
+time do I have for an answer?"
+
+
+11
+
+"Boyd?" the agent-in-charge said. "He went out to talk to Mike Sand
+down at the ITU a while ago, and he hasn't come back yet."
+
+"Fine," Malone said. "I'll be in my office if he wants me."
+
+The agent-in-charge picked up a small package. "A messenger brought
+this," he said. "It's from the Psychical Research Society, and if it's
+ghosts, they're much smaller than last time."
+
+"Dehydrated," Malone said. "Just add ectoplasm and out they come,
+shouting _boo_ at everybody and dancing all over the world."
+
+"Sounds wonderful," the agent-in-charge said. "Can I come to the
+party?"
+
+"First," Malone said judiciously, "you'd have to be dead. Of course, I
+can arrange that--"
+
+"Thanks," the agent-in-charge said, leaving in a hurry. Malone went on
+down to his office and opened the package. It contained more
+facsimiles from Sir Lewis Carter, all dealing with telepathic
+projection. He spent a few minutes looking them over and trying to
+make some connected sense out of them, and then he just sat and
+thought for awhile.
+
+Finally he picked up the phone. In a few minutes he was talking to Dr.
+Thomas O'Connor, at Yucca Flats.
+
+"Telepathic projection?" O'Connor said when Malone asked him the
+question he'd thought of. "Well, now. I should say that--no. First,
+Mr. Malone, tell me what evidence you have for this phenomenon."
+
+Malone felt almost happy, as if he had done all his homework before
+the instructor called on him. "According to what I've been able to get
+from the PRS," he said, "ordinary people--people who aren't
+telepaths--occasionally receive some sort of messages from other
+people."
+
+"I assume," O'Connor said frostily, "that you are speaking of
+telepathic messages?"
+
+Malone nodded guiltily. "I didn't mean the phone," he said, "or
+letters or things like that. Telepathic messages, or something very
+like it."
+
+"Indeed," O'Connor said. "Mr. Malone, I believe you will find that
+such occurrences, when accurately reported, are confined to close
+relatives or loved ones of the person projecting the message."
+
+Malone thought back. "That's right," he said.
+
+"And, further," O'Connor went on, "I think you'll find that the--ah--
+message so received is one indicating that the projector of such a
+message is in dire peril. He has, for instance, been badly injured, or
+is rapidly approaching death, or else he has narrowly escaped death."
+
+"True," Malone said.
+
+"Under such circumstances," O'Connor said coldly, "it is possible that
+the mind of the person projecting the communication might be capable
+of generating immense psionic power, thereby forcing even a
+non-telepath to recognize the content of the message."
+
+"Good," Malone said. "That's wonderful, Doctor, and I--"
+
+"But," O'Connor said sharply, "the amount of psionic energy necessary
+for such a feat is tremendous. Usually, it is the final burst of
+energy, the outpouring of all the remaining psionic force immediately
+before death. And if death does not occur, the person is at the least
+greatly weakened; his mind, if it ever does recover, needs time and
+rest to do so."
+
+Malone let that sink in slowly. "Then a person couldn't do it very
+often," he said.
+
+"Hardly," O'Connor said.
+
+Malone nodded. "It's like--like giving blood to a blood bank. Giving,
+say, three quarts of blood. It might not kill you. But if it didn't,
+you'd be weak for a long time."
+
+"Exactly," O'Connor said. "A good analogy, Mr. Malone."
+
+Malone hated himself for it, but he felt pleased when O'Connor praised
+him. "Well," he said, "that winds up Cartier Taylor's theory pretty
+thoroughly."
+
+"I should think so," O'Connor said. "I am surprised, Mr. Malone, that
+you would put any credence whatever in that man's theories. His
+factual data, I will admit, is fairly reliable. But his theories are--
+well, they are hardly worth the time it takes to read them."
+
+"I see," Malone said. "It did seem like a good answer, though."
+
+"It undoubtedly is a good one," O'Connor said. "It is clever and has
+the advantage of being simple. It is contradicted, Mr. Malone, only by
+the facts."
+
+"Sure," Malone said sadly. "But--hey. Wait a minute."
+
+"Yes?" O'Connor said.
+
+"One person couldn't do this alone, at least, not very often and not
+without serious harm to himself. Right?"
+
+"That is what I said," O'Connor agreed. "Yes, Mr. Malone."
+
+"But how about several people?" Malone said. "I mean, well, let's look
+at that blood bank again. You need three quarts of blood. But one
+person doesn't have to give it. Suppose twelve people gave half a pint
+each. Suppose twenty-four people gave a quarter of a pint each.
+Suppose--"
+
+"There is," O'Connor said, "a point of diminishing returns. But I do
+see your point, Mr. Malone." He thought for a second. "It might just
+be possible," he said. "At least theoretically. But it would take a
+great deal of mental co-ordination among the participants. They would
+have to be telepathic themselves, for one thing."
+
+"Why?" Malone said, feeling stupid.
+
+"Because they would have to mesh their thoughts closely enough to
+direct them properly and at the correct time." O'Connor nodded. "But,
+given that, I imagine that it could be done."
+
+"Wonderful," Malone said.
+
+"However," O'Connor said, apparently glad to throw even a little cold
+water on the notion, "it could not be done for very long periods of
+time, you realize."
+
+"Sure," Malone said happily.
+
+"By the way, Mr. Malone," O'Connor said. "Does this have anything to
+do with the hypothesis you presented to me some time ago? Mass
+hypnotism, as I recall--"
+
+"No," Malone said. "I've given that idea up for good. I think this is
+being done on an individual basis--working on one person at a time."
+Then another idea hit him. "You say these people would have to be
+telepaths?"
+
+"That's right," O'Connor said.
+
+"Then wouldn't Her Majesty know about them? If they're telepaths? Or
+is there some kind of a mind shield or something that a telepath could
+work out?"
+
+"Mind shield?" O'Connor said. "Ah, yes. Miss Thompson might be fooled
+by such a shield. It would have to be an exceptional one, but such
+things do seem to be possible. They belong to the realm of mental
+disciplines, of course, rather than psionics."
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "But there could be that kind of shield?"
+
+"There could," O'Connor said. "The mind which created the shield for
+itself would have to be of tremendous power and a really high order of
+control. A strong, sane mind might conceivably create such a block
+that even Miss Thompson, let us say, might believe that she was
+picking up a real mind, when she was only picking up surface thoughts,
+with the real thought hidden behind the telepathic block."
+
+"Fine," Malone said. "Thanks. Thanks a lot, Dr. O'Connor."
+
+"I am always happy to put my extensive knowledge of science at your
+disposal, Mr. Malone," O'Connor said.
+
+Malone watched the image collapse without really seeing it. Instead,
+he was busily talking to himself, or rather to his other self.
+
+"Well, now, Sir Kenneth," he said. "Let's pull all the facts together
+and see what happens."
+
+"Indeed, Mr. Malone," said Sir Kenneth Malone, "it is time that we
+did. Proceed, Sirrah. I shall attend."
+
+* * * * *
+
+"Let's start from the beginning," Malone said. "We know there's
+confusion in all parts of the country, in all parts of the world, I
+guess. And we know that confusion is being caused by carefully timed
+accidents and errors. We also know that these errors appear to be
+accompanied by violent bursts of psionic static--violent energy. And
+we know, further, that on three specific occasions, these bursts of
+energy were immediately followed by a reversal of policy in the mind
+of the person on the receiving end."
+
+"You mean," Sir Kenneth put in, "that they changed their minds."
+
+"Correct," Malone said. "I refer, of course, to the firm of Brubitsch,
+Borbitsch and Garbitsch, Spying Done Cheap."
+
+"Indeed," Sir Kenneth said. "Then the operators of this force,
+whatever it may be, have some interest in allowing these spies to
+confess?"
+
+"Maybe," Malone said. "Let's leave that for later. To get back to the
+beginning of all this: it seems to me to follow that the accidents and
+errors which have caused all the confusion through the United States
+and Russia are caused by somebody's mind being changed at exactly the
+right moment. A man does something just a little differently than he
+decided to--or else he forgets to do it at all."
+
+"Correct," Sir Kenneth said. "And you feel, Mr. Malone, that a
+telepathic command is the cause of this confusion?"
+
+"A series of them," Malone said. "But we also know, from Dr. O'Connor,
+that it takes a great deal of psychic energy to perform this
+particular trick--more than a person can normally afford to expend."
+
+"Marry, now," Sir Kenneth exclaimed, "such a statement does not seem
+to have reason in it. Changing the mind of a man seems a small thing
+in comparison to teleportation, or psychokinesis, or levitation. And
+yet it takes more power than any of these?"
+
+Malone thought for a second. "Sure it does," he said. "I'd say it was
+a matter of resistance. Moving an inanimate object is pretty simple--
+comparatively, anyhow--because inert matter has no mental resistance."
+
+"And moving yourself?" Sir Kenneth said.
+
+"There is some resistance there, probably," Malone said. "But you'll
+remember that part of the Fueyo training system for teleportation
+involved overcoming your own mental resistance to the idea."
+
+"True," Sir Kenneth said. "Quite true. Then let us say that it
+requires enormous power to effect these changes. What is our next
+step, Mr. Malone?"
+
+"Next, Sir Kenneth," Malone said, "We have to do a little supposing.
+This project must be handled by a fairly large group, since no
+individual can work it. This large group has to be telepathic, and not
+only for the precise timing O'Connor specified."
+
+"There is another reason?" Sir Kenneth said.
+
+"There is," Malone said. "They've also got to know exactly when to
+make their victim change his mind. Right?"
+
+"Absolutely," said Sir Kenneth. "Now, Sirrah, where does all this
+leave us? We have had the orderly presentation of the case; where,
+Sirrah, is your summation?"
+
+"Coming up," Malone said. "We've got to look for a widespread
+organization of telepaths, with enough mental discipline to hold a
+mental shield that Her Majesty can't crack, and can't even recognize
+the existence of. We thought she'd found all the telepaths. She said
+so, and she obviously thought so. But she didn't. These are strong,
+trained--and sane."
+
+"Aha," said Sir Kenneth.
+
+"Her Majesty," Malone said, "found us only the crazy telepaths, the
+weak ones, the nuts."
+
+"Fine," said Sir Kenneth. "And this, Mr. Malone, leaves us with only
+one question. Her Majesty--may God bless her--stated that she first
+spotted these flashes of telepathic static by listening in on our
+minds."
+
+"Our mind," Malone said. "I hope."
+
+"Very well," Sir Kenneth said. "This means that some force is being
+directed in this way, toward us. And how do we know that all the
+deduction, all the careful case-building we have done, hasn't been
+influenced by this group? That might mean, of course, that we are
+miles, or even light-years, from the solution."
+
+Malone said: "Yeep." The sound was echoed by Sir Kenneth, and the two
+halves of the coruscating mind of Kenneth J. Malone were once more
+one.
+
+_Your Majesty,_ the minds thought, _I'd like to talk to you._
+
+Nothing happened. Evidently, Her Majesty was temporarily out of mental
+contact with him.
+
+"Hell," Malone said. "Not to mention od's blood." He flipped on the
+visiphone and dialed Yucca Flats.
+
+The figure that appeared on the screen was that of a tall,
+solidly-built man with a red face and the uniform of a Beefeater. This
+Tower Warder had the British royal crest embroidered on his chest, and
+the letters: "E. R."
+
+"Good evening, Sir Kenneth," he said politely.
+
+Malone had sometimes wondered what it would be like to be on the
+Queen's permanent, personal staff. Evidently, it soaked in so
+thoroughly that one began to stay in character all the time. The
+little old lady's delusion was such a pleasant one that it was
+painlessly infectious.
+
+"I'd like to speak to Her Majesty, Colonel Fairfax," Malone said.
+
+"Her Majesty," Colonel Fairfax said with regret, "is asleep, sir. I
+understand that she has had rather a trying time, of late."
+
+"Then I must ask you to wake her," Malone said. "I don't want to
+disturb her any more than you do, Colonel, but this is important."
+
+"Her Majesty's rest," Colonel Fairfax said gently, "is also important,
+Sir Kenneth."
+
+"This is more important," Malone said. "I know how you feel, but it's
+necessary to wake her."
+
+The screen blanked out.
+
+Malone sighed and began to sing softly to himself while he waited:
+
+"The soldiers of the Queen are linked in friendly tether--
+And if she's off her bean, we'll all go nuts together..."
+
+Her Majesty appeared at this point, dressed in a silken robe bearing
+her crest and initials (E. R., rather than R. T., of course), and
+wearing a silken Mother Hubbard cap on her head. "Oh, dear," she said
+instantly. "Are you still worried about them?"
+
+"The flashes?" Malone said. "That's right. You tuned in on my mind
+right away, didn't you?"
+
+"As soon as I got your message," she said. "I like your little song,
+at least, I think I do."
+
+Malone blushed faintly. "Sorry," he said.
+
+"Oh, don't be, Sir Kenneth," Her Majesty said. "After all, I do allow
+my subjects a good deal of liberty; it is theirs to make use of." She
+smiled at him. "Actually, I should have told you, Sir Kenneth. But it
+seemed so natural that I--that I forgot it."
+
+_Oh, no,_ Malone thought.
+
+"I'm afraid so," Her Majesty said. "When I told you about the
+interference, your mind quite automatically began to build what I
+think of as a--as a defense against it. A shield, so to speak."
+
+_Me?_ Malone thought.
+
+"Most certainly," Her Majesty said. "You know, Sir Kenneth, you have a
+very strong mind."
+
+"Oh, I don't know," Malone said aloud. "Sometimes I don't feel so
+bright."
+
+"I'm not talking about intelligence," Her Majesty said. "The two
+properties are interconnected, of course, but they are not identical.
+After all ... well, never mind. But you have strength of will, Sir
+Kenneth, and strength of purpose. As a matter of fact, you have been
+building your strength in the last few days."
+
+"Really?" Malone said, surprised.
+
+"It's become more and more difficult," Her Majesty said, "to see into
+the depths of your mind, during the past few days. The surface of your
+mind is as easy to read as ever, but it's hard to see what's going on
+in the depths."
+
+"I'm not doing it deliberately," Malone said.
+
+"In any case," Her Majesty said, "this process has been going on ever
+since you knew that telepathy was possible, two years ago. But in the
+past forty-eight hours matters have accelerated tremendously."
+
+"That sounds good," Malone said. "Does it mean these mind-changers
+I've been thinking about can't get through to me?"
+
+"What mind-changers?" the Queen said. "Oh. I see." She paused. "Well,
+I can't be positive about this, Sir Kenneth; it's all so new, you
+know. All I can tell you is that there haven't been any flashes of
+telepathic energy in your mind in the last forty-eight hours."
+
+"Well," Malone said doubtfully, "that's something. And I am sorry I
+had to wake you, Your Majesty."
+
+"Oh, that's perfectly all right," she said. "I know you're working
+hard to restore order to the realm, and it is the duty of any
+Sovereign to give such aid as she can to her Royal subjects."
+
+Malone cleared his throat. "I trust," he said, "Your Majesty will ever
+find me a faithful servant."
+
+Her Majesty smiled. "I'm sure I shall," she said. "Good night, Sir
+Kenneth."
+
+"Good night," he said, and flipped off. At once, the phone chimed
+again.
+
+He flipped the switch on. "Malone here," he said.
+
+Boyd's face appeared on the screen. "Ken," he said fervently, "I am
+very glad you're still in town."
+
+"Thanks," Malone said politely. "But what about Mike Sand? Any
+information?"
+
+"Plenty," Boyd said. "I damn near didn't believe it."
+
+"What do you mean, you didn't believe it?" Malone said. "Isn't the
+information any good?"
+
+"It's good, all right," Boyd said. "It's great. He practically talked
+his head off to me. Gave me all his books, including secret sets. And
+I've put him under arrest as a material witness--at his own request."
+
+"It sounds," Malone said, "as if Mike Sand has had a sudden and
+surprising change of heart."
+
+"Doesn't it, though," Boyd said. "We can crack the ITU wide open now,
+and I mean really wide open."
+
+"Same pattern?" Malone said.
+
+"Of course it is," Boyd said. "What does it sound like? Same pattern."
+
+"Good," Malone said. "Get on up here. I'll talk to you later."
+
+He cut off in a hurry, leaned back in his chair and started to think.
+At first, he thought of a cigar. Boyd, he figured, couldn't be back in
+the office for some time, and nobody else would come in. He locked the
+door, drew out the cigar-laden box he kept in his desk in New York,
+and lit up with great satisfaction.
+
+When the cloud of smoke around his head was dense enough to cut with a
+knife, he went back to more serious subjects. He didn't have to worry
+too much about his mind being spied on; if Her Majesty couldn't read
+his deepest thoughts, and the mind-changers weren't throwing any bolts
+of static in his direction, he was safe.
+
+Now, then, he told himself--and sneezed.
+
+He shook his head, cursed slightly, and went on.
+
+Now, then...
+
+There was an organization, spread all over the Western world, and with
+secret branches, evidently, in the Soviet Union. The organization had
+to be an old one, because it had to have trained telepaths of such a
+high degree of efficiency that they could evade Her Majesty's probing
+without her even being aware of the evasion. And training took time.
+
+There was something else to consider, too. In order to organize to
+such a degree that they could wreak the efficient, complete havoc they
+were wreaking, the organization couldn't be completely secret; there
+are always leaks, always suspicious events, and a secret society that
+covered all of those up would have no time for anything else.
+
+So the organization had to be a known one, a known group, masquerading
+as something else.
+
+So far, everything made sense. Malone took another deep, grateful puff
+on the cigar, and frowned. Where, he wondered, did he go from here?
+
+He reached for a pencil and a piece of paper. He headed the paper:
+_Organization._ Then he started putting down what he knew about it,
+and what he'd figured out.
+
+     1. Large
+     2. Old
+     3. Disguised
+
+It sounded just a little like Frankenstein's Monster, so far. But what
+else did he know about it?
+
+After a second's thought, he murmured: "Nothing," and took another
+puff.
+
+But that wasn't quite true.
+
+He knew one more thing about the organization. He knew they'd probably
+be immune to the confusion everybody else was suffering from. The
+organization would be--had to be--efficient. It would be composed of
+intelligent, superbly cooperative people, who could work together as a
+unit without in the least impairing their own individuality.
+
+He reached for the list again, put down:
+
+     4. Efficient
+
+And looked at it. Now it didn't remind him quite so much of the
+Monster. But it didn't look familiar, either. Who did he know, he
+thought, who was large, old, disguised and efficient?
+
+It sounded like an improbable combination. He set the list down again,
+clearing off some of the papers the PRS had sent him to make room for
+it.
+
+Then he stopped.
+
+The papers the PRS had sent him...
+
+And he'd gotten them so quickly, so efficiently...
+
+They were a large organization...
+
+And an old one...
+
+He tossed the cigar in the general direction of the ashtray, grabbed
+the phone and jabbed at buttons.
+
+The girl who answered the phone looked familiar. She did not look very
+old, but she was large and she had to be disguised, Malone thought.
+Nobody could naturally have that many teeth.
+
+"Psychical Research Society," she said. "Oh, Mr. Malone, good
+evening."
+
+"Sir Lewis," Malone said. "Sir Lewis Carter. President. I want to talk
+to him. Hurry."
+
+"Sir Lewis?" the girl said slowly. "Oh, I'm sorry, Mr. Malone, but the
+office is closed now for the day. And Sir Lewis has gone already. It's
+after six o'clock, Mr. Malone, and the office is closed."
+
+"Home number," Malone said desperately. "I've got to."
+
+"Well, I can do that, Mr. Malone," she said, "but it wouldn't do you
+any good, really. Because he went away on his vacation, and when he
+goes on his vacation he never tells us where. You know? He won't be
+back for two or three weeks."
+
+"Oog," Malone said, and thought for less than a second. "Miss
+Garbitsch," he said. "Lou. Got to talk to her. Now."
+
+"Oh, I can't do that, either, Mr. Malone," the toothy girl said. "All
+of the executive officers, they left already on their vacation. And
+that includes Miss Garbitsch, too. They just left a skeleton force
+here at the office."
+
+"They're all gone?" Malone said hollowly.
+
+"That's right," she said cheerfully. "As a matter of fact, I'm in
+charge now, and that's why I'm staying so late. To sort of catch up on
+things. You know?"
+
+"It's very important," Malone said tensely. "You don't know where any
+of them went? You don't have any address?"
+
+"None at all," she said. "I'm sorry, but that's how it is. Maybe it's
+strange, and maybe you'd ask questions, but I obey orders, and
+those're my orders. To take over until they get back. They didn't tell
+me where they went, and I didn't ask."
+
+"Great," Malone said. He wanted to shoot himself.
+
+Lou was one of them. Of course she was; that was obvious now, when he
+thought about it. Lou was one of the secret group that was sabotaging
+practically everything.
+
+And now they'd all gone. For two weeks--or for good.
+
+The girl's voice broke in on his thoughts.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Malone," she said, "I'm sorry, but I just remembered. They
+left a note for you."
+
+"A note?" Malone said.
+
+"Sir Lewis said you might call," the girl said, "and he left a
+message. If you'll hold on a minute I'll read it to you."
+
+Malone waited tensely. The girl found a slip of paper, blinked at it
+and read:
+
+"My dear Malone, I'm afraid you are perfectly correct in your
+deductions; and, as you can see, that leaves us no alternative. Sorry.
+Miss G. sends her apologies to you, as do I." The girl looked up.
+"It's signed by Sir Lewis," she said. "Does that mean anything to you,
+Mr. Malone?"
+
+"I'm afraid it does," Malone said bleakly. "It means entirely too
+much."
+
+
+12
+
+After the great mass of teeth, vaguely surrounded by a face, had faded
+from Malone's screen, he just sat there, looking at the dead, grey
+screen of the visiphone and feeling about twice as dead and at least
+three times as grey.
+
+Things, he told himself, were terrible. But even that sentence, which
+was a good deal more cheerful than what he actually felt, didn't do
+anything to improve his mood. All of the evidence, after all, had been
+practically living on the tip of his nose for nearly twenty-four
+hours, and not only had he done nothing about it, but he hadn't even
+seen it.
+
+Two or three times, for instance, he'd doubted the possibility of
+teleporting another human being. All his logic had told him it wasn't
+so. But, he'd thought, he and Her Majesty had teleported Lou, and so,
+obviously, his logic was wrong.
+
+No, it wasn't, he thought now. There _would_ be too much mental
+resistance, even if the person were unconscious. Teleportation of
+another human being _would_ be impossible.
+
+Unless, of course, the other human being was able to teleport on her
+own.
+
+True, she had been no more than semiconscious. She probably couldn't
+have teleported on her own. But Malone and Her Majesty had, ever so
+kindly and ever so mistakenly, helped her, and Lou had managed to
+teleport to the plane.
+
+And that wasn't all, he thought dismally. That was far from all.
+
+"Let's take another for-instance," he said savagely, in what he
+thought was a caricature of the Manelli voice. In order for all three
+to teleport, there had to be perfect synchronization.
+
+Otherwise, they'd have arrived either at different places, or at the
+same place but at different times.
+
+And perfect synchronization on a psionic level meant telepathy. At
+least two of the three had to be telepathic. Her Majesty was, of
+course. Malone wasn't.
+
+So Lou had to be telepathic, too.
+
+Malone told himself bitterly to quit calling the girl Lou. After the
+way she'd deceived him, she didn't deserve it. Her name was Luba
+Garbitsch, and from now on he was going to call her Luba Garbitsch. In
+his own mind, anyway.
+
+Facts came tumbling in on him like the side of a mountain, falling on
+a hapless traveler during a landslide. And, Malone told himself, he
+had never had less help in all of his ill-starred life.
+
+Her Majesty had never, never suspected that Luba Garbitsch was
+anything other than the girl she pretended to be. That was negative
+evidence, true, and taken alone it meant nothing at all. But when you
+added the other facts to it, it showed, with perfect plainness, that
+Luba Garbitsch was the fortunate possessor of a mind shield as tough,
+as strong and as perfect as any Malone, O'Connor or good old Cartier
+Taylor had ever even thought of dreaming up.
+
+And then, very suddenly, another fact arrived, and pushed the rest out
+into the black night of Malone's bitter mind. He punched hard on the
+intercom button and got the desk of the agent-in-charge.
+
+"Now what's wrong?" the A-in-C said. "Ghosts got loose? Or do you want
+some help with a beautiful blonde heiress?"
+
+"What would I be doing," Malone snapped, "with a beautiful blonde
+heiress?"
+
+The agent-in-charge looked thoughtful. It was obvious that he had been
+saving his one joke up for several hours. "You might be holding her,"
+he suggested, "for ransom, of course."
+
+"That's not funny," Malone said. "Nothing is funny any more."
+
+"Oh, all right," the A-in-C said. "You Washington boys are just too
+good for the rest of us. What's on your mind?"
+
+"You've got a twenty-four-hour watch on Luba Garbitsch, haven't you?"
+Malone said.
+
+"Sure we have," the A-in-C said. "Boyd said--"
+
+"Yes, I know what he said," Malone cut in. "Give me a check on those
+men. I want to find out where she is right now. Right this minute."
+
+The agent-in-charge shrugged. "Sure," he said. "It's none of my
+business. Hang on a second."
+
+The screen went blank, but it didn't go silent. Each of the agents, on
+a stakeout job like the Garbitsch one, would be carrying personal
+communicators, and Malone could hear the voice of the agent-in-charge
+as he spoke to them.
+
+He couldn't make out all the words, and it wasn't important anyhow.
+He'd know soon enough, he kept telling himself; just as soon as the
+A-in-C came back and reported.
+
+It seemed like about twelve years before he did.
+
+"She's all right," he said. "Nothing to worry about; she's probably
+working late at her office, that's all. She hasn't gone home yet."
+
+"Want to bet?" Malone snapped.
+
+"Don't tempt me," the A-in-C said. "I wouldn't take your money--it's
+probably counterfeit, printed in Washington."
+
+"I'll give you ten to one," Malone said.
+
+"Ten to one, I'll take," the A-in-C said rapidly. "Ten to one is like
+taking candy from a traffic cop. I'm no amateur, even if I am stuck
+away in dull little old New York--and I know the boys I've got on
+stakeout. I'll check, and--"
+
+"Let me know when you do," Malone said. "I've got some long-distance
+calls to make."
+
+* * * * *
+
+Forty-five minutes later, he had all the news he needed. Spot checks
+on PRS offices on the West Coast, where it wasn't closing time yet,
+showed that all the executive officers had suddenly felt the need of
+extended vacations to parts unknown.
+
+That, if not exactly cheering news, was still welcome; Malone had more
+backing for his theory.
+
+An overseas call to New Scotland Yard in London took a little more
+time, and several arguments with bored overseas operators who,
+apparently, had nothing better to do than to confuse the customers.
+But Malone finally managed to get Assistant Commissioner C. E. Teal,
+who promised to check on Malone's inquiry at once.
+
+It seemed like years before he called back, and Malone leaped to the
+phone.
+
+"Yes?" he said.
+
+Teal, red-faced and apparently masticating a stick of gum, said: "I
+got C. I. D. Commander Gideon to follow up on that matter, Mr. Malone.
+It is rather late here, as you must realize--"
+
+"Yes?" Malone said. "And they've all gone?"
+
+"Why, no," Teal said, surprised. "A spot check shows that most of the
+executives of the London branch of the Psychical Research Society are
+spending quiet evenings in their homes. Our Inspector Ottermole
+actually spoke to Dr. Carnacki, the head of the office here."
+
+"Oh," Malone said.
+
+"They haven't skipped," Teal went on. "Is this in connection with
+anything serious, Mr. Malone?"
+
+"Not yet," Malone said. "But I'll let you know at once if there are
+any further developments. Thanks very much, Mr. Teal."
+
+"A pleasure, Mr. Malone," Teal said. "A pleasure." And then, still
+masticating, he switched off.
+
+And that, Malone told himself, was definitely that. Of course the
+British PRS hadn't gone underground; why should they? The British
+police weren't on to them, as Scotland Yard showed. And, no matter
+what opinions Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I might hold in the matter,
+the FBI had absolutely no jurisdiction in the British Isles.
+
+Malone buried his face in his hands, thought about a cigar and decided
+that even a cigar might make him feel worse. Where were they? What
+were they doing now? What did they plan to do?
+
+Where had they gone?
+
+"Out of the everywhere," he said in a hollow, sepulchral voice, "into
+the here."
+
+But where was the here?
+
+He tried to make up his mind whether or not that made sense.
+Superficially, it sounded like plain bad English, but he wasn't sure
+of anything any more. Things were getting much too confused.
+
+There was a knock at the door.
+
+Malone, without any hope at all, called: "Come in," and the door
+opened.
+
+The agent-in-charge came in, and dropped a dollar on Malone's desk.
+
+"So you checked," Malone said.
+
+"I checked," the A-in-C said sadly. "The boys went through the entire
+damned building. Not a sign of her. Not even a trace."
+
+"There wouldn't be one," Malone said, shoving the dollar back to
+waiting hands. "Take the money; I knew what would happen. It was a
+sucker bet."
+
+"Well, I feel like the sucker, all right," the A-in-C said. "I don't
+know how she did it."
+
+"I do," Malone said quietly. "Teleportation."
+
+The A-in-C whistled. "Well," he said, "it was a great secret as long
+as it was FBI property. But now, friend, all hell is going to bust
+loose."
+
+"It already has," Malone said hollowly.
+
+"Great," the A-in-C said. "What now?"
+
+"Now," Malone said, "I am going to go back to Washington. Take care of
+poor little old New York for me."
+
+He closed his eyes, and vanished.
+
+When he opened them, he was in his Washington apartment. He went over
+to the big couch and sat down, feeling that if he were going to curse
+he might as well be comfortable while he did it. But when the air was
+bright blue, some minutes later, he didn't feel any better. Cursing
+was not the answer.
+
+Nothing seemed to be.
+
+What was his next move?
+
+Where did he go from here?
+
+The more he thought about it, the more his mind spun. He was, he
+realized, at an absolute, total, dead end.
+
+Oh, there were things he could do. Malone knew that very well. He
+could make a lot of noise and go through a lot of waste motion--that
+was what it would amount to. He could have all the homes of all the
+missing PRS members checked. That would result, undoubtedly, in the
+discovery that the PRS members involved weren't in their homes. He
+could have their files impounded, which would clutter everything with
+a great many more pieces of paper, and none of the pieces of paper
+would do any good to him. In general, he could have the entire FBI
+chasing all over hell and gone--and finding nothing whatever.
+
+No, it would be a waste of time, he told himself. That much was
+certain.
+
+And, though he probably had enough evidence to get the FBI in motion,
+he had nowhere near enough to carry the case into court, much less
+make a try at getting the case to stand up in court. That was one
+thing he couldn't do, even if he wanted to: issue warrants for arrest
+on any basis whatever.
+
+But Malone was an FBI agent, and his motto was: "There's always a
+way." No normal method of tracking down the PRS members, and finding
+their present whereabouts, was going to work. They'd been covering
+themselves for such an emergency, undoubtedly, for a good many years
+and, due to telepathy, they certainly knew enough not to leave any
+clues around, of any kind.
+
+But nobody, Malone told himself, was perfect. There were clues lying
+around somewhere, he was sure of that; there had to be. The problem
+was, simply, to figure out where to look, and what to look for.
+
+Somewhere, the clues were sitting quietly and waiting for him to find
+them. The thought cheered him slightly, but not very much. Instead, he
+went into the kitchen and started heating water for coffee. He thought
+there might be a long night ahead of him, and sighed gently. But there
+was no help for it. The work had to be done, and done quickly.
+
+But when eight cigars had been reduced to ash, and what seemed like
+several gallons of coffee had sloshed their way into Malone's interior
+workings, his mind was as blank as a baby's. The lovely, opalescent
+dawn began to show in the East, and Malone swore at it. Then, haggard,
+red-eyed, confused, violently angry, and not one inch closer to a
+solution, he fell into a fitful doze on his couch.
+
+* * * * *
+
+When he awoke the sun was high in the sky, and outside his window the
+cheerful sound of traffic floated in the air. Downstairs somebody was
+playing a television set too loudly, and the voice reached Malone's
+semi-aware mind in a great tinny shout:
+
+"And now, the makers of Bon-Ton B-Complex Bolsters--the blanket of
+health--present Mother Kohler's Chit-Chat Hour!"
+
+The invisible audience screamed and howled. Malone ripped out a
+particularly foul oath and sat up on the couch. "That," he muttered,
+"is a fine thing to wake up to." He focused his eyes, with only
+slight difficulty, on his watch. The time was exactly noon.
+
+"But first," the announcer burbled downstairs, "a word from Mother
+Kohler herself, about the brand new special B-Complex _Irradiated_
+Bolster you can get at your neighborhood stores..."
+
+"Shut up," Malone said. He had wasted a lot of time doing nothing but
+sleeping, he told himself. This was no time to be listening to
+television. He got up and found, to his vague surprise, that he felt a
+lot better and more clear-headed than he'd been feeling. Maybe the
+sleep had done him some good.
+
+He yawned, blinked and stretched, and then he padded into the
+bathroom, showered and shaved and put on fresh clothes. He thought
+about having a morning cup of coffee, but last night's dregs appeared
+to have taken up permanent residence in his digestive tract, and he
+decided against it at last. He swallowed some orange juice and toast
+and then, heaving a great sigh of resignation and brushing crumbs off
+his shirt, he teleported himself over to his office.
+
+He was going to have to face Burris eventually, he knew.
+
+And now was just as good, or as bad, a time as any.
+
+Malone didn't hesitate. He punched the button on his intercom for
+Burris' office and then sat back, with his eyes closed, for the
+well-known voice.
+
+It didn't come.
+
+Instead, Wolf, the director's secretary, spoke up.
+
+"Burris isn't in, Malone," he said. "He had to fly to Miami. I can get
+a call through to him on the plane, if it's urgent, but he'll be
+landing in about fifteen minutes. And he did say he'd call this
+afternoon."
+
+"Oh," Malone said. "Sure. Okay. It isn't urgent." He was just as glad
+of the reprieve; it gave him one more chance to work matters through
+to a solution, and report success instead of failure. "But what's
+going on in Miami?" he added.
+
+"Don't you read the papers?" Wolf asked.
+
+Everybody, Malone reflected, seemed to be asking him that lately. "I
+haven't had time," he said.
+
+"The governor of Mississippi was assassinated yesterday, at Miami
+Beach," Wolf said.
+
+"Ah," Malone said. He thought about it for a second. "Frankly," he
+said, "this does not strike me as an irreparable loss to the nation.
+Not even to Mississippi."
+
+"You express my views precisely," Wolf said.
+
+"How about the killer?" Malone said. "I gather they haven't got him
+yet, or Burris wouldn't be on his way down."
+
+"No," Wolf said. "The killer would be on his way here instead. They
+haven't got him, Malone. It seems Governor Flarion was walking along
+Collins Avenue when somebody fired at him, using a high-powered rifle
+with, I guess, a scope sight."
+
+"Professional," Malone commented.
+
+"It looks like it," Wolf said. "Nobody even heard the sniper's shot;
+the governor just fell over, right there in the street. And by the
+time his bodyguards found out what had happened, it was impossible
+even to be sure just which way he was facing when the shot had been
+fired."
+
+"And, as I remember Collins Avenue--" Malone started.
+
+"Right," Wolf said. "Out where Governor Flarion was taking his stroll,
+there's an awful lot of it to search. The boys are trying to find
+somebody who might have seen a man acting suspicious in any of the
+nearby buildings, or heard a shot, or seen anybody at all lurking or
+loitering anywhere remotely close to the scene."
+
+"Lovely," Malone said. "Sounds like a nice complicated job."
+
+"You don't know the half of it," Wolf said. "There's also the Miami
+Beach Chamber of Commerce. According to them, Flarion died of a heart
+attack, and not even in Miami Beach. The bullet and the body are
+supposed to be written off as just coincidences, to keep the fair name
+of Miami Beach unsullied."
+
+"All I can say," Malone offered, "is good luck. This is the saddest
+day in American history since the assassination of Huey P. Long."
+
+"Agreed," Wolf said. "Want me to tell Burris you called?"
+
+"Right," Malone said. He flicked off.
+
+Now, he asked himself, how did the assassination of Governor Nemours
+P. Flarion fit in with anything? Granted, good old Nemours P. had been
+a horrible mistake, a paranoid, self-centered, would-be dictator whose
+talents as a rabble-rouser and a fearmonger had somehow managed to get
+him elected to a governorship. Certainly nobody felt particularly
+unhappy about his death. But he wouldn't fit into the pattern. Malone
+reminded himself that that was one more thing he had to find out when
+he got the chance.
+
+The trouble lay in finding an opportunity, he thought--and then he
+corrected himself.
+
+Not _finding_ it--_making_ it. Nobody was going to hand him anything
+on a silver serving salver.
+
+He punched the intercom again and got the Records office.
+
+"Yes, sir?" a familiar voice said.
+
+"Potter?" Malone said. "This is Malone. I want facsimiles of
+everything we have on the Psychical Research Society, on Sir Lewis
+Carter, and on Luba Vasilovna Garbitsch. Both of those last are
+connected with the Society."
+
+"Right," Potter said. "They'll be up at once."
+
+Then he punched again, and asked for the latest copy of the Washington
+_Post_. He gave the article on Governor Flarion one quick glance, but
+it didn't contain anything in the way of facts that he hadn't already
+had from Wolf. After that, he left it and concentrated on the more
+prosaic, human-interest news, the smaller stories.
+
+     FIFTH SPLINTER GROUP FORMS IN DCA BATTLE
+
+That was an interesting one, he thought. The Daughters of Colonial
+Americans had about reached the point of diminishing returns in their
+battle over the claims of Rose Carswell Elder, a descendant of a Negro
+freedman named William Elder who had lived in Boston in 1776 and
+fought on the side of the Colonies during the Revolution. One more
+splinter group, Malone thought, and there'd be as many splinters as
+members. Rose Carswell Elder was pressing her claim for membership,
+and the ladies were replying by throwing crockery and hard words at
+each other.
+
+Then there was the Legion of American War Veterans. The headline on
+this one read:
+
+     LAWV OUSTS 'ROWDIES': AID MEETING CONTINUES
+
+The "rowdies," Malone discovered, were a large minority group that
+wanted the good old days of electric canes, paper hats, whistles and
+pretty girls. "The Legion has grown up," a spokesman told them. "This
+convention is being held to discuss the possibility of increased
+technological aid to India and Africa. There is no place for
+tomfoolery or high jinks."
+
+The expulsion order had been carried by a record majority.
+
+And then there were two items, on different pages, that seemed to
+contradict each other. The first was a small headline on page
+fourteen:
+
+     RESIGNATIONS REACH NEW HIGH IN U.S. COLLEGE FACULTIES
+
+Teachers were apparently resigning all over the place, in virtually
+every department of virtually every college. That made sense. And the
+other item, on page three, made just as much sense:
+
+     HIGHER TAXES VOTED THROUGHOUT U.S.
+     FOR TEACHER INCOME RISE
+     State and Federal Aid Also Promised
+     in Drive to Raise Salaries Now
+
+Apparently, teachers were resigning just as they were about to get
+more money than they'd ever seen before. But Malone could fit that
+into the pattern easily enough; it was perfectly obvious, once he
+thought about it.
+
+Malone didn't have time to go through much more of the paper; the
+facsimile records he'd been waiting for arrived, and he put the _Post_
+aside and concentrated on them instead. Maybe somewhere in the records
+was the clue he desperately needed.
+
+The PRS was widely spread, all right. It had branches in almost every
+major city in the United States, in Europe, South Africa, South
+America and Australia. There was even a small branch society in
+Greenland. True, the Communist disapproval of such non-materialistic,
+un-Marxian objectives as Psychical Research showed up in the fact that
+there were no registered branches in the Sino-Soviet bloc. But that,
+Malone thought, didn't really matter. Maybe in Russia they called
+themselves the Lenin Study Group, or the Better Borshcht League. He
+was fairly sure, from what he'd experienced, that the PRS had some
+kind of organization even behind the Iron Curtain.
+
+Money didn't seem to be much of a problem, either. Malone checked for
+the supporters of the organization and found a microfilmed list that
+ran into the hundreds of thousands of names, most of them ordinary
+people who seemed to be interested in spiritualism and the like, and
+who donated a few dollars apiece each year to the PRS. Besides this
+mass of small donations, of course, there were a few large ones, from
+independently wealthy men who gave support to the organization and
+seemed actively interested in its aims.
+
+It wasn't an unusual picture; it was just an exceptionally big one.
+
+Malone sighed and went on to the personal dossiers.
+
+Sir Lewis Carter himself was a well-known astronomer and
+mathematician. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal
+Astronomical Society and the Royal Mathematical Society. He had been
+knighted for his contributions in higher mathematics only two years
+before he had come to live in the United States. Malone went over the
+papers dealing with his entry into the country carefully, but they
+were all in order and they contained absolutely no clues he could use.
+
+Sir Lewis' books on political and historical philosophy had been
+well-received, and he had also written a novel, _But Some Are More
+Equal,_ which, for a few weeks after publication, had managed to reach
+the bottom of the best-seller list.
+
+And that was that. Malone tried to figure out whether all this
+information did him any good at all, and he didn't have to think for
+very long. The answer was no. He opened the next dossier.
+
+Luba Vasilovna Garbitsch had been born in New York. Her mother had
+been a woman of Irish descent named Mary O'Keefe, and had died in '68.
+Her father, of course, had now been revealed as a Russian agent, and
+was at present making his home, such as it probably was, in good old
+Moscow.
+
+Malone sighed. Somewhere in the dossiers, he was sure, there was a
+clue, the basic clue that would tell him everything he needed to know.
+His prescience had never been so strong; he knew perfectly well that
+he was staring at the biggest, most startling and most complete
+disclosure of all. And he couldn't see it.
+
+He stared at the folders for a long minute. What did they tell him?
+What was the clue?
+
+And then, very slowly, the soft light of a prodigal sun illuminated
+his mind.
+
+"Mr. Malone," Malone said gently, "you are a damned fool. There are
+times when it is necessary to discard the impossible after you have
+seen that the obscure is the obvious."
+
+He wasn't sure whether that meant anything, or even whether he knew
+what he was saying. He was sure of only one thing: the final answer.
+
+And it _was_ obvious. Obvious as all hell.
+
+
+13
+
+There was, of course, only one thing to do, and only one place to go.
+Malone went downstairs without even stopping to wave farewell to the
+agent-in-charge, and climbed into the big, specially-built FBI Lincoln
+that waited for him.
+
+"Want a driver?" one of the mechanics asked.
+
+"No, thanks," Malone said. "This one's a solo job."
+
+That was for sure. He drove out onto the streets and into the heavy
+late afternoon traffic of Washington, D. C. The Lincoln handled
+smoothly, but Malone didn't press his luck among the rushing cars. He
+wasn't in any hurry. He had all the time in the world, and he knew it.
+They--and, for once, Malone knew just who "they" were--would still be
+waiting for him when he got there.
+
+_If_ he got there, he thought suddenly, dodging a combination
+roadblock consisting of a green Plymouth making an illegal turn, a
+fourteen-year-old boy on a bicycle and a sweet young girl pushing a
+baby carriage. He managed to get past and wiped his forehead with one
+hand. He continued driving, even more carefully, until he was out of
+the city.
+
+It took quite a lot of time. Washington traffic was getting worse and
+worse with every passing month, and the pedestrians were as nonchalant
+as ever. As Malone turned a corner, a familiar face popped into view,
+practically in front of his car. He swerved and got by without
+committing homicide, and a cheerful voice said: "Thanks, sorry."
+
+"It's okay, Chester," Malone said. The big man skipped back to the
+sidewalk and watched the car go by. Malone knew him slightly, a
+private eye who did some work on the fringes of Washington crime;
+basically a nice guy, but a little too active for Malone's taste.
+
+For a second he thought of asking the man to accompany him, but the
+last thing Malone needed was muscle. What he wanted was brains, and he
+even thought he might be developing some of those.
+
+He was nearly sure of it by the time he finally did leave the city and
+get out onto the highway that went south into the depths of Virginia.
+And, while he drove, he began to use that brain, letting his reflexes
+take over most of the driving problems now that the Washington traffic
+tangle was behind him.
+
+He took all his thoughts from behind the shield that had sheltered
+them and arrayed them neatly before him. Everything was perfectly
+clear; all he had to do now was explain it.
+
+Malone had wondered, over the years, about the detectives in books.
+They always managed to wrap everything up in the last chapter--and
+that was all right. But they always had a whole crowd of suspects
+listening to them, too. And Malone knew perfectly well that he could
+never manage a set-up like that. People would be interrupting him.
+Things would happen. Dogs would rush in and start a fight on the
+floor. There would be earthquakes, or else somebody would suddenly
+faint and interrupt him.
+
+But now, at long last, he realized, he had his chance.
+
+Nobody, he thought happily, could interrupt him. And he could explain
+to his heart's content.
+
+Because the members of the PRS were telepathic. And Malone, he thought
+cheerfully, was not.
+
+Somebody, he was sure, would be tuned in on him as he drove toward
+their Virginia hiding place. And he hoped that that somebody would
+alert everybody else, so they could all tune in and hear his grand
+final explanation of everything.
+
+_And a hearty good afternoon to everybody,_ he thought. _A very hearty
+and happy and sunny good afternoon to all--and most especially to Miss
+Luba Garbitsch. I hope she's the one who's tuned in--or that somebody
+has alerted her by now, because I'd rather talk to her than to anyone
+else I can think of out there._
+
+_Nothing personal, you understand. It's just that I'd like to show off
+a little. I don't need to hide anything from you--as a matter of
+plain, simple fact, I can't. Not with my shield down._
+
+He paused then, and, in his imagination, he could almost hear Lou's
+voice.
+
+"I'm listening, Kenneth," the voice said. "Go on."
+
+_Well, then,_ he thought. He fished around in his mind for a second,
+wondering exactly where to start. Then he decided, in the best
+traditions of the detective story, not to mention _Alice in
+Wonderland,_ to start at the beginning.
+
+_The dear old Psychical Research Society,_ he thought, _had been going
+along for a good many years now--since the 1880's, as a matter of
+fact, or somewhere near there. That's a long time and a lot of
+research. A lot of famous and intelligent men and women have belonged
+to the Society. And in all that time, they've worked hard, and worked
+sincerely, in testing every kind of psychic phenomenon. They've worked
+impartially and scientifically to find out whether a given unusual
+incident was explicable in terms of known natural laws, or was the
+result of some unknown force._
+
+_And it's hardly surprising that, after about a hundred years of work,
+something finally came of it._
+
+"Not surprising at all," he imagined Lou's voice saying. "You're
+making things very clear, Kenneth."
+
+Or had that been "Sir Kenneth"? Malone wasn't sure, but it didn't
+really matter. He spun the car around a curve in the highway, smiled
+gently to himself, and went on.
+
+_Naturally, to the average man in the street, the Society was just a
+bunch of crackpots, and the more respected and famous the people who
+belonged to it, the happier he was; it just proved his superiority to
+them. He didn't deal with crackpot notions, did he?_
+
+_No, the Society did. And nobody except the members paid much
+attention to what was going on._
+
+_I remember one of the book facsimiles you gave me, for instance. Some
+man, whose name I can't recall, wrote a great "expos�" of the Society,
+in which he tried to prove that Sir Lewis Carter and certain other
+members were trying to take over the world and run it to suit
+themselves, making a sort of horrible dictatorship out of their power
+and position. At that, he wasn't really far from the truth, though he
+had it turned around a little. But the book shows that he has no
+knowledge whatever of what psionics is, or how it works. He seems to
+me to be just a little afraid of it, which probably adds to his
+ignorance. And, as a result, he got a twisted idea of what the PRS is
+actually doing._
+
+He could almost hear Lou's voice again. "Yes," she was saying. "I
+remember the book. It was put in our reference library for its
+humorous aspects."
+
+_That's right,_ Malone thought. _It would be only funny to you. But it
+would be frightening and terrible to an awful lot of people simply
+because they wouldn't understand what the Society was all about._
+
+"All right," Lou's voice said helpfully. "And what _is_ it all about?"
+
+Malone settled back in the driver's seat as the car continued to spin
+along the road. _It seems to me,_ he thought carefully, _that any
+telepath has to go one of two ways. Either, like Her Majesty or the
+others we found when we discovered her two years ago, the telepath
+ends up insane--or perhaps commits suicide, which is simply one step
+further in retreat--or else he learns to understand and control his
+own powers, and to understand other human beings so well that, if he
+actually did control the world, everyone would benefit in the long
+run._
+
+_The difference between the two kinds is the difference between Her
+Majesty and the PRS._
+
+"That's good thinking," he could hear Lou say.
+
+_No, it isn't,_ he thought; _it's no more than guessing, and it could
+be just as wild as you please. But there is one thing I do know: the
+way to get a better world, or anyhow the first step, is to clear the
+road ahead. And that means getting rid of the fools, idiots, maniacs,
+blockheads, morons, psychopaths, paranoids, timidity-ridden,
+fear-worshipers, fanatics, thieves, criminals and a whole lot more._
+
+"Get rid of them?" Lou's voice said.
+
+_Well,_ Malone thought, _I don't mean they've got to be killed or
+driven out of the civilized world. You've just got to get them out of
+any place where their influence is heavily felt on society as a
+whole._
+
+"All right," Lou's voice said pleasantly. "And how could we go about
+that? Do we write nasty letters to the editor?"
+
+_There's a much more effective way,_ Malone thought. _There's no
+trouble in getting rid of a man if you can make him expose himself.
+And you've managed that pretty well. You've thwarted their idiotic
+plans, made them stumble over their own fumble-mindedness, played on
+their neuroses, concocted errors for them to fight and, in general,
+rigged things in any possible way so that they'd quit, or get fired,
+or lose elections, or get arrested, or just generally get put out of
+circulation somehow._
+
+_It's extremely effective--and it works very well._
+
+_Sometimes, you've only had to put the blocks to individuals.
+Sometimes whole nations have had to go. And sometimes it's been
+in-between, and you've managed to foul up whole organizations with
+misplaced papers missent messages, error, and changed minds and
+everything else you can think of._
+
+_As a matter of fact, it sounds like fun._
+
+"Well," he imagined Lou saying, "it is fun, in away. But it's a deadly
+serious business, too."
+
+_Sure it is,_ Malone thought. _I think the first time that came home
+to me was when I saw what was happening in Russia, and compared it to
+what had been going on over here. Tom Boyd saw that, too, when I
+pointed it out to him--as you probably know if you were spying on my
+mind at the time._
+
+_Not that I mind that in the least._
+
+_Come more often, by all means._
+
+_But Tom, in case you weren't listening, said: "Over here there are a
+lot of confused jerks and idiots... And in Russia there's a lot of
+confusion."_
+
+_Now, that's perfectly true, and it spells out the difference. Over
+here, you've been confusing the jerks and the idiots, getting rid of
+them so the system can work properly. Over in Russia, on the other
+hand, you've left the jerks and the idiots all alone to do their dirty
+work, and you've just added to the confusion where necessary, so that
+the system will break down of its own weight._
+
+"But, after all," Lou said, "things look pretty bad over here, too.
+Look at the papers."
+
+_Everybody,_ Malone thought, _has been telling me to go and look at
+the newspapers. And when I do look at them I find all sorts of
+evidence of confusion. Teachers resigning, senators and
+representatives goofing up bills on Congress, gang wars cluttering up
+the streets with cadavers and making things tough for the Sanitation
+Department, factional fights in various organizations. Now, all of
+that looks pretty horrible in the papers, but do you know something?
+It isn't horrible at all._
+
+_It's pretty damn good, as a matter of fact._
+
+_The teachers who are resigning, for instance, are the nincompoops
+who've got to be pruned out so that competent teachers can come in.
+And, with the higher salaries, more and more competent men and women
+are going to be attracted to the job. The universities are going to be
+freer and better places to work in; they won't be monopolies any
+more._
+
+"Monopolies?" Lou said.
+
+_In restraint of knowledge,_ Malone thought. _The old monopoly was in
+restraint of trade, and legal action helped to kill that kind. The
+monopoly in restraint of knowledge took a little more killing, but
+you're doing the job quite nicely. And not only in the schools._
+
+_The factional fights are having the same result. Look at the AAAM,
+for instance. That organization is a monopoly, pure and simple.
+Simple, anyhow. And what the factional fights are doing to it is just
+breaking up the monopoly and letting knowledge free again._
+
+_And then we come to Congress. Senators and representatives are having
+a terrible time, some of them. There's a fight going on between
+Furbisher and Deeks because Deeks has discovered some evidence against
+Furbisher. Who's having the terrible time?_
+
+_All of them?_
+
+_Nope. Furbisher is. Deeks isn't._
+
+_And that's the way it's going all over. The useful, necessary
+legislation is going through Congress now without being cluttered up
+by stupid dam bills and water bills and other idiocies that simply
+clog the works._
+
+_And then, of course, there are the gang wars. Now, I feel as sorry
+for the Sanitation Department as anybody, but at least they're
+cleaning the streets for good now. The boys who are dying off and
+getting sent to hospitals and jails are just the ones who should have
+been sent away long ago. Everybody knows that, but nobody can prove
+it._
+
+_Except the PRS._
+
+_And the PRS is busy doing just what it can about that proof._
+
+_And all it takes is a few of you. I don't know how many--I don't know
+how many of you there really are, for that matter. But it must be a
+fair number to stock all your branches with "top-level" executives and
+the lower-level men and women who really believe in the PRS blind, and
+do their best to keep it working._
+
+_There are probably a lot of ways it might work, but the simplest and
+best way I can think of is this one: there's a clearing-house sort of
+set-up, and information comes in from various telepathic spies working
+for the PRS, about various projected activities of the imbecile
+contingent._
+
+_And, from this information, you figure out the best time and place
+for lightning to strike, and you select the kind of lightning it's
+going to be. Here it's a misplaced letter, there some "facts" that
+aren't facts, and somewhere else a dropped package of secret records.
+Somebody goofs--and is exposed._
+
+_Maybe it works on the local-organization level. Maybe there are teams
+all over the country, all ready to synchronize their minds and jab
+somebody in the thought processes at just the right time, in just the
+right way, as soon as they get the word. That's one way of doing it,
+maybe the best way._
+
+_There are others, but it doesn't really matter how that end of it
+works. The important thing is that it does work._
+
+_And, when it works, it can certainly create quite a mess. Yes-sirree,
+Bob. Or Lou, as the case may be._
+
+_I sure hope somebody's picking all this up, because I'd hate to have
+to explain it again when I get there._
+
+_Are you there, anybody?_
+
+Malone imagined he heard Lou's voice. "Yes, Ken," she said. "Yes, I'm
+here."
+
+But, of course, there was no way for them to get through to him. They
+were telepathic, but Kenneth J. Malone wasn't he told himself sadly.
+
+_Hello, out there,_ he thought. _I hope you've been listening so far,
+because there isn't going to be too much more. But there are a couple
+of things that still need to be cleared up. I've got some answers, but
+there are others I'm going to need._
+
+_There's Russia, for instance. It does seem to me as if your teams in
+Russia, whatever they're calling themselves, are having a lot more fun
+than the U. S. teams. For one thing they've got an easier job._
+
+_In this country, the teams are looking for ways to get rid of the
+blockheads, and there are a lot of them. In Russia, you don't have to
+get rid of the blockheads. All you have to do is clear the road for
+them. And you can do that by fouling up the more intelligent people._
+
+"Intelligent people?" he could hear Lou say.
+
+_Intelligence doesn't mean good sense,_ Malone thought. _I don't doubt
+that the men who are maintaining Russia's power are intelligent men--
+but what they're doing is bad for the world as a whole, in the long
+run._
+
+_So you foul them up, and leave the blockheads a clear field to run
+the country into the ground. And that's easier than fouling up the
+blockheads._
+
+_Sure it is._
+
+_There are fewer intelligent, active people around than there are
+blockheads._
+
+_Always were._
+
+_And maybe there always will be--but not if the PRS can help it._
+
+_Oh, and by the way,_ Malone thought. _You do know how I spotted you,
+don't you? You were tuned in then, weren't you?_
+
+_And I don't mean just Lou. I mean all of you._
+
+_In a world of blind men, the man who can see stands out. In a world
+of the insane, the sane man stands out._
+
+_And in a world where organizations are regularly being confused and
+fouled up--either as whole organizations, or through your attempts to
+get rid of individual members--a smooth-running, efficient
+organization stands out like a sore thumb._
+
+_Frankly, it took me longer to see it than it should have._
+
+_But I've got the answer at last--the main answer. Though, as I say,
+there are some others I'd like to have._
+
+_Like, for instance, Russia. And exactly what did happen that night in
+Moscow._
+
+
+14
+
+At this point Malone suddenly became aware of a sound that was not
+coming from his own mind. It was coming from somewhere behind his car,
+and it was a very loud sound. It was, he discovered when he looked
+back, the siren of a highway patrolman on a motorcycle, coming toward
+him at imminent risk of life and limb and waving frantically with an
+unbelievably free hand.
+
+Malone glanced down at the speedometer. With a sigh, he realized that
+his reflexes had allowed him a little leeway, and that he was going
+slightly over the legal speed limit for this Virginia highway. He
+shook his head, eased up on the accelerator, and began to apply the
+brakes.
+
+By the time he had pulled over to the side of the road, the highway
+patrolman was coming to a halt behind the big Lincoln. Malone watched
+him check the number on the rear plate and then walk slowly around to
+the window on the driver's side. "Can't you hurry?" Malone muttered
+under his breath. "All this Virginian ease is okay in its place,
+but--" In the meanwhile he was getting out his identification, and by
+the time the patrolman reached him he had it in his hand.
+
+"I'm sorry," he said.
+
+"Sorry?" the patrolman said, frowning. He had an open, boyish face
+with freckles and a pug nose. He looked like somebody's kid brother,
+very dependable but just a little cute. "What for?" he said.
+
+Malone shrugged. "What else?" he said. "Speeding."
+
+"Oh, that," the patrolman said. "Why, don't you worry about that."
+
+"Don't worry about it?" Malone said. This particular kid brother was
+obviously a little nuts, and should have been put away years ago. He
+ground his teeth silently, but he didn't make any complaints. It was
+never wise, he knew, to irritate a traffic cop of any sort.
+
+"Sure not," the patrolman said. "Why, we don't pay any attention out
+here until a fella hits ten miles over the posted limit. That's okay."
+
+"Fine," Malone said cheerily. "Then I can drive on?"
+
+"Now, just hold it a second there," the patrolman said. "Let's see
+your identification if you don't mind."
+
+Malone held it out wordlessly. The patrolman, obviously intent on
+finding out just what kind of paper the card was made of, who had
+printed it and whether there were any germs on it, gave it a long,
+careful scrutiny. Malone shifted slightly in his seat, counted to ten
+and managed to say nothing.
+
+Then the patrolman started reading the card aloud. "Kenneth J.
+Malone," he said in a tone of some surprise. "Special Agent of the
+FBI." He looked up. "That right?" he said. "What it says here?"
+
+"That's right," Malone said. "And you can have my autograph later." He
+regretted the last sentence as soon as it was out of his mouth, but
+the patrolman didn't seem to notice.
+
+"Then you're the man, all right," he said happily. "I caught your
+plate number as you went on by me, back there."
+
+"Plate number?" Malone said. "What am I supposed to have done?" He'd
+overslept, he knew, but that was the only violation of even his
+personal code that he could think of. And it didn't seem likely that
+the Virginia Highway Patrol was sending out its men to arrest people
+who overslept.
+
+"Why, Mr. Malone," the patrolman said with honest surprise written all
+over his Norman Rockwell face, "as far as I know you didn't do a thing
+wrong."
+
+"But--"
+
+"They just told us to be on the watch for a black 1973 Lincoln with
+your number, and see if you were driving it. They did say you'd
+probably be driving it."
+
+"Good," Malone said. "And I am. And I'd like to continue doing so." He
+paused and then added, "But what happened?"
+
+"Well," the patrolman said, in exactly the manner of a man starting
+out to tell a long, interesting story about the Wars of the Spanish
+Succession, "well, sir, it seems FBI Headquarters in Washington, they
+got in touch with the Highway Patrol Headquarters, down in Richmond,
+and Highway Patrol Headquarters--"
+
+"Down in Richmond," Malone muttered resignedly.
+
+"That's right," the patrolman said in a pleased voice. "Well, they
+called all the local barracks, and then we got the message on our
+radios." He stopped, exactly as if he thought he had finished.
+
+Malone counted to ten again, made it twenty and then found that he was
+capable of speech. "What?" he said in a calm, patient voice, "was the
+message about?"
+
+"Well," the patrolman said, "it seems some fella down in Washington,
+fella name of Thomas Boyd, they said it was, wants to talk to you
+pretty bad."
+
+"He could have called me on the car phone," Malone said in what he
+thought was a reasonable tone of voice. "He didn't have to--"
+
+"There's no call for yelling at me, Mr. Malone," the patrolman said
+reproachfully. "I only obeyed my orders, which were to locate your
+black 1973 Lincoln and see if you were driving it, and give you a
+message. That's all."
+
+"It's enough," Malone muttered. "He didn't have to send out the
+militia to round me up."
+
+"Oh, no, Mr. Malone," the patrolman said. "Not the militia. Highway
+Patrol. We don't rightly have any connection with the militia at all."
+
+"Glad to hear it," Malone said. He picked up the receiver of the car
+phone and waited for the buzz that would show that he was connected
+with Communications Central in Washington.
+
+It didn't come.
+
+"Oh, yes," the patrolman said suddenly. "I suppose that's why this Mr.
+Boyd, he couldn't call you on the car telephone, Mr. Malone. The
+message we got, it also says that the fella at the FBI garage in
+Washington just forgot to plug in that phone there."
+
+"Oh," Malone said. "Well, thanks for telling me."
+
+"You're right welcome, Mr. Malone," the patrolman said "You can plug
+it in now."
+
+"I intend to," Malone said through his teeth. He closed his eyes for a
+long second, and then opened them again. He saw the interested face of
+the patrolman looking down at him. Hurriedly, he turned away, felt
+underneath the dashboard until he found the dangling plug, and
+inserted it into its socket.
+
+The buzz now arrived.
+
+Malone heaved a great sigh and punched for Boyd's office. Then he
+looked around.
+
+The patrolman was still standing at the car window. He was looking
+down at Malone with an interested, slightly blank expression.
+
+Malone thought of several things to say, and chose the most harmless.
+"Thanks a lot," he told the patrolman. "I appreciate your stopping off
+to let me know."
+
+"Oh, that's all right, Mr. Malone," the patrolman said. "That was my
+orders, to do that. And even if they weren't, it was no trouble at
+all. Any time. I'd always be glad to do anything for the FBI."
+
+"Boyd here," a tinny voice from the phone said.
+
+Malone eyed the patrolman sourly. "Malone here," he said. "What's the
+trouble, Tom? I--No, wait a minute."
+
+"Ken!" Boyd's voice said. "I've been trying to--"
+
+"Hold it a second," Malone said. He opened his mouth, and then he saw
+a car go by. The patrolman hadn't seen it. Malone felt sorry for the
+driver, but not too sorry. "Say!" he said to the patrolman.
+
+"Yes, sir?" the patrolman said.
+
+"That boy was really going, wasn't he?" Malone said. "He must have
+been doing at least ninety."
+
+The patrolman jerked his head around to stare at the disappearing car.
+"Well--" he said, and then: "Yes, sir. Thank you, Mr. Malone. Thanks.
+I'll see you later." He raced for his machine, swung aboard and roared
+down the road, guiding with one hand and manipulating the controls of
+his radar set with the other.
+
+Malone waved him a cheery farewell, and got back to the phone.
+
+"Okay, Tom," he said. "Go ahead."
+
+"Who was that you were talking to?" Boyd asked.
+
+"Oh, just a motorcycle patrolman," Malone said. "He wanted to be
+helpful, so I told him to go chase a Buick."
+
+"Why a Buick?" Boyd said, interestedly.
+
+"Why not?" Malone said. "There happened to be one handy at the time.
+Now, what's on your mind?"
+
+"I've been searching all over hell for you," Boyd said. "I wish you'd
+just leave some word where you were going, and then I wouldn't have
+to--"
+
+"Damn it," Malone cut in. "Tom, just tell me what you want. In
+straightforward, simple language. It just took me ten minutes to pry a
+few idiotic facts out of a highway patrolman. Don't make me go through
+it all over again with you."
+
+"Okay, okay," Boyd said. "Keep your pants on. But here's the dope: I
+just flew in from New York, and I brought all the files on the case--
+the stuff you left in your office in New York, remember?"
+
+"Right," Malone said. "Thanks."
+
+"And I think we may be able to get the Big Cheese," Boyd went on.
+
+"Manelli?" Malone said.
+
+"None other than the famous Cesare Antonio," Boyd said. "It seems two
+of his most valued lieutenants were found in a garage in Queens,
+practically weighted down with machine-gun bullets."
+
+Malone thought of Manelli, complaining sadly about the high overhead
+of murder. "And where does that get us?" he said.
+
+"Well," Boyd said, "whoever did the job forgot to search the bodies."
+
+"Oh-oh," Malone said.
+
+"Very much oh-oh," Boyd said. "They're loaded down, not only with
+lead, but with paper. There are documents linking Manelli right up to
+the International Truckers' Union--a direct tie-in with Mike Sand. And
+Sand now says he's tied in with the Great Lakes Transport Union in
+Chicago."
+
+"This sounds like a big one," Malone said.
+
+"You have no idea," Boyd said. "And in the middle of all this, Burris
+called."
+
+"Burris?" Malone said.
+
+"That's right," Boyd said. "He wants me to go on down to Florida and
+take over the investigation of the Flarion assassination. So it looks
+as if I'm going to miss most of the fun."
+
+"Too bad," Malone said.
+
+"But maybe not all," Boyd said. "It may tie in with the case we're
+working on. At least, that's what Burris thinks."
+
+"Yes," Malone said. "I can see why he thinks so. Did he have any
+message for me, by the way?"
+
+"Not exactly," Boyd said.
+
+Malone blinked. "Not exactly?" he said. "What's that supposed to
+mean?"
+
+"Well," Boyd said, "he says he does have something to tell you, but
+it'll wait until he sees you. Then, he says, he'll tell you
+personally."
+
+"Great," Malone said.
+
+"Maybe it's a surprise," Boyd said. "Maybe you're fired."
+
+"I wouldn't have the luck," Malone said. "But if I get any leads on
+the Flarion job, I'll let you know right away."
+
+"Sure," Boyd said. "Thanks. And--by the way, what are you doing now?"
+
+"Me?" Malone said. "I'm driving."
+
+"Yes, I know," Boyd said patiently. "To where, and why? Or is this
+another secret? Sometimes I think nobody loves me any more."
+
+"Oh, don't be silly," Malone said. "The entire city of Miami Beach is
+awaiting your arrival with bated breath."
+
+"But what are you doing?" Boyd said.
+
+Malone chose his words carefully. "I'm just checking a lead," he said
+at last. "I don't know if it's going to pan out or not, but I thought
+I'd drive down to Richmond and check on a name I've got. I'll call you
+about it in the morning, Tom, and let you know what the result is."
+
+"Oh," Boyd said. "Okay. Sure. So long, Ken."
+
+"So long," Malone said. He hung up the phone, put the car into gear
+again and roared off down U. S. Highway Number One. He didn't feel
+entirely happy about the way things had gone; he'd been forced to lie
+to Tom Boyd, and that just wasn't right.
+
+However, there was no help for it. It was actually better this way, he
+told himself hopefully. After all, the less Tom knew from now on, the
+better off he was going to be. The better off everyone would be.
+
+He went on through Fredericksburg without incident, but he didn't
+continue on to Richmond. Instead, he turned off U. S. 1 when he
+reached a little town called Thornburg, which was smaller than he had
+believed a town could be and live. He began following a secondary road
+out into the countryside.
+
+The countryside, of course, was filled with country, in the shape of
+hills, birds, trees, flowers, grass and other distractions to the
+passing motorist. It took Malone quite a bit longer than he expected
+to find the place he was looking for, and he finally came to the sad
+conclusion that country estates are just as difficult to find as
+houses in Brooklyn. In both cases, he thought, there was the same
+frantic search down what seemed to be a likely route, the same
+disappointment when the route turned out to lead nowhere, and the same
+discovery that no one had ever heard of the place and, in fact,
+doubted very strongly whether it even existed.
+
+But he found it at last, rounding a curve in a narrow black-top road
+and spotting the house beyond a grove of trees. He recognized it
+instantly.
+
+He had seen it so often that he felt as if he knew it intimately.
+
+It was a big, rambling, Colonial-type mansion, painted a blinding and
+beautiful white, with a broad, pillared porch and a great carved front
+door. The front windows were curtained in rich purples, and before the
+house was a great front garden, and tall old trees. Malone
+half-expected Scarlett O'Hara to come tripping out of the house at any
+moment.
+
+Inside it, however, if Malone were right, was not the magnetic
+Scarlett. Inside the house were some of the most important members of
+the Psychical Research Society.
+
+But it was impossible to tell from the outside. Nothing moved on the
+well-kept grounds, and the windows didn't show so much as the flutter
+of a purple curtain. There was no sound. No cars were parked around
+the house, nor, Malone thought as he remembered _Gone With the Wind,_
+were there any horses or carriages.
+
+The place looked deserted.
+
+Malone thought he knew better, but it took a few minutes for him to
+get up enough courage to go up the long driveway. He stared at the
+house. It was an old one, he knew, built long before the Civil War and
+originally commanding a huge plantation. Now, all that remained of
+that vast parcel of land was the few acres that surrounded the house.
+
+But the original family still inhabited it, proud of the house and of
+their part in its past. Over the years, Malone knew, they had kept it
+up scrupulously, and the place had been both restored and modernized
+on the inside without harming the classic outlines of the
+hundred-and-fifty-year-old structure.
+
+A fence surrounded the estate, but the front gate was swinging open.
+Malone saw it and took a deep breath. Now, he told himself, or never.
+He drove the Lincoln through the opening slowly, alert for almost
+anything.
+
+There was no disturbance. Thirty yards from the front door he pulled
+the car to a cautious stop and got out. He started to walk toward the
+building. Each step seemed to take whole minutes, and everything he
+had thought raced through his mind again.
+
+Nothing seemed to move anywhere, except Malone himself.
+
+Was he right? Were the PRS people really here? Or had he been led
+astray by them? Had he been manipulated as easily as they had
+manipulated so many others?
+
+That was possible. But it wasn't the only possibility.
+
+Suppose, he thought, that he was perfectly right, and that the PRS
+members were waiting inside. And suppose, too, that he'd misunderstood
+their motives.
+
+Suppose they were just waiting for him to get a little closer.
+
+Malone kept walking.
+
+In just a few steps, he would be close enough so that a bullet aimed
+at him from the house hadn't a real chance of missing him.
+
+And it didn't have to be bullets, either. They might have set a trap,
+he thought, and were waiting for him to walk right into it. Then they
+would hold him prisoner while they devised ways to...
+
+To what? He didn't know. And that was even worse; it called up
+horrible terrors from the darkest depths of Malone's mind. He
+continued to walk forward, feeling about as exposed as a restaurant
+lamb chop caught with its panty down.
+
+He reached the steps that led up to the porch, and took them one at a
+time.
+
+He stood on the porch. A long second passed.
+
+He took a step toward the high, wide and handsome oaken door. Then he
+took another step, and another.
+
+What was waiting for him inside?
+
+He took a deep breath, and pressed the doorbell button.
+
+The door swung open immediately, and Malone involuntarily stepped
+back.
+
+The owner of the house smiled at him from the doorway. Malone let out
+his breath in one long sigh of relief.
+
+"I was hoping it would be you," he said weakly. "May I come in?"
+
+"Why, certainly, Malone. Come on in. We've been expecting you, you
+know," said Andrew J. Burris, director of the FBI.
+
+
+15
+
+Malone sat, quietly relaxed and almost completely at ease, in the
+depths of a huge, comfortable, old-fashioned Morris chair. Three
+similar chairs were clustered with his, around a squat, massive coffee
+table made of a single slab of dark wood set on short, curved legs.
+Malone looked around at the other three with a relaxed feeling of
+recognition: Andrew J. Burris, Sir Lewis Carter, and Luba Vasilovna
+Garbitsch.
+
+"That mind shield of yours," Burris was saying, "is functioning very
+well. We weren't entirely sure you had actually located us until you
+pulled into that driveway."
+
+"I wasn't entirely sure what I was locating," Malone said.
+
+"And so it's over," Burris said with a satisfied air. "Everything's
+over."
+
+"And just beginning," Sir Lewis put in. He drew a pipe from an inside
+pocket and began to fill it.
+
+"And, of course," Burris said, "just beginning. Things do that; they
+go round and round in circles. It's what makes everything so
+confusing."
+
+"And so much fun," Lou said, leaning back in her chair. She didn't
+look hostile now, Malone thought; she looked like a cat, wary but
+content. He decided that he liked this Lou even better than the old
+one. Lou, at home among her psionic colleagues, was even more than
+he'd ever thought she could be.
+
+"More what?" she said suddenly. Burris jerked upright a trifle.
+
+"What's more what?" he said. "Damn it, let's stick to one thing or the
+other. As soon as this thing starts mixing talk and thought it
+confuses me."
+
+"Never mind," Lou said. She smiled across the table at Malone.
+
+Malone jerked a finger under his collar.
+
+"What made you decide to come here?" Sir Lewis said. He had the pipe
+lit now, and blew a cloud of fragrant smoke over the table.
+
+Malone wondered where to start. "One of the clues," he said at last,
+"was the efficiency of the FBI. It hit me the same way the efficiency
+of the PRS had hit me, while I was looking at the batch of reports
+that had been run off so rapidly."
+
+"Ah," Sir Lewis said. "The dossiers."
+
+"Dossiers?" Burris said.
+
+Sir Lewis puffed at his pipe. "Sorry," he said. "I thought you had
+been tuned in for that."
+
+"I was busy," Burris said. "I can't tune into everything. After all,
+I've only got one mind."
+
+"And two hands," Malone said at random.
+
+"At least," Lou said. Their eyes met in a glance of perfect
+understanding.
+
+"What the hell do hands have to do with it?" Burris said.
+
+Sir Lewis shrugged. "Tune in and see," he said. "It's an old joke; but
+you'll never really adjust to telepathy unless you practice."
+
+"Damn it," Burris said, "I practice. I'm always practicing. This and
+that and the other thing--after all, I am the director of the FBI.
+There's a lot to be done."
+
+Sir Lewis puffed at his pipe again. "At any rate," he said smoothly,
+"Mr. Malone had requested some dossiers on us. On the PRS, myself, and
+Luba. They arrived very quickly. The efficiency of that arrival, and
+the efficiency he'd been noting about the FBI ever since he began work
+on this case, finally struck home to him."
+
+"Ah," Burris said. "You see? The FBI's a full-time job. It's got to be
+efficient."
+
+"Of course," Sir Lewis said soothingly.
+
+"Anyhow," Malone said, "Sir Lewis is right. While every other branch
+of the government was having its troubles with the Great Confusion,
+the FBI was ticking along like a transistorized computer."
+
+"A good start," Sir Lewis said.
+
+"Darn good," Burris said. "Malone, I knew I could depend on you.
+You're a good man."
+
+Malone swallowed hard. "Well, anyway," he said after a pause, "when I
+saw that I began to remember a few other things. Starting with a
+couple of years ago, when we first found Her Majesty, remember?"
+
+"I'll never forget it," Burris said fervently. "She knighted me.
+Knight Commander of the Queen's Own FBI. What a moment."
+
+"Thrilling," Malone said. "But you got to Yucca Flats for your
+knighting awfully quickly, a little too fast even for a modern plane."
+
+"It had to be done," Burris said. "Anyhow, I've never really liked
+planes. Basically unsafe. People crash in them."
+
+"But you wouldn't," Malone said. "You could always teleport yourself
+out."
+
+"Sure," Burris said. "But that's troublesome. Why bother? Anyhow, I'd
+been to Yucca Flats before, so I could teleport there--a little way
+down the road, where I could meet my car--without any trouble."
+
+"Anyhow, that was one thing," Malone said. "And then there was Her
+Majesty, when she pointed at that visiphone screen and accused you of
+being the telepathic spy. Remember?"
+
+"She wasn't pointing at me," Burris said. "She was pointing at the man
+in the next room. How about you doing some remembering?"
+
+"Sure she was," Malone said. "But it was just a little coincidence.
+And I have a hunch she felt, subconsciously, that there was something
+not quite right about you."
+
+"Maybe," Burris conceded. "But that doesn't answer my question."
+
+"It doesn't?" Malone said.
+
+"Now look, Malone," Burris said. "None of this is proof. Not real
+proof. Not the kind the FBI has trained you to look for."
+
+"But--"
+
+"What I want to know," Burris said, "is why you came here, to my home?
+And in spite of everything you've said, that hasn't been tied down."
+
+Malone frowned. After a second's thought he said, "Well...  All I know
+is that it just seemed obvious. That's all."
+
+"Indeed it is," Sir Lewis said. "But one of the things we'll have to
+teach you, my boy, is how to distinguish between a deduction from
+observed fact and a psionic intuition. You've been confusing them for
+some years now."
+
+"I have?" Malone said.
+
+"Sure you have," Burris said. "And, what's more--"
+
+"Well, he's no worse than you are, Andrew," Lou said.
+
+Burris turned. "Me?" he said in a voice of withering scorn.
+
+"Certainly," Lou said. "After all, you've never really become used to
+mixtures of thought and speech. And, what's more, you've been using
+telepathy so long that when you try to communicate with nothing but
+words you only confuse yourself."
+
+"And everybody else," Sir Lewis added.
+
+"Hmpf," Burris said. "I'm busy all the time. I haven't got any extra
+time for practice."
+
+Malone nodded, comparatively unsurprised. He'd wondered for years how
+a man so obviously unable to express himself clearly could run an
+organization like the FBI as well as he did. Having psionic abilities
+evidently led to drawbacks as well as advantages.
+
+"Actually," he said, "my prescience made one mistake."
+
+"Really?" Burris said, looking both worried and pleased about it.
+
+"I expected the place to be full of people," Malone said. "I thought
+the elite corps of the PRS would be here."
+
+"Oh," Burris said, looking crestfallen.
+
+"Why, that was no mistake," Sir Lewis said. "As a matter of fact, they
+are all here. But they're quite busy at the moment; things are coning
+to a head, you know, and they must work quite undisturbed."
+
+"And this," Burris added, "is a good place for it. There are sixty
+rooms in this house. Sixty."
+
+"That's a lot of rooms," Malone said politely.
+
+"A mansion," Burris said. "A positive mansion. And my family has lived
+here ever since--"
+
+"I'm sure Ken isn't very interested in your family just now," Lou
+broke in.
+
+"My family," Burris said with dignity, "is a very interesting family."
+
+"I'm sure it must be," Lou said demurely. Sir Lewis choked with
+laughter suddenly and began waving his pipe. After a minute, Malone
+joined in.
+
+"Damn it," Burris said. "Let's stick to one thing or the other. Did I
+say that?"
+
+"Twice," Malone said.
+
+"Sixty rooms," Burris said. "All built by my family. And local
+contractors, of course. That's enough to house sixty rooms full of
+people. And that number of people is a large houseful, I should
+think."
+
+"It sounds like a lot," Malone said.
+
+"It is a lot," Burris said. "All in my house. The house my family
+built."
+
+"And we're grateful for it," Sir Lewis said soothingly. "We truly
+are."
+
+"Good," Burris said.
+
+"You must have had a large family," Lou said.
+
+"A large family," Burris said, "and many guests. Many, many guests.
+From all over. Including famous people. General Hood slept in this
+house, and he slept very well indeed."
+
+"As a matter of fact," Lou added, "he's still sleeping. They call it
+being dead."
+
+"That's not funny," Burris snapped.
+
+"Sorry," Lou said. "It was meant to be."
+
+"I--" Burris shut his mouth and glared.
+
+Malone was far away, thinking of the sixty rooms full of people,
+sitting quietly, their minds ranging into the distance, meshed
+together in small units. It was a picture that frightened and
+comforted him at the same time. He wasn't sure he liked it, but he
+certainly didn't dislike it, either.
+
+After all, he told himself confusedly, too many cooks save a stitch in
+time.
+
+He veered away from that sentence quickly. "Tell me," he said, "were
+you receiving my broadcast on the way here?"
+
+Burris and Sir Lewis nodded. Lou started to nod, too, but stopped and
+looked surprised. "You mean you didn't know we were?" she said.
+
+"How could I know?" Malone said. "After all, I was just tossing it out
+and hoping that somebody was on the listening end."
+
+"But of course somebody was," Lou said. "I was."
+
+"Good," Malone said. "But I still don't see how I was supposed to know
+that you--"
+
+"I answered you, silly," Lou said. "I kept on answering you.
+Remember?"
+
+Malone blinked, focused and then said, very slowly, "That was my
+imagination. Please tell me it was my imagination before I go nuts."
+
+"Sorry," Lou said. "It wasn't."
+
+"But that kind of thing," Malone said, "it takes a tremendous amount
+of power, doesn't it?"
+
+"Not when the receiver is a telepath," Lou said sweetly.
+
+Malone nodded slowly. "That," he said, "is exactly what I'm afraid of.
+Don't tell me--"
+
+There was silence.
+
+"Well?" Malone said.
+
+"You said not to tell you," Lou said instantly.
+
+"All right," Malone said. "I rescind the order. Am I a telepath, or am
+I not?"
+
+Lou's lips didn't move. But then, they didn't have to.
+
+The message came, unbidden, into Malone's mind.
+
+_Of course you are. That was the whole reason for Andrew's assigning
+you to this type of case._
+
+"My God," Malone said softly.
+
+Sir Lewis laid down his pipe in a handy ashtray. "Of course," he said,
+"you will find it difficult to pick up anyone but Lou, at first. The
+rapport between you two is really quite strong."
+
+"Very strong indeed," Lou murmured. Malone found himself beginning to
+blush.
+
+"It will be some time yet," Sir Lewis went on, "before you can really
+call yourself a telepath, my boy."
+
+"I'll bet it will," Malone said. "Before I can call myself a telepath
+I'm going to have to get thoroughly used to the idea. And that's going
+to take a long, long time indeed."
+
+"You only think that," Sir Lewis said. "Actually, you're used to the
+idea now. That was Andrew's big job."
+
+"His big job?" Malone said. "Now, wait a minute--"
+
+"You don't think I picked you for our first psionics case out of thin
+air, do you?" Burris said. "Before anything else, you had to be forced
+to accept the fact that such things as telepaths really existed."
+
+"Oh, they do," Malone said. "They certainly do."
+
+"There's me, for instance," Burris said. "But you had to be convinced.
+So I ordered you to go out and find one."
+
+"Like the Bluebird of Happiness," Malone said.
+
+Burris frowned. "What's like the Bluebird of Happiness?" he said.
+
+"You are," Malone said.
+
+"I am not," Burris said indignantly. "Bluebirds eat worms. My God,
+Malone."
+
+"But the Bluebird," Malone said doggedly, "was right at home all the
+time, while everyone searched for it far away. And I had to go far
+away to find a telepath, when you were the one who ordered me to do
+it."
+
+"Right," Burris said. "So you went and found Her Majesty. And, when
+you did find her, she forced acceptance on you simply by being Her
+Majesty and proving to you, once and for all, that she could read
+minds."
+
+"Great," Malone said. "Of course, I could have got myself killed
+taking these lessons--"
+
+"We were watching you," Burris said. "If anything had happened, we'd
+have been right on the spot."
+
+"In time to bury the body," Malone said. "I think that's very
+thoughtful of you."
+
+"We would have arrived in time to save you," Burris said. "Don't
+quibble. You're alive, aren't you?"
+
+"Well," Malone said slowly, "if you're not sure, I don't know how I
+can convince you."
+
+"There," Burris said triumphantly. "You see?"
+
+Malone sighed wearily. "Okay," he said. "So you sent me out to find a
+telepath and to prove to me that there were such things. And I did.
+And then what happened?"
+
+"You had a year," Burris said, "to get used to the idea of somebody
+reading your mind."
+
+"Thanks," Malone said. "Of course, I didn't know it was you."
+
+"It was Her Majesty too," Burris said. "Everybody."
+
+"Good old Malone," Malone said. "The human peep-show."
+
+"Now, that's what we mean," Sir Lewis broke in. "Subconsciously, you
+disliked the idea of leaving your thoughts bare to anyone, even a
+sweet little old lady. To some extent, you still do. But that will
+pass."
+
+"Goody," Malone said.
+
+"The residue is simply not important," Sir Lewis went on. "Your
+telepathic talents prove that."
+
+"Oh, fine," Malone said. "Here I am reading minds and teleporting and
+all sorts of things. What will the boys back at Headquarters think
+now?"
+
+"We'll get to that," Burris said. "But that first case did one more
+thing for you. Because you didn't like the idea of leaving your mind
+open, you began to develop a shield. That allowed you some sort of
+mental privacy."
+
+"And then," Malone said, "I met Mike Fueyo and his little gang of
+teleporting juvenile delinquents."
+
+"So that you could develop a psionic ability of your own," Burris
+said. "That completed your acceptance. But it took a threat to
+solidify that shield. That was step three. When you discovered your
+mind was being tampered with--"
+
+"The shield started growing stronger," Malone said. "Sure. Her Majesty
+told me that, though she didn't know why."
+
+"Right," Burris said.
+
+"But, wait a minute," Malone said. "How could I do all that without
+knowing it? How would I know that some of my thoughts were safe behind
+a shield if I didn't know the shield existed and couldn't even tell if
+my mind were being read?" He paused. "Does that make sense?" he asked.
+
+"It does," Burris said, "but it shouldn't."
+
+"What?" Malone said.
+
+"Two years ago, you had the answer to that one," Burris said. "Dr.
+O'Connor's machine. Remember why it did detect when a person's mind
+was being read?"
+
+"Oh," Malone said. "Oh, sure. He said that any human being would know,
+subconsciously, whether his mind was being read."
+
+"He did, indeed," Burris said. "And then we came to the fourth step:
+to put you in rapport with some psionicist who could teach you how to
+control the shield, how to raise and lower it, you might say. To learn
+to accept other thoughts, as well as reject them. To learn to accept
+your full telepathic talent. That was Lou's job."
+
+"Lou's ... job?" Malone said. He felt his own shield go up. The
+thoughts behind it weren't pleasant. Lou had been ... well, hired to
+stay with him. She had pretended to like him; it was part of her job.
+
+That was perfectly clear now.
+
+Horribly clear.
+
+"You are now on your way," Sir Lewis said, "to being a real
+psionicist."
+
+"Fine," Malone said dully. "But why me? Why not, oh, Wolfe Wolf? I'd
+think he'd have a better chance than I would."
+
+"My secretary," Burris said, "has talents enough of his own. But you,
+you're something brand-new. It's wonderful, Malone. It's exciting."
+
+"It's a new taste thrill," Malone murmured. "Try Bon-Ton B-Complex
+Bolsters. Learn to eat your blanket as well as sleep with it."
+
+"What?" Burris said.
+
+"Never mind," Malone said. "You wouldn't understand."
+
+"But I--"
+
+"I know you wouldn't," Malone said, "because I don't."
+
+Sir Lewis cleared his throat "My dear boy," he said, "you represent a
+breakthrough. You are an adult."
+
+"That," Malone said testily, "is not news."
+
+"But you are a telepathic adult," Sir Lewis said. "Many of them are
+capable of developing it into a useful ability. Children who have the
+talent may accidentally develop the ability to use it, but that almost
+invariably results in insanity. Without proper guidance, a child is no
+more capable of handling the variety of impressions it receives from
+adult minds than it is capable of understanding a complex piece of
+modern music. The effort to make a coherent whole out of the
+impression overstrains the mind, so to speak, and the damage is
+permanent."
+
+"So here I am," Malone said, "and I'm not nuts. At least I don't think
+I'm nuts."
+
+"Because you are an adult," Sir Lewis went on. "Telepathy seems to be
+almost impossible to develop in an adult, even difficult to test for
+it. A child may be tested comparatively simply; an adult, seldom or
+never."
+
+He paused to relight his pipe.
+
+"However," he went on, "the Psychical Research Society's executive
+board discovered a method of bringing out the ability in a talented
+child as far back as 1931. All of us who are sane telepaths today owe
+our ability to that process, which was applied to us, in each case,
+before the age of sixteen."
+
+"How about me?" Malone said.
+
+"You," Sir Lewis said, "are the first adult ever to learn the use of
+psionic powers from scratch."
+
+"Oh," Malone said. "And that's why Mike Fueyo, for instance, could
+learn to teleport, though his older sister couldn't."
+
+"Mike was an experiment," Sir Lewis said. "We decided to teach him
+teleportation without teaching him telepathy. You saw what happened."
+
+"Sure I did," Malone said. "I had to stop it."
+
+"We were forced to make you stop him," Sir Lewis said. "But we also
+let him teach you his abilities."
+
+"So I'm an experiment," Malone said.
+
+"A successful experiment," Sir Lewis added.
+
+"Well," Malone said dully, "bully for me."
+
+"Don't feel that way," Sir Lewis said. "We have--"
+
+He stopped suddenly, and glanced at the others. Burris and Lou stood
+up, and Sir Lewis followed them.
+
+"Sorry," Sir Lewis said in a different tone. "There's something
+important that we must take care of. Something quite urgent, I'm
+afraid."
+
+"You can go on home, Malone," Burris said. "We'll talk later, but
+right now there's a crisis coming and we've got to help. Leave the
+car. I'll take care of it."
+
+"Sure," Malone said, without moving.
+
+Lou said, "Ken--" and stopped. Then the three of them turned and
+started up the long, curving staircase that led to the upstairs rooms.
+
+Malone sat in the Morris chair for several long minutes, wishing that
+he were dead. Nobody made a sound. He rubbed his hands over the soft
+leather and tried to tell himself that he was lucky, and talented, and
+successful.
+
+But he didn't care.
+
+He closed his eyes at last, and took a deep breath.
+
+Then he vanished.
+
+
+16
+
+Two hours passed, somehow. Bourbon and soda helped them pass, Malone
+discovered; he drank two highballs slowly, trying not to think about
+anything, and kept staring around at the walls of his apartment
+without really seeing anything. He felt terrible.
+
+He made himself a third bourbon and soda and started in on it. Maybe
+this one would make him feel better. Maybe, he thought, he ought to
+break out the cigars and celebrate.
+
+But there didn't seem to be very much to celebrate, somehow.
+
+He felt like a guinea pig being congratulated on having successfully
+resisted a germ during an experiment.
+
+He drank some more of the bourbon and soda. Guinea pigs didn't drink
+bourbon and soda, he told himself. He was better off than a guinea
+pig. He was happier than a guinea pig. But he couldn't imagine any
+guinea pig in the world, no matter how heartbroken, feeling any worse
+than Kenneth J. Malone.
+
+He looked up. There was another guinea pig in the room.
+
+Then he frowned. She wasn't a guinea pig. She was one off the
+experimenters. She was the one the guinea pig was supposed to fall in
+love with, so the guinea pig could be nice and telepathic and all the
+other experimenters could congratulate themselves. But whoever heard
+of a scientist falling in love with a guinea pig? It was fate. And
+fate was awful. Malone had often suspected it, but now he was sure.
+Now he saw things from the guinea pig's side, and fate was terrible.
+
+"But Ken," the experimenter said. "It isn't like that at all."
+
+"It is, too," Malone said. "It's even worse, but that'll have to wait.
+When I have some more to drink it will get worse. Watch and see."
+
+"But Ken--" Lou hesitated, and then went on. "Don't feel sad about
+being an experiment. We're all experiments."
+
+"I'm the guinea pig," Malone said. "I'm the only guinea pig. You said
+so."
+
+"No, Ken," she said. "Remember, all of us in the PRS got early
+training when it was new and untried. Some of those methods weren't as
+good as we now have them; that's why a man like your boss sometimes
+tends to have a little trouble."
+
+"Sure," Malone said. "But I'm your guinea pig. You made me dance
+through hoops and do tricks and everything just for an experiment.
+That's what." He took another swallow of his drink. "See?" he said.
+"It's getting worse already."
+
+"No, it's not," Lou said. "It's getting better, if you'll only listen.
+I wasn't given this job, Ken. I volunteered for it."
+
+"That isn't any better," Malone said morosely.
+
+"I volunteered because I--because I liked you," Lou said. "Because I
+wanted to work with you, wanted to be with you."
+
+"It's more experimenting," Malone said flatly. "More guinea-pigging
+around."
+
+"It isn't, Ken," Lou said. "Believe me. Look into my mind. Believe
+me."
+
+Malone tried. A second passed...
+
+And then a long time passed, without any words at all.
+
+"Well, well," Malone said at last. "If this is the life of a guinea
+pig, I'm all for it."
+
+"I'm all for guinea pigs' rights," Lou said. "Life, Liberty and the
+Pursuit of Me."
+
+"Agreed," Malone said. "How about that crisis, by the way? Are you
+going to have to leave suddenly again?"
+
+Lou stretched lazily on the couch. "That's all over with, thank God,"
+she said. "We had to get our agent out of Miami Beach, and cover his
+tracks at the same time."
+
+"Tricky," Malone said.
+
+"Very," Lou said.
+
+"But--" Malone blinked. "Wait a minute," he said. "Your agent? You
+mean you had Governor Flarion killed?"
+
+Lou nodded soberly. "We had to," she said. "That paranoid mind of his
+had built up a shield we simply couldn't get through. He had plans for
+making himself president, you know--and all the terrifying
+potentialities of an embryonic Hitler." She grimaced. "We don't like
+being forced to kill," she said, "but sometimes we've got to."
+
+Malone thought of his own .44 Magnum, and the times he had used it,
+and nodded very slowly.
+
+"There are still a couple of questions, though," he said. "For
+instance, there's that trip to Russia. Why _did_ you make it? Was it
+your father?"
+
+"Of course it was," Lou said. "We had to get him back in and make sure
+he was safe."
+
+"You mean that Vasili Garbitsch is a PSR member?" Malone said,
+stunned.
+
+"Well, really," Lou said. "Did you think my father would really be a
+spy? We had to get him back to Russia; he was needed for work in the
+Kremlin. That's why we nudged Boyd into making the arrest."
+
+"And the others?" Malone said. "Brubitsch and Borbitsch?"
+
+"Real spies," Lou said. "Bad ones, but real. Any more questions?"
+
+"Some," Malone said. "Were you kidding about that drink in Moscow?"
+
+She shook her head. "I wish I had been," she said. "But I was
+concentrating on Petkoff, who didn't know a thing about the drugged
+drink. I didn't catch anything else until after I'd swallowed it. And
+then it was too late."
+
+"Good old Petkoff," Malone said. "Always helpful. But he was right
+about one thing, anyway."
+
+"What?" Lou said.
+
+"The FBI," Malone said. "He told us it was a secret police
+organization. And, by God, in a way it is!"
+
+Lou grinned. Malone started to laugh outright. They found themselves
+very close and the laughter stopped, and there was some more time
+without words. When Malone broke free, he had a suddenly sobered
+expression on his face.
+
+"Hey," he said. "What about Tom Boyd? He knows a lot but he hasn't got
+any talents, as far as I know, and--"
+
+"He'll be all right," Lou said. "Andrew and the others have thought of
+that."
+
+"But he knows an awful lot about the evidence I dug up."
+
+"Andrew will give him a cover-up explanation they're working out," Lou
+said. "That will convince Boyd there's nothing more to worry about. Of
+course, we may have to change his mind about a few things, but we can
+do that, probably through you, since you know him best. There's
+nothing for you to worry over, Ken. Nothing at all."
+
+"Good," Malone said. He leaned over and kissed her. "Because I'm not
+in the least worried."
+
+Lou sighed deeply, looking off into space.
+
+"Luba Malone," she said. "It sounds nice. And, after all, my mother
+was Irish. At least it sounds better than Garbitsch."
+
+"What doesn't?" Malone said automatically. Then he blinked. "Hey,
+_I'm_ Malone!" he said. "How could you be Malone?"
+
+"Me?" Lou said. She caroled happily. "I'm Malone because I love you,
+love you with all my heart."
+
+"That," Malone said, "does it. A woman after my own heart."
+
+Lou made a low curtsy.
+
+"And a woman of grace and breeding," Malone said. "Eftsoons, if that
+means anything."
+
+"You know," Lou said, "I like you even better when you're being Sir
+Kenneth. Especially when you're talking to yourself."
+
+"My innate gallantry and all my good qualities come out," Malone said.
+
+"Yes," Lou said. "Indeed they do. All over the place. It's nice to go
+back to Elizabethan times, anyhow, in the middle of all these
+troubles."
+
+"Oh, I don't know," Malone said. "There's always been trouble. In the
+Middle Ages, it was witches. In the Seventeenth Century, it was
+demons. In the Nineteenth it was revolutions. In--"
+
+Lou cut him off with a kiss. When she broke away Malone raised his
+eyebrows.
+
+"I prithee," he said, "interrupt me not. I am developing a scheme of
+philosophy. There have always been troubles. In the 1890's there was a
+Depression and panic, and the Spanish-American War--"
+
+"All right, Sirrah," Lou said. "And then what?"
+
+"Let's see," Malone said, reverting to 1973 for a second. "In 1903
+there was the airplane, and troubles abroad."
+
+"Yes?" Lou said. "Do go on, Sirrah. Your liege awaits your slightest
+word."
+
+"Hmm," Malone said.
+
+"That, Milord, was a very slight word indeed," Lou said. "What's after
+1903?"
+
+Malone smiled and went back to the days of the First Elizabeth
+happily.
+
+"In 1914, it was enemy aliens," said Sir Kenneth Malone.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Supermind, by 
+Gordon Randall Garrett and Laurence Mark Janifer
+
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+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold;'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Supermind, by Randall Garrett and Laurence M. Janifer</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you
+are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the
+country where you are located before using this eBook.
+</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: Supermind</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Randall Garrett and Laurence M. Janifer</div>
+<div style='display:block;margin:1em 0'>Release Date: August 16, 2007 [eBook #22342]<br />
+[Most recently updated: January 16, 2022]</div>
+<div style='display:block;margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
+<div style='display:block;margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Revised: Richard Tonsing.</div>
+<div style='margin-top:2em;margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUPERMIND ***</div>
+
+
+
+<p>Transcriber’s Note:</p>
+
+<p>This etext was produced from the 1963 book publication of the story.
+Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the copyright on
+this publication was renewed.</p>
+
+<p>Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without
+note.</p>
+
+<p>The word “PLaza” (two capital letters) was correct usage to designate
+a telephone exchange at the time the story was written. It has been
+left as printed.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h1 class="nobreak" id="Supermind">Supermind</h1>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Mark Phillips</p>
+
+
+<p>
+
+<!-- Autogenerated TOC. Modify or delete as required. -->
+
+<a href="#Supermind">Supermind</a><br />
+<a href="#c1">1</a><br />
+<a href="#c2">2</a><br />
+<a href="#c3">3</a><br />
+<a href="#c4">4</a><br />
+<a href="#c5">5</a><br />
+<a href="#c6">6</a><br />
+<a href="#c7">7</a><br />
+<a href="#c8">8</a><br />
+<a href="#c9">9</a><br />
+<a href="#c10">10</a><br />
+<a href="#c11">11</a><br />
+<a href="#c12">12</a><br />
+<a href="#c13">13</a><br />
+<a href="#c14">14</a><br />
+<a href="#c15">15</a><br />
+<a href="#c16">16</a><br />
+
+<!-- End Autogenerated TOC. -->
+
+</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c1">1</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>In 1914, it was enemy aliens.</p>
+
+<p>In 1930, it was Wobblies.</p>
+
+<p>In 1957, it was fellow travelers.</p>
+
+<p>In 1971, it was insane telepaths.</p>
+
+<p>And, in 1973:</p>
+
+<p>“We don’t know <i>what</i> the hell it is,” said Andrew J. Burris, Director
+of the FBI. He threw his hands in the air and looked baffled and
+confused.</p>
+
+<p>Kenneth J. Malone tried to appear sympathetic. “What what is?” he
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>Burris frowned and drummed his fingers on his big desk. “Malone,” he
+said, “make sense. And don’t stutter.”</p>
+
+<p>“Stutter?” Malone said. “You said you didn’t know what it was. What
+the hell it was. And I wanted to know what it was.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s just it,” Burris said. “I don’t know.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone sighed and repressed an impulse to scream. “Now wait a minute,
+Chief—” he started.</p>
+
+<p>Burris frowned again. “Don’t call me Chief,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone nodded. “Okay,” he said. “But if you don’t know what it is, you
+must have some idea of what you don’t know. I mean, is it larger than
+a breadbox? Does it perform helpful tasks? Is it self-employed?”</p>
+
+<p>“Malone,” Burris sighed, “you ought to be on television.”</p>
+
+<p>“But—”</p>
+
+<p>“Let me explain,” Burris said. His voice was calmer now, and he spoke
+as if he were enunciating nothing but the most obvious and eternal
+truths. “The country,” he said, “is going to hell in a handbasket.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone nodded again. “Well, after all, Chief—”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t call me Chief,” Burris said wearily.</p>
+
+<p>“Anything you say,” Malone agreed peacefully. He eyed the Director of
+the FBI warily. “After all, it isn’t anything new,” he went on. “The
+country’s always been going to hell in a handbasket, one way or
+another. Look at Rome.”</p>
+
+<p>“Rome?” Burris said.</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Malone said. “Rome was always going to hell in a handbasket,
+and finally it—” He paused. “Finally it did, I guess,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Exactly,” Burris said. “And so are we. Finally.” He passed a hand
+over his forehead and stared past Malone at a spot on the wall. Malone
+turned and looked at the spot, but saw nothing of interest. “Malone,”
+Burris said, and the FBI agent whirled around again.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Ch—Yes?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“This time,” Burris said, “it isn’t the same old story at all. This
+time it’s different.”</p>
+
+<p>“Different?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Burris nodded. “Look at it this way,” he said. His eyes returned to
+the agent. “Suppose you’re a congressman,” he went on, “and you find
+evidence of inefficiency in the government.”</p>
+
+<p>“All right,” Malone said agreeably. He had the feeling that if he
+waited around a little while everything would make sense, and he was
+willing to wait. After all, he wasn’t on assignment at the moment, and
+there was nothing pressing waiting for him. He was even between
+romances.</p>
+
+<p>If he waited long enough, he told himself, Andrew J. Burris might say
+something worth hearing. He looked attentive and eager. He considered
+leaning over the desk a little, to look even more eager, but decided
+against it; Burris might think he looked threatening. There was no
+telling.</p>
+
+<p>“You’re a congressman,” Burris said, “and the government is
+inefficient. You find evidence of it. What do you do?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone blinked and thought for a second. It didn’t take any longer
+than that to come up with the old, old answer. “I start an
+investigation,” he said. “I get a committee and I talk to a lot of
+newspaper editors and magazine editors and maybe I go on television
+and talk some more, and my committee has a lot of meetings—”</p>
+
+<p>“Exactly,” Burris said.</p>
+
+<p>“And we talk a lot at the meetings,” Malone went on, carried away,
+“and get a lot of publicity, and we subpoena famous people, just as
+famous as we can get, except governors or presidents, because you
+can’t—they tried that back in the Fifties, and it didn’t work very
+well—and that gives us some more publicity, and then when we have all
+the publicity we can possibly get—”</p>
+
+<p>“You stop,” Burris said hurriedly.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s right,” Malone said. “We stop. And that’s what I’d do.”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course, the problem of inefficiency is left exactly where it
+always was,” Burris said. “Nothing’s been done about it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Naturally,” Malone said. “But think of all the lovely publicity. And
+all the nice talk. And the subpoenas and committees and everything.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Burris said wearily. “It’s happened a thousand times. But,
+Malone, that’s the difference. It isn’t happening this time.”</p>
+
+<p>There was a short pause. “What do you mean?” Malone said at last.</p>
+
+<p>“This time,” Burris said, in a tone that sounded almost awed, “they
+want to keep it a secret.”</p>
+
+<p>“A secret?” Malone said, blinking. “But that’s—that’s not the
+American way.”</p>
+
+<p>Burris shrugged. “It’s un-congressman-like, anyhow,” he said. “But
+that’s what they’ve done. Tiptoed over to me and whispered softly that
+the thing has to be investigated quietly. Naturally, they didn’t give
+me any orders—but only because they know they can’t make one stick.
+They suggested it pretty strongly.”</p>
+
+<p>“Any reasons?” Malone said. The whole idea interested him strangely.
+It was odd—and he found himself almost liking odd cases, lately. That
+is, he amended hurriedly, if they didn’t get <i>too</i> odd.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, they had reasons, all right,” Burris said. “It took a little
+coaxing, but I managed to pry some loose. You see, every one of them
+found inefficiency in his own department. And every one knows that
+other men are investigating inefficiency.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s right,” Burris said. “Every one of them came to me to get me
+to prove that the goof-ups in his particular department weren’t his
+fault. That covers them in case one of the others happens to light
+into the department.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, it must be <i>somebody’s</i> fault,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“It isn’t theirs,” Burris said wearily, “I ought to know. They told
+me. At great length, Malone.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone felt a stab of honest pity. “How many so far?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Six,” Burris said. “Four representatives, and two senators.”</p>
+
+<p>“Only two?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Burris said, “the Senate is so much smaller. And, besides, we
+may get more. As a matter of fact, Senator Lefferts is worth any six
+representatives all by himself.”</p>
+
+<p>“He is?” Malone said, puzzled. Senator Lefferts was not one of his
+favorite people. Nor, as far as he knew, did the somewhat excitable
+senator hold any place of honor in the heart of Andrew J. Burris.</p>
+
+<p>“I mean his story,” Burris said. “I’ve never heard anything like it—
+at least, not since the Bilbo days. And I’ve only heard about those,”
+he added hurriedly.</p>
+
+<p>“What story?” Malone said. “He talked about inefficiency—”</p>
+
+<p>“Not exactly,” Burris said carefully. “He said that somebody was out
+to get him—him, personally. He said somebody was trying to discredit
+him by sabotaging all his legislative plans.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Malone said, feeling that some comment was called for, “three
+cheers.”</p>
+
+<p>“That isn’t the point,” Burris snapped. “No matter how we feel about
+Senator Lefferts or his legislative plans, we’re sworn to protect him.
+And he says ‘they’ are out to get him.”</p>
+
+<p>“They?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“You know,” Burris said, shrugging. “The great ‘they.’ The invisible
+enemies all around, working against him.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” Malone said. “Paranoid?” He had always thought Senator Lefferts
+was slightly on the batty side, and the idea of real paranoia didn’t
+come as too much of a surprise. After all, when a man was batty to
+start out with ... and he even <i>looked</i> like a vampire, Malone thought
+confusedly.</p>
+
+<p>“As far as paranoia is concerned,” Burris said, “I checked with one of
+our own psych men, and he’ll back it up. Lefferts has definite
+paranoid tendencies, he says.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then,” Malone said, “that’s that.”</p>
+
+<p>Burris shook his head. “It isn’t that simple,” he said. “You see,
+Malone, there’s some evidence that somebody <i>is</i> working against him.”</p>
+
+<p>“The American public, with any luck at all,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“No,” Burris said. “An enemy. Somebody sabotaging his plans. Really.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone shook his head. “You’re crazy,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Burris looked shocked. “Malone, I’m the Director of the FBI,” he said.
+“And if you insist on being disrespectful—”</p>
+
+<p>“Sorry,” Malone murmured. “But—”</p>
+
+<p>“I am perfectly sane,” Burris said slowly. “It’s Senator Lefferts
+who’s crazy. The only trouble is, he has evidence to show he’s not.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone thought about odd cases, and suddenly wished he were somewhere
+else. Anywhere else. This one showed sudden signs of developing into
+something positively bizarre. “I see,” he said, wondering if he did.</p>
+
+<p>“After all,” Burris said, in a voice that attempted to sound
+reasonable, “a paranoid has just as much right to be persecuted as
+anybody else, doesn’t he?”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Malone said. “Everybody has rights. But what do you want me to
+do about that?”</p>
+
+<p>“About their rights?” Burris said. “Nothing, Malone. Nothing.”</p>
+
+<p>“I mean,” Malone said patiently, “about whatever it is that’s going
+on.”</p>
+
+<p>Burris took a deep breath. His hands clasped behind his head, and he
+looked up at the ceiling. He seemed perfectly relaxed. That, Malone
+knew, was a bad sign. It meant that there was a dirty job coming, a
+job nobody wanted to do, and one Burris was determined to pass off on
+him. He sighed and tried to get resigned.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” the FBI director said, “the only actual trouble we can
+pinpoint is that there seem to be a great many errors occurring in the
+paperwork. More than usual.”</p>
+
+<p>“People get tired,” Malone said tentatively.</p>
+
+<p>“But computer-secretary calculating machines don’t,” Burris said. “And
+that’s where the errors are, in the computer-secretaries down in the
+Senate Office Building. I think you’d better start out there.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Malone said sadly.</p>
+
+<p>“See if there’s any mechanical or electrical defect in any of those
+computers,” Burris said. “Talk to the computer technicians. Find out
+what’s causing all these errors.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, sir,” Malone said. He was still trying to feel resigned, but he
+wasn’t succeeding very well.</p>
+
+<p>“And if you don’t find anything—” Burris began.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll come right back,” Malone said instantly.</p>
+
+<p>“No,” Burris said. “You keep on looking.”</p>
+
+<p>“I do?”</p>
+
+<p>“You do,” Burris said. “After all, there has to be <i>something</i> wrong.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Malone said, “if you say so. But—”</p>
+
+<p>“There are the interview tapes,” Burris said, “and the reports the
+Congressmen brought in. You can go through those.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone sighed. “I guess so,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“And there must be thousands of other things to do,” Burris said.</p>
+
+<p>“Well—” Malone began cautiously.</p>
+
+<p>“You’ll be able to think of them,” Burris said heartily. “I know you
+will. I have confidence in you, Malone. Confidence.”</p>
+
+<p>“Thanks,” Malone said sadly.</p>
+
+<p>“You just keep me posted from time to time on what you’re doing, and
+what ideas you get,” Burris said. “I’m leaving the whole thing in your
+hands, Malone, and I’m sure you won’t disappoint me.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll try,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“I know you will,” Burris said warmly. “And no matter how long it
+takes, I know you’ll succeed.”</p>
+
+<p>“No matter how long it takes?” Malone said hesitantly.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s right!” Burris said. “You can do it, Malone! You can do it.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone nodded slowly. “I hope so,” he said. “Well, I—Well, I’ll start
+out right away, then.”</p>
+
+<p>He turned. Before he could make another move Burris said, “Wait!”</p>
+
+<p>Malone turned again, hope in his eyes. “Yes, sir?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“When you leave—” Burris began, and the hope disappeared. “When you
+leave,” he went on, “please do one little favor for me. Just one
+little favor, because I’m an old, tired man and I’m not used to things
+any more.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Malone said. “Anything, Chief.”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t call me—”</p>
+
+<p>“Sorry,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Burris breathed heavily. “When you leave,” he said, “please, please
+use the door.”</p>
+
+<p>“But—”</p>
+
+<p>“Malone,” Burris said, “I’ve tried. I’ve really tried. Believe me.
+I’ve tried to get used to the fact that you can teleport. But—”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s useful,” Malone said, “in my work.”</p>
+
+<p>“I can see that,” Burris said. “And I don’t want you to, well, to stop
+doing it. By no means. It’s just that it sort of unnerves me, if you
+see what I mean. No matter how useful it is for the FBI to have an
+agent who can go instantaneously from one place to another, it
+unnerves me.” He sighed. “I can’t get used to seeing you disappear
+like an overdried soap bubble, Malone. It does something to me, here.”
+He placed a hand directly over his sternum and sighed again.</p>
+
+<p>“I can understand that,” Malone said. “It unnerved me, too, the first
+time I saw it. I thought I was going crazy, when that kid—Mike
+Fueyo—winked out like a light. But then we got him, and some FBI
+agents besides me have learned the trick.” He stopped there, wondering
+if he’d been tactful. After all, it took a latent ability to learn
+teleportation, and some people had it, while others didn’t. Malone,
+along with a few other agents, did. Burris evidently didn’t, so he
+couldn’t teleport, no matter how hard he tried or how many lessons he
+took.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Burris said, “I’m still unnerved. So please, Malone, when you
+come in here, or go out, use the door. All right?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, sir,” Malone said. He turned and went out. As he opened the
+door, he could almost hear Burris’ sigh of relief. Then he banged it
+shut behind him and, feeling that he might as well continue with his
+space-bound existence, walked all the way to the elevator, and rode it
+downstairs to the FBI laboratories.</p>
+
+<p>The labs, highly efficient and divided into dozens of departments,
+covered several floors. Malone passed through the Fingerprint section,
+filled with technicians doing strange things to great charts and
+slides, and frowning over tiny pieces of material and photographs.
+Then came Forgery Detection, involving many more technicians, many
+more slides and charts and tiny pieces of things and photographs, and
+even a witness or two sitting on the white bench at one side and
+looking lost and somehow civilian. Identification Classified was next,
+a great barn of a room filled with index files. The real indexes were
+in the sub-basement; here, on microfilm, were only the basic
+divisions. A man was standing in front of one of the files, frowning
+at it. Malone went on by without stopping.</p>
+
+<p>Cosmetic Surgery Classification came next. Here there were more
+indexes, and there were also charts and slides. There was an agent
+sitting on a bench looking bored while two female technicians—
+classified as O&amp;U for Old and Ugly in Malone’s mind—fluttered around
+him, deciding what disguises were possible, and which of those was
+indicated for the particular job on hand. Malone waved to the agent,
+whom he knew very slightly, and went on. He felt vaguely regretful
+that the FBI couldn’t hire prettier girls for Cosmetic Surgery, but
+the trouble was that pretty girls fell for the Agents, and vice versa,
+and this led to an unfortunate tendency toward only handsome and
+virile-looking disguises. The O&amp;U division was unfortunate, he
+decided, but a necessity.</p>
+
+<p>Chemical Analysis (III) was next. The Chemical Analysis Section was
+scattered over several floors, with the first stages up above.
+Division III, Malone remembered, was devoted to nonpoisonous
+substances, like clay or sand found in boots or trouser cuffs, cigar
+ashes and such. They were placed on the same floor as Fingerprints to
+allow free and frequent passage between the sections on the problems
+of plastic prints, made in putty or like substances, and visible
+prints, made when the hand is covered with a visible substance like
+blood, ketchup or glue.</p>
+
+<p>Malone found what he was looking for at the very end of the floor. It
+was the Computer Section, a large room filled with humming, clacking
+and buzzing machines of an ancient vintage, muttering to themselves as
+they worked, and newer machines which were smaller and more silent.
+Lights were lighting and bells were ringing softly, relays were
+relaying and the whole room was a gigantic maze of calculating and
+control machines. What space wasn’t filled by the machines themselves
+was filled by workbenches, all littered with an assortment of gears,
+tubes, spare relays, transistors, wires, rods, bolts, resistors and
+all the other paraphernalia used in building the machines and
+repairing them. Beyond the basic room were other, smaller rooms, each
+assigned to a particular kind of computer work.</p>
+
+<p>The narrow aisles were choked here and there with men who looked up as
+Malone passed by, but most of them gave him one quick glance and went
+back to work. A few didn’t even do that, but went right on
+concentrating on their jobs. Malone headed for a man working all alone
+in front of a workbench, frowning down at a complicated-looking
+mechanism that seemed to have neither head nor tail, and prodding at
+it with a long, thin screwdriver. The man was thin, too, but not very
+long; he was a little under average height, and he had straight black
+hair, thick-lensed glasses and a studious expression, even when he was
+frowning. He looked as if the mechanism were a student who had cut too
+many classes, and he was being kind but firm with it.</p>
+
+<p>Malone managed to get to the man’s side, and coughed discreetly. There
+was no response.</p>
+
+<p>“Fred?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>The screwdriver waggled a little. Malone wasn’t quite sure that the
+man was breathing.</p>
+
+<p>“Fred Mitchell,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Mitchell didn’t look up. Another second passed.</p>
+
+<p>“Hey,” Malone said. Then he closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
+“Fred,” he said in a loud, reasonable-sounding voice, “the State
+Department’s translator has started to talk pig-Latin.”</p>
+
+<p>Mitchell straightened up as if somebody had jabbed him with a pin. The
+screwdriver waved wildly in the air for a second, and then pointed at
+Malone. “That’s impossible,” Mitchell said in a flat, precise voice.
+“Simply impossible. It doesn’t have a pig-Latin circuit. It can’t
+possibly—” He blinked and seemed to see Malone for the first time.
+“Oh,” he said. “Hello, Malone. What can I do for you?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone smiled, feeling a little victorious at having got through the
+Mitchell armor, which was almost impregnable when there was a job in
+hand. “I’ve been standing here talking to you for some time.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, have you?” Mitchell said. “I was busy.” That, obviously,
+explained that. Malone shrugged.</p>
+
+<p>“I want you to help me check over some calculators, Fred,” he said.
+“We’ve had some reports that some of the government machines are out
+of kilter, and I’d like you to go over them for me.”</p>
+
+<p>“Out of kilter?” Fred Mitchell said. “No, you can forget about it.
+It’s absolutely unnecessary to make a check, believe me. Absolutely.
+Forget it.” He smiled suddenly. “I suppose it’s some kind of a joke,
+isn’t it?” he said, just a trifle uncertainly. Fred Mitchell’s world,
+while pleasant, did not include much humor, Malone knew. “It’s
+supposed to be funny,” he said in the same flat, precise voice.</p>
+
+<p>“It isn’t funny,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Fred sighed. “Then they’re obviously lying,” he said, “and that’s all
+there is to it. Why bother me with it?”</p>
+
+<p>“Lying, Fred?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly,” Fred said. He looked at the machinery with longing.</p>
+
+<p>Malone took a breath. “How do you know?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Fred sighed. “It’s perfectly obvious,” he said in a patient tone.
+“Since the State Department translator has no pig-Latin circuit, it
+can’t possibly be talking pig-Latin. I will admit that such a circuit
+would be relatively easy to build, though it would have no utility as
+far as I can see. Except, of course, for a joke.” He paused. “Joke?”
+he said, in a slightly uneasy tone.</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Malone said. “Joke.”</p>
+
+<p>Mitchell looked relieved. “Very well, then,” he began. “Since—”</p>
+
+<p>“Wait a minute,” Malone said. “The pig-Latin is a joke. That’s right.
+But I’m not talking about the pig-Latin.”</p>
+
+<p>“You’re not?” Mitchell asked, surprised.</p>
+
+<p>“No,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Mitchell frowned. “But you said—” he began.</p>
+
+<p>“A joke,” Malone said. “You were perfectly right. The pig-Latin is a
+joke.” He waited for Fred’s expression to clear, and then added: “But
+what I want to talk to you about isn’t.”</p>
+
+<p>“It sounds very confused,” Fred said after a pause. “Not at all the
+sort of thing that—that usually goes on.”</p>
+
+<p>“You have no idea,” Malone said. “It’s about the political machines,
+all right, but it isn’t anything as simple as pig-Latin.” He
+explained, taking his time over it.</p>
+
+<p>When he had finished, Fred was nodding his head slowly. “I see,” he
+said. “I understand just what you want me to do.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll take a team over to the Senate Office Building,” Fred said, “and
+check the computer-secretaries there. That way, you see, I’ll be able
+to do a full running check on them without taking any one machine out
+of operation for too long.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“And it shouldn’t take long,” Fred went on, “to find out just what the
+trouble is.” He looked very confident.</p>
+
+<p>“How long?” Malone asked.</p>
+
+<p>Fred shrugged. “Oh,” he said, “five or six days.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone repressed an impulse to scream. “Days?” he said. “I mean—well,
+look, Fred, it’s important. Very important. Can’t you do the job any
+faster?”</p>
+
+<p>Fred gave a little sigh. “Checking and repairing all those machines,”
+he said, “is an extremely complex job. Sometimes, Malone, I don’t
+think you realize quite how complex and how delicate a job it is to
+deal with such a high-order machine. Why—”</p>
+
+<p>“Wait a minute,” Malone said. “Check and repair them?”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course,” Fred said.</p>
+
+<p>“But I don’t want them repaired,” Malone said. Seeing the look of
+horror on Fred’s face, he added hastily, “I only want a report from
+you on what’s wrong, whether they are actually making errors or not.
+And if they are making errors, just what’s making them do it. And just
+what kind of errors. See?”</p>
+
+<p>Fred nodded very slowly. “But I can’t just leave them there,” he said
+piteously. “In pieces and everything. It isn’t right, Malone. It just
+isn’t right.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then,” Malone said with energy, “you go right ahead and repair
+them, if you want to. Fix ’em all up. But you can do that after you
+make the report to me, can’t you?”</p>
+
+<p>“I—” Fred hesitated. “I had planned to check and repair each machine
+on an individual basis.”</p>
+
+<p>“The Congress can allow for a short suspension,” Malone said. “Anyhow,
+they can now, or as soon as I get the word to them. Suppose you check
+all the machines first, and then get around to the repair work.”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s not the best way,” Fred demurred.</p>
+
+<p>Malone discovered that it was his turn to sigh. “Is it the fastest?”
+he said.</p>
+
+<p>Fred nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“Then it’s the best,” Malone said. “How long?”</p>
+
+<p>Fred rolled his eyes to the ceiling and calculated silently for a
+second. “Tomorrow morning,” he announced, returning his gaze to
+Malone.</p>
+
+<p>“Fine,” Malone said. “Fine.”</p>
+
+<p>“But—”</p>
+
+<p>“Never mind the buts,” Malone said hurriedly. “I’ll count on hearing
+from you tomorrow morning.”</p>
+
+<p>“All right.”</p>
+
+<p>“And if it looks like sabotage,” Malone added, “if the errors aren’t
+caused by normal wear and tear on the machines, you let me know right
+away. Phone me. Don’t waste an instant.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll—I’ll start right away,” Fred said heavily. He looked sadly at
+the mechanism he had been working on, and put his screwdriver down
+next to it. It looked to Malone as if he were putting flowers on the
+grave of a dear departed. “I’ll get a team together,” Fred added. He
+gave the mechanism and screwdriver one last fond parting look, and
+tore himself away.</p>
+
+<p>Malone looked after him for a second, thinking of nothing in
+particular, and then turned in the opposite direction and headed back
+toward the elevator. As he walked, he began to feel more and more
+pleased with himself. After all, he’d gotten the investigation
+started, hadn’t he?</p>
+
+<p>And now all he had to do was go back to his office and read some
+reports and listen to some interview tapes, and then he could go home.</p>
+
+<p>The reports and the interview tapes didn’t exactly sound like fun,
+Malone thought, but at the same time they seemed fairly innocent. He
+would work his way through them grimly, and maybe he would even
+indulge his most secret vice and smoke a cigar or two to make the work
+pass more pleasantly. Soon enough, he told himself, they would be
+finished.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes, though, he regretted the reputation he’d gotten. It had
+been bad enough in the old days, the pre-1971 days when Malone had
+thought he was just lucky. Burris had called him a Boy Wonder then,
+when he’d cracked three difficult cases in a row. Being just lucky had
+made it a little tough to live with the Boy Wonder label. After all,
+Malone thought, it wasn’t actually as if he’d done anything.</p>
+
+<p>But since 1971 and the case of the Telepathic Spy, things had gotten
+worse. Much worse. Now Malone wasn’t just lucky any more. Instead, he
+could teleport and he could even foretell the future a little, in a
+dim sort of way. He’d caught the Telepathic Spy that way, and when the
+case of the Teleporting Juvenile Delinquents had come up he’d been
+assigned to that one too, and he’d cracked it. Now Burris seemed to
+think of him as a kind of God, and gave him all the tough dirty jobs.</p>
+
+<p>And if he wasn’t just lucky any more, Malone couldn’t think of himself
+as a fearless, heroic FBI agent, either. He just wasn’t the type. He
+was ... well, talented. That was the word, he told himself: talented.
+He had all these talents and they made him look like something
+spectacular to Burris and the other FBI men. But he wasn’t, really. He
+hadn’t done anything really tough to get his talents; they’d just
+happened to him.</p>
+
+<p>Nobody, though, seemed to believe that. He heaved a little sigh and
+stepped into the waiting elevator.</p>
+
+<p>There were, after all, he thought, compensations. He’d had some good
+times, and the talents did come in handy. And he did have his pick of
+the vacation schedule lately. And he’d met some lovely girls....</p>
+
+<p>And besides, he told himself savagely as the elevator shot upward, he
+wasn’t going to do anything except return to his office and read some
+reports and listen to some tapes. And then he was going to go home and
+sleep all night, peacefully. And in the morning Mitchell was going to
+call him up and tell him that the computer-secretaries needed nothing
+more than a little repair. He’d say they were getting old, and he’d be
+a little pathetic about it; but it wouldn’t be anything serious.
+Malone would send out orders to get the machines repaired, and that
+would be that. And then the next case would be something both normal
+and exciting, like a bank robbery or a kidnapping involving a gorgeous
+blonde who would be so grateful to Malone that....</p>
+
+<p>He had stepped out of the elevator and gone down the corridor without
+noticing it. He pushed at his own office door and walked into the
+outer room. The train of thought he had been following was very nice,
+and sounded very attractive indeed, he told himself.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately, he didn’t believe it. His prescient ability,
+functioning with its usual efficient aplomb, told Malone that things
+would not be better, or simpler, in the morning. They would be worse,
+and more complicated.</p>
+
+<p>They would be quite a lot worse.</p>
+
+<p>And, as usual, that prescience was perfectly accurate.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c2">2</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>The telephone, Malone realized belatedly, had had a particularly
+nasty-sounding ring. He might have known it would be bad news.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, he told himself sadly, he had known.</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing at all wrong?” he said into the mouthpiece. “Not with any of
+the computers?” He blinked. “Not even one of them?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not a thing,” Mitchell said. “I’ll be sending a report up to you in a
+little while. You read it; we put them through every test, and it’s
+all detailed there.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m sure you were very thorough,” Malone said helplessly.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course we were,” Mitchell said. “Of course. And the machines
+passed every single test. Every one. Malone, it was beautiful.”</p>
+
+<p>“Goody,” Malone said at random. “But there’s got to be something—”</p>
+
+<p>“There is, Malone,” Fred said. “There is. I think there’s definitely
+something odd going on. Something funny. I mean peculiar, not
+humorous.”</p>
+
+<p>“I thought so,” Malone put in.</p>
+
+<p>“Right,” Fred said. “Malone, try and relax. This is a hard thing to
+say, and it must be even harder to hear, but—”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell me,” Malone said. “Who’s dead? Who’s been killed?”</p>
+
+<p>“I know it’s tough, Malone,” Fred went on.</p>
+
+<p>“Is everybody dead?” Malone said. “It can’t be just one person, not
+from that tone in your voice. Has somebody assassinated the entire
+senate? Or the president and his cabinet? Or—”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s nothing like that, Malone,” Fred said, in a tone that implied
+that such occurrences were really rather minor. “It’s the machines.”</p>
+
+<p>“The machines?”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s right,” Fred said grimly. “After we checked them over and
+found they were in good shape, I asked for samples of both the input
+and the output of each machine. I wanted to do a thorough job.”</p>
+
+<p>“Congratulations,” Malone said. “What happened?”</p>
+
+<p>Fred took a deep breath. “They don’t agree,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“They don’t?” Malone said. The phrase sounded as if it meant something
+momentous, but he couldn’t quite figure out what. In a minute, he
+thought confusedly, it would come to him. But did he want it to?</p>
+
+<p>“They definitely do not agree,” Fred was saying. “The correlation is
+erratic; it makes no statistical sense. Malone, there are two
+possibilities.”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell me about them,” Malone said. He was beginning to feel relieved.
+To Fred, the malfunction of a machine was more serious than the murder
+of the entire Congress. But Malone couldn’t quite bring himself to
+feel that way about things.</p>
+
+<p>“First,” Fred said in a tense tone, “it’s possible that the
+technicians feeding information to the machines are making all kinds
+of mistakes.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone nodded at the phone. “That sounds possible,” he said. “Which
+ones?”</p>
+
+<p>“All of them,” Fred said. “They’re all making errors—and they’re all
+making about the same number of errors. There don’t seem to be any
+real peaks or valleys, Malone; everybody’s doing it.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone thought of the Varsity Drag and repressed the thought. “A bunch
+of fumblebums,” he said. “All fumbling alike. It does sound unlikely,
+but I guess it’s possible. We’ll get after them right away, and—”</p>
+
+<p>“Wait,” Fred said. “There is a second possibility.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Maybe they aren’t mistakes,” Fred said. “Maybe the technicians are
+deliberately feeding the machine with wrong answers.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone hated to admit it, even to himself, but that answer sounded a
+lot more probable. Machine technicians weren’t exactly picked off the
+streets at random; they were highly trained for their work, and the
+idea of a whole crew of them starting to fumble at once, in a big way,
+was a little hard to swallow.</p>
+
+<p>The idea of all of them sabotaging the machines they worked on, Malone
+thought, was a tough one to take, too. But it had the advantage of
+making some sense. People, he told himself dully, will do nutty things
+deliberately. It’s harder to think of them doing the same nutty things
+without knowing it.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” he said at last, “however it turns out, we’ll get to the
+bottom of it. Frankly, I think it’s being done on purpose.”</p>
+
+<p>“So do I,” Fred said. “And when you find out just who’s making the
+technicians do such things—when you find out who gives them their
+orders—you let me know.”</p>
+
+<p>“Let you know?” Malone said. “But—”</p>
+
+<p>“Any man who would give false data to a perfectly innocent computer,”
+Fred said savagely, “would—would—” For a second he was apparently
+lost for comparisons. Then he finished: “Would kill his own mother.”
+He paused a second and added, in an even more savage voice, “And then
+lie about it!”</p>
+
+<p>The image on the screen snapped off, and Malone sat back in his chair
+and sighed. He spent a few minutes regretting that he hadn’t chosen,
+early in life, to be a missionary to the Fiji Islands, or possibly
+simply a drunken bum without any troubles, but then the report
+Mitchell had mentioned arrived. Malone picked it up without much
+eagerness, and began going through it carefully.</p>
+
+<p>It was beautifully typed and arranged; somebody on Mitchell’s team had
+obviously been up all night at the job. Malone admired the work,
+without being able to get enthusiastic about the contents. Like all
+technical reports, it tended to be boring and just a trifle obscure to
+someone who wasn’t completely familiar with the field involved. Malone
+and cybernetics were not exactly bosom buddies, and by the time he
+finished reading through the report he was suffering from an extreme
+case of ennui.</p>
+
+<p>There were no new clues in the report, either; Mitchell’s phone
+conversation had covered all of the main points. Malone put the sheaf
+of papers down on his desk and looked at them for a minute as if he
+expected an answer to leap out from the pile and greet him with a glad
+cry. But nothing happened. Unfortunately, he had to do some more work.</p>
+
+<p>The obvious next step was to start checking on the technicians who
+were working on the machines. Malone determined privately that he
+would give none of his reports to Fred Mitchell; he didn’t like the
+idea of being responsible for murder, and that was the least Fred
+would do to someone who confused his precious calculators.</p>
+
+<p>He picked up the phone, punched for the Records Division, and waited
+until a bald, middle-aged face appeared. He asked the face to send up
+the dossiers of the technicians concerned to his office. The face
+nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“You want them right away?” it said in a mild, slightly scratchy
+voice.</p>
+
+<p>“Sooner than right away,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“They’re coming up by messenger,” the voice said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone nodded and broke the connection. The technicians had, of
+course, been investigated by the FBI before they’d been hired, but it
+wouldn’t do any harm to check them out again. He felt grateful that he
+wouldn’t have to do all that work himself; he would just go through
+the dossiers and assign field agents to the actual checking when he
+had a picture of what might need to be checked.</p>
+
+<p>He sighed again and leaned back in his chair. He put his feet up on
+the desk, remembered that he was entirely alone, and swung them down
+again. He fished in a private compartment in his top desk drawer, drew
+out a cigar and unwrapped it. Putting his feet back on the desk, he
+lit the cigar, drew in a cloud of smoke, and lapsed into deep thought.</p>
+
+<p>Cigar smoke billowed around him, making strange, fantastic shapes in
+the air of the office. Malone puffed away, frowning slightly and
+trying to force the puzzle he was working on to make some sense.</p>
+
+<p>It certainly looked as though something were going on, he thought.
+But, for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out just what it was.
+After all, what could be anybody’s purpose in goofing up a bunch of
+calculators the way they had? Of course, the whole thing could be a
+series of accidents, but the series was a pretty long one, and made
+Malone suspicious to start with. It was easier to assume that the
+goof-ups were being done deliberately.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately, they didn’t make much sense as sabotage, either.</p>
+
+<p>Senator Deeds, for instance, had sent out a ten-thousand-copy form
+letter to his constituents, blasting an Administration power bill in
+extremely strong language, and asking for some comments on the
+Deeds-Hartshorn Air Ownership Bill, a pending piece of legislation
+that provided for private, personal ownership, based on land title, to
+the upper stratosphere, with a strong hint that rights of passage no
+longer applied without some recompense to the owner of the air.
+Naturally, Deeds had filed the original with a computer-secretary to
+turn out ten thousand duplicate copies, and the machine had done so,
+folding the copies, slipping them into addressed envelopes and sending
+them out under the Senator’s franking stamp.</p>
+
+<p>The addresses on the envelopes, however, had not been those of the
+Senator’s supporters. The letter had been sent to ten thousand
+stockholders in major airline companies, and the Senator’s head was
+still ringing from the force of the denunciatory letters, telegrams
+and telephone calls he’d been getting.</p>
+
+<p>And then there was Representative Follansbee of South Dakota. A set of
+news releases on the proposed Follansbee Waterworks Bill contained the
+statement that the artificial lake which Follansbee proposed in the
+Black Hills country “be formed by controlled atomic power blasts, and
+filled with water obtained from collecting the tears of widows and
+orphans.”</p>
+
+<p>Newsmen who saw this release immediately checked the bill. The wording
+was exactly the same. Follansbee claimed that the “widows and orphans”
+phrase had appeared in his speech on the bill, and not in the proposed
+bill itself. “It’s completely absurd,” he said, with commendable calm,
+“to consider this method of filling an artificial lake.”
+Unfortunately, the absurdity was now contained in the bill, which
+would have to go back to committee for redefinition, and probably
+wouldn’t come up again in the present session of Congress. Judging
+from the amount of laughter that had greeted the error when it had
+come to light, Malone privately doubted whether any amount of
+redefinition was going to save it from a landslide defeat.</p>
+
+<p>Representative Keller of Idaho had made a speech which contained so
+many errors of fact that newspaper editorials, and his enemies on the
+floor of Congress, cut him to pieces with ease and pleasure. Keller
+complained of his innocence and said he’d gotten his facts from a
+computer-secretary, but this didn’t save him. His re-election was a
+matter for grave concern in his own party, and the opposition was,
+naturally, tickled. They would not, Malone thought, dare to be tickled
+pink.</p>
+
+<p>And these were not the only casualties. They were the most blatant
+foul-ups, but there were others, such as the mistake in numbering of a
+House Bill that resulted in a two-month delay during which the
+opposition to the bill raised enough votes to defeat it on the floor.
+Communications were diverted or lost or scrambled in small ways that
+made for confusion—including, Malone recalled, the perfectly horrible
+mixup that resulted when a freshman senator, thinking he was talking
+to his girlfriend on a blanked-vision circuit, discovered he was
+talking to his wife.</p>
+
+<p>The flow of information was being blocked by bottlenecks that suddenly
+existed where there had never been bottlenecks before.</p>
+
+<p>And it wasn’t only the computers, Malone knew. He remembered the
+reports the senators and representatives had made. Someone forgot to
+send an important message here, or sent one too soon over there. Both
+courses were equally disturbing, and both resulted in more snarl-ups.
+Reports that should have been sent in weeks before arrived too late;
+reports meant for the eyes of only one man were turned out in
+triplicate and passed all over the offices of Congress.</p>
+
+<p>Each snarl-up was a little one. But, together, they added up to
+inefficiency of a kind and extent that hadn’t been seen, Malone told
+himself with some wonder, since the Harding administration fifty years
+before.</p>
+
+<p>And there didn’t seem to be anyone to blame anything on.</p>
+
+<p>Malone thought hopefully of sabotage, infiltration and mass treason,
+but it didn’t make him feel much better. He puffed out some more smoke
+and frowned at nothing.</p>
+
+<p>There was a knock at the door of his office.</p>
+
+<p>Speedily and guiltily, he swung his feet off the desk and snatched the
+cigar out of his mouth. He jammed it into a deep ashtray and put the
+ashtray back into his desk drawer. He locked the drawer, waved
+ineffectively at the clouds of smoke that surrounded him, and said in
+a resigned voice: “Come in.”</p>
+
+<p>The door opened. A tall, solidly-built man stood there, wearing a
+fringe of beard and a cheerful expression. The man had an enormous
+amount of muscle distributed more or less evenly over his chunky body,
+and a pot-belly that looked as if he had swallowed a globe of the
+world. In addition, he was smoking a cigarette and letting out little
+puffs of smoke, rather like a toy locomotive.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, well,” Malone said, brushing feebly at the smoke that still
+wreathed him faintly. “If it isn’t Thomas Boyd, the FBI’s answer to
+Nero Wolfe.”</p>
+
+<p>“And if the physique holds true, you’re Sherlock Holmes, I suppose,”
+Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone shook his head, thinking sadly of his father and the cigar.
+“Not exactly,” he said. “Not ex—” And then it came to him. It wasn’t
+that he was ashamed of smoking cigars like his father, exactly, but
+cigars just weren’t right for a fearless, dedicated FBI agent. And he
+had just thought of a way to keep Boyd from knowing what he’d been
+doing. “That’s a hell of a cigarette you’re smoking, by the way,” he
+said.</p>
+
+<p>Boyd looked at it. “It is?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Sure is,” Malone said, hoping he sounded sufficiently innocent.
+“Smells like a cigar or something.”</p>
+
+<p>Boyd sniffed the air for a second, his face wrinkled. Then he looked
+down at his cigarette again. “By God,” he said, “you’re right, Ken. It
+<i>does</i> smell like a cigar.” He came over to Malone’s desk, looked
+around for an ashtray and didn’t find one, and finally went to the
+window and tossed the cigarette out into the Washington breeze. “How
+are things, anyhow, Ken?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Things are confused,” Malone said. “Aren’t they always?”</p>
+
+<p>Boyd came back to the desk and sat down in a chair at one side of it.
+He put his elbow on the desk. “Sure they are,” he said. “I’m confused
+myself, as a matter of fact. Only I think I know where I can get some
+help.”</p>
+
+<p>“Really?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Boyd nodded. “Burris told me I might be able to get some information
+from a certain famous and highly respected person,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, well,” Malone said. “Who?”</p>
+
+<p>“You,” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” Malone said, trying to look disappointed, flattered and modest
+all at the same time. “Well,” he went on after a second, “anything I
+can do—”</p>
+
+<p>“Burris thought you might have some answers,” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>“Burris is getting optimistic in his old age,” Malone said. “I don’t
+even have many questions.”</p>
+
+<p>Boyd nodded. “Well,” he said, “you know this California thing?”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure I do,” Malone said. “You’re looking into the resignation out
+there, aren’t you?”</p>
+
+<p>“Senator Burley,” Boyd said. “That’s right. But Senator Burley’s
+resignation isn’t all of it, by any means.”</p>
+
+<p>“It isn’t?” Malone said, trying to sound interested.</p>
+
+<p>“Not at all,” Boyd said. “It goes a lot deeper than it looks on the
+surface. In the past year, Ken, five senators have announced their
+resignations from the Senate of the United States. It isn’t exactly a
+record—”</p>
+
+<p>“It sounds like a record,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Boyd said, “there was 1860 and the Civil War, when a whole lot
+of senators and representatives resigned all at once.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” Malone said. “But there isn’t any Civil War going on now. At
+least,” he added, “I haven’t heard of any.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s what makes it so funny,” Boyd said. “Of course, Senator Burley
+said it was ill health, and so did two others, while Senator Davidson
+said it was old age.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Malone said, “people do get old. And sick.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Boyd said. “The only trouble is—” He paused. “Ken,” he said,
+“do you mind if I smoke? I mean, do you mind the smell of cigars?”</p>
+
+<p>“Mind?” Malone said. “Not at all.” He blinked. “Besides,” he added,
+“maybe this one won’t smell like a cigar.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, the last one did,” Boyd said. He took a cigarette out of a pack
+in his pocket, and lit it. He sniffed. “You know,” he said, “you’re
+right. This one doesn’t.”</p>
+
+<p>“I told you,” Malone said. “Must have been a bad cigarette. Spoiled or
+something.”</p>
+
+<p>“I guess so,” Boyd said vaguely. “But about these retirements—the FBI
+wanted me to look into it because of Burley’s being mixed up with the
+space program scandal last year. Remember?”</p>
+
+<p>“Vaguely,” Malone said. “I was busy last year.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure you were,” Boyd said. “We were both busy getting famous and well
+known.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone grinned. “Go on with the story,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Boyd puffed at his cigarette. “Anyhow, we couldn’t find anything
+really wrong,” he said. “Three senators retiring because of ill
+health, one because of old age. And Farnsworth, the youngest, had a
+nervous breakdown.”</p>
+
+<p>“I didn’t hear about it,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Boyd shrugged “We hushed it up,” he said. “But Farnsworth’s got
+delusions of persecution. He apparently thinks somebody’s out to get
+him. As a matter of fact, he thinks <i>everybody’s</i> out to get him.”</p>
+
+<p>“Now that,” Malone said, “sounds familiar.”</p>
+
+<p>Boyd leaned back a little more in his chair. “Here’s the funny thing,
+though,” he said. “The others all act as if they’re suspicious of
+everybody who talks to them. Not anything obvious, you understand.
+Just worried, apprehensive. Always looking at you out of the corners
+of their eyes. That kind of thing.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone thought of Senator Lefferts, who was also suffering from
+delusions of persecution, delusions that had real evidence to back
+them up. “It does sound funny,” he said cautiously.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I reported everything to Burris,” Boyd went on. “And he said
+you were working on something similar, and we might as well pool our
+resources.”</p>
+
+<p>“Here we go again,” Malone said. He took a deep breath, filling his
+nostrils with what remained of the cigar odor in the room, and felt
+more peaceful. Quickly, he told Boyd about what had been happening in
+Congress. “It seems pretty obvious,” he finished, “that there is some
+kind of a tie-up between the two cases.”</p>
+
+<p>“Maybe it’s obvious,” Boyd said, “but it is just a little bit odd. Fun
+and games. You know, Ken, Burris was right.”</p>
+
+<p>“How?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“He said everything was all mixed up,” Boyd went on. “He told me the
+country was going to Rome in a handbasket, or something like that.”</p>
+
+<p>Wondering vaguely if Burris had really been predicting mass religious
+conversions, Malone nodded silently.</p>
+
+<p>“And he’s right,” Boyd said. “Look at the newspapers. Everything’s
+screwy lately.”</p>
+
+<p>“Everything always is screwy,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Not like now,” Boyd said. “So many big-shot gangsters have been
+killed lately we might as well bring back Prohibition. And the labor
+unions are so busy with internal battles that they haven’t had time to
+go on strike for over a year.”</p>
+
+<p>“Is that bad?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Boyd shrugged. “God knows,” he said. “But it’s sure confusing as all
+hell.”</p>
+
+<p>“And now,” Malone said, “with all that going on—”</p>
+
+<p>“The Congress of the United States decides to go off its collective
+rocker,” Boyd finished. “Exactly.” He stared down at his cigarette for
+a minute with a morose and pensive expression on his face. He looked,
+Malone thought, like Henry VIII trying to decide what to do about all
+these here wives.</p>
+
+<p>Then he looked up at Malone. “Ken,” he said in a strained voice,
+“there seem to be a lot of nutty cases lately.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone considered. “No,” he said at last. “It’s just that when a nutty
+one comes along, we get it.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s what I mean,” Boyd said. “I wonder why that is.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone shrugged. “It takes a thief to catch a thief,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“But these aren’t thieves,” Boyd said. “I mean, they’re just nutty.”
+He paused. “Oh,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“And two thieves are better than one,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Anyhow,” Boyd said with a small, gusty sigh, “it’s company.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Boyd looked for an ashtray, failed again to find one, and walked over
+to flip a second cigarette out onto Washington. He came back to his
+chair, sat down, and said, “What’s our next step, Ken?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone considered carefully. “First,” he said finally, “we’ll start
+assuming something. We’ll start assuming that there is some kind of
+organization behind all this, behind all the senators’ resignations
+and everything like that.”</p>
+
+<p>“It sounds like a big assumption,” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone shook his head. “It isn’t really,” he said. “After all, we
+can’t figure it’s the work of one person: it’s too widespread for
+that. And it’s silly to assume that everything’s accidental.”</p>
+
+<p>“All right,” Boyd said equably. “It’s an organization.”</p>
+
+<p>“Trying to subvert the United States,” Malone went on. “Reducing
+everything to chaos. And that brings in everything else, Tom. That
+brings in the unions and the gang wars and everything.”</p>
+
+<p>Boyd blinked. “How?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Obvious,” Malone said. “Strife brought on by internal confusion,
+that’s what’s going on all over. It’s the same pattern. And if we
+assume an organization trying to jam up the United States, it even
+makes sense.” He leaned back and beamed.</p>
+
+<p>“Sure it makes sense,” Boyd said. “But who’s the organization?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone shrugged.</p>
+
+<p>“If I were doing the picking,” Boyd said, “I’d pick the Russians. Or
+the Chinese. Or both. Probably both.”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s a possibility,” Malone said. “Anyhow, if it’s sabotage, who else
+would be interested in sabotaging the United States? There’s some
+Russian or Chinese organization fouling up Congress, and the unions,
+and the gangs. Come to think of it, why the gangs? It seems to me that
+if you left the professional gangsters strong, it would do even more
+to foul things up.”</p>
+
+<p>“Who knows?” Boyd said. “Maybe they’re trying to get rid of American
+gangsters so they can import some of their own.”</p>
+
+<p>“That doesn’t make any sense,” Malone said, “but I’ll think about it.
+In the meantime, we have one more interesting question.”</p>
+
+<p>“We do?” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>“Sure we do,” Malone said. “The question is: how?”</p>
+
+<p>Boyd said: “Mmm.” Then there was silence for a little while.</p>
+
+<p>“How are the saboteurs doing all this?” Malone said. “It just doesn’t
+seem very probable that <i>all</i> the technicians in the Senate Office
+Building, for instance, are spies. It makes even less sense that the
+labor unions are composed mostly of spies. Or, for that matter, the
+Mafia and the organizations like it. What would spies be doing in the
+Mafia?”</p>
+
+<p>“Learning Italian,” Boyd said instantly.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t be silly,” Malone said. “If there were that many spies in this
+country, the Russians wouldn’t have to fight at all. They could <i>vote</i>
+the Communists into power, and by a nice big landslide, too.”</p>
+
+<p>“Wait a minute,” Boyd said. “If there aren’t so many spies, then how
+is all this getting done?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone beamed. “That’s the question,” he said. “And I think I have an
+answer.”</p>
+
+<p>“You do?” Boyd said. After a second he said: “Oh, no.”</p>
+
+<p>“Suppose you tell me,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Boyd opened his mouth. Nothing emerged. He shut it. A second passed
+and he opened it again. “Magic?” he said weakly.</p>
+
+<p>“Not exactly,” Malone said cheerfully. “But you’re getting warm.”</p>
+
+<p>Boyd shut his eyes. “I’m not going to stand for it,” he announced.
+“I’m not going to take any more.”</p>
+
+<p>“Any more what?” Malone said. “Tell me what you have in mind.”</p>
+
+<p>“I won’t even consider it,” Boyd said. “It haunts me. It gets into my
+dreams. Now, look, Ken, I can’t even see a pitchfork any more without
+thinking of Greek letters.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone took a breath. “Which Greek letter?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“You know very well,” Boyd said. “What a pitchfork looks like. <i>Psi.</i>
+And I’m not even going to think about it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Malone said equably, “you won’t have to. If you’d rather start
+with the Russian-spy end of things, you can do that.”</p>
+
+<p>“What I’d rather do,” Boyd said, “is resign.”</p>
+
+<p>“Next year,” Malone said instantly. “For now, you can wait around
+until the dossiers come up—they’re for the Senate Office Building
+technicians, and they’re on the way. You can go over them, and start
+checking on any known Russian agents in the country for contacts. You
+can also start checking on the dossiers, and in general for any
+hanky-panky.”</p>
+
+<p>Boyd blinked. “Hanky-panky?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s a perfectly good word,” Malone said, offended. “Or two words.
+Anyhow, you can start on that end, and not worry about anything else.”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s going to haunt me,” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Malone said, “eat lots of ectoplasm and get enough sleep, and
+everything will be fine. After all, I’m going to have to do the real
+end of the work, the psionics end. I may be wrong, but—”</p>
+
+<p>He was interrupted by the phone. He flicked the switch and Andrew J.
+Burris’ face appeared on the screen.</p>
+
+<p>“Malone,” Burris said instantly, “I just got a complaint from the
+State Department that ties in with your work. Their translator has
+been acting up.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone couldn’t say anything for a minute.</p>
+
+<p>“Malone,” Burris went on. “I said—”</p>
+
+<p>“I heard you,” Malone said. “And it doesn’t have one.”</p>
+
+<p>“It doesn’t have one what?” Burris said.</p>
+
+<p>“A pig-Latin circuit,” Malone said. “What else?”</p>
+
+<p>Burris’ voice was very calm. “Malone,” he said, “what does pig-Latin
+have to do with anything?”</p>
+
+<p>“You said—”</p>
+
+<p>“I said one of the State Department translators was acting up,” Burris
+said. “If you want details—”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t think I can stand them,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Some of the Russian and Chinese releases have come through with the
+meaning slightly altered,” Burris went on doggedly. “And I want you to
+check on it right away. I—”</p>
+
+<p>“Thank God,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Burris blinked. “What?”</p>
+
+<p>“Never mind,” Malone said. “Never mind. I’m glad you told me, Chief.
+I’ll get to work on it right away, and—”</p>
+
+<p>“You do that, Malone,” Burris said. “And for God’s sake stop calling
+me Chief! Do I look like an Indian? Do I have feathers in my hair?”</p>
+
+<p>“Anything,” Malone said grandly, “is possible.” He broke the
+connection in a hurry.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c3">3</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>The summer sun beat down on the white city of Washington, D. C, as if
+it had mistaken its instructions slightly and was convinced that the
+city had been put down somewhere in the Sahara. The sun seemed
+confused, Malone thought. If this were the Sahara, obviously there was
+no reason whatever for the Potomac to be running through it. The sun
+was doing its best to correct this small error, however, by exerting
+even more heat in a valiant attempt to dry up the river.</p>
+
+<p>Its attempt was succeeding, at least partially. The Potomac was still
+there, but quite a lot of it was not in the river bed any more.
+Instead, it had gone into the air, which was so humid by now that
+Malone was willing to swear that it was splashing into his lungs at
+every inhalation. Resisting an impulse to try the breaststroke, he
+stood in the full glare of the straining sun, just outside the Senate
+Office Building. He looked across at the Capitol, just opposite,
+squinting his eyes manfully against the glare of its dome in the
+brightness.</p>
+
+<p>The Capitol was, at any rate, some relief from the sight of Thomas
+Boyd and a group of agents busily grilling two technicians. That was
+going on in the Senate Office Building, and Malone had come over to
+watch the proceedings. Everything had been set up in what Malone
+considered the most complicated fashion possible. A big room had been
+turned into a projection chamber, and films were being run off over
+and over. The films, taken by hidden cameras watching the
+computer-secretaries, had caught two technicians red-handed punching
+errors into the machines. Boyd had leaped on this evidence, and he and
+his crew were showing the movies to the technicians and questioning
+them under bright lights in an effort to break down their resistance.</p>
+
+<p>But it didn’t look as though they were going to have any more success
+than the sun was having, turning Washington into the Sahara. After
+all, Malone told himself, wiping his streaming brow, there were no
+Pyramids in Washington. He tried to discover whether that made any
+sense, but it was too much work. He went back to thinking about Boyd.</p>
+
+<p>The technicians were sticking to their original stories that the
+mistakes had been honest ones. It sounded like a sensible idea to
+Malone; after all, people did make mistakes. And the FBI didn’t have a
+single shred of evidence to prove that the technicians were engaged in
+deliberate sabotage. But Boyd wasn’t giving up. Over and over he got
+the technicians to repeat their stories, looking for discrepancies or
+slips. Over and over he ran off the films of their mistakes, looking
+for some clue, some shred of evidence.</p>
+
+<p>Even the sight of the Capitol, Malone told himself sadly, was better
+than any more of Boyd’s massive investigation techniques.</p>
+
+<p>He had come out to do some thinking. He believed, in spite of a good
+deal of evidence to the contrary, that his best ideas came to him
+while walking. At any rate, it was a way of getting away from four
+walls and from the prying eyes and anxious looks of superiors. He
+sighed gently, crammed his hat onto his head and started out.</p>
+
+<p>Only a maniac, he reflected, would wear a hat on a day like the one he
+was swimming through. But the people who passed him as he trudged
+onward to no particular destination didn’t seem to notice; they gave
+him a fairly wide berth, and seemed very polite, but that wasn’t
+because they thought he was nuts, Malone knew. It was because they
+knew he was an FBI man.</p>
+
+<p>That was the result of an FBI regulation. All agents had to wear hats.
+Malone wasn’t sure why, and his thinking on the matter had only
+dredged up the idea that you had to have a hat in case somebody asked
+you to keep something under it. But the FBI was firm about its
+rulings. No matter what the weather, an agent wore a hat. Malone
+thought bitterly that he might just as well wear a red, white and blue
+luminous sign that said <i>FBI</i> in great winking letters, and maybe a
+hooting siren too. Still, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was not
+supposed to be a secret organization, no matter what occasional
+critics might say. And the hats, at least as long as the weather
+remained broiling, were enough proof of that for anybody.</p>
+
+<p>Malone could feel water collecting under his hat and soaking his head.
+He removed the hat quickly, wiped his head with a handkerchief and
+replaced the hat, feeling as if he had become incognito for a few
+seconds. The hat was back on now, feeling official but terrible, and
+about the same was true of the fully-loaded Smith &amp; Wesson .44
+Magnum revolver which hung in his shoulder holster. The harness chafed
+at his shoulder and chest and the weight of the gun itself was an
+added and unwelcome burden.</p>
+
+<p>But even without the gun and the hat, Malone did not feel exactly
+chipper. His shirt and undershirt were no longer two garments, but
+one, welded together by seamless sweat and plastered heavily and not
+too skillfully to his skin. His trouser legs clung damply to calves
+and thighs, rubbing as he walked, and at the knees each trouser leg
+attached and detached itself with the unpleasant regularity of a wet
+bastinado. Inside Malone’s shoes, his socks were completely awash, and
+he seemed to squish as he walked. It was hard to tell, but there
+seemed to be a small fish in his left shoe. It might, he told himself,
+be no more than a pebble or a wrinkle in his sock. But he was willing
+to swear that it was swimming upstream.</p>
+
+<p>And the forecast, he told himself bitterly, was for continued warm.</p>
+
+<p>He forced himself to take his mind off his own troubles and get back
+to the troubles of the FBI in general, such as the problem at hand. It
+was an effort, but he frowned and kept walking, and within a block he
+was concentrating again on the <i>psi</i> powers.</p>
+
+<p><i>Psi</i>, he told himself, was behind the whole mess. In spite of Boyd’s
+horrified refusal to believe such a thing, Malone was sure of it.
+Three years ago, of course, he wouldn’t have considered the notion
+either. But since then a great many things had happened, and his
+horizons had widened. After all, capturing a double handful of totally
+insane, if perfectly genuine telepaths, from asylums all over the
+country, was enough by itself to widen quite a few stunned horizons.
+And then, later, there had been the gang of juvenile delinquents. They
+had been perfectly normal juvenile delinquents, stealing cars and
+bopping a stray policeman or two. It happened, though, that they had
+solved the secret of instantaneous teleportation, too. This made them
+just a trifle unusual.</p>
+
+<p>In capturing them, Malone, too, had learned the teleportation secret.
+Unlike Boyd, he thought, or Burris, the idea of psionic power didn’t
+bother him much. After all, the psionic spectrum (if it was a spectrum
+at all) was just as much a natural phenomenon as gravity or magnetism.</p>
+
+<p>It was just a little hard for some people to get used to.</p>
+
+<p>And, of course, he didn’t fully understand <i>how</i> it worked, or <i>why</i>.
+This put him in the position, he told himself, of an Australian
+aborigine. He tried to imagine an Australian aborigine in a hat on a
+hot day, decided the aborigine would have too much sense, and got back
+off the subject again.</p>
+
+<p>However, he thought grimly, there was this Australian aborigine. And
+he had a magnifying glass, which he’d picked up from the wreck of some
+ship. Using that—assuming that experience, or a friendly missionary,
+taught him how—he could manage to light a fire, using the sun’s
+thermonuclear processes to do the job. Malone doubted that the
+aborigine knew anything about thermonuclear processes, but he could
+start a fire with them.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, he told himself, the aborigine didn’t understand
+oxidation, either. But he could use that fire, when he got it going.
+In spite of his lack of knowledge, the aborigine could use that nice,
+hot, burning fire....</p>
+
+<p>Hurriedly, Malone pried his thoughts away from aborigines and heat,
+and tried to focus his mind elsewhere. He didn’t understand psionic
+processes, he thought; but then, nobody did, really, as far as he
+knew. But he could use them.</p>
+
+<p>And, obviously, somebody else could use them too.</p>
+
+<p>Only what kind of force was being used? What kind of psionic force
+would it take to make so many people in the United States goof up the
+way they were doing?</p>
+
+<p>That, Malone told himself, was a good question, a basic and an
+important question. He was proud of himself for thinking of it.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately, he didn’t have the answer.</p>
+
+<p>But he thought he knew a way of getting one.</p>
+
+<p>It was perfectly true that nobody knew much about how psionics worked.
+For that matter, nobody knew very much about how gravity worked. But
+there was still some information, and, in the case of psionics, Malone
+knew where it was to be found.</p>
+
+<p>It was to be found in Yucca Flats, Nevada.</p>
+
+<p>It was, of course, true that Nevada would probably be even hotter than
+Washington, D. C. But there was no help for that, Malone told himself
+sadly; and, besides, the cold chill of the expert himself would
+probably cool things off quite rapidly. Malone thought of Dr. Thomas
+O’Connor, the Westinghouse psionics expert and frowned. O’Connor was
+not exactly what might be called a friendly man.</p>
+
+<p>But he did know more about psionics than anyone else Malone could
+think of. And his help had been invaluable in solving the two previous
+psionic cases Malone had worked on.</p>
+
+<p>For a second he thought of calling O’Connor, but he brushed that
+thought aside bravely. In spite of the heat of Yucca Flats, he would
+have to talk to the man personally. He thought again of O’Connor’s
+congealed personality, and wondered if it would really be effective in
+combating the heat. If it were, he told himself, he would take the man
+right back to Washington with him, and plug him into the
+air-conditioning lines.</p>
+
+<p>He sighed deeply, thought about a cigar and decided regretfully
+against it, here on the public street where he would be visible to
+anyone. Instead, he looked around him, discovered that he was only a
+block from a large, neon-lit drugstore and headed for it. Less than a
+minute later he was in a phone booth.</p>
+
+<p>The operators throughout the country seemed to suffer from heat
+prostration, and Malone was hardly inclined to blame them. But, all
+the same, it took several minutes for him to get through to Dr.
+O’Connor’s office, and a minute or so more before he could convince a
+security-addled secretary that, after all, he would hardly blow
+O’Connor to bits over the long-distance phone.</p>
+
+<p>Finally the secretary, with a sigh of reluctance, said she would see
+if Dr. O’Connor were available. Malone waited in the phone booth,
+opening the door every few seconds to breathe. The booth was
+air-conditioned, but remained for some mystical reason an even ten
+degrees above the boiling point of Malone’s temper.</p>
+
+<p>Finally Dr. O’Connor’s lean, pallid face appeared on the screen. He
+had not changed since Malone had last seen him. He still looked, and
+acted, like one of Malone’s more disliked law professors.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah,” the scientist said in a cold, precise voice. “Mr. Malone. I am
+sorry for our precautions, but you understand that security must be
+served.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Being an FBI man, of course you would,” Dr. O’Connor went on, his
+face changing slightly and his voice warming almost to the boiling
+point of nitrogen. It was obvious that the phrase was Dr. O’Connor’s
+idea of a little joke, and Malone smiled politely and nodded. The
+scientist seemed to feel some friendliness toward Malone, though it
+was hard to tell for sure. But Malone had brought him some fine
+specimens to work with—telepaths and teleports, though human, being
+no more than specimens to such a very precise scientific mind—and he
+seemed grateful for Malone’s diligence and effort in finding such
+fascinating objects of study.</p>
+
+<p>That Malone certainly hadn’t started out to find them made, it
+appeared, very little difference.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then,” O’Connor said, returning to his normal, serious tone.
+“What can I do for you, Mr. Malone?”</p>
+
+<p>“If you have the time, Doctor,” Malone said respectfully, “I’d like to
+talk to you for a few minutes.” He had the absurd feeling that
+O’Connor was going to tell him to stop by after class, but the
+scientist only nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“Your call is timed very well,” he said. “As it happens, Mr. Malone, I
+do have a few seconds to spare just now.”</p>
+
+<p>“Fine,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“I should be glad to talk with you,” O’Connor said, without looking
+any more glad than ever.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll be right there,” Malone said. O’Connor nodded again, and blanked
+out. Malone switched off and took a deep, superheated breath of phone
+booth air. For a second he considered starting his trip from outside
+the phone booth, but that was dangerous—if not to Malone, then to
+innocent spectators. Psionics was by no means a household word, and
+the sight of Malone leaving for Nevada might send several citizens
+straight to the wagon. Which was not a place, he thought judiciously,
+for anybody to be on such a hot day.</p>
+
+<p>He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second. In that time he
+reconstructed from memory a detailed, three-dimensional, full-color
+image of Dr. O’Connor’s office in his mind. It was perfect in detail;
+he checked it over mentally and then, by a special effort of will, he
+gave himself the psychic push that made the transition possible.</p>
+
+<p>When he opened his eyes, he was in O’Connor’s office, standing in
+front of the scientist’s wide desk. He hoped nobody had been looking
+into the phone booth at the instant he had disappeared, but he was
+reasonably sure he’d been unobserved. People didn’t go around peering
+into phone booths, after all, and he had seen no one.</p>
+
+<p>O’Connor looked up without surprise. “Ah,” he said. “Sit down, Mr.
+Malone.” Malone looked around for the chair, which was an
+uncomfortably straight-backed affair, and sat down in it gingerly.
+Remembering past visits to O’Connor, he was grateful for even the
+small amount of relaxation the hard wood afforded him. O’Connor had
+only recently unbent to the point of supplying a spare chair in his
+office for visitors, and, apparently, especially for Malone. Perhaps,
+Malone thought, it was more gratitude for the lovely specimens.</p>
+
+<p>Malone still felt uncomfortable, but tried bravely not to show it. He
+felt slightly guilty, too, as he always did when he popped into
+O’Connor’s office without bothering to stay space-bound. By law, after
+all, he knew he should check in and out at the main gate of the huge,
+ultra-top-secret Government reservation whenever he visited Yucca
+Flats. But that meant wasting a lot of time and going through a lot of
+trouble. Malone had rationalized it out for himself that way, and had
+gotten just far enough to do things the quick and easy way and not
+quite far enough to feel undisturbed about it. After all, he told
+himself grimly, anything that saved time and trouble increased the
+efficiency of the FBI, so it was all to the good.</p>
+
+<p>He swallowed hard. “Dr. O’Connor—” he began.</p>
+
+<p>O’Connor looked up again. “Yes?” he said. He’d had plenty of practice
+in watching people appear and disappear, between Malone and the
+specimens Malone had brought him; he was beyond surprise or shock by
+now.</p>
+
+<p>“I came here to talk to you,” Malone began again.</p>
+
+<p>O’Connor nodded, a trifle impatiently. “Yes,” he said. “I know that.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well—” Malone thought fast. Presenting the case to O’Connor was
+impossible; it was too complicated, and it might violate governmental
+secrecy somewhere along the line. He decided to wrap it up in a
+hypothetical situation. “Doctor,” he said, “I know that all the
+various manifestations of the <i>psi</i> powers were investigated and named
+long before responsible scientists became interested in the subject.”</p>
+
+<p>“That,” O’Connor said with some reluctance, “is true.” He looked sad,
+as if he wished they’d waited on naming some of the psionic
+manifestations until he’d been born and started investigating them.
+Malone tried to imagine a person doing something called O’Connorizing,
+and decided he was grateful for history.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then—” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“At least,” O’Connor cut in, “it is true in a rather vague and general
+way. You see, Mr. Malone, any precise description of a psionic
+manifestation must wait until a metalanguage has grown up to encompass
+it; that is, until understanding and knowledge have reached the point
+where careful and accurate description can take place.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” Malone said helplessly. “Sure.” He wondered if what O’Connor had
+said meant anything, and decided that it probably did, but he didn’t
+want to know about it.</p>
+
+<p>“While we have not yet reached that point,” O’Connor said, “we are
+approaching it in our experiments. I am hopeful that, in the near
+future—”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Malone cut in desperately, “sure. Of course. Naturally.”</p>
+
+<p>Dr. O’Connor looked miffed. The temperature of the room seemed to drop
+several degrees, and Malone swallowed hard and tried to look
+ingratiating and helpful, like a student with nothing but A’s on his
+record.</p>
+
+<p>Before O’Connor could pick up the thread of his sentence, Malone went
+on: “What I mean is something like this. Picking up the mental
+activity of another person is called telepathy. Floating in the air is
+called levitation. Moving objects around is psychokinesis. Going from
+one place to another instantaneously is teleportation. And so on.”</p>
+
+<p>“The language you use,” O’Connor said, still miffed, “is extremely
+loose. I might go so far as to say that the statements you have made
+are, essentially, meaningless as a result of their lack of rigor.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone took a deep breath. “Dr. O’Connor,” he said, “you know what I
+mean, don’t you?”</p>
+
+<p>“I believe so,” O’Connor said, with the air of a king granting a
+pardon to a particularly repulsive-looking subject in the lowest
+income brackets.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then,” Malone said. “Yes or no?”</p>
+
+<p>O’Connor frowned. “Yes or no what?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“I—” Malone blinked. “I mean, the things have names,” he said at
+last. “All the various psionic manifestations have names.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah,” O’Connor said. “Well. I should say—” He put his fingertips
+together and stared at a point on the white ceiling for a second.
+“Yes,” he said at last.</p>
+
+<p>Malone breathed a sigh of relief. “Good,” he said. “That’s what I
+wanted to know.” He leaned forward. “And if they all do have names,”
+he went on, “what is it called when a large group of people are forced
+to act in a certain manner?”</p>
+
+<p>O’Connor shrugged. “Forced?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Forced by mental power,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>There was a second of silence.</p>
+
+<p>“At first,” O’Connor said, “I might think of various examples: the
+actions of a mob, for example, or the demonstrations of the Indian
+Rope Trick, or perhaps the sale of a useless product through
+television or through other advertising.” Again his face moved, ever
+so slightly, in what he obviously believed to be a smile. “The usual
+name for such a phenomenon is ‘mass hypnotism,’ Mr. Malone,” he said.
+“But that is not, strictly speaking, a <i>psi</i> phenomenon at all.
+Studies in that area belong to the field of mob psychology; they are
+not properly in my scope.” He looked vastly superior to anything and
+everything that was outside his scope. Malone concentrated on looking
+receptive and understanding.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>O’Connor gave him a look that made Malone feel he’d been caught
+cribbing during an exam, but the scientist said nothing to back up the
+look. Instead he went on: “I will grant that there may be an
+amplification of the telepathic faculty in the normal individual in
+such cases.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good,” Malone said doubtfully.</p>
+
+<p>“Such an amplification,” O’Connor went on, as if he hadn’t heard,
+“would account for the apparent—ah—mental linkage that makes a mob
+appear to act as a single organism during certain periods of—ah—
+stress.” He looked judicious for a second, and then nodded. “However,”
+he said, “other than that, I would doubt that there is any psionic
+force involved.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone spent a second or two digesting O’Connor’s reply.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” he said at last, “I’m not sure that’s what I meant. I mean,
+I’m not sure I meant to ask that question.” He took a breath and
+decided to start all over. “It’s not like a mob,” he said, “with
+everybody all doing the same thing at the same time. It’s more like a
+group of men, all separated, without any apparent connections between
+any of the men. And they’re all working toward a common goal. All
+doing different things, but all with the same objective. See?”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course I do,” O’Connor said flatly. “But what you’re suggesting—”
+He looked straight at Malone. “Have you had any experience of this ...
+phenomenon?”</p>
+
+<p>“Experience?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“I believe you have had,” O’Connor said. “Such a concept could not
+have come to you in a theoretical manner. You must be involved with an
+actual situation very much like the one you describe.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone swallowed. “Me?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Malone,” O’Connor said. “May I remind you that this is Yucca
+Flats? That the security checks here are as careful as anywhere in the
+world? That I, myself, have top-security clearance for many special
+projects? You do not need to watch your words here.”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s not security,” Malone said. “Anyhow, it’s not only security. But
+things are pretty complicated.”</p>
+
+<p>“I assure you,” O’Connor said, “that I will be able to understand even
+events which you feel are complex.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone swallowed again, hard. “I didn’t mean—” he started.</p>
+
+<p>“Please, Mr. Malone,” O’Connor said. His voice was colder than usual.
+Malone had the feeling that he was about to take the extra chair away.
+“Go on,” O’Connor said. “Explain yourself.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone took a deep breath. He started with the facts he’d been told by
+Burris, and went straight through to the interviews of the two
+computer-secretary technicians by Boyd and Company.</p>
+
+<p>It took quite awhile. By the time he had finished, O’Connor wasn’t
+looking frozen any more; he’d apparently forgotten to keep the freezer
+coils running. Instead, his face showed frank bewilderment, and great
+interest. “I never heard of such a thing,” he said. “Never. Not at any
+time.”</p>
+
+<p>“But—”</p>
+
+<p>O’Connor shook his head. “I have never heard of a psionic
+manifestation on that order,” he said. It seemed to be a painful
+admission. “Something that would make a random group of men co-operate
+in that manner—why, it’s completely new.”</p>
+
+<p>“It is?” Malone said, wondering if, when it was all investigated and
+described, it might be called O’Connorizing. Then he wondered how
+anybody was going to go about investigating it and describing it, and
+sank even deeper into gloom.</p>
+
+<p>“Completely new,” O’Connor said. “You may take my word.” Then, slowly,
+he began to brighten again, with all the glitter of newly-formed ice.
+“As a matter of fact,” he said, in a tone more like his usual one, “as
+a matter of fact, Mr. Malone, I don’t think it’s possible.”</p>
+
+<p>“But it happened,” Malone said. “It’s still happening. All over.”</p>
+
+<p>O’Connor’s lips tightened. “I have given my opinion,” he said. “I do
+not believe that such a thing is possible. There must be some other
+explanation.”</p>
+
+<p>“All right,” Malone said agreeably. “I’ll bite. What is it?”</p>
+
+<p>O’Connor frowned. “Your levity,” he said, “is uncalled-for.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone shrugged. “I didn’t mean to be—” He paused. “Anyhow, I didn’t
+mean to be funny,” he went on. “But I would like to have another idea
+of what’s causing all this.”</p>
+
+<p>“Scientific theories,” O’Connor said sternly, “are not invented on the
+spur of the moment. Only after long, careful thought.”</p>
+
+<p>“You mean you can’t think of anything,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“There must be some other explanation,” O’Connor said. “Naturally,
+since the facts have only now been presented to me, it is impossible
+for me to display at once a fully-constructed theory.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone nodded slowly. “Okay,” he said. “Have you got any hints, then?
+Any ideas at all?”</p>
+
+<p>O’Connor shook his head. “I have not,” he said. “But I strongly
+suggest, Mr. Malone, that you recheck your data. The fault may very
+well lie in your own interpretations of the actual facts.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t think so,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>O’Connor grimaced. “I do,” he said firmly.</p>
+
+<p>Malone sighed, very faintly. He shifted in the chair and began to
+realize, for the first time, just how uncomfortable it really was. He
+also felt a little chilly, and the chill was growing. That, he told
+himself, was the effect of Dr. O’Connor. He no longer regretted
+wearing his hat. As a matter of fact, he thought wistfully for a
+second of a small, light overcoat.</p>
+
+<p>O’Connor, he told himself, was definitely not the warm, friendly type.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then,” he said, conquering the chilly feeling for a second,
+“maybe there’s somebody else. Somebody who knows something more about
+psionics, and who might have some other ideas about—”</p>
+
+<p>“Please, Mr. Malone,” O’Connor said. “The United States Government
+would hardly have chosen me had I not been uniquely qualified in my
+field.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone sighed again. “I mean, maybe there are some books on the
+subject,” he said quietly, hoping he sounded tactful. “Maybe there’s
+something I could look up.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Malone.” The temperature of the office, Malone realized, was
+definitely lowering. O’Connor’s built-in freezer coils were working
+overtime, he told himself. “The field of psionics is so young that I
+can say, without qualification, that I am acquainted with everything
+written on the subject. By that, of course, I mean scientific works. I
+do not doubt that the American Society for Psychical Research, for
+instance, has hundreds of crackpot books which I have never read, or
+even heard of. But in the strictly scientific field, I must say
+that—”</p>
+
+<p>He broke off, looking narrowly at Malone with what might have been
+concern, but looked more like discouragement and boredom.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Malone,” he said, “are you ill?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone thought about it. He wasn’t quite sure, he discovered. The
+chill in the office was bothering him more and more, and as it grew he
+began to doubt that it was all due to the O’Connor influence. Suddenly
+a distinct shudder started somewhere in the vicinity of his shoulders
+and rippled its way down his body.</p>
+
+<p>Another one followed it, and then a third.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Malone,” O’Connor said.</p>
+
+<p>“Me?” Malone said. “I’m—I’m all right.”</p>
+
+<p>“You seem to have contracted a chill,” O’Connor said.</p>
+
+<p>A fourth shudder followed the other three.</p>
+
+<p>“I—guess so,” Malone said. “I d-d—I do s-seem to be r-r-rather
+chilly.”</p>
+
+<p>O’Connor nodded. “Ah,” he said. “I thought so. Although a chill is
+certainly odd at seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit.” He looked at the
+thermometer just outside the window of his office, then turned back to
+Malone. “Pardon me,” he said. “Seventy-one point six.”</p>
+
+<p>“Is—is that all it is?” Malone said. Seventy-one point six degrees,
+or even seventy-two, hardly sounded like the broiling Nevada desert
+he’d expected.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course,” O’Connor said. “At nine o’clock in the morning, one would
+hardly expect great temperatures. The desert becomes quite hot during
+the day, but cools off rapidly; I assume you are familiar with the
+laws covering the system.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Malone said. “S-sure.”</p>
+
+<p>The chills were not getting any better. They continued to travel up
+and down his body with the dignified regularity of Pennsylvania
+Railroad commuter trains.</p>
+
+<p>O’Connor frowned for a second. It was obvious that his keen scientific
+eye was sizing up the phenomenon, and reporting events to his keen
+scientific brain. In a second or less, the keen scientific brain had
+come up with an answer, and Dr. O’Connor spoke in his very keenest
+scientific voice.</p>
+
+<p>“I should have warned you,” he said, without an audible trace of
+regret. “The answer is childishly simple, Mr. Malone. You left
+Washington at noon.”</p>
+
+<p>“Just a little before noon,” Malone said. Remembering the burning sun,
+he added: “High noon. Very high.”</p>
+
+<p>“Just so,” O’Connor said. “And not only the heat was intense; the
+humidity, I assume, was also high.”</p>
+
+<p>“Very,” Malone said, thinking back. He shivered again.</p>
+
+<p>“In Washington,” O’Connor said, “it was noon. Here it is nine o’clock,
+and hardly as warm. The atmosphere is quite arid, and about twenty
+degrees below that obtaining in Washington.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone thought about it, trying to ignore the chills. “Oh,” he said at
+last. “And all the time I thought it was you.”</p>
+
+<p>“What?” O’Connor leaned forward.</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing,” Malone said hastily. “Nothing at all.”</p>
+
+<p>“My suggestion,” O’Connor said, putting his fingertips together again,
+“is that you take off your clothes, which are undoubtedly damp, and—”</p>
+
+<p>Naturally, Malone had not brought any clothes to Yucca Flats to change
+into. And when he tried to picture himself in a spare suit of Dr.
+O’Connor’s, the picture just wouldn’t come. Besides, the idea of doing
+a modified striptease in, or near, the O’Connor office was thoroughly
+unattractive.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” he said slowly, “thanks a lot, Doctor, but no thanks. I really
+have a better idea.”</p>
+
+<p>“Better?” O’Connor said.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I—” Malone took a deep breath and shut his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>He heard Dr. O’Connor say: “Well, Mr. Malone, goodbye. And good luck.”</p>
+
+<p>Then the office in Yucca Flats was gone, and Malone was standing in
+the bedroom of his own apartment, on the fringes of Washington, D.C.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c4">4</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>He walked over to the wall control and shut off the air-conditioning
+in a hurry. He threw open a window and breathed great gulps of the
+hot, humid air from the streets. In a small corner at the back of his
+mind, he wondered why he was grateful for the air he had suffered
+under only a few minutes before. But that, he reflected, was life. And
+a very silly kind of life, too, he told himself without rancor.</p>
+
+<p>In a few minutes he left the window, somewhat restored, and headed for
+the shower. When it was running nicely and he was under it, he started
+to sing. But his voice didn’t sound as much like the voice of Lauritz
+Melchior as it usually did, not even when he made a brave, if
+foolhardy stab at the Melchior accent. Slowly, he began to realize
+that he was bothered.</p>
+
+<p>He climbed out of the shower and started drying himself. Up to now, he
+thought, he had depended on Dr. Thomas O’Connor for edifying,
+trustworthy and reasonably complete information about psionics and
+<i>psi</i> phenomena in general. He had looked on O’Connor as a sort of
+living version of an extremely good edition of the Britannica, always
+available for reference.</p>
+
+<p>And now O’Connor had failed him. That, Malone thought, was hardly
+fair. O’Connor had no business failing him, particularly when there
+was no place else to go.</p>
+
+<p>The scientist had been right, of course, Malone knew. There was no
+other scientist who knew as much about psionics as O’Connor, and if
+O’Connor said there were no books, then that was that: there were no
+books.</p>
+
+<p>He reached for a drawer in his dresser, opened it and pulled out some
+underclothes, humming tunelessly under his breath as he dressed. If
+there was no one to ask, he thought, and if there were no books....</p>
+
+<p>He stopped with a sock in his hand, and stared at it in wonder.
+O’Connor hadn’t said there were no books. As a matter of fact, Malone
+realized, he’d said exactly the opposite.</p>
+
+<p>There were books. But they were “crackpot” books. O’Connor had never
+read them. He had, he said, probably never even heard of many of them.</p>
+
+<p>“Crackpot” was a fighting word to O’Connor. But to Malone it had all
+the sweetness of flattery. After all, he’d found telepaths in insane
+asylums, and teleports among the juvenile delinquents of New York.
+“Crackpot” was a word that was rapidly ceasing to have any meaning at
+all in Malone’s mind.</p>
+
+<p>He realized that he was still staring at the sock, which was black
+with a pink clock. Hurriedly, he put it on, and finished dressing. He
+reached for the phone and made a few fast calls, and then teleported
+himself to his locked office in FBI Headquarters, on East 69th Street
+in New York. He let himself out, and strolled down the corridor. The
+agent-in-charge looked up from his desk as Malone passed, blinked, and
+said, “Hello, Malone. What’s up now?”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m going prowling,” Malone said. “But there won’t be any work for
+you, as far as I can see.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh?”</p>
+
+<p>“Just relax,” Malone said. “Breathe easy.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll try to,” the agent-in-charge said, a little sadly. “But every
+time you show up, I think about that wave of red Cadillacs you
+started. I’ll never feel really secure again.”</p>
+
+<p>“Relax,” Malone said. “Next time it won’t be Cadillacs. But it might
+be spirits, blowing on ear-trumpets. Or whatever it is they do.”</p>
+
+<p>“Spirits, Malone?” the agent-in-charge said.</p>
+
+<p>“No, thanks,” Malone said sternly. “I never drink on duty.” He gave
+the agent a cheery wave of his hand and went on out to the street.</p>
+
+<p>The Psychical Research Society had offices in the Ravell Building, a
+large structure composed mostly of plate glass and anodized aluminum
+that looked just a little like a bright blue transparent crackerbox
+that had been stood on end for purposes unknown. Having walked all the
+way down to this box on 56th Street, Malone had recovered his former
+sensitivity range to temperature and felt pathetically grateful for
+the coolish sea breeze that made New York somewhat less of an
+unbearable Summer Festival than was normal.</p>
+
+<p>The lobby of the building was glittering and polished, as if human
+beings could not possibly exist in it. Malone took an elevator to the
+sixth floor, stepped out into a small, equally polished hall, and
+hurriedly looked off to his right. A small door stood there, with a
+legend engraved in elegantly small letters. It said:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent1"><i>The Psychical Research Society</i></div>
+    <div class="verse indent14"><i>Push</i></div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Malone obeyed instructions. The door swung noiselessly open, and then
+closed behind him.</p>
+
+<p>He was in a large square-looking room which had a couch and chair set
+at one corner, and a desk at the far end. Behind the desk was a brass
+plate, on which was engraved:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent1"><i>The Psychical Research Society</i></div>
+    <div class="verse indent11"><i>Main Offices</i></div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>To Malone’s left was a hall that angled off into invisibility, and to
+the left of the desk was another one, going straight back past doors
+and two radiators until it ran into a right-angled turn and also
+disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>Malone took in the details of his surroundings almost automatically,
+filing them in his memory just in case he ever needed to use them.</p>
+
+<p>One detail, however, required more than automatic attention. Sitting
+behind the desk, her head just below the brass plaque, was a redhead.
+She was, Malone thought, positively beautiful. Of course, he could not
+see the lower two-thirds of her body, but if they were half as
+interesting as the upper third and the face and head, he was willing
+to spend days, weeks or even months on their investigation. Some jobs,
+he told himself, feeling a strong sense of duty, were definitely worth
+taking time over.</p>
+
+<p>She was turned slightly away from Malone, and had obviously not heard
+him come in. Malone wondered how best to announce himself, and
+regretfully gave up the idea of tiptoeing up to the girl, placing his
+hands over her eyes, kissing the back of her neck and crying:
+“Surprise!” It was elegant, he felt, but it just wasn’t <i>right</i>.</p>
+
+<p>He compromised at last on the old established method of throat-clearing
+to attract her attention. He was sure he could take it from there, to
+an eminently satisfying conclusion.</p>
+
+<p>He tiptoed on the deep-pile rug right up to her desk. He took a deep
+breath.</p>
+
+<p>And the expected happened.</p>
+
+<p>He sneezed.</p>
+
+<p>The sneeze was loud and long, and it echoed through the room and
+throughout the corridors. It sounded to Malone like the blast of a
+small bomb, or possibly a grenade. Startled himself by the volume of
+sound he had managed to generate, he jumped back.</p>
+
+<p>The girl had jumped, too, but her leap had been straight upward, about
+an inch and a half. She came down on her chair and reached up a hand.
+The hand wiped the back of her neck with a slow, lingering motion of
+complete loathing. Then, equally slowly, she turned.</p>
+
+<p>“That,” she said in a low, sweet voice, “was a hell of a dirty trick.”</p>
+
+<p>“It was an accident,” Malone said. “The Will of God.”</p>
+
+<p>“God has an exceedingly nasty mind,” the girl said. “Something, by the
+way, which I have often suspected.” She regarded Malone darkly. “Do
+you always do that to strangers? Is it some new sort of perversion?”</p>
+
+<p>“I have never done such a thing before,” Malone said sternly.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” the girl said. “An experimenter. Avid for new sensations.
+Probably a jaded scion of a rich New York family.” She paused. “Tell
+me,” she said, “is it fun?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He shut it, thought for
+a second and then tried again. He got as far as: “I—” before Nemesis
+overtook him. The second sneeze was even louder and more powerful than
+the first had been.</p>
+
+<p>“It must be fun,” the girl said acidly, producing a handkerchief from
+somewhere and going to work on her face. “You just can’t seem to wait
+to do it again. Would it do any good to tell you that the fascination
+with this form of greeting is not universal? Or don’t you care?”</p>
+
+<p>“Damn it,” Malone said, goaded, “I’ve got a cold.”</p>
+
+<p>“And you feel you should share it with the world,” the girl said. “I
+quite understand. Tell me, is there anything I can do for you? Or has
+your mission been accomplished?”</p>
+
+<p>“My mission?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Having sneezed twice at me,” the girl said, “do you feel satisfied?
+Will you vanish softly and silently away? Or do you want to sneeze at
+somebody else?”</p>
+
+<p>“I want the president of the Society,” Malone said. “According to my
+information, his name is Sir Lewis Carter.”</p>
+
+<p>“And if you sneeze at him,” the girl said, “yours is going to be mud.
+He isn’t much on novelty.”</p>
+
+<p>“I—”</p>
+
+<p>“Besides which,” she said, “he’s extremely busy. And I don’t think
+he’ll see you at all. Why don’t you go and sneeze at somebody else?
+There must be lots of people who would consider themselves honored to
+be noticed, especially in such a startling way. Why don’t you try and
+find one somewhere? Somewhere very far away.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone was beyond speech. He fumbled for his wallet, flipped it open
+and showed the girl his identification.</p>
+
+<p>“My, my,” she said. “And hasn’t the FBI anything better to do? I mean,
+can’t you go and sneeze at counterfeiters in their lairs, or wherever
+they might be?”</p>
+
+<p>“I want to see Sir Lewis Carter,” Malone said doggedly.</p>
+
+<p>The girl shrugged and picked up the phone on the desk. It was a
+blank-vision device, of course; many office intercoms were. She
+dialed, waited and then said, “Sir Lewis, please.” Another second went
+by. Then she spoke again. “Sir Lewis,” she said, “this is Lou, at the
+front desk. There’s a man here named Malone, who wants to see you.”</p>
+
+<p>She waited a second. “I don’t know what he wants,” she told the phone.
+“But he’s from the FBI.” A second’s pause. “That’s right, the FBI,”
+she said. “All right, Sir Lewis. Right away.” She hung up the phone
+and turned to watch Malone warily.</p>
+
+<p>“Sir Lewis,” she said, “will see you. I couldn’t say why. But take the
+side corridor to the rear of the suite. His office has his name on it,
+and I won’t tell you you can’t miss it because I have every faith that
+you will. Good luck.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone blinked. “Look,” he said. “I know I startled you, but I didn’t
+mean to. I—” He started to sneeze, but this time he got his own
+handkerchief out in time and muffled the explosion slightly.</p>
+
+<p>“Good work,” the girl said approvingly. “Tell me, Mr. Malone, have you
+been toilet-trained, too?”</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing at all to say to that remark, Malone reflected as he
+wended his way down the side corridor. It seemed endless, and kept
+branching off unexpectedly. Once he blundered into a large open room
+filled with people at desks. A woman who seemed to have a great many
+teeth and rather bulbous eyes looked up at him. “Can I help you?” she
+said in a fervent whine.</p>
+
+<p>“I sincerely hope not,” Malone said, backing away and managing to find
+the corridor once more. After what seemed like a long time, and two
+more sneezes, he found a small door which was labeled in capital
+letters:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent1">THE PSYCHICAL RESEARCH SOCIETY</div>
+    <div class="verse indent9">SIR LEWIS CARTER</div>
+    <div class="verse indent12">PRESIDENT</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Malone sighed. “Well,” he muttered, “they certainly aren’t hiding
+anything.” He pushed at the door, and it swung open.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Lewis was a tall, solidly-built man with a kindly expression. He
+wore grey flannel trousers and a brown tweed jacket, which made an
+interesting color contrast with his iron-grey hair. His teeth were
+clenched so firmly on the bit of a calabash pipe with a meerschaum
+bowl that Malone wondered if he could ever get loose. Malone shut the
+door behind him, and Sir Lewis rose and extended a hand.</p>
+
+<p>Malone went to the desk and reached across to take the hand. It was
+firm and dry. “I’m Kenneth Malone,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, yes,” Sir Lewis said. “Pleased to meet you. Always happy, of
+course, to do whatever I can for your FBI. Not only a duty, so to
+speak, but a pleasure. Sit down. Please do sit down.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone found a chair at the side of the desk, and sank into it. It was
+soft and comfortable. It provided such a contrast to O’Connor’s
+furnishings that Malone began to wish it was Sir Lewis who was
+employed at Yucca Flats. Then he could tell Sir Lewis everything about
+the case.</p>
+
+<p>Now, of course, he could only hedge and try to make do without stating
+very many facts. “Sir Lewis,” he said, “I trust you’ll keep this
+conversation confidential.”</p>
+
+<p>“Naturally,” Sir Lewis said. He removed the pipe, stared at it, and
+replaced it.</p>
+
+<p>“I can’t give you the full details,” Malone went on, “but the FBI is
+presently engaged in an investigation which requires the specialized
+knowledge your organization seems to have.”</p>
+
+<p>“FBI?” Sir Lewis said. “Specialized investigation?” He seemed pleased,
+but a trifle puzzled. “Dear boy, anything we have is at your disposal,
+of course. But I quite fail to see how you can consider us—”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s rather an unusual problem,” Malone said, feeling that that was
+the understatement of the year. “But I understand that your records go
+back nearly a century.”</p>
+
+<p>“Quite true,” Sir Lewis murmured.</p>
+
+<p>“During that time,” Malone said, “the Society investigated a great
+many supposedly supernatural or supernormal incidents.”</p>
+
+<p>“Many of them,” Sir Lewis said, “were discovered to be fraudulent, I’m
+afraid. The great majority, in fact.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s what I’d assume,” Malone said. He fished in his pockets, found
+a cigarette and lit it. Sir Lewis went on chewing at his unlit pipe.
+“What we’re interested in,” Malone said, “is some description of the
+various methods by which these frauds were perpetrated.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah,” Sir Lewis said. “The tricks of the trade, so to speak?”</p>
+
+<p>“Exactly,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then,” Sir Lewis said. “The luminous gauze, for instance, that
+passes for ectoplasm; the various methods of table-lifting; control of
+the Ouija board—things like that?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not quite that elementary,” Malone said. He puffed on the cigarette,
+wishing it was a cigar. “We’re pretty much up to that kind of thing.
+But had it ever occurred to you that many of the methods used by phony
+mind-reading acts, for instance, might be used as communication
+methods by spies?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, I believe some have been,” Sir Lewis said. “Though I don’t know
+much about that, of course; there was a case during the First World
+War—”</p>
+
+<p>“Exactly,” Malone said. He took a deep breath. “It’s things like that
+we’re interested in,” he said, and spent the next twenty minutes
+slowly approaching his subject. Sir Lewis, apparently fascinated, was
+perfectly willing to unbend in any direction, and jotted down notes on
+some of Malone’s more interesting cases, murmuring: “Most unusual,
+most unusual,” as he wrote.</p>
+
+<p>The various types of phenomena that the Society had investigated came
+into the discussion, and Malone heard quite a lot about the Beyond,
+the Great Summerland, Spirit Mediums and the hypothetical existence of
+fairies, goblins and elves.</p>
+
+<p>“But, Sir Lewis—” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“I make no claims personally,” Sir Lewis said. “But I understand that
+there is a large and somewhat vocal group which does make rather
+solid-sounding claims in that direction. They say that they have seen
+fairies, talked with goblins, danced with the elves.”</p>
+
+<p>“They must be very unusual people,” Malone said, understating heavily.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” Sir Lewis said, without a trace of irony, “they certainly are.”</p>
+
+<p>Talk like this passed away nearly a half-hour, until Malone finally
+felt that it was the right time to introduce some of his real
+questions. “Tell me, Sir Lewis,” he said. “Have you had many instances
+of a single man, or a small group of men, controlling the actions of a
+much larger group? And doing it in such a way that the larger group
+doesn’t even know it is being manipulated?”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course I have,” Sir Lewis said. “And so have you. They call it
+advertising.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone flicked his cigarette into an ashtray. “I didn’t mean exactly
+that,” he said. “Suppose they’re doing it in such a way that the
+larger group doesn’t even suspect that manipulation is going on?”</p>
+
+<p>Sir Lewis removed his pipe and frowned at it. “I may be able to give
+you a little information,” he said slowly, “but not much.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah?” Malone said, trying to sound only mildly interested.</p>
+
+<p>“Outside of mob psychology,” Sir Lewis said, “and all that sort of
+thing, I really haven’t seen any record of a case of such a thing
+happening. And I can’t quite imagine anyone faking it.”</p>
+
+<p>“But you have got some information?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly,” Sir Lewis said. “There is always spirit control.”</p>
+
+<p>“Spirit control?” Malone blinked.</p>
+
+<p>“Demoniac intervention,” Sir Lewis said. “‘My name is Legion,’ you
+know.”</p>
+
+<p>Sir Lewis Legion, Malone thought confusedly, was a rather unusual
+name. He took a breath and caught hold of his revolving mind. “How
+would you go about that?” he said, a little hopelessly.</p>
+
+<p>“I haven’t the foggiest,” Sir Lewis admitted cheerfully. “But I will
+have it looked up for you.” He made a note. “Anything else?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone tried to think. “Yes,” he said at last. “Can you give me a
+condensed report on what is known—and I mean <i>known</i>—on telepathy
+and teleportation?”</p>
+
+<p>“What you want,” Sir Lewis said, “are those cases proven genuine, not
+the ones in which we have established fraud, or those still in doubt.”</p>
+
+<p>“Exactly,” Malone said. If he got no other use out of the data, it
+would provide a measuring-stick for the Society. The general public
+didn’t know that the Government was actually using psionic powers, and
+the Society’s theories, checked against actual fact, would provide a
+rough index of reliability to use on the Society’s other data.</p>
+
+<p>But spirits, somehow, didn’t seem very likely. Malone sighed and stood
+up.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll have copies made of all the relevant material,” Sir Lewis said,
+“from our library and research files. Where do you want the material
+sent? I do want to warn you of its bulk; there may be quite a lot of
+it.”</p>
+
+<p>“FBI Headquarters, on 69th Street,” Malone said. “And send a statement
+of expenses along with it. As long as the bill’s within reason, don’t
+worry about itemizing; I’ll see that it goes through Accounting
+myself.”</p>
+
+<p>Sir Lewis nodded. “Fine,” he said. “And, if you should have any
+difficulties with the material, please let me know. I’ll always be
+glad to help.”</p>
+
+<p>“Thanks for your co-operation,” Malone said. He went to the door, and
+walked on out.</p>
+
+<p>He blundered back into the same big room again, on his way through the
+corridors. The bulbous-eyed woman, who seemed to have inherited a full
+set of thirty-two teeth from each of her parents, gave him a friendly
+if somewhat crowded smile, but Malone pressed on without a word. After
+awhile, he found the reception room again.</p>
+
+<p>The girl behind the desk looked up. “How did he react?” she said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone blinked. “React?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“When you sneezed at him,” she said. “Because I’ve been thinking it
+over, and I’ve got a new theory. You’re doing a survey on how people
+act when encountering sneezes. Like Kinsey.”</p>
+
+<p>This girl—Lou something, Malone thought, and with difficulty
+refrained from adding “Gehrig”—had an unusual effect, he decided. He
+wondered if there were anyone in the world she couldn’t reduce to
+paralyzed silence.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course,” she went on, “Kinsey was dealing with sex, and you
+aren’t. At least, you aren’t during business hours.” She smiled
+politely at Malone.</p>
+
+<p>“No,” he said helplessly, “I’m not.”</p>
+
+<p>“It is sneezing, then,” she said. “Will I be in the book when it’s
+published?”</p>
+
+<p>“Book?” Malone said, feeling more and more like a rather low-grade
+moron.</p>
+
+<p>“The book on sneezing, when you get it published,” she said. “I can
+see it now: <i>The Case of Miss X, a Receptionist</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>“There isn’t going to be any book,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head. “That’s a shame,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to
+be a Miss X. It sounds exciting.”</p>
+
+<p>“X,” Malone said at random, “marks the spot.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, that’s the sweetest thing that’s been said to me all day,” the
+girl said. “I thought you could hardly talk, and here you come out
+with lovely things like that. But I’ll bet you say it to all the
+girls.”</p>
+
+<p>“I have never said it to anybody before,” Malone said flatly. “And I
+never will again.”</p>
+
+<p>The girl sighed. “I’ll treasure it,” she said. “My one great moment.
+Goodbye, Mr.—Malone, isn’t it?”</p>
+
+<p>“Ken,” Malone said. “Just call me Ken.”</p>
+
+<p>“And I’m Lou,” the girl said. “Goodbye.”</p>
+
+<p>An elevator arrived and Malone ducked into it. Louie? he thought.
+Louise? Luke? Of course, there was Sir Lewis Carter, who might be
+called Lou. Was he related to the girl?</p>
+
+<p>No, Malone thought wildly. Relations went by last names. There was no
+reason for Lou to be related to Sir Lewis. They didn’t even look
+alike. For instance, he had no desire whatever to make a date with Sir
+Lewis Carter, or to take him to a glittering night-club, or to make him
+any whispered propositions. And the very idea of Sir Lewis Carter
+sitting on the Malone lap was enough to give him indigestion and spots
+before the eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Sternly, he told himself to get back to business. The elevator stopped
+at the lobby and he got out and started down the street, feeling that
+consideration of the lady known as Lou was much more pleasant. After
+all, what did he have to work with, as far as his job was concerned?</p>
+
+<p>So far, two experts had told him that his theory was full of lovely
+little holes. Worse than that, they had told him that mass control of
+human beings was impossible, as far as they knew.</p>
+
+<p>And maybe it was impossible, he told himself sadly. Maybe he should
+just junk his whole theory and think up a new one. Maybe there was no
+psionics involved in the thing at all, and Boyd and O’Connor were
+right.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, he had a deep-seated conviction that psionics was somewhere
+at the root of everything, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything.
+A lot of people had deep-seated convictions that they were beetles, or
+that the world was flat And then again, murderers often suffered as a
+result of deep-seated convictions of one sort or another.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, maybe he had invented a whole new psionic theory
+or, at least, observed some new psionic facts. Maybe they would call
+the results Malonizing, instead of O’Connorizing. He tried to picture
+a man opening a door and saying: “Come out quick, Mr. Frembits is
+Malonizing again.”</p>
+
+<p>It didn’t sound very plausible. But, after all, he did have a
+deep-seated conviction. He tried to think of a shallow-seated
+conviction, and failed. Didn’t convictions ever stand up, anyhow, or
+lie down?</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head, discovered that he was on 69th Street, and headed
+for the FBI Headquarters. His convictions, he had found, were
+sometimes an expression of his precognitive powers; he determined to
+ride with them, at least for awhile.</p>
+
+<p>By the time he came to the office of the agent-in-charge, he had
+figured out the beginnings of a new line of attack.</p>
+
+<p>“How about the ghosts?” the agent-in-charge asked as he passed.</p>
+
+<p>“They’ll be along,” Malone said. “In a big bundle, addressed to me
+personally. And don’t open the bundle.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why not?” the agent-in-charge asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Because I don’t want the things to get loose and run around saying
+boo to everybody,” Malone said brightly, and went on.</p>
+
+<p>He opened the door of his private office, went inside and sat down at
+the desk there. He took his time about framing a thought, a single,
+clear, deliberate thought:</p>
+
+<p><i>Your Majesty, I’d like to speak to you.</i></p>
+
+<p>He hardly had time to finish it. A flash of color appeared in the
+room, just a few feet from his desk. The flash resolved itself into a
+tiny, grandmotherly-looking woman with a coronal of white hair and a
+kindly, twinkling expression. She was dressed in the full court
+costume of the First Elizabethan period, and this was hardly
+surprising to Malone. The little old lady believed, quite firmly, that
+she was Queen Elizabeth I, miraculously preserved over all these
+centuries. Malone, himself, had practically forgotten that the woman’s
+real name was Rose Thompson, and that she had only been alive for
+sixty-five years or so. For most of that time, she had been insane.</p>
+
+<p>For all of that time, however, she had been a genuine telepath. She
+had been discovered during the course of Malone’s first psionic case,
+and by now she had even learned to teleport by “reading” the process
+in Malone’s mind.</p>
+
+<p>“Good afternoon, Sir Kenneth,” she said in a regal, kindly voice. She
+was mad, he knew, but her delusion was nicely kept within bounds. All
+of her bright world hinged on the single fact that she was unshakably
+certain of her royalty. As long as the FBI catered to that notion—
+which included a Royal dwelling for her in Yucca Flats, and the
+privilege of occasionally knighting FBI agents who had pleased her
+unpredictable fancy—she was perfectly rational on all other points.
+She co-operated with Dr. O’Connor and with the FBI in the
+investigation of her psionic powers, and she had given her Royal word
+not to teleport except at Malone’s personal request.</p>
+
+<p>“I’d like to talk to you,” Malone said, “Your Majesty.”</p>
+
+<p>There was an odd note in the Queen’s voice, and an odd, haunted
+expression on her face. “I’ve been hoping you’d ask me to come,” she
+said.</p>
+
+<p>“I had a hunch you were following me telepathically,” Malone said.
+“Can you give me any help?”</p>
+
+<p>“I—I really don’t know,” she said. “It’s something new, and something
+disturbing. I’ve never come across anything like it before.”</p>
+
+<p>“Like what?” Malone asked.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s the—” She made a gesture that conveyed nothing at all to
+Malone. “The—the static,” she said at last.</p>
+
+<p>Malone blinked. “Static?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” she said. “You’re not telepathic, so I can’t tell you what it’s
+really like. But—well, Sir Kenneth, have you ever seen disturbance on
+a TV screen, when there’s some powerful electric output nearby? The
+bright, senseless snowstorms, the meaningless hash?”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s like that,” she said. “It’s a sudden, meaningless, disturbing
+blare of telepathic energy.”</p>
+
+<p>The telephone rang once. Malone ignored it.</p>
+
+<p>“What’s causing these disturbances?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head. “I don’t know, Sir Kenneth. I don’t know,” she
+said. “I can’t pick up a person’s mind over a distance unless I know
+him, and I can’t see what’s causing this at all. It’s—frankly, Sir
+Kenneth, it’s rather terrifying.”</p>
+
+<p>The phone rang again.</p>
+
+<p>“How long have you been experiencing this disturbance?” Malone asked.
+He looked at the phone.</p>
+
+<p>“The telephone isn’t important,” Her Majesty said. “It’s only Sir
+Thomas, calling to tell you he’s arrested three spies, and that
+doesn’t matter at all.”</p>
+
+<p>“It doesn’t?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not at all,” Her Majesty said. “What does matter is that I’ve only
+been picking up these flashes since you were assigned to this new
+case, Sir Kenneth. And....” She paused.</p>
+
+<p>“Well?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“And they only appear,” Her Majesty said, “when I’m tuned to <i>your</i>
+mind!”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c5">5</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Malone stared. He tried to say something but he couldn’t find any
+words. The telephone rang again and he pushed the switch with a sense
+of relief. The beard-fringed face of Thomas Boyd appeared on the
+screen.</p>
+
+<p>“You’re getting hard to find,” Boyd said. “I think you’re letting fame
+and fortune go to your head.”</p>
+
+<p>“I left word at the office that I was coming here,” Malone said
+aggrievedly.</p>
+
+<p>“Sure you did,” Boyd said. “How do you think I found you? Am I
+telepathic? Do I have strange powers?”</p>
+
+<p>“Wouldn’t surprise me in the least,” Malone said. “Now, about those
+spies—”</p>
+
+<p>“See what I mean?” Boyd said. “How did you know?”</p>
+
+<p>“Just lucky, I guess,” Malone murmured. “But what about them?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Boyd said, “we picked up two men working in the Senate Office
+Building, and another one working for the State Department.”</p>
+
+<p>“And they are spies?” Malone said. “Real spies?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, they’re real enough,” Boyd said. “We’ve known about ’em for
+years, and I finally decided to pick them up for questioning. God
+knows, but maybe they have something to do with all this mess that’s
+bothering everybody.”</p>
+
+<p>“You haven’t the faintest idea what you mean,” Malone said. “Mess is
+hardly the word.”</p>
+
+<p>Boyd snorted. “You go on getting yourself confused,” he said, “while
+some of us do the real work. After all—”</p>
+
+<p>“Never mind the insults,” Malone said. “How about the spies?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Boyd said, a trifle reluctantly, “they’ve been working as
+janitors and maintenance men, and of course we’ve made sure they
+haven’t been able to get their hands on any really valuable
+information.”</p>
+
+<p>“So they’ve suddenly turned into criminal masterminds,” Malone said.
+“After being under careful surveillance for years.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, it’s possible,” Boyd said defensively.</p>
+
+<p>“Almost anything is possible,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Some things,” Boyd said carefully, “are more possible than others.”</p>
+
+<p>“Thank you, Charles W. Aristotle,” Malone said. “I hope you realize
+what you’ve done, picking up those three men. We might have been able
+to get some good lines on them, if you’d left them where they were.”</p>
+
+<p>There is an old story about a general who went on an inspection tour
+of the front during World War I, and, putting his head incautiously up
+out of a trench, was narrowly missed by a sniper’s bullet. He turned
+to a nearby sergeant and bellowed: “Get that sniper!”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, we’ve got him spotted, sir,” the sergeant said. “He’s been there
+for six days now.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then,” the general said, “why don’t you blast him out of
+there?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, sir, it’s this way,” the sergeant explained. “He’s fired about
+sixty rounds since he’s been out there, and he hasn’t hit anything
+yet. We’re afraid if we get rid of him they’ll put up somebody who
+<i>can</i> shoot.”</p>
+
+<p>This was standard FBI policy when dealing with minor spies. A great
+many had been spotted, including four in the Department of Fisheries.
+But known spies are easier to keep track of than unknown ones. And, as
+long as they’re allowed to think they haven’t been spotted, they may
+lead the way to other spies or spy networks.</p>
+
+<p>“I thought it was worth the risk,” Boyd said. “After all, if they have
+something to do with the case—”</p>
+
+<p>“But they don’t,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Damn it,” Boyd exploded, “let me find out for myself, will you?
+You’re spoiling all the fun.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, anyhow,” Malone said, “they don’t.”</p>
+
+<p>“You can’t afford to take any chances,” Boyd said. “After all, when I
+think about William Logan, I tell myself we’d better take care of
+every lead.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Malone said finally, “you may be right. And then again, you
+may be normally wrong.”</p>
+
+<p>“What is that supposed to mean?” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>“How should I know?” Malone said. “I’m too busy to go around and
+around like this. But since you’ve picked the spies up, I suppose it
+won’t do any harm to find out if they know anything.”</p>
+
+<p>Boyd snorted again. “Thank you,” he said, “for your kind permission.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll be right down,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll be waiting,” Boyd said. “In Interrogation Room 7. You’ll
+recognize me by the bullet hole in my forehead and the strange South
+American poison, hitherto unknown to science, in my esophagus.”</p>
+
+<p>“Very funny,” Malone said. “Don’t give up the ship.”</p>
+
+<p>Boyd switched off without a word. Malone shrugged at the blank screen
+and pushed his own switch. Then he turned slowly back to Her Majesty,
+who was standing, waiting patiently, at the opposite side of the desk.
+Interference, he thought, located around him....</p>
+
+<p>“Why yes,” she said. “That’s exactly what I did say.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone blinked. “Your Majesty,” he said, “would you mind terribly if I
+asked you questions before you answered them? I know you can see them
+in my mind, but it’s simpler for me to do things the normal way, just
+now.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m sorry,” she said sincerely. “I do agree that matters are confused
+enough already. Please go on.”</p>
+
+<p>“Thank you, Your Majesty,” Malone said. “Well, then. Do you mean that
+<i>I’m</i> the one causing all this mental static?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, no,” she said. “Not at all. It’s definitely coming from somewhere
+else, and it’s beamed at you, or beamed around you.”</p>
+
+<p>“But—”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s just that I can only pick it up when I’m tuned to your mind,”
+she said.</p>
+
+<p>“Like now?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head. “Right now,” she said, “there isn’t any. It only
+happens every once in awhile, every so often, and not continuously.”</p>
+
+<p>“Does it happen at regular intervals?” Malone asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Not as far as I’ve been able to tell,” Her Majesty said. “It just
+happens, that’s all. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to
+it. Except that it did start when you were assigned to this case.”</p>
+
+<p>“Lovely,” Malone said. “Perfectly lovely. And what is it supposed to
+mean?”</p>
+
+<p>“Interference,” she said. “Static. Jumble. That’s all it means. I just
+don’t know any more than that, Sir Kenneth; I’ve never experienced
+anything like it in my life. It really does disturb me.”</p>
+
+<p>That, Malone told himself, he could believe. It must be an experience,
+he told himself, like having someone you were looking at suddenly
+dissolve into a jumble of meaningless shapes and lights.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s a very good analogy,” Her Majesty said. “If you’ll pardon me
+speaking before you’ve voiced your thought.”</p>
+
+<p>“Not at all,” Malone said. “Go right ahead.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then,” Her Majesty said. “The analogy you use is a good one.
+It’s just as disturbing and as meaningless as that.”</p>
+
+<p>“And you don’t know what’s causing it?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“Nor what the purpose of it is?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Her Majesty shook her head slowly. “Sir Kenneth,” she said, “I don’t
+even know whether or not there <i>is</i> any purpose.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone sighed deeply. Nothing in the case seemed to make any sense. It
+wasn’t that there were no clues, or no information for him to work
+with. There were a lot of clues, and there was a lot of information.
+But nothing seemed to link up with anything else. Every new fact was a
+bright, shiny arrow pointing nowhere in particular.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then—” he started.</p>
+
+<p>The intercom buzzed. Malone jabbed ferociously at the button. “Yes?”
+he said.</p>
+
+<p>“The ghosts are here,” the agent-in-charge’s voice said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone blinked. “What?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“You said you were going to get some ghosts,” the agent-in-charge
+said. “From the Psychical Research Society, in a couple of large
+bundles. And they’re here now. Want me to exorcise ’em for you?”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” Malone said wearily. “Just send them in to join the crowd. Got a
+messenger?”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll send them down,” the agent-in-charge said. “About one minute.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone nodded, realized the man couldn’t see him, said: “Fine,” and
+switched off. He looked at his watch. A little over half an hour had
+passed since he had left the Psychical Research Society offices. That,
+he told himself, was efficiency.</p>
+
+<p>Not that the books would mean anything, he thought. They would just
+take their places at the end of the long row of meaningless,
+disturbing, vicious facts that cluttered up his mind. He wasn’t an FBI
+agent any more; he was a clown and a failure, and he was through. He
+was going to resign and go to South Dakota and live the life of a
+hermit. He would drink goat’s milk and eat old shoes or something, and
+whenever another human being came near he would run away and hide.
+They would call him Old Kenneth, and people would write articles for
+magazines about The Twentieth Century Hermit.</p>
+
+<p>And that would make him famous, he thought wearily, and the whole
+circle would start all over again.</p>
+
+<p>“Now, now, Sir Kenneth,” Queen Elizabeth said. “Things aren’t quite
+that bad.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes, they are,” Malone said. “They’re even worse.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m sure we can find an answer to all your questions,” Her Majesty
+said.</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Malone said. “Even I can find an answer. But it isn’t the
+right one.”</p>
+
+<p>“You can?” Her Majesty said.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s right,” Malone said. “My answer is: to hell with everything.”</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Malone’s Washington offices didn’t look any different. He sighed and
+put the two big packages from the Psychical Research Society down on
+his desk, and then turned to Her Majesty.</p>
+
+<p>“I wanted you to teleport along with me,” he said, “because I need
+your help.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” she said. “I know.”</p>
+
+<p>He blinked. “Oh. Sure you do. But let me go over the details.”</p>
+
+<p>Her Majesty waved a gracious hand. “If you like, Sir Kenneth,” she
+said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone nodded. “We’re going on down to Interrogation Room 7 now,” he
+said. “Next door to it, there’s an observation room, with a one-way
+panel in the wall. You’ll be able to see us, but we won’t be able to
+see you.”</p>
+
+<p>“I really don’t require an observation panel,” Her Majesty said. “If I
+enter your mind, I can see through your eyes.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, sure,” Malone said. “But the observation room was built for more
+normal people—saving your presence, Your Majesty.”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“Now,” Malone went on, “I want you to watch all three of the men we’re
+going to bring in, and dig everything you can out of their minds.”</p>
+
+<p>“Everything?” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“We don’t know what might be useful,” Malone said. “Anything you can
+find. And if you want any questions asked—if there’s anything you
+think I ought to ask the men, or say to them—there’s a non-vision
+phone in the observation room. Just lift the receiver. That
+automatically rings the one in the interrogation room and I’ll pick it
+up. Understand?”</p>
+
+<p>“Perfectly, Sir Kenneth,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“Okay, then,” Malone said. “Let’s go.” They headed for the door.
+Malone stopped as he opened it. “And by the way,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes?”</p>
+
+<p>“If you get any more of those disturbances, let me know.”</p>
+
+<p>“At once,” Her Majesty promised.</p>
+
+<p>They went on down the hall and took the elevator down to Interrogation
+Room 7, on the lowest level. There was no particular reason for
+putting the interrogation section down there, except that it tended to
+make prisoners more nervous. And a nervous prisoner, Malone knew, was
+very possibly a confessing prisoner.</p>
+
+<p>Malone ushered Her Majesty through the unmarked door of the
+observation chamber, made sure that the panel and phone were in
+working order, and went out. He stepped into Interrogation Room 7
+trying hard to look bored, businesslike and unbeatable. Boyd and four
+other agents were already there, all standing around and talking
+desultorily in low tones. None of them looked as if they had a
+moment’s worry in their lives. It was all part of the same technique,
+of course, Malone thought. Make the prisoner feel resistance is
+useless, and you’ve practically got him working for you.</p>
+
+<p>The prisoner was a hulking, flabby fat man in work coveralls. He had
+black hair that spilled all over his forehead, and tiny button eyes.
+He was the only man in the room who was sitting down, and that was
+meant to make him feel even more inferior and insecure. His hands were
+clasped fatly in his lap, and he was staring down at them in a
+regretful manner. None of the agents paid the slightest attention to
+him. The general impression was that something really tough was coming
+up, but that they were in no hurry for it. They were willing to wait
+for the third degree, it seemed, until the blacksmith had done a
+really good job with the new spikes for the Iron Maiden.</p>
+
+<p>The prisoner looked up apprehensively as Malone shut the door. Malone
+paid no attention to him, and the prisoner unclasped his hands, rubbed
+them on his coveralls and then reclasped them in his lap. His eyes
+fell again.</p>
+
+<p>Boyd looked up too. “Hello, Ken,” he said. He tapped a sheaf of papers
+on the single table in the room. Malone went over and picked them up.</p>
+
+<p>They were the abbreviated condensations of three dossiers. All three
+of the men covered in the dossiers were naturalized citizens, but all
+had come in as “political refugees” from Hungary, from Czechoslovakia,
+and from East Germany. Further checking had turned up the fact that
+all three were actually Russians. They had been using false names
+during their stay in the United States, but their real ones were
+appended to the dossiers.</p>
+
+<p>The fat one in the interrogation room was named Alexis Brubitsch. The
+other two, who were presumably waiting separately in other rooms, were
+Ivan Borbitsch and Vasili Garbitsch. The collection sounded, to
+Malone, like a seedy musical-comedy firm of lawyers: Brubitsch,
+Borbitsch and Garbitsch. He could picture them dancing gaily across a
+stage while the strains of music followed them, waving legal forms and
+telephones and singing away.</p>
+
+<p>Brubitsch did not, however, look very gay. Malone went over to him
+now, walking slowly, and looked down. Boyd came and stood next to him.</p>
+
+<p>“This is the one who won’t talk, eh?” Malone said, wondering if he
+sounded as much like Dick Tracy as he thought he did. It was a
+standard opening, meant to make the prisoner think his fellows had
+already confessed.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s him,” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>“Mmm,” Malone said, trying to look as if he were deciding between the
+rack and the boiling oil. Brubitsch fidgeted slightly, but he didn’t
+say anything.</p>
+
+<p>“We didn’t know whether we had to get this one to talk, too,” Boyd
+said. “What with the others, and all. But we did think you ought to
+have a look at him.” He sounded very bored. It was obvious from his
+tone that the FBI didn’t care in the least if Alexis Brubitsch never
+opened his mouth again, in what was likely to be a very short
+lifetime.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Malone said, equally bored, “we might be able to get a few
+corroborative details.”</p>
+
+<p>Brubitsch swallowed hard. Malone ignored him.</p>
+
+<p>“Now, just look at him,” Boyd said. “He certainly doesn’t <i>look</i> like
+the head of a spy ring, does he?”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course he doesn’t,” Malone said. “That’s probably why the Russians
+used him. They figured nobody would ever look twice at a fat slob like
+this. Nobody would ever suspect him of being the head man.”</p>
+
+<p>“I guess you’re right,” Boyd said. He yawned, which Malone thought was
+overacting a trifle. Brubitsch saw the yawn, and one hand came up to
+jerk at his collar.</p>
+
+<p>“Who’d ever think,” Malone said, “that he plotted those killings in
+Redstone—all three of them?”</p>
+
+<p>“It is surprising,” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>“But, then,” Malone said, “we know he did. There isn’t any doubt of
+that.”</p>
+
+<p>Brubitsch seemed to be turning a pale green. It was a fascinating
+color, unlike any other Malone had ever seen. He watched it with
+interest.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, sure,” Boyd said. “We’ve got enough evidence from the other two
+to send this one to the chair tomorrow, if we want to.”</p>
+
+<p>“More than enough,” Malone agreed.</p>
+
+<p>Brubitsch opened his mouth, shut it again and closed his eyes. His
+lips moved silently.</p>
+
+<p>“Tell me,” Boyd said conversationally, leaning down to the fat man.
+“Did your orders on that job come from Moscow, or did you mastermind
+it all by yourself?”</p>
+
+<p>Brubitsch’s eyes stirred, then snapped open as if they’d been pulled
+by a string. “Me?” he said in a hoarse bass voice. “I know nothing
+about this murder. What murder? I know nothing about it.”</p>
+
+<p>There were no such murders, of course. But Malone was not ready to let
+Brubitsch know anything about that. “Oh, the ones you shot in
+Redstone,” he said in an offhand way.</p>
+
+<p>“The what?” Brubitsch said. “I shot people? Never.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, sure you did,” Boyd said. “The others say you did.”</p>
+
+<p>Brubitsch’s head seemed to sink into his neck. “Borbitsch and
+Garbitsch, they tell you about a murder? It is not true. Is a lie.”</p>
+
+<p>“Really?” Malone said. “We think it’s true.”</p>
+
+<p>“Is a lie,” Brubitsch said, his little eyes peering anxiously from
+side to side. “Is not true,” he went on hopefully. “I have alibi.”</p>
+
+<p>“You do?” Boyd said. “For what time?”</p>
+
+<p>“For time when murder happened,” Brubitsch said. “I was someplace
+else.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then,” Malone said, “how do you know when the murders were
+done? They were kept out of the newspapers.” That, he reflected, was
+quite true, since the murders had never happened. But he watched
+Brubitsch with a wary eye.</p>
+
+<p>“I know nothing about time,” Brubitsch said, jerking at his collar. “I
+don’t know when they happened.”</p>
+
+<p>“Then how can you have an alibi?” Boyd snapped.</p>
+
+<p>“Because I didn’t do them!” Brubitsch said tearfully. “If I didn’t,
+then I <i>must</i> have alibi!”</p>
+
+<p>“You’d be surprised,” Malone said. “Now, about these murders—”</p>
+
+<p>“Was no murder, not by me,” Brubitsch said firmly. “Was never any
+killing of anybody, not even by accident.”</p>
+
+<p>“But your two friends say—” Boyd began.</p>
+
+<p>“My two friends are not my friends,” Brubitsch said firmly. “If they
+tell you about murder and say it was me, they are no friends. I did
+not murder anybody, I have alibi. I did not even murder anybody a
+little bit. They are no friends. This is terrible.”</p>
+
+<p>“There,” Malone said reflectively, “I agree with you. It’s positively
+awful. And I think we might as well give it up. After all, we don’t
+need your testimony. The other two are enough; they’ll get maybe ten
+years apiece, but you’re going to get the chair.”</p>
+
+<p>“I will not sit down,” Brubitsch said firmly. “I am innocent. I am
+innocent like a small child. Does a small child commit a murder? It is
+ridiculous.”</p>
+
+<p>Boyd picked up his cue with ease. “You might as well give us your side
+of the story, then,” he said easily. “If you didn’t commit any
+murders—”</p>
+
+<p>“I am a small child,” Brubitsch announced.</p>
+
+<p>“Okay,” Boyd said. “But if you didn’t commit any murders, just what
+<i>have</i> you been doing since you’ve been in this country as a Soviet
+agent?”</p>
+
+<p>“I will say nothing,” Brubitsch announced. “I am a small child. It is
+enough.” He paused, blinked, and went on, “I will only tell you this:
+no murders were done by our group in any of our activities.”</p>
+
+<p>“And what were your activities?” Malone asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, many things,” Brubitsch said. “Many, many things. We—”</p>
+
+<p>The telephone rang loudly, and Malone scooped it up with a practiced
+hand. “Malone here,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Her Majesty’s voice was excited. “Sir Kenneth!” she said. “I just got
+a tremendous burst of static!”</p>
+
+<p>Malone blinked. <i>Is my mind acting up again?</i> he thought, knowing she
+would pick it up. <i>Am I being interfered with?</i></p>
+
+<p>He didn’t feel any different. But then, how was he supposed to feel?</p>
+
+<p>“It’s not <i>your</i> mind, Sir Kenneth,” Her Majesty said. “Not this time.
+It’s <i>his</i> mind. That sneaky-thinking Brubitsch fellow.”</p>
+
+<p><i>Brubitsch?</i> Malone thought. <i>Now what is that supposed to mean?</i></p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know, Sir Kenneth,” Her Majesty said. “But get on back to
+your questioning. He’s ready to talk now.”</p>
+
+<p>“Okay,” Malone said aloud. “Fine.” He hung up and looked back to the
+Russian sitting on his chair. Brubitsch was ready to talk, and that
+was one good thing, anyhow. But what was all the static about?</p>
+
+<p>What was going on?</p>
+
+<p>“Now, then,” Malone said. “You were telling us about your group
+activities.”</p>
+
+<p>“True,” Brubitsch said. “I did not commit any murders. It is possible
+that Borbitsch committed murders. It is maybe even possible that
+Garbitsch committed murders. But I do not think so.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why not?” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>“They are my friends,” Brubitsch said. “Even if they tell lies. They
+are also small children. Besides, I am not even the head of the
+group.”</p>
+
+<p>“Who is?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Garbitsch,” Brubitsch said instantly. “He worked in the State
+Department, and he told us what to look for in the Senate Office
+Building.”</p>
+
+<p>“What were you supposed to look for?” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>“For information,” Brubitsch said. “For scraps of paper, or things we
+overheard. But it was very bad, very bad.”</p>
+
+<p>“What do you mean, bad?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Everything was terrible,” Brubitsch said mournfully. “Sometimes
+Borbitsch heard something and forgot to tell Garbitsch about it.
+Garbitsch did not like this. He is a very inflamed person. Once he
+threatened to send Borbitsch to the island of Yap as a spy. That is a
+very bad place to go to. There are no enjoyments on the island of Yap,
+and no ones likes strangers there. Borbitsch was very sad.”</p>
+
+<p>“What did you do with your information?” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>“We remembered it,” Brubitsch said. “Or, if we had a scrap of paper,
+we saved it for Garbitsch and gave it to him. But I remember once that
+I had some paper. It had a formula on it. I do not know what the
+formula said.”</p>
+
+<p>“What was it about?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Brubitsch gave a massive shrug. “It was about an X and some numbers,”
+he said. “It was not very interesting, but it was a formula, and
+Garbitsch would have liked it. Unfortunately, I did not give it to
+him.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why not?” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>“I am ashamed,” Brubitsch said, looking ashamed. “I was lighting a
+cigarette in the afternoon, when I had the formula. It is a very
+relaxing thing to smoke a cigarette in the afternoon. It is soothing
+to the soul.” He looked very sad. “I was holding the piece of paper in
+one hand,” he said. “Unfortunately, the match and the paper came into
+contact. I burned my finger. Here.” He stuck out a finger toward
+Malone and Boyd, who looked at it without much interest for a second.
+“The paper is gone,” he said. “Don’t tell Garbitsch. He is very
+inflamed.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone sighed. “But you remember the formula,” he said. “Don’t you?”</p>
+
+<p>Brubitsch shook his massive head very slowly. “It was not very
+interesting,” he said. “And I do not have a mathematical mind.”</p>
+
+<p>“We know,” Malone said. “You are a small child.”</p>
+
+<p>“It was terrible,” Brubitsch said. “Garbitsch was not happy about our
+activities.”</p>
+
+<p>“What did Garbitsch do with the information?” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>“He passed it on,” Brubitsch said. “Every week he would send a
+short-wave message to the homeland, in code. Some weeks he did not
+send the message.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why not?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“The radio did not work,” Brubitsch said simply. “We received orders
+by short-wave, but sometimes we did not receive the orders. The radio
+was of very poor quality, and some weeks it refused to send any
+messages. On other weeks, it refused to receive any messages.”</p>
+
+<p>“Who was your contact in Russia?” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>“A man named X,” Brubitsch said. “Like in the formula.”</p>
+
+<p>“But what was his real name?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Who knows?” Brubitsch said. “Does it matter?”</p>
+
+<p>“What else did you do?” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>“We met twice a week,” Brubitsch said. “Sometimes in Garbitsch’s home,
+sometimes in other places. Sometimes we had information. At other
+times, we were friends, having a social gathering.”</p>
+
+<p>“Friends?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Brubitsch nodded. “We drank together, talked, played chess. Garbitsch
+is the best chess player in the group. I am not very good. But once we
+had some trouble.” He paused. “We had been drinking Russian liquors.
+They are very strong. We decided to uphold the honor of our country.”</p>
+
+<p>“I think,” Malone murmured sadly, “I know what’s coming.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah?” Brubitsch said, interested. “At any rate, we decided to honor
+our country in song. And a policeman came and talked to us. He took us
+down to the police station.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why?” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>“He was suspicious,” Brubitsch said. “We were singing the
+<i>Internationale</i>, and he was suspicious. It is unreasonable.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I don’t know,” Boyd said. “What happened then?”</p>
+
+<p>“He took us to the police station,” Brubitsch said, “and then after a
+little while he let us go. I do not understand this.”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s all right,” Malone said. “I do.” He drew Boyd aside for a
+second, and whispered to him: “The cops were ready to charge these
+three clowns with everything in the book. We had a hell of a time
+springing them so we could go on watching them. I remember the
+stir-up, though I never did know their names until now.”</p>
+
+<p>Boyd nodded, and they returned to Brubitsch, who was staring up at
+them with surly eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“It is a secret you are telling him,” Brubitsch said. “That is not
+right.”</p>
+
+<p>“What do you mean, it’s not right?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“It is wrong,” Brubitsch went on. “It is not the American way.”</p>
+
+<p>He went on, with some prodding, to tell about the activities of the
+spy ring. It did not seem to be a very efficient spy ring; Brubitsch’s
+long sad tale of forgotten messages, mixed orders, misplaced documents
+and strange mishaps was a marvel and a revelation to the listening
+officers. “I’ve never heard anything like it,” one of them whispered
+in a tone of absolute wonder. “They’re almost working on our side.”</p>
+
+<p>Over an hour later, Malone turned wearily away from the prisoner. “All
+right, Brubitsch,” he said. “I guess that pretty much covers things
+for the moment. If we want any more information, though—”</p>
+
+<p>“Call on me,” Brubitsch said sadly. “I am not going anyplace. And I
+will give you all the information you desire. But I did not commit any
+murders.”</p>
+
+<p>“Goodbye, small child,” Malone said, as two agents led the fat man
+away. The other two left soon afterward, and Malone and Boyd were
+alone.</p>
+
+<p>“Think he was telling the truth?” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone nodded. “Nobody,” he said, “could make up a story like that.”</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose so,” Boyd said, and the phone rang. Malone picked it up.</p>
+
+<p>“Well?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“He was telling the truth, all right,” Her Majesty said. “There are a
+few more details, of course, like the girl Brubitsch was involved
+with, Sir Kenneth. But she doesn’t seem to have anything to do with
+the spy ring, and besides, she isn’t a very nice person. She always
+wants money.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sounds perfectly lovely,” Malone said. “As a matter of fact, I think
+I know her. I know a lot of girls who always want money. It seems to
+be in fashion.”</p>
+
+<p>“You don’t know this one, Sir Kenneth,” Her Majesty said, “and
+besides, she wouldn’t be a good influence on you.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone sighed. “How about the static explosions?” he said. “Pick up
+any more?”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” she said. “Just that one.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone nodded at the receiver. “All right,” he said. “We’re going to
+bring in the second one now. Keep up the good work.”</p>
+
+<p>He hung up.</p>
+
+<p>“Who’ve you got in the observation room?” Boyd asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Queen Elizabeth I,” Malone said. “Her Royal Majesty.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” Boyd said without surprise. “Well, was Brubitsch telling the
+truth?”</p>
+
+<p>“He wasn’t holding back anything important,” Malone said, thinking
+about the girl. It would be nice to meet a bad influence, he thought
+mournfully. It would be nice to go somewhere with a bad influence (a
+bad influence, he amended, with a good figure) and forget all about
+his job, about the spies, about telepathy, teleportation, psionics and
+everything else. It might be restful.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately, it was impossible.</p>
+
+<p>“What’s this business about a static explosion?” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t ask silly questions,” Malone said. “A static explosion is a
+contradiction in terms. If something is static, it doesn’t move—
+whoever heard of a motionless explosion?”</p>
+
+<p>“If it is a contradiction in terms,” Boyd said, “they’re your terms.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Malone said. “But I don’t know what they mean. I don’t even
+know what I mean.”</p>
+
+<p>“You’re in a bad way,” Boyd said, looking sympathetic.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m in a perfectly terrible way,” Malone said, “and it’s going to get
+worse. You wait and see.”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course I’ll wait and see,” Boyd said. “I wouldn’t miss the end of
+the world for anything. It ought to be a great spectacle.” He paused.
+“Want them to bring in the next one?”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Malone said. “What have we got to lose but our minds? And who
+is the next one?”</p>
+
+<p>“Borbitsch,” Boyd said. “They’re saving Garbitsch for a big finish.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone nodded wearily. “Onward,” he said, and picked up the phone. He
+punched a number, spoke a few words and hung up.</p>
+
+<p>A minute later, the four FBI agents came back, leading a man. This one
+was tall and thin, with the expression of a gloomy, degenerate and
+slightly nauseated bloodhound. He was led to the chair and he sat down
+in it as if he expected the worst to start happening at once.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Malone said in a bored, tired voice. “So this is the one who
+won’t talk.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c6">6</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Midnight.</p>
+
+<p>Kenneth J. Malone sat at his desk, in his Washington office,
+surrounded by piles of papers covering the desk, spilling off onto the
+floor and decorating his lap. He was staring at the papers as if he
+expected them to leap up, dance round him and shout the solution to
+all his problems at him in trained choral voices. They did nothing at
+all.</p>
+
+<p>Seated cross-legged on the rug in the center of the room, and looking
+like an impossible combination of the last Henry Tudor and Gautama
+Buddha, Thomas Boyd did nothing either. He was staring downward, his
+hands folded on his ample lap, wearing an expression of utter, burning
+frustration. And on a nearby chair sat the third member of the
+company, wearing the calm and patient expression of the gently-born
+under all vicissitudes: Queen Elizabeth I.</p>
+
+<p>“All right,” Malone said into the silence. “Now let’s see what we’ve
+got.”</p>
+
+<p>“I think we’ve got cerebral paresis,” Boyd said. “It’s been coming on
+for years.”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t be funny,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Boyd gave a short, mirthless bark. “Funny?” he said. “I’m absolutely
+hysterical with joy and good humor. I’m out of my mind with
+happiness.” He paused. “Anyway,” he finished, “I’m out of my mind.
+Which puts me in good company. The entire FBI, Brubitsch, Borbitsch,
+Garbitsch, Dr. Thomas O’Connor and Sir Lewis Carter—we’re all out of
+our minds. If we weren’t, we’d all move away to the moon.”</p>
+
+<p>“And drink to forget,” Malone added. “Sure. But let’s try and get some
+work done.”</p>
+
+<p>“By all means, Sir Kenneth,” Her Majesty said. Boyd had not included
+her in his list of insane people, and she looked slightly miffed. It
+was hard for Malone to tell whether she was miffed by the mention of
+insanity, or at being left out.</p>
+
+<p>“Let’s review the facts,” Malone said. “This whole thing started with
+some inefficiency in Congress.”</p>
+
+<p>“And some upheavals elsewhere,” Boyd said. “Labor unions, gangster
+organizations.”</p>
+
+<p>“Just about all over,” Malone said. “And though we’ve found three
+spies, it seems pretty obvious that they aren’t causing this.”</p>
+
+<p>“They aren’t causing much of anything,” Boyd said. “Except a lot of
+unbelieving laughter further up the FBI line. I don’t think anybody is
+going to believe our reports of those interviews.”</p>
+
+<p>“But they’re true,” Her Majesty said.</p>
+
+<p>“Sure they’re true,” Boyd said. “That’s the unbelievable part. They
+read like farce, and not very good farce at that.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I don’t know,” Malone said. “I think they’re pretty funny.”</p>
+
+<p>“Shall we get back to the business at hand?” Her Majesty said gently.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah,” Malone said. “Anyhow, it isn’t the spies. And what we now have
+is confusion even worse compounded.”</p>
+
+<p>“Confounded,” Boyd said. “John Milton. <i>Paradise Lost</i>, I heard it
+somewhere.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t mean confounded,” Malone said. “I mean confusion. Anyhow, the
+Russian espionage rings in this country seem to be in as bad a state
+as the Congress, the labor unions, the syndicates, and all the rest.
+And all of them seem to have some sort of weird tie-in to these
+flashes of telepathic interference. Right, Your Majesty?”</p>
+
+<p>“I believe so, Sir Kenneth,” she said. The old woman looked tired and
+confused. Somehow, a lot of the brightness seemed to have gone out of
+her life. “That’s right,” she said. “I didn’t realize there was so
+much of it going on. You see, Sir Kenneth, you’re the only one I can
+pick up at a distance who has been having these flashes. But now that
+I’m here in Washington, I can feel it going on all around me.”</p>
+
+<p>“It may not have anything to do with everything else,” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone shook his head. “If it doesn’t,” he said, “it’s the weirdest
+coincidence I’ve ever even dreamed about, and my dreams can be pretty
+strange. No, it’s got to be tied in. There’s some kind of mental
+static that is somehow making all these people goof up.”</p>
+
+<p>“But why?” Boyd said. “What is it being done for? Just fun?”</p>
+
+<p>“God only knows,” Malone said. “But we’re going to have to find out.”</p>
+
+<p>“In that case,” Boyd said, “I suggest lots and lots of prayers.”</p>
+
+<p>Her Majesty looked up. “That’s a fine idea,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“But God helps those,” Malone said, “who help themselves. And we’re
+going to help ourselves. Mostly with facts.”</p>
+
+<p>“All right,” Boyd said. “So far, all the facts have been a great
+help.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, here’s one,” Malone said. “We got one flash each from
+Brubitsch, Borbitsch and Garbitsch while we were questioning them. And
+in each case, that flash occurred just before they started to blab
+everything they knew. Before the flash, they weren’t talking. They
+were behaving just like good spies and keeping their mouths shut.
+After the flash, they couldn’t talk fast enough.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s true,” Boyd said reflectively. “They did seem to give up
+pretty fast, even for amateurs.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone nodded. “So the question is this,” he said. “Just what happens
+during those crazy bursts of static?”</p>
+
+<p>He looked expectantly at Her Majesty, but she shook her head sadly. “I
+don’t know,” she said. “I simply don’t know. It’s just noise to me,
+meaningless noise.” She put her hands slowly over her face. “People
+shouldn’t do things like that to their Sovereign,” she said in a
+muffled voice.</p>
+
+<p>Malone got up and went over to her. She wasn’t crying, but she wasn’t
+far from it. He put an arm around her thin shoulders. “Now, look, Your
+Majesty,” he said in gentle tones, “this will all clear up. We’ll find
+out what’s going on, and we’ll find a way to put a stop to it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure we will,” Boyd said. “After all, Your Majesty, Sir Kenneth and I
+will work hard on this.”</p>
+
+<p>“And the Queen’s own FBI,” Malone said, “won’t stop until we’ve
+finished with this whole affair, once and for all.”</p>
+
+<p>Her Majesty brought her hands down from her face, very slowly. She was
+forcing a smile, but it didn’t look too well. “I know you won’t fail
+your Queen,” she said. “You two have always been the most loyal of my
+subjects.”</p>
+
+<p>“We’ll work hard,” Malone said. “No matter how long it takes.”</p>
+
+<p>“Because, after all,” Boyd said in a musing, thoughtful tone, “it is a
+serious crime, you know.”</p>
+
+<p>The words seemed to have an effect on Her Majesty, like a tonic. For a
+second her face wore an expression of Royal anger and indignance, and
+the accustomed strength flowed back into her aged voice. “You’re quite
+correct, Sir Thomas!” she said. “The security of the Throne and the
+Crown are at stake!”</p>
+
+<p>Malone blinked. “What?” he said. “Are you two talking about something?
+What crime is this?”</p>
+
+<p>“An extremely serious one,” Boyd said in a grave voice. He rose
+unsteadily to his feet, planted them firmly on the carpet, and
+frowned.</p>
+
+<p>“Go on,” Malone said, fascinated. Her Majesty was watching Boyd with
+an intent expression.</p>
+
+<p>“The crime,” Boyd said, “the very serious crime involved, is that of
+Threatening the Welfare of the Queen. The criminal has committed the
+crime of Causing the Said Sovereign, Baselessly, Reasonlessly and
+Without Consent or Let, to Be in a State of Apprehension for Her Life
+or Her Well-Being. And this crime—”</p>
+
+<p>“Aha,” Malone said. “I’ve got it. The crime is—”</p>
+
+<p>“High treason,” Boyd intoned.</p>
+
+<p>“High treason,” Her Majesty said with satisfaction and fire in her
+voice.</p>
+
+<p>“Very high treason,” Malone said. “Extremely high.”</p>
+
+<p>“Stratospheric,” Boyd agreed. “That is, of course,” he added, “if the
+perpetrators of this dastardly crime are Her Majesty’s subjects.”</p>
+
+<p>“My goodness,” the Queen said. “I never thought of that. Suppose
+they’re not?”</p>
+
+<p>“Then,” Malone said in his most vibrant voice, “it is an Act of War.”</p>
+
+<p>“Steps,” Boyd said, “must be taken.”</p>
+
+<p>“We must do our utmost,” Malone said. “Sir Thomas—”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Sir Kenneth?” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>“This task requires our most fervent dedication,” Malone said. “Please
+come with me.”</p>
+
+<p>He went to the desk. Boyd followed him, walking straight-backed and
+tall. Malone bent and removed from a drawer of the desk a bottle of
+bourbon. He closed the drawer, poured some bourbon into two handy
+water-glasses from the desk, and capped the bottle. He handed one of
+the water-glasses to Boyd, and raised the other one aloft.</p>
+
+<p>“Sir Thomas,” Malone said, “I give you Her Majesty, the Queen!”</p>
+
+<p>“To the Queen!” Boyd echoed.</p>
+
+<p>They downed their drinks and turned, as one man, to hurl the glasses
+into the wastebasket.</p>
+
+<p>In thinking it over later, Malone realized that he hadn’t considered
+anything about that moment silly at all. Of course, an outsider might
+have been slightly surprised at the sequence of events, but Malone was
+no outsider. And, after all, it was the proper way to treat a Queen,
+wasn’t it?</p>
+
+<p>And....</p>
+
+<p>When Malone had first met Her Majesty, he had wondered why, although
+she could obviously read minds, and so knew perfectly well that
+neither Malone nor Boyd believed she was Queen Elizabeth I, she
+insisted on an outward show of respect and dedication. He’d asked her
+about it at last, and her reply had been simple, reasonable and to the
+point.</p>
+
+<p>According to her—and Malone didn’t doubt it for an instant—most
+people simply didn’t think their superiors were all they claimed to
+be. But they acted as if they did, at least while in the presence of
+those superiors. It was a common fiction, a sort of handy oil on the
+wheels of social intercourse.</p>
+
+<p>And all Her Majesty had ever insisted on was the same sort of
+treatment.</p>
+
+<p>“Bless you,” she’d said, “I can’t help the way you <i>think</i>, but, as
+Queen, I do have some control over the way you <i>act</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>The funny thing, as far as Malone was concerned, was that the two
+parts of his personality were becoming more and more alike. He didn’t
+actually believe that Her Majesty was Queen Elizabeth I, and he hoped
+fervently that he never would. But he did have a great deal of respect
+for her, and more affection than he had believed possible at first.
+She was the grandmother Malone had never known; she was good, and
+kind, and he wanted to keep her happy and contented. There had been
+nothing at all phony in the solemn toast he had proposed, nor in the
+righteous indignation he had felt against anyone who was giving Her
+Majesty even a minute’s worth of discomfort.</p>
+
+<p>And Boyd, surprisingly enough, seemed to feel the same way. Malone
+felt good about that; Her Majesty needed all the loyal supporters she
+could get.</p>
+
+<p>But all of this was later. At the time, Malone was doing nothing
+except what came naturally. Nor, apparently, was Boyd. After the
+glasses had been thrown, with a terrifying crash, into the metal
+wastebasket, and the reverberations of that second had stopped ringing
+in their ears, a moment of silence had followed.</p>
+
+<p>Then Boyd turned, briskly rubbing his hands. “All right,” he said.
+“Let’s get back to work.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone looked at the proud, happy look on Her Majesty’s face; he saw
+the glimmer of a tear in the corner of each eye. But he gave no
+indication that he had noticed anything at all out of the ordinary.</p>
+
+<p>“Fine,” he said. “Now, getting on back to the facts, we’ve established
+something, anyhow. Some agency is causing flashes of telepathic static
+all over the place. And those flashes are somehow connected with the
+confusion that’s going on all around us. Somehow, these flashes have
+an effect on the minds of people.”</p>
+
+<p>“And we know at least one manifestation of that effect,” Boyd said.
+“It makes spies blab all their secrets when they’re exposed to it.”</p>
+
+<p>“These three spies, anyhow,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“If spies is the right word,” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>“Okay,” Malone said. “And now we’ve got another obvious question.”</p>
+
+<p>“It seems to me we’ve got about twelve,” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>“I mean, who’s doing it?” Malone said. “Who is causing these
+telepathic flashes?”</p>
+
+<p>“Maybe it’s just happening,” Boyd said. “Out of thin air.”</p>
+
+<p>“Maybe,” Malone said. “But let’s go on the assumption that there’s a
+human cause. The other way, we can’t do a thing except sit back and
+watch the world go to hell.”</p>
+
+<p>Boyd nodded. “It doesn’t seem to be the Russians,” he said. “Although,
+of course, it might be a Red herring.”</p>
+
+<p>“What do you mean?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Boyd said, “they might have known we were on to Brubitsch,
+Borbitsch and Garbitsch—” He stopped. “You know,” he said, “every
+time I say that name I have to reassure myself that we’re not all
+walking around in the world of Florenz Ziegfeld.”</p>
+
+<p>“Likewise,” Malone said. “But go on.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Boyd said. “Anyhow, they might have set the three of them up
+as patsies, just in case we stumbled on to this mess. We can’t
+overlook this possibility.”</p>
+
+<p>“Right,” Malone said. “It’s faint, but it is a possibility. In other
+words, the agency behind the flashes might be Russian, and it might
+not be Russian.”</p>
+
+<p>“That clears that up nicely,” Boyd said. “Next question?”</p>
+
+<p>“The next one,” Malone said grimly, “is, what’s behind the flashes?
+Some sort of psionic power is causing them, that much is obvious.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll go along with that,” Boyd said. “I have to go along with it. But
+don’t think I like it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Nobody likes it,” Malone said. “But let’s go on. O’Connor isn’t any
+help; he washes his hands of the whole business.”</p>
+
+<p>“Lucky man,” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>“He says that it can’t be happening,” Malone said, “and if it is we’re
+all screwy. Now, right or wrong, that isn’t an opinion that gives us
+any handle to work with.”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” Boyd said reflectively. “A certain amount of comfort, to be
+sure, but no handles.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sir Lewis Carter, on the other hand—” Malone said. He fumbled
+through some of the piles of paper until he had located the ones the
+president of the Psychical Research Society had sent. “Sir Lewis
+Carter,” he went on, “does seem to be doing some pretty good work. At
+least, some of the more modern stuff he sent over looks pretty solid.
+They’ve been doing quite a bit of research into the subject, and their
+theories seem to be all right, or nearly all right, to me. Of course,
+I’m not an expert.”</p>
+
+<p>“Who is?” Boyd said. “Except for O’Connor, of course.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, somebody is,” Malone said. “Whoever’s doing all this, for
+instance. And the theories do seem okay. In most cases, for instance,
+they agree with O’Connor’s work, though they’re not in complete
+agreement.”</p>
+
+<p>“I should think so,” Boyd said. “O’Connor wouldn’t recognize an astral
+plane if TWA were putting them into service.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t mean that sort of thing,” Malone said. “There’s lots about
+astral bodies and ghosts, ectoplasm, Transcendental Yoga, theosophy,
+deros, the Great Pyramid, Atlantis, Mu, norns, and other such
+ridiculous pets. That’s just silly, as far as I can see. But what they
+have to say about parapsychology and psionics as such does seem to be
+reasonably accurate.”</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose so,” Boyd said tiredly.</p>
+
+<p>“Okay, then,” Malone said. “Did anybody notice anything in that pile
+of stuff that might conceivably have any bearing whatever on our
+problems?”</p>
+
+<p>“I did,” Boyd said. “Or I think I did.”</p>
+
+<p>“You both did,” Her Majesty said. “And so did I, when I looked through
+it. But I didn’t bother with it. I dismissed it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Because I don’t think it’s true,” she said. “However, my opinion is
+really only an opinion.” She smiled around at the others.</p>
+
+<p>Malone picked up a thick sheaf of papers from one of the piles of his
+desk. “Let’s get straight what it is we’re talking about,” he said.
+“All right?”</p>
+
+<p>“Anything’s all right with me,” Boyd said. “I’m easy to please.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone nodded. “Now, this writer—what’s his name?” he said. He
+glanced at the copy of the cover page. “<i>Minds and Morons</i>,” he read.
+“By Cartier Taylor.”</p>
+
+<p>“Great title,” Boyd said. “Does he say which is which?”</p>
+
+<p>“Let’s get back to serious business,” Malone said, giving Boyd a
+single look. There was silence for a second, and then Malone said, “He
+mentions something, in the book, that he calls ‘telepathic
+projection.’ As far as I understand what he’s talking about, that’s
+some method of forcing your thoughts on another person.” He glanced
+over at the Queen. “Now, Your Majesty,” he said, “you don’t think it’s
+true—and that may only be an opinion, but it’s a pretty informed one.
+It seems to me as if Taylor makes a good case for this ‘telepathic
+projection’ of his. Why don’t you think so?”</p>
+
+<p>“Because,” Her Majesty said flatly, “it doesn’t work.”</p>
+
+<p>“You’ve tried it?” Boyd put in.</p>
+
+<p>“I have,” she said. “And I have had no success with it at all. It’s a
+complete failure.”</p>
+
+<p>“Now, wait a minute,” Boyd said. “Just a minute.”</p>
+
+<p>“What’s the matter?” Malone said. “Have you tried it, and made it
+work?”</p>
+
+<p>Boyd snorted. “Fat chance,” he said. “I just want to look at the
+thing, that’s all.” He held out his hand, and Malone gave him the
+sheaf of papers. Boyd leafed through them slowly, stopping every now
+and again to consult a page, until he found what he was looking for.
+“There,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“There what?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Listen to this,” Boyd said. “‘For those who draw the line at demonic
+possession, I suggest trying telepathic projection. Apparently, it is
+possible to project one’s own thoughts directly into the mind of
+another—even to the point of taking control of the other’s mind.
+Hypnotism? You tell me, and we’ll both know. Ever since the orthodox
+scientists have come around to accepting hypnotism, I’m been chary of
+it. Maybe there really is an astral body or a soul that a person has
+stashed about him somewhere—something that he can send out to take
+control of another human being. But I, personally, prefer the
+telepathic projection theory. All you have to do is squirt your
+thoughts across space and spray them all over the other fellow’s
+brain. Presto-bingo, he does pretty much what you want him to do.’”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s the quote I was thinking of,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course it is,” Her Majesty said. “But it really doesn’t work. I’ve
+tried it.”</p>
+
+<p>“How have you tried it?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“There were many times, Sir Kenneth,” Her Majesty said, “when I wanted
+someone to do something particular for me or for some other person.
+After all, you must remember that I was in a hospital for a long time.
+Of course, that represents only a short segment of my life-span, but
+it seemed long to me.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone, who was trying to view the years from age fifteen to age
+sixty-odd as a short segment of anybody’s lifetime, remembered with a
+shock that this was not Rose Thompson speaking. It was Queen Elizabeth
+I, who had never died.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s right, Sir Kenneth,” she said kindly. “And in that hospital,
+there were a number of times when I wanted one of the doctors or
+nurses to do what I wanted them to. I tried many times, but I never
+succeeded.”</p>
+
+<p>Boyd nodded his head. “Well—” he began.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes, Sir Thomas,” Her Majesty said. “What you’re thinking is
+certainly possible. It may even be true.”</p>
+
+<p>“What <i>is</i> he thinking?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“He thinks,” Her Majesty said, “that I may not have the talent for
+this particular effect—and perhaps I don’t. But, talent or not, I
+know what’s possible and what isn’t. And the way Mr. Taylor describes
+it is simply silly, that’s all. And unladylike. Imagine any
+self-respecting lady ‘squirting’ her thoughts about in space!”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Malone said carefully, “aside from its being unladylike—”</p>
+
+<p>“Sir Kenneth,” Her Majesty said, “you are not telepathic. Neither is
+Sir Thomas.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m nothing,” Boyd said. “I don’t even exist.”</p>
+
+<p>“And it is very difficult to explain to the non-telepath just what Mr.
+Taylor is implying,” Her Majesty went on imperturbably. “Before you
+could inject any thoughts into anyone else’s mind, you’d have to be
+able to see into that mind. Is that correct?”</p>
+
+<p>“I guess so,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“And in order to do that, you’d have to be telepathic,” Her Majesty
+said. “Am I correct?”</p>
+
+<p>“Correct,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then,” Her Majesty said with satisfaction, and beamed at him.</p>
+
+<p>A second passed.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then, what?” Malone said in confusion.</p>
+
+<p>“Telepathy,” Her Majesty said patiently, “is an extremely complex
+affair. It involves a sort of meshing with the mind of this other
+person. It has nothing, absolutely nothing, in common with this simple
+‘squirting’ of thoughts across space, as if they were orange pips you
+were trying to put into a wastebasket. No, Sir Kenneth, I cannot
+believe in what Mr. Taylor says.”</p>
+
+<p>“But it’s still possible,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” Her Majesty said, “it’s certainly possible. But I should think
+that if any telepaths were around, and if they were changing people’s
+minds by ‘squirting’ at them, I would know it.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone frowned. “Maybe you would at that,” he said. “I guess you
+would.”</p>
+
+<p>“Not to mention,” Boyd put in, “that if you were going to control
+everything we’ve come across like that you’d need an awful lot of
+telepathic operators.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s true,” Malone admitted. “And the objections seem to make some
+sense. But what else is there to go on?”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know,” Boyd said. “I haven’t the faintest idea. And I’m
+rapidly approaching the stage where I don’t care.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Malone said, heaving a sigh, “let’s keep looking.”</p>
+
+<p>He bent down and picked up another sheaf of copies from the Psychical
+Research Society.</p>
+
+<p>“After all,” he said, without much hope, “you never know.”</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Malone looked around the office of Andrew J. Burris as if he’d never
+seen it before. He felt tired, and worn out, and depressed; it had
+been a long night, and here it was morning and the head of the FBI was
+giving him instructions. It was, Malone told himself, a hell of a
+life.</p>
+
+<p>“Now, Malone,” Burris said, “this is a very ticklish situation. You’ve
+got to handle it with great care.”</p>
+
+<p>“I can see that,” Malone said apprehensively. “It certainly looks
+ticklish. And unusual.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, we don’t want any trouble,” Burris said. “We have enough
+trouble now.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sometimes I think we have too much,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s our job,” Burris said, looking grim.</p>
+
+<p>Malone blinked. “What is?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Having trouble,” Burris said.</p>
+
+<p>There was a short silence. Malone broke it. “Anyhow,” he said, “you
+feel we have enough trouble, so we’re trying to make things easy for
+everybody.”</p>
+
+<p>Burris nodded. “I’ve talked with the president,” he said, “and he
+feels this is the best way to handle matters.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone tried to imagine Burris explaining the incredible complexities
+of the situation to the president, and was torn between relief that he
+hadn’t been there and a curious wish to have heard the scrambled
+conversation that must have taken place. “The way it seems to me,” he
+said cautiously, “shipping those spies back to Russia is a worse
+punishment than sending them to the federal pen.”</p>
+
+<p>“Maybe it is,” Burris said. “Maybe it is. How would you feel if you
+were being sent to jail?”</p>
+
+<p>“Innocent,” Malone said instantly.</p>
+
+<p>“But that isn’t the point,” Burris went on. “You see, Malone, we don’t
+really have much damaging evidence against those spies, except for
+their confessions. During all the time we were watching them, we took
+care that they never did come up with anything dangerous; we weren’t
+fishing for them but for their superiors, for the rest of the
+network.”</p>
+
+<p>“There doesn’t seem to be any more network,” Malone said. “Not in this
+country, anyhow.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Burris said. “We know that now, thanks to the confessions, and
+to Her Majesty. But we can’t prosecute on that sort of evidence. You
+know what a good defense attorney could do with unsupported
+confessions—and even if we wanted to take the lid off telepathy for
+the general public, it would be absolute hell bringing it into court.”</p>
+
+<p>“So,” Malone said, “we can’t put them in prison, even if we want to.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I didn’t say that,” Burris said hastily. “We could probably win,
+even against a good defense. But they wouldn’t get much time in
+prison, and we’d only end up deporting them in any case.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone fished for a cigarette, lit it and blew out smoke. “So we’re
+going to save the taxpayers some money,” he said. “That’ll be nice for
+a change.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s right,” Burris said, beaming. “We’re going to save Federal
+funds by shipping them back to their motherland now. After all, they
+did take out their naturalization papers under false names, and their
+declarations are chockfull of false information. So all it takes is a
+court order to declare their citizenships null and void, and hand all
+three of them back to the Soviets.”</p>
+
+<p>“A nice, simple housecleaning,” Malone said. “All open and
+above-board. And the confessions will certainly stand up in a
+deportation hearing.”</p>
+
+<p>“No question of it,” Burris said. “But the reason I called you here,
+Malone, is that there’s still one thing bothering me.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone blew out some more smoke, thought wistfully about cigars, and
+said: “What? Everything seems simple enough to me.”</p>
+
+<p>Burris frowned and leaned back in his chair. “It’s this notion of
+yours, Malone,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Notion?”</p>
+
+<p>“About going over there,” Burris said. “Now, I can understand your
+wanting some facts on Moscow, current background and all that sort of
+thing. So far, everything makes sense.”</p>
+
+<p>“Fine,” Malone said warily.</p>
+
+<p>“But, after all, Malone,” Burris said, “we do have such a thing as the
+Central Intelligence Agency. They send us reports. That’s what they’re
+for. And why you want to ignore the reports and make a trip over there
+to walk around and see for yourself—”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s because of everything that’s happening,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Burris looked puzzled. “What?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Because of all the confusion,” Malone said. “Frankly, I can’t trust
+the CIA, or any other branch of the government. I’ve got to see for
+myself.”</p>
+
+<p>Burris considered this for a second. “It’s going to look very
+peculiar,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone shrugged. “Everything looks peculiar,” he said. “A little more
+won’t hurt anything. And if I do turn up anything we can use, the
+whole trip will be worth it.”</p>
+
+<p>“But sending an FBI man along with Brubitsch, Borbitsch and Garbitsch
+is a little strange,” Burris said. “Not to mention Her Majesty.”</p>
+
+<p>“There is that,” Malone said. “I wonder what our Red friends are going
+to think of the Queen.”</p>
+
+<p>“God knows,” Burris said. “If they take her seriously, they’re liable
+to call her some sort of capitalist deviationist.”</p>
+
+<p>“And if they don’t take her seriously?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Then they’re going to wonder why she’s <i>pretending</i> to be a
+capitalist deviationist,” Burris said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone flicked his cigarette at an ashtray. “You can’t win,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Frankly,” Burris said, “I wouldn’t allow Her Majesty to go along
+under any circumstances—except that there is an excuse for having an
+older woman around.”</p>
+
+<p>“There is?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Burris nodded. “As a chaperone,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Now, wait a minute,” Malone said. “Brubitsch, Borbitsch and
+what’s his name don’t need a chaperone.”</p>
+
+<p>“I didn’t say it was for them,” Burris said.</p>
+
+<p>“Me?” Malone asked in a tone of absolute wonder. “Now, Chief, I don’t
+need a chaperone. I’m a grown man. I know my way around. And the idea
+of having Her Majesty along to chaperone me is going to make
+everything look even stranger. After all, Chief—”</p>
+
+<p>“Malone,” Burris said, in a voice of steel.</p>
+
+<p>“Sorry,” Malone mumbled. “But, really, I’m not some young, innocent
+girl in a Victorian novel.”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” Burris said, a trifle sadly, “you’re not. But there is one going
+along on the trip with the rest of you.”</p>
+
+<p>“There is?” Malone said. “Who is she? Rebecca?”</p>
+
+<p>“Her name’s Luba,” Burris said. “Luba Garbitsch.”</p>
+
+<p>“Garbitsch’s wife?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Burris shook his head. “His daughter,” he said. “And don’t tell me
+there isn’t any such name as Luba. I know there isn’t. But what would
+you pick to go with Garbitsch?”</p>
+
+<p>“Wastepaper basket,” Malone said instantly. “Grapefruit rinds. Lemon
+peels. Coffee grounds.”</p>
+
+<p>“Damn it, Malone,” Burris said, “this is serious.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Malone said, “it doesn’t sound serious. What are we doing,
+deporting the entire family?”</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose we could,” Burris said, “if we really wanted to get
+complicated about it. What with Garbitsch’s false declaration, I
+haven’t the faintest idea what his daughter’s status would be—but she
+<i>was</i> born here, Malone, and as far as we can tell she’s perfectly
+loyal to the United States.”</p>
+
+<p>“Fine,” Malone said. “So you’re sending her to Russia. This is making
+less and less sense, you know.”</p>
+
+<p>Burris rubbed a hand over his face. “Malone,” he said in a quiet,
+patient voice, “why don’t you wait for me to finish? Then everything
+will make sense. I promise.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, all right,” Malone said doubtfully. “Luba Garbitsch is going
+along to Russia, in spite of the fact that she’s perfectly loyal.”</p>
+
+<p>“True,” Burris said. “You see, Malone, she loves her traitorous old
+daddy just the same. Family affection. Very touching.”</p>
+
+<p>“And if he’s going to Moscow—”</p>
+
+<p>“She wants to go along,” Burris said. “That’s right.”</p>
+
+<p>“And you’re going to send her along,” Malone said, “out of the
+goodness of your kindly old heart. Just like Santa Claus. Or the
+Easter bunny.”</p>
+
+<p>Burris looked acutely uncomfortable. “Now, Malone,” he said. “It’s not
+exactly that, and you know it.”</p>
+
+<p>“It isn’t?” Malone said, trying to look surprised.</p>
+
+<p>Burris shook his head. “If we send Luba Garbitsch along,” he said,
+“that gives us a good excuse for Her Majesty. As a chaperone.”</p>
+
+<p>“Are you sure,” Malone asked slowly, “that anybody with a name like
+Luba Garbitsch could plausibly need a chaperone? Even in a den of
+vice? Because somehow it doesn’t sound right: Luba Garbitsch,
+chaperoned by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Burris said, “it won’t be the Queen. I mean, she won’t be
+known as the Queen.”</p>
+
+<p>“Incognito?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Burris shrugged. “In away,” he said. “What do you think would be a
+good name for her to travel under?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone considered. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “But no more
+Lubas.”</p>
+
+<p>“I was thinking,” Burris said carefully. “How about Rose Thompson?”</p>
+
+<p>There was a long silence.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know whether she’ll go for the idea,” Malone said. “But I’ll
+try it.”</p>
+
+<p>“You can do it, Malone,” Burris said instantly. “I know you can. I
+just know it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Your faith,” Malone said with a sigh, “is going to be too much for me
+one of these days.”</p>
+
+<p>Burris shrugged. “Just take it easy, Malone,” he said. “You said you
+wanted to have Her Majesty over there to read a few minds, and you’ve
+got her. But remember, don’t get involved in anything complicated.
+Don’t start any fireworks.”</p>
+
+<p>“I hope not,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Stay out of political arguments,” Burris said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone blinked. “What do you think I’m going to do?” he said. “Bring
+along a soapbox?”</p>
+
+<p>“You never know,” Burris said. “Just keep quiet, and don’t go prowling
+around where you’re not wanted.”</p>
+
+<p>“That,” Malone said decisively, “would keep me out of Russia
+entirely.”</p>
+
+<p>“Damn it,” Burris said, “you know what I mean. We don’t want any
+international incidents, understand?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, sir,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Burris nodded. “All right, then,” he said. “Your plane leaves from the
+airport in an hour. You’d better go and talk to Her Majesty first.”</p>
+
+<p>“Right,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“And I hope you know what you’re doing,” Burris said.</p>
+
+<p><i>So do I</i>, Malone thought privately. Aloud, he said, “I just want to
+get the feel of things over there, that’s all, sir. I won’t cause any
+more trouble than an ordinary tourist.”</p>
+
+<p>“Malone,” Burris said, “don’t be an ordinary tourist. They’re
+empty-headed morons and they do make trouble. Be an invisible tourist.
+Be nice to everybody. Be polite and kind. Don’t step on any toes, no
+matter whose and no matter why.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, sir,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Remember, they’re going to know who you are,” Burris said.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s not as if we could keep it a secret.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, sir,” Malone said. “I’ll remember.”</p>
+
+<p>“All right.” Burris extended his hand. “Good luck, Malone,” he said,
+with a deeper feeling of sincerity than Malone had experienced from
+him in months.</p>
+
+<p>Malone shook the hand. “Thank you, sir,” he said.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>A little less than an hour later, Malone sat on the steps of the
+landing ramp that led up to the open door of the big Air Force
+transport plane on the runway. The plane was waiting, and so was
+Malone. He didn’t feel confident, or even excited. He felt just a
+little bit frightened. Burris’ complicated warnings had had some
+effect, and Malone was fighting down a minor case of the shakes.</p>
+
+<p>Next to him, her face wreathed in happy smiles, sat a smartly-dressed
+grey-haired woman in her sixties. She wore an unobtrusive tailored
+suit and a light jacket, and she looked as if she might be one of the
+elder matrons of the society set, very definitely an upper-crust type.
+In spite of the normality of her clothing, Her Majesty looked every
+inch a Queen, Malone thought.</p>
+
+<p>“And that, Sir Kenneth, is only natural,” she said sweetly. “Even when
+traveling incognito, one must retain one’s dignity. And I don’t object
+at all to using the name of Rose Thompson in a good cause; it was used
+for so many years it almost feels like part of me.”</p>
+
+<p>“I shouldn’t be at all surprised,” Malone said mildly.</p>
+
+<p>A voice from above and behind him interrupted his worried thoughts.
+“Mr. Malone!” it said. “Mr. Malone?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone screwed his head around and looked up. An Air Force colonel was
+standing in the doorway of the plane, looking down with a stern,
+worried expression. “Yes?” Malone said. “What is it?”</p>
+
+<p>“Takeoff, Mr. Malone,” the colonel said. “We’re due to go in fifteen
+minutes, and our clearance has been established.”</p>
+
+<p>“Fine,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“But your passengers,” the colonel said. “Where are they?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone tried to look calm, cool and collected. “They’ll be here,” he
+said. “Don’t worry about a thing.” Privately, he hoped he was right.
+Boyd hadn’t shown up yet, and Boyd was bringing the musical-comedy spy
+trio. It wasn’t, Malone thought, that Boyd was usually late. But with
+Brubitsch, Borbitsch and Garbitsch in tow, almost anything could
+happen, he thought. He hoped fervently that it wouldn’t.</p>
+
+<p>“It won’t,” Her Majesty said. “At least, it hasn’t so far. They’re all
+in a car, and they’re driving right here. Boyd is thinking that he
+ought to be here within five minutes.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone nodded, wiping his forehead. “Five minutes, Colonel,” he called
+back to the figure at the door. The colonel nodded efficiently at him,
+turned and disappeared inside the plane. Malone looked at his watch.
+The second hand was going around awfully fast, he thought. He wondered
+if it were possible for time to speed up while he waited, so that by
+the time Boyd arrived he would be an old, old man. He felt about eight
+years older already, he told himself, and a minute hadn’t even passed.</p>
+
+<p>He forced his eyes away from the moving second hand. Looking at it, he
+knew, would only make him more nervous. Maybe there was some scenery
+around that he could stare at. He raised his eyes and looked out
+toward the gates that led to the interior of the air terminal.</p>
+
+<p>Scenery, he told himself in sudden wonder, was no word for it.</p>
+
+<p>He stared. He wanted to blink, but at the same time he felt that it
+would be a shame to close his eyes for even a tenth of a second. He
+held his eyelids apart by main force and went right on staring.</p>
+
+<p>The girl walking toward him across the field was absolutely beautiful.
+She seemed to make everything light up and start singing. Malone was
+sure that, somewhere, he could hear birds plugging their favorite
+numbers, and the soft rustle of the wind through pine branches. He
+could feel the soft caress of the wind on his face, and he could smell
+the odor of lilacs and honeysuckles and violets and whatever all those
+other flowers were. They had all different colors and shapes, and he
+couldn’t remember many of their names, but he could tell they were all
+around him. They had to be all around him. Especially all the red
+ones.</p>
+
+<p>The girl had red hair that tossed gently in the wind. The bottom
+two-thirds of her figure, Malone was happy to note, was not only as
+good as the top third but a good deal better. It took him several
+seconds to reach this conclusion, because at first he was willing to
+swear that he had never seen such a beautiful girl before.</p>
+
+<p>But, he told himself with a shade of apprehension, he had.</p>
+
+<p>As she approached, he stood up. “Well, well,” he said brightly. “If it
+isn’t the Lady That’s Known as Lou. Did the Psychical Research Society
+give you the day off, or are you here to see about a misplaced broom?”</p>
+
+<p>The girl beamed at him. “My, my,” she said. “How are you?”</p>
+
+<p>“Fine,” Malone said. “And—”</p>
+
+<p>“And how are the others?” she said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone blinked. “Others?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>She nodded. “Grumpy, Sleepy, Happy, Dopey, Bashful and Doc,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone opened his mouth, shut it again, and thought for a second.
+“Now, wait a minute,” he said at last. “That’s not fair. I—”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” she said. “And I nearly forgot. I owe you one from last time:
+<i>gesundheit</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>“And many happy returns,” Malone said. “Seriously, what are you doing
+out here?”</p>
+
+<p>“Talking,” the girl said. “To you. Or hadn’t you noticed?”</p>
+
+<p>“I mean in general,” Malone said desperately.</p>
+
+<p>“In general,” she said agreeably, “I’m here to take a little trip.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” Malone said. “By plane?”</p>
+
+<p>She smiled sweetly and shook her head. “Not at all,” she said. “I’m
+waiting for the next scheduled broomstick.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone took a deep breath. “When does your plane leave?” he said
+doggedly.</p>
+
+<p>“In ten minutes or so,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“Then you’d better hurry and get on,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>She nodded. “That’s what I thought,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>A second passed.</p>
+
+<p>“Did you want to say something?” Malone said uncomfortably.</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head. “Not particularly,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then—”</p>
+
+<p>“The time <i>is</i> growing short,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“Isn’t it, though?” Malone said, feeling a little mystified. “Well,
+now. Goodbye. I’ll see you soon.”</p>
+
+<p>“Goodbye,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>Another second passed.</p>
+
+<p>“Your plane—” Malone started.</p>
+
+<p>“How about yours?” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m all right,” Malone said nervously. “But if your plane’s leaving
+in ten minutes you’d better get on it.”</p>
+
+<p>“I intend to,” she said, without moving.</p>
+
+<p>“Well—” Malone started.</p>
+
+<p>“As soon as you quit blocking the ramp,” she said. “Would you mind
+terribly if I climbed over your head? Because I do have to get on
+board.”</p>
+
+<p>“Now wait a minute,” Malone said. “This isn’t your plane.”</p>
+
+<p>“How do you know?” she said. “Do you own it? Are you flying it away?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Malone said helplessly, “it’s my plane, and there’s nobody
+going on it but—”</p>
+
+<p>He paused. A great light seemed to burst in his mind, shedding a
+perfectly horrible glow over the wreck of his mental processes. “You
+know,” he said in a tentative tone, “we never have been properly
+introduced. I only know your name is Lou.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s what people call me,” the girl said. “For short. I’m Luba
+Garbitsch.”</p>
+
+<p>“And I’m Kenneth Malone,” Malone said. “Kenneth J. Malone. Of the
+FBI.”</p>
+
+<p>She nodded. “Yes,” she said. “I know.”</p>
+
+<p>“Your father—”</p>
+
+<p>“My father is going to Russia,” she said, “and I am going along with
+him.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” Malone said. “Sure. Sure. Oh.”</p>
+
+<p>There was a longer silence.</p>
+
+<p>“Can I get on board now?” Luba said.</p>
+
+<p>“There isn’t any hurry,” Malone said. “We’re still waiting for—for
+passengers. And this is one of them.” He turned and indicated the
+Queen. “This is Her—Rose Thompson. She’ll be traveling along with
+us.”</p>
+
+<p>Her Majesty was wearing a broad, broad grin, Malone noticed nervously
+as he turned. Undoubtedly she had been tuned in to the whole
+conversation, and knew just what had gone on in both minds. But she
+only said, “I’m very pleased to meet you, my dear.”</p>
+
+<p>Lou blinked, smiled and stretched out her hand. “Well, then,” she
+said. “Hello. And let’s all have a happy trip.”</p>
+
+<p>“By all means,” Malone said. “And the trip seems to be about to
+start.”</p>
+
+<p>He could hear the tramping of a lot of feet coming across the field
+toward them. He looked and saw that the feet were all neatly attached
+to bodies, two to a body. There were Thomas Boyd’s feet, the assorted
+twelve feet of six FBI agents, and three pairs that belonged to Alexis
+Brubitsch, Ivan Borbitsch and Vasili Garbitsch. Brubitsch looked even
+fatter than ever, Borbitsch even thinner. Garbitsch was of an
+indeterminate middling shape; he had grey hair and a pair of
+pince-nez, and he walked a trifle unevenly, like a duck, with his
+hands clasped low in front of him. He was looking down at the ground
+as the crowd shoved him along.</p>
+
+<p>When the crowd neared the steps, Luba went over to him. Garbitsch
+looked up, with a pleasant, somehow wistful smile on his face. “Hello,
+Luba, my child,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Luba smiled, too. “Hello, Dad,” she said. “All ready to go?”</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly I am ready,” he said. “I am all packed. We take off in a
+few minutes. And you, Luba, my child?”</p>
+
+<p>“Fine, Dad,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>She looked down. “They’ve got handcuffs on you,” she said. “Why,
+that’s—”</p>
+
+<p>Garbitsch shrugged. He looked even more wistful. “A formality,” he
+said. “It makes no difference.”</p>
+
+<p>“Okay,” Boyd said suddenly. “We’ve got to get out of here pretty soon,
+and you’ll be taking off. Let’s break it up. Miss Thompson, you and
+Luba go aboard. Malone, you follow with the others.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone rounded up Brubitsch, Borbitsch and Garbitsch and followed the
+ladies aboard.</p>
+
+<p>He came back to the door then, and stuck his head out. “The keys,” he
+said.</p>
+
+<p>Boyd stared. “What?”</p>
+
+<p>“The keys to the handcuffs,” Malone said. “I’ll need ’em.”</p>
+
+<p>“You’re going to take them off when they get to Russia?” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone shook his head. “No,” he said. “Now.”</p>
+
+<p>“But—”</p>
+
+<p>“I think we’ll have plenty of warning if they decide to try anything,
+Tom,” Malone said quietly. “Her Majesty, after all, is keeping them
+under surveillance.”</p>
+
+<p>Without another word, Boyd tossed up the keys. Malone caught and
+pocketed them. “I’ll be back as soon as possible,” he said.
+“Meanwhile, you can keep digging on other stuff—what we’ve discussed
+and anything it seems to lead into.”</p>
+
+<p>“Right,” Boyd said. “Stay out of trouble, Ken. So long.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone nodded and ducked back into the plane. He unlocked the
+handcuffs, and Brubitsch and Borbitsch immediately went and sat down
+mournfully together at the back of the plane. Malone looked for Lou,
+but she was already seated—with Her Majesty, naturally. He sighed
+briefly and sat down, at last, next to the wistful Garbitsch.</p>
+
+<p>“It will be nice to see Russia again,” Garbitsch said. “I hardly hoped
+to do so.”</p>
+
+<p>The plane shuddered, roared and took off. Then it settled down to its
+normal state of unnatural quiet. Malone sat back and tried to relax.</p>
+
+<p>It was impossible.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c7">7</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Red Square was, somehow, disappointing. It was crowded with men and
+women, all looking very Russian in an undefined sort of way, and the
+big glass windows sparkled from every side. “I know it’s silly,” Luba
+said in a baffled voice, “but, somehow, I always expected Red Square
+to be red.”</p>
+
+<p>“And why should that be?” the MVD man next to her said. He was a burly
+man with a sour expression, as if he had eaten too many onions the day
+before.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Malone said, “it is Red Square, after all.”</p>
+
+<p>“But red is symbolic only,” the MVD man said surlily. “Is not color.
+Only symbol of glorious Russia.”</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose so,” Luba said. “But it’s still disappointing.”</p>
+
+<p>“You expect, perhaps, that we recruit our glorious Red Army from
+American Indian tribes?” the MVD man said sourly. “You are
+literal-minded bourgeois intellectual. This is not good thing to be.”</p>
+
+<p>“Somehow,” Malone mused, “I didn’t think it was.”</p>
+
+<p>“But this is different,” Luba said. “The Red Army is made up of
+Russians. But this is just a square. You could paint it.”</p>
+
+<p>“After all,” Malone offered, “the White House is white, isn’t it?”</p>
+
+<p>“White is cowardly color,” the MVD man pointed out with satisfaction.</p>
+
+<p>“Never mind that,” Malone said. “We call it a white house, and it is a
+white house. You call this a red square, and it isn’t even pink. Not
+even a little bit pink. It’s just—just—”</p>
+
+<p>“Just building-colored,” Luba put in. Malone turned to her and
+executed a small bow.</p>
+
+<p>“Thank you,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Think nothing of it,” Luba said.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, don’t worry,” Malone said. “I will.”</p>
+
+<p>The MVD man hissed like a teakettle and both heads swung round to look
+at him again. Her Majesty, who had been admiring some dresses in a
+shop window, also turned. “My goodness,” she said. “That’s a terrible
+wheeze. Do you take something for it?”</p>
+
+<p>“Is not wheeze,” the MVD man said. “Is noise representing impatience
+with arrogance and stupidity of capitalist warmonger conversation.”</p>
+
+<p>“Arrogance?” Luba said.</p>
+
+<p>“Stupidity?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Her Majesty drew herself to her full height. “We do not monger war,”
+she said. “Not in the least. We are not mongers.”</p>
+
+<p>The MVD man looked at her, blinked, sighed and looked away. “This
+color discussion,” he said, “it is very silly. Look at the Blue Ridge
+Mountains, in your country. Are they blue?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well—” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“What color, for example, is the Golden Gate Bridge?” the MVD man
+continued, with heavy sarcasm. “Is not even a gate. Is a bridge. Is
+not golden. But you say we disappoint. No. You disappoint.”</p>
+
+<p>There seemed to be no immediate answer to that, so Malone didn’t try
+for one. Instead, he went back to looking at the Square, and beyond it
+to where the inverted turnips of the Kremlin gleamed in the moonlight.
+The turnips were very pretty, if a little odd for building-tops. But
+Red Square, in spite of all its historic associations, seemed to be a
+little dull. The buildings were just buildings, and the streets were
+filled with Russians. They were not bomb-throwing Russians, bearded
+Russians or even “Volga Boatman”-singing Russians. They were just
+ordinary, dull Russians of every sort, shade, race, color and previous
+condition of servitude.</p>
+
+<p>It was just about what he’d expected after the trip. That hadn’t been
+exciting either, he told himself. There had been no incident of any
+kind. None of the three spies seemed to be exactly overjoyed about
+being sent back to good old Mother Russia, but none seemed inclined to
+make much fuss about the matter, either. Malone had blandly told them
+that they were being deported, instead of tried, because there was no
+evidence that was worth the expense of a trial. And, besides that, he
+had particularly emphasized that the FBI did not believe any of the
+stories the three men had told.</p>
+
+<p>“They just don’t match up,” he said. “You all told different stories,
+and there’s too much disagreement between them. Frankly, we don’t
+believe any of them—not yet, we don’t. But mark my words. We’ll find
+out the truth some day.”</p>
+
+<p>He’d thought it was a good speech, and Her Majesty had agreed with
+him. It had its desired effect, since the plane was the first place
+the three had had a chance to meet since their arrest. “Each one knows
+that he told the truth,” Her Majesty said, “but nobody knows what the
+other two said.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s what I figured,” Malone said. “They didn’t have a chance to
+talk to each other.”</p>
+
+<p>“And so each one is lying his head off to the others,” Her Majesty
+said, “and telling them all about how he, too, lied gloriously and
+bravely in defense of the Motherland. It’s really very funny.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Malone said, “it makes them happy. And why not?”</p>
+
+<p>Luba, too, had chatted with her father quite a lot of the time. Her
+Majesty reported that none of this conversation could possibly be
+understood as dangerous or harmful. It was just simple conversation.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, Luba and her father hadn’t talked all the time, and Malone
+did have a chance to get a few words in edgewise. Her Majesty made no
+report on those conversations, but Malone was comfortably aware that
+they did not belong in the harmless class. His relationship with the
+girl seemed, he told himself happily, to be improving slightly. Now
+and again, he even won a round from her.</p>
+
+<p>As the American plane crossed the border, it was picked up by an
+escort of Russian fighter craft, which stuck with them all the way
+into Moscow. The fighters didn’t do anything; they were just there,
+Malone figured, for insurance. But they made him nervous when he
+looked out the window. The trip from the border to Moscow seemed to
+take a long time.</p>
+
+<p>Then, at the airfield, a group of MVD men had almost elbowed the
+American Embassy delegation out of the way in greeting the
+disembarking little band. There was a lot of palaver, in Russian,
+English and various scrambled mixtures which nobody understood. The
+American delegation greeted Malone, Luba and Her Majesty formally, and
+the MVD concentrated on Brubitsch, Borbitsch and Garbitsch. The three
+spies were hustled away, apparently to MVD Headquarters, without much
+fuss. Luba said goodbye to her father calmly enough, and Vasili
+Garbitsch seemed almost entirely unaffected by his surroundings. As
+the plane touched ground, he had said: “Ah, the soil of Mother
+Russia,” but, outside of a goodbye or two, those were his last words
+before leaving.</p>
+
+<p>One MVD man stayed behind, even after the American delegation had
+left. His name, he explained, was Vladimir Josefovitch Petkoff. “It
+will be my pleasure to show your group the many historic and
+interesting sights of Moskva,” he announced to Malone.</p>
+
+<p>“Pleasure?” Malone said. Petkoff was tall and heavy, and wore a row of
+medals that strung out across his chest like a newspaper headline.</p>
+
+<p>“My duty,” Petkoff said flatly, “is my pleasure. That is how we
+arrange matters in Russia.”</p>
+
+<p>And so the tour had started, with Red Square. Malone told himself he
+didn’t really mind if it weren’t red, but he did think it could at
+least look sinister. Unfortunately, the Square did not seem
+particularly willing to oblige.</p>
+
+<p>“So this is Red Square,” Malone said, after a long silence.</p>
+
+<p>“You do not sound interested,” Petkoff said in what sounded like a
+vaguely ominous voice. “Because it is not painted in capitalistic and
+obvious colors, it bores you?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not exactly,” Malone said. “But when you’ve seen one Square, you’ve
+seen them all, is how I feel about it. There must be somewhere else to
+sight-see.”</p>
+
+<p>“Somewhere?” Petkoff said. “There is everywhere. This is Moskva, the
+capital and the greatest city in Mother Russia. That is what we are
+told to say.” He lowered his voice. “Personally,” he added, “I come
+from Leningrad. I prefer it. But in Moskva one talks only of Moskva.”</p>
+
+<p>“I know just how you feel,” Malone assured him. “I’ve been to San
+Francisco.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then,” Petkoff said, almost smiling at him. “What is there you
+would like to see?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone fished in his pocket for an American cigarette. He’d brought a
+carton with him, having once tried Russian makes. They seemed to be
+mostly cardboard, both the long filter and the tobacco. He lit the
+cigarette and thought for a second. “I don’t suppose,” he said
+cautiously, “that we could take a look around inside the Kremlin,
+could we?”</p>
+
+<p>“Aha,” Petkoff said. “I see what is in your mind.”</p>
+
+<p>“You do?” Malone said, startled.</p>
+
+<p>“Naturally,” Petkoff said. “You wish to see the tomb of Lenin. It is
+famous throughout the world.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone considered that for a minute. “Somehow,” he said cautiously,
+“the coffin of Lenin doesn’t exactly sound like a gay start for
+sight-seeing.”</p>
+
+<p>Petkoff looked pleased instantly. “I understand,” he said. “Truly I
+understand. You, too, feel sad over the death of the great Lenin. How
+beautiful! How cultured!”</p>
+
+<p>Malone wondered whether or not to disillusion the man, and decided
+against it. “Well, something like that,” he said vaguely.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll tell you what: is there a restaurant around here where we could
+get something to eat?”</p>
+
+<p>“To eat?” Petkoff said, still looking pleased. “You wish to eat?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Malone said, “I’m rather hungry, and I guess the ladies must
+be, too.”</p>
+
+<p>“What?” Luba said, returning to the group. She had joined Her Majesty
+in viewing the display of dresses. The Queen came scurrying over, too,
+through the silent and jostling Russian crowds.</p>
+
+<p>“I was suggesting a restaurant,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Best idea anybody’s had all day,” Lou said. Her Majesty graciously
+consented to agree, and Petkoff beamed like the rising sun.</p>
+
+<p>“My friends,” he said. “My very fine friends—although you are
+capitalistic bourgeois intellectuals, thrown aside by the path of
+progress—in Moskva we have the finest restaurants in all the world.”</p>
+
+<p>“How about ... oh, Leningrad?” Malone said in a low voice.</p>
+
+<p>“In Leningrad,” Petkoff admitted, “the restaurants are better. But in
+Moskva, the restaurants are very good indeed. Much better than one
+might expect, if one knows Leningrad.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Malone said, “I suppose we’ve just got to put up with Moscow.”</p>
+
+<p>They went back to the corner, and hailed the long, black,
+sleek-looking limousine that had brought them in from the airport. The
+two silent men in the front seat of the gleaming Volga sedan were
+waiting patiently. Malone, Her Majesty and Lou got into the back,
+Petkoff in front. The two men were as still as statues—and rather
+unpleasant-looking statues, Malone thought—until Petkoff snapped
+something in Russian. Then one of them, at the wheel, said: “<i>Da,
+Tovarishch</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>The car started down the Moscow streets.</p>
+
+<p>Her Majesty was silent and somewhat abstracted during the ride, just
+as she had been during the entire trip so far. She was, Malone knew,
+prying into every mind she could touch. He smiled inwardly when he
+thought about that.</p>
+
+<p>The MVD, all unbeknownst to itself, was busily carrying around and
+protecting the single most dangerous spy in Moscow.</p>
+
+<p>Nobody else spoke, either, until the car was moving along at a good
+clip. Petkoff began some small talk then, but it wasn’t very
+interesting until he finally managed to edge it around to the subject
+he really wanted to talk about.</p>
+
+<p>“By the way, Mr. Malone,” he said, in a voice that sounded as if
+Petkoff were trying to establish an offhand manner, and not succeeding
+in the least. “It was thoughtful, very thoughtful, of American
+government, to return to us those men. Very kind.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone’s expression conveyed nothing but the sheerest good will.
+“Well, you know how it is,” he said. “Anything we can do to preserve
+peace and amity between our countries—we’ll do it. You know that.
+Getting along, coexistence, that sort of thing. Oh, we’re glad to
+oblige.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am sure,” Petkoff said darkly. “You realize, of course, that they
+are criminals? Deserters from Red Army, embezzlers. Embezzlers of
+money.”</p>
+
+<p>Wondering vaguely what else you could be an embezzler of, Malone
+nodded. “That’s what your ambassador in Washington said, when we told
+him about the deportation order.”</p>
+
+<p>“But Dad’s not an embezzler,” Luba broke in. “Or a deserter, either.
+He—”</p>
+
+<p>“We have the records,” Petkoff said.</p>
+
+<p>“But—”</p>
+
+<p>“Ordinarily, Mr. Malone,” Petkoff said pointedly, “we do not find it
+the policy of the American government to send back political
+refugees.”</p>
+
+<p>“Now, listen,” Lou said. “If you think you can shut me up—”</p>
+
+<p>“That is exactly what I think,” Petkoff said. “Let me assure you that
+no offense has been intended.”</p>
+
+<p>Lou opened her mouth and started to say something. Then she shut it
+again. “Well,” she said, “I guess this isn’t the time to argue about
+it. I’m sorry, Mr. Petkoff.”</p>
+
+<p>The MVD man beamed back at her. “Call me Vladimir,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone broke in hastily. “You see, Major,” he said, “these men are all
+embezzlers, as you’ve said yourself. We have the word of your
+government on that.”</p>
+
+<p>Petkoff took his eyes off Lou with what seemed real reluctance. “Oh,”
+he said. “Yes. Of course you do.”</p>
+
+<p>“Therefore,” Malone said smoothly, “the three are criminals and not
+political refugees.”</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed,” Petkoff said blandly. “Very interesting. Your government has
+done a good deal of thinking in this matter.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure we have,” Malone said. “After all, we don’t want to cause any
+trouble.”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” Petkoff said, and frowned. “Of course not.”</p>
+
+<p>“Naturally,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>After that, there was silence for almost a full minute. Then Major
+Petkoff turned to Malone again with a frown. “Wait,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Wait?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” Petkoff said, “has no
+extradition treaty with your capitalist warmongering country.”</p>
+
+<p>“We’re not warmongers,” Her Majesty put in. Both men ignored her.</p>
+
+<p>“True,” Malone admitted.</p>
+
+<p>“Then there was no reason to send these men back to us,” Petkoff said.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, no,” Malone said. “There was a very good reason. You see, we
+didn’t want them in our country, either.”</p>
+
+<p>“But—”</p>
+
+<p>“And when we found that they’d lied on their naturalization papers,
+why, naturally, we took immediate steps. The only steps we could take,
+as a matter of fact.”</p>
+
+<p>“The only steps?” Petkoff said. “You could have preferred charges.
+This was not done. Why was it not done?”</p>
+
+<p>“That,” Malone said, sidestepping neatly, “is a matter of governmental
+policy, Major Petkoff. And I can’t provide any final answer.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah?” Petkoff said.</p>
+
+<p>“But, after all, a trial would not make sense,” Malone said, now
+busily attacking from the side. “You see, at first we thought they
+were espionage agents.”</p>
+
+<p>“A foolish conclusion,” Petkoff said uneasily.</p>
+
+<p>Malone nodded. “That’s what we finally realized,” he said. “We
+questioned them, but their stories were nonsense, absolute nonsense.
+Of course, we had no idea of what foreign government might have
+employed them.”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course not,” Petkoff said, shifting slightly in his seat. The car
+took a wide curve and swayed slightly, and Malone found himself nearly
+in Lou’s lap. The sensation was so pleasant that all conversation was
+delayed for a couple of seconds, until the car had righted itself.</p>
+
+<p>“So,” Malone went on when he had straightened out, “we decided to save
+ourselves the expense of a trial.”</p>
+
+<p>“Very natural,” Petkoff said. The slight delay had apparently allowed
+him to recover his own mental balance. “The capitalist countries think
+only of money.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Malone said agreeably. “Well, anyhow, that’s the way it was.
+There was no point, really, in putting them in prison—what for? What
+good could it do us?”</p>
+
+<p>“Who knows?” Petkoff said.</p>
+
+<p>“Exactly,” Malone said. “So, since all we wanted to do was get rid of
+them, and since we had an easy way to do that, why, we took it, that’s
+all, and shipped them here.”</p>
+
+<p>“I see,” Petkoff said. “And the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is
+properly grateful.”</p>
+
+<p>“My goodness,” Her Majesty put in, apparently out of an irrepressible
+sense of fun. “Maybe we’ll get medals.”</p>
+
+<p>“Medals,” Petkoff said sternly, “are not given to capitalist
+agitators.”</p>
+
+<p>“We are not agitated,” Her Majesty said, and folded her hands in her
+lap, looking quite satisfied with herself.</p>
+
+<p>Petkoff thought for a second. “And why,” he said, “did you feel that
+such elaborate precautions were necessary in returning these men to
+us?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone shrugged. “Well, we couldn’t have them just running around all
+over the world, could we?” he said. “We felt that here they’d be
+properly housed and fed, in their own homeland, even if they didn’t
+get a job.”</p>
+
+<p>“They will be properly taken care of,” Petkoff prophesied darkly.</p>
+
+<p>“Now, wait a minute—” Lou began, and then stopped. “Sorry,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone felt sorry for her, but there was nothing he could say to make
+things any better. “Exactly,” he told Petkoff with what he hoped was a
+smile.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, well,” Petkoff said. “My friend and colleague, we should cease
+this shoptalk. Shoptalk?”</p>
+
+<p>“Quite correct,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“I have studied English a long time,” Petkoff said. “It is not a
+logical language.”</p>
+
+<p>“You’re doing very well,” Malone said. Petkoff gave him a military
+duck of the head.</p>
+
+<p>“I appreciate your compliments,” he said. “But I fear we are boring
+the ladies.”</p>
+
+<p>The major had timed his speech well. At that moment, the ornate Volga
+pulled up to a smooth stop before a large, richly decorated building
+that glowed brightly under the electric lights of a large sign. The
+sign said something incomprehensible in Cyrillic script. Under it, the
+building entrance was gilded and carved into fantastic rococo shapes.
+Malone stared at the sign, and was about to ask a question about it
+when Petkoff spoke.</p>
+
+<p>“Trotkin’s,” he said. “The finest restaurant in all the world—in
+Moskva, this is what they say of it.”</p>
+
+<p>“I understand,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Come,” Petkoff said grandly, and got out of the car. One of the two
+silent men leaped out and opened the back door, and Her Majesty, Lou
+and Malone climbed out and stood blinking on the sidewalk under the
+sign.</p>
+
+<p>Petkoff leaned over and said something to the driver. The second
+silent man got back into the car, and it drove away down the street,
+turned a corner and disappeared. The party of four started toward the
+entrance of the restaurant.</p>
+
+<p>The door swung open before Major Petkoff reached it. A doorman was
+holding it, and bowing to each of the four as they passed. He was
+dressed in Victorian livery, complete to knee-breeches and lace, and
+Malone thought this was rather odd for the classless Russian society.
+But the doorman was only the opening note of a great symphony.</p>
+
+<p>Inside, there were tables and chairs—or at least, Malone told
+himself, that’s what he thought they were. They were massive wood
+affairs, carved into tortuous shapes and gilded or painted in all
+sorts of colors that glittered madly under the barrage of several
+electric chandeliers.</p>
+
+<p>The chandeliers hung from a frescoed ceiling, and looked much too
+heavy. They swayed and tinkled in time to the music that filled the
+room, but for a second Malone looked past them at the ceiling. It
+appeared to represent some sort of Russian heaven, at the end of the
+Five-Year Plan. There were officers and ladies eating grapes,
+waltzing, strolling on white puffy clouds, singing, drinking, making
+love. There was an awful lot of activity going on up on the ceiling,
+and it wasn’t until Malone lowered his gaze that he realized that none
+of this activity had been exaggerated.</p>
+
+<p>True, there were no white puffy clouds, and he couldn’t immediately
+locate a bunch of grapes anywhere. But there were the musicians, in
+the same Victorian outfits as the doorman: three fiddlers, a cellist,
+and a man who played piano. “Just like in night-clubs in bourgeois
+Paris,” Petkoff said, following Malone’s gaze with every evidence of
+pride.</p>
+
+<p>Between the musicians and Malone were a lot of tables and chairs and
+ancient, proud-looking waiters who appeared to have been hired when
+Trotkin’s had opened—and that, Malone thought, had been a long, long
+time ago. He felt like those two ladies, whose names he couldn’t
+remember, who said they’d slipped back in time. Officers and their
+ladies, the men in glittering uniforms, the ladies in ball dresses of
+every imaginable shade, cut, material and degree of exposure, were
+waltzing around the room looking very polite and old-world. Others
+were sitting at the tables, where candles fluttered, completely
+useless in the electric glare. The noise was something terrific, but,
+somehow, it was all very well-bred.</p>
+
+<p>The headwaiter was suddenly next to them. He hadn’t walked there, at
+least not noticeably; he appeared to have perfected the old-world
+manner of the silent servant. Or, of course, Malone thought, the man
+might be a teleport.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, Major Petkoff,” he said, in a silken voice. “It is so good to see
+you again. And your friends?”</p>
+
+<p>“Americans,” Petkoff said. “They have come to see the glorious Soviet
+Union.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah,” the headwaiter said. “Your usual table, Major?”</p>
+
+<p>Petkoff nodded. The headwaiter led the party through the dancers,
+snaking slowly along until they reached a large table near the
+musicians and at the edge of the dance floor. Her Majesty
+automatically took the seat nearest the musicians, which she imagined
+to be the head of the table. Lou sat at her left hand, and Malone at
+her right, his back against a wall. Petkoff took the foot of the
+table, called a waiter over, and ordered for the party. He did a
+massive job of it, with two waiters, at last, taking down what seemed
+to be his entire memoirs, plus the list of all soldiers in the Red
+Army below the rank of Grand Exalted Elk, or whatever it might have
+been. Malone had no idea what the major was ordering, except that it
+sounded extensive and very, very Russian.</p>
+
+<p>Finally the waiter went on his way. Major Petkoff turned to Malone and
+smiled. “Naturally,” he said, “we will begin with vodka, <i>nyet</i>?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone considered saying <i>nyet</i>, but he didn’t feel that this was the
+time or the place. Besides, he told himself grimly, it would be a sad
+day when a Petkoff could drink a Malone under the table. His proudest
+heritage from his father was an immense capacity, he told himself. Now
+was his chance to test it.</p>
+
+<p>“And, naturally, a little caviar to go with it,” Petkoff added.</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly,” Malone said, as if caviar were the most common thing in
+the world in his usual Washington saloons.</p>
+
+<p>It wasn’t long before the waiter reappeared, bringing four glasses and
+three bottles of vodka chilled in an ice-bucket, like a bouquet of
+champagne. Petkoff bowed him out after one bottle had been opened, set
+the glasses up and began to pour.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, goodness,” Her Majesty started to say.</p>
+
+<p>“None for me, thanks,” Lou chimed in.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes,” Her Majesty said. “I don’t think I’ll have any either. An
+old lady has to be very careful of her system, you know.”</p>
+
+<p>“You do not look like an old lady,” Petkoff said gallantly.
+“Middle-aged, perhaps, to be cruel. But certainly not old. Not over ...
+oh, perhaps forty.”</p>
+
+<p>Her Majesty smiled politely at him. Malone began to wonder if it had
+been gallantry, after all. From what he’d seen of the Russian women,
+it was likely, after all, that Petkoff really thought Her Majesty
+wasn’t much over forty at that.</p>
+
+<p>“You’re very flattering, Major,” Her Majesty said. “But I assure you
+that I’m a good deal older than I look.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone tried to tell himself that no one else had noticed the stifled
+gulp that had followed that remark. It had been his own stifled gulp.
+And his face, he felt sure, had aged one hundred and twelve years
+within a second or so. He waited for Her Majesty to tell Major Petkoff
+just how old she really was....</p>
+
+<p>But she said nothing else. After a second she turned and smiled at
+Malone.</p>
+
+<p>“Thanks,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, you’re quite welcome,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>Petkoff frowned at both of them, shrugged, and readied the bottle.
+“Well, then,” he said. “It seems as if the drinking will be done by
+men—and that is right. Vodka is the drink for men.”</p>
+
+<p>He had filled his own glass full of the cold, clear liquid. Now he
+filled Malone’s. He stood, glass in hand. Malone also climbed to his
+feet.</p>
+
+<p>“To the continued friendship of our two countries!” Petkoff said. He
+raised his glass for a second, then downed the contents. Malone
+followed suit. The vodka burned its merry way into his stomach. They
+sat.</p>
+
+<p>A waiter arrived with a large platter. “Ah,” Petkoff said, turning.
+“Try some of this caviar, Mr. Malone. You will find it the finest in
+the world.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone, somehow, had never managed to develop a taste for caviar. He
+was willing to admit, if pressed, that this made him an uncultured
+slob, but caviar always made him think of the joke about the country
+bumpkin who thought it was marvelous that you could soften up buckshot
+just by soaking it in fish oil.</p>
+
+<p>Now, though, he felt he had to be polite, and he tried some of the
+stuff. All things considered, it wasn’t quite as bad as he’d thought
+it was going to be. And it did make a pretty good chaser for the
+vodka.</p>
+
+<p>Her Majesty also helped herself to some caviar. “My goodness,” she
+said. “This reminds me of the old days.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone waited, once again, with bated breath. But, though Her Majesty
+may have been crazy, she wasn’t stupid. She said nothing more.</p>
+
+<p>Petkoff, meanwhile, refilled the glasses and looked expectantly at
+Malone. This time it was his turn to propose the toast. He thought for
+a second, then stood up and raised his glass.</p>
+
+<p>“To the most beautiful woman in all the world,” he said, feeling just
+a little like a character in <i>War and Peace</i>. “Luba Vasilovna
+Garbitsch.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah,” Petkoff said, smiling approvingly. Malone executed a little bow
+in Lou’s direction and followed Petkoff in downing the drink. Two more
+glasses of vodka wended their tortuous ways into the interior.</p>
+
+<p>“Tell me, colleague,” Petkoff said as be spooned up some more caviar,
+“how are things in the United States?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone shot a glance at Her Majesty, but she was concentrating on
+something else, and her eyes seemed far away. “Oh, all right,” he said
+at last.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course, you must say so,” Petkoff murmured. “But, as one colleague
+to another, tell me: how much longer do you think it will be before
+the proletarian uprising in your country?”</p>
+
+<p>There were a lot of answers to that, Malone told himself. But he chose
+one without too much difficulty. “Well, that’s hard to judge,” he
+said. “I’d hate to make any prediction. I don’t have enough
+information.”</p>
+
+<p>“Not enough information?” Petkoff said. “I don’t understand.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone shrugged. “Since our proletariat,” he said, “have shown no sign
+of wanting any rebellion at all, how can I predict when they’re going
+to rebel?”</p>
+
+<p>Petkoff gave him an unbelieving smile. “Well,” he said. “We must have
+patience, eh, colleague?”</p>
+
+<p>“I guess so,” Malone said, watching Petkoff pour more vodka.</p>
+
+<p>By the time the meal came, Malone was feeling a warm glow in his
+interior, but no real fogginess. The dance floor had been cleared by
+this time, and a group of six costumed professionals glided out and
+took places. The musicians broke out into a thunderous and bumpy
+piece, and the dancers began some sort of Slavic folk dance that
+looked like a combination of a <i>kazotska</i> and a shivaree. Malone
+watched them with interest. They looked like good dancers, but they
+seemed to be plagued with clumsiness; they were always crashing into
+one another. On the other hand, Malone thought, maybe it was part of
+the dance. It was hard to tell.</p>
+
+<p>The dinner was as extensive as anything Malone had ever dreamed of:
+<i>borshcht</i>, beef Stroganoff, smoked fish, vegetables in gigantic
+tureens, ices and cheeses and fruits. And always, between the courses,
+during the courses and at every available moment, there was vodka.</p>
+
+<p>The drinking didn’t bother him too much. But the food was too much.
+Unbelieving, he watched Petkoff polish off a large red apple, a pear
+and a small wedge of white, creamy-looking cheese at the end of the
+towering meal. Her Majesty was staring, too, in a very polite manner.
+Lou simply looked glassy-eyed and overstuffed. Malone felt a good deal
+of sympathy for her.</p>
+
+<p>Petkoff finished the wedge of cheese and ripped off a belch of
+incredible magnitude and splendor. Malone felt he should applaud, but
+managed to restrain himself. Her Majesty looked startled for a second,
+and then regained her composure. Only Lou seemed to take the event as
+a matter of course, which set Malone to wondering about her home-life.
+Somehow he couldn’t picture her wistful little father ever producing a
+sound of such awesome magnitude.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear colleague,” Petkoff was saying. Malone turned to him and
+tried to look interested. “There is one thing I have wondered for many
+years.”</p>
+
+<p>“Really?” Malone said politely.</p>
+
+<p>“That is right,” Petkoff said. “For years, there has never been a
+change of name in your organization of secret police.”</p>
+
+<p>“We’re not secret police,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Petkoff gave a massive shrug. “Naturally,” he said, “one must say
+this. But surely, one tires of being called FBI all the time.”</p>
+
+<p>“One does?” Malone said. “I don’t know. It gives a person a sort of
+sense of security.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah,” Petkoff said. “But take us, for instance. We pride ourselves on
+our ability to camouflage ourselves. GPU, and then OGPU—which were, I
+understand, subject for many capitalist jokes.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone tried to look as if he couldn’t imagine such a thing. “I
+suppose they might have been,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Then we were NKVD,” Petkoff said, “and now MVD. And I understand,
+quite between us, Mr. Malone, that there is talk of further change.”</p>
+
+<p>There was a sudden burst of applause. Malone wondered what for, looked
+at the dance floor and realized that the six Slavic dancers were
+taking bows. As he watched, one of them slipped and nearly fell. The
+musicians obliged with a final series of chords and the dancers
+trotted away. A waltz began, and couples from the tables began
+crowding the floor.</p>
+
+<p>“How can you manage the proletariat,” Petkoff asked, “if you do not
+keep them confused?”</p>
+
+<p>“We don’t, exactly,” Malone said. “They more or less manage us.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ha,” Petkoff said, dismissing this with a wave of his hand.
+“Propaganda.” And then he, too, turned to watch the dancers. The waltz
+was finishing, and a fox-trot had begun. “With your permission, Mr.
+Malone,” he said, rising, “I should like to ask so-lovely Miss
+Garbitsch to dance with me.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone glanced at the girl. She gave him a quick smile, with just a
+hint of nervousness or strain in it, and turned to Petkoff. “I’d be
+delighted, Major,” she said. Malone shut his own mouth. As the girl
+rose, he got to his feet and gave the couple a small, Victorian bow.
+Petkoff and Lou walked to the floor, and Malone, sitting down again,
+watched enviously as he took her in his arms and began to guide her
+expertly across the floor in time to the music.</p>
+
+<p>Malone sighed. Some men, he told himself, had all the luck. But, of
+course, Lou had to be polite, too. She didn’t really like Petkoff, he
+told himself; she was just being diplomatic. And he had made some
+progress with her on the plane, he thought.</p>
+
+<p>He looked over at Her Majesty, but the Queen was staring abstractedly
+at a crystal chandelier. Malone sighed again, took a little caviar and
+washed it down with vodka. The vodka felt nice and warm, he thought
+vaguely. Vodka was good. It was too bad that the people who made such
+good vodka had to be enemies. But that was the way things were, he
+told himself philosophically.</p>
+
+<p>Terrible. That’s how things were.</p>
+
+<p>The fox-trot went to its conclusion. Malone saw Petkoff, chatting
+animatedly with Lou, lead her off to a small bar at the opposite side
+of the room. “Some people,” he muttered, “have too much luck. Or too
+much diplomacy.”</p>
+
+<p>Her Majesty was tugging at his arm. That, Malone thought, was going to
+be more bad news.</p>
+
+<p>It was.</p>
+
+<p>“Sir Kenneth,” she said softly, “do you realize that this place is
+full of MVD men? Of course you don’t; I haven’t told you yet.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone opened his mouth, shut it again, and thought in a hurry. If the
+place were full of MVD men, that meant they probably had it bugged.
+And that meant several things, all of them unpleasant. Her Majesty
+shouldn’t have said anything—she shouldn’t have shown any nervousness
+or anxiety in the first place, she shouldn’t have known there were so
+many MVD men in the second place—because there was no way for her to
+know, except through her telepathy, a little secret Malone did not
+want the Russians to find out about. And she should definitely, most
+definitely, not have called him “Sir Kenneth.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” Her Majesty said. “I am sorry, Sir—er—Mr. Malone. You’re quite
+right, you know.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Malone said. “Well. My goodness.” He thought of something to
+say, and said it at once. “Of course there are MVD men here. This is
+just the place for good old MVD men to come when they go off duty. A
+nice, relaxing place full of fun and dancing and food and vodka....”
+And he was thinking, at the same time: <i>Are they doing anything odd?</i></p>
+
+<p>“Russian, you know,” Her Majesty said, almost conversationally, “is an
+extremely difficult language. It takes a great deal of practice to
+learn to think in it really fluently.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I should think it would,” Malone said absently. <i>You mean you
+haven’t been able to pick up what these people are thinking?</i></p>
+
+<p>“Oh, one can get the main outlines,” Her Majesty went on, “but a
+really full knowledge is nearly impossible. Though, of course, it
+isn’t quite as bad as all that. A man who speaks both languages, like
+our dear Major Petkoff, for instance—so charming, so full of <i>joie de
+vivre</i>—could be an invaluable assistant to anyone interested in
+learning exactly how Russians really think.” She smiled nervously. Her
+face was suddenly set and strained. “I find that—”</p>
+
+<p>She stopped then, very suddenly. Her eyes widened, and her right hand
+reached out to grasp Malone’s arm more strongly than he had thought
+she ever could. “Sir Kenneth!” Her voice, all restraint gone, was a
+hissing whisper. Malone started to say something, but Her Majesty went
+on, her eyes wide. “Do something quickly!” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“What?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“They’ve put something in Lou’s drink!” Her Majesty hissed.</p>
+
+<p>Malone was on his feet before she’d finished, and he took a step
+across the room.</p>
+
+<p>“She’s already swallowed it!” the Queen said. “Do something! Quickly!”</p>
+
+<p>The dancers on the floor were no concern of his, Malone told himself
+grimly. He didn’t decide to move; he was on his way before any thought
+filtered through into his mind. Officers and their ladies looked after
+him with shocked stupor as he plowed his way across the dance floor,
+using legs, elbows, shoulders and anything else that allowed him free
+passage. Sometimes the dancers managed to get out of his way.
+Sometimes they didn’t. It was all the same to Kenneth J. Malone.</p>
+
+<p>Her Majesty followed in his wake, silent and stricken, scurrying after
+him like a small destroyer following a battleship, or like a
+ball-carrying grandmother following up her interference.</p>
+
+<p>Malone caught sight of Lou, standing at the bar. In that second, she
+seemed to realize for the first time that something was wrong. She
+pushed herself violently away from the bar, and looked frantically
+around, her mouth opening to call. Petkoff was a blur next to her;
+Malone didn’t look at him clearly. Lou took a step....</p>
+
+<p>And two men with broken, lumpy faces came through a door somewhere in
+the rear of the restaurant, closer to her than Malone. Petkoff
+suddenly swam into sight; he was standing very still and looking
+entirely baffled.</p>
+
+<p>Malone pushed through a pair of dancers, ignored their glares and the
+man’s hissed insult, which he didn’t understand anyhow, and found his
+view suddenly blocked by a large expanse of dark grey.</p>
+
+<p>It was somebody’s chest, in a uniform. Malone shifted his gaze half an
+inch and saw a row of gold buttons. He looked upward.</p>
+
+<p>There, towering above him, was a face. It stared down, looking heavy
+and cruel and stupid. Malone, his legs still carrying him forward,
+bounced off the chest and staggered back a step or two. He heard a
+hissed curse behind him, and realized without thinking about it that
+he had managed to collide with the same pair of dancers again. He
+didn’t look around to see them. Instead, he looked ahead, at the giant
+who blocked his path.</p>
+
+<p>The man was about six feet six inches tall, a great Mongol who weighed
+about a sixth of a ton. But he didn’t look fat; he looked strong
+instead, and enormously massive. Malone sidestepped, and the Mongol
+moved slightly to block him. To one side, Malone saw Her Majesty
+scurrying by. The Mongol was apparently more interested in Malone than
+in trying to stop sweet little old ladies. Malone saw Her Majesty
+heading for the bar, and forgot about her for the second.</p>
+
+<p>The Mongol shifted again to block Malone’s forward progress.</p>
+
+<p>“What seems to be such great hurry, <i>Tovarishch</i>?” he said in a voice
+that sounded like an earthquake warning. “Have you no culture? Why you
+run across floor in such impolite manner?”</p>
+
+<p>The man might have been blocking his way because of Lou, or might
+simply want to teach an uncultured <i>Amerikanski</i> a lesson. Malone
+couldn’t tell which, and it didn’t seem to matter. He whirled and
+reached for a glass of vodka standing momentarily unattended on a
+nearby table.</p>
+
+<p>He tossed the vodka at the giant’s eyes, and scooted around the
+mountain of flesh before it erupted with a volcanic succession of
+Russian curses that shook the room with their volume and sincerity.</p>
+
+<p>But Lou and Her Majesty were nowhere in sight. Major Petkoff was
+staring, and Malone followed his line of sight.</p>
+
+<p>A door in the rear of the restaurant was just closing. Behind it
+Malone saw Her Majesty and Lou, disappearing from sight.</p>
+
+<p>Malone knocked over a waiter and headed for Petkoff. “What’s going on
+here?” he bellowed over the crash of dishes and the rising wave of
+Russian profanity.</p>
+
+<p>Petkoff shrugged magnificently. “I have no ideas, colleague,” he said.
+“I have no ideas.”</p>
+
+<p>“But she—”</p>
+
+<p>“Miss Garbitsch was taken suddenly ill,” Petkoff said.</p>
+
+<p>“Damn sudden,” Malone growled.</p>
+
+<p>“Her friend, Miss Thompson, has taken her to the ladies’ room,”
+Petkoff said. He gestured, narrowly missing a broken, lumpy face
+Malone had seen before.</p>
+
+<p>“You are under arrest,” the face said. Its partner peered over
+Petkoff’s shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>“I?” Petkoff said.</p>
+
+<p>“Not you,” the face said. “Him.” He started for Malone and Petkoff
+threw out both arms.</p>
+
+<p>“Hold!” he said. “My orders are to see that this man is not molested.”</p>
+
+<p>The guests had suddenly and silently melted away. Malone backed off a
+step, looking for something to stage a fight with.</p>
+
+<p>“On the other hand, Comrade,” one of the lumpy-faced men said, “we
+have orders also.”</p>
+
+<p>“My orders—” Petkoff began.</p>
+
+<p>“Your orders do not exist,” the other lumpy man said. “We are to
+arrest this man. Our orders say so.”</p>
+
+<p>“You are fools,” Petkoff said. He spread his arms wider, blocking both
+of them. Malone edged back against the bar, feeling behind him for a
+bottle or maybe a bungstarter. Instead, his hand touched a sleeve.</p>
+
+<p>A voice behind him bellowed: “Cease!”</p>
+
+<p>The two lumpy-faced men goggled. Petkoff did not move.</p>
+
+<p>Malone turned, and saw a tall, thin civilian with dark glasses.
+“Cease,” the civilian repeated. “It is the girl we are to arrest! The
+girl!”</p>
+
+<p>“This is not a girl,” one of the lumpy men said. “Sir. We are to
+arrest this man. Our orders say distinctly—”</p>
+
+<p>“Never mind your orders!” Petkoff said. “Go and reduce your orders to
+shreds and stuff them up your nostrils and die of suffocation! My
+orders say—”</p>
+
+<p>“The girl!” the civilian said. “Where is the girl?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone darted forward. Petkoff caught him neatly with one arm as he
+went by. “Until we decide what to do,” the MVD man said, “you stay
+here.” Malone bucked against him, but could get nowhere. “Meanwhile,”
+Petkoff said, “I am for letting you go.”</p>
+
+<p>“I appreciate it,” Malone said through his teeth. “How about proving
+it?”</p>
+
+<p>“If you let him go,” a lumpy man said, “you will answer to our group
+head.”</p>
+
+<p>Petkoff tightened his hold protectively. Meanwhile, the civilian was
+climbing up into a stratospheric rage.</p>
+
+<p>“You are dolts, imbeciles, worms without brains and walking bellies
+filled with carrion!” he said magnificently. “I have orders which I am
+sworn to carry out!”</p>
+
+<p>“You are not alone,” Petkoff said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone took another try at a getaway, and failed.</p>
+
+<p>“We take precedence,” a lumpy man said. “We can talk later. Arrest
+comes first.”</p>
+
+<p>“But who?” the civilian snapped. “I insist—”</p>
+
+<p>“There shall be no arrest!” Petkoff screamed. “No one is to be
+arrested at all!”</p>
+
+<p>“I swear by the bones of Stalin that my orders state—” the tall man
+began.</p>
+
+<p>“The bones of Stalin are with us!” a lumpy man said. “Go and die in a
+kennel filled with fleas and old newspaper! Go and freeze to the
+likeness of an obscene statue of a bourgeois deity! Go and hang by the
+ears from a monument four thousand feet high in the center of the
+great desert!”</p>
+
+<p>Inspired, the other lumpy man screamed “Charge!” and came for Petkoff
+and the civilian. Petkoff whirled, letting go of Malone in order to
+beat back this wave of maddened attackers, and Malone took the
+advantage. He ducked free under Petkoff’s left arm and started around
+the gesticulating, screaming, fighting group for the door at the back
+of the restaurant. He took exactly four steps.</p>
+
+<p>Then he stopped. The Mongol, his eyes red with a combination of vodka
+and bull-roaring rage, was charging toward him, his hands outflung and
+his fingers grasping at the air. “Warmonger!” he was shouting.
+“Capitalist slave-owner! Leprous and ancient cannibal without culture!
+You have begun a war you can not finish!”</p>
+
+<p>“Ha!” Malone said, feeling inadequate to the occasion. As the Mongol
+charged, he felt a wave of intense pragmatism come over him. He
+reached back toward the bar, grabbed a bottle of vodka and tossed
+several glassfuls into the giant’s face. The Mongol, deluged and
+screaming, clawed wildly at his eyes and spun round several times,
+cursing Malone and all his kin for the next twenty-seven generations,
+and grabbing thin air in his attempt to reach the <i>Amerikanski</i>.</p>
+
+<p>All of the customers appeared to have discovered urgent engagements
+elsewhere. There was little for the Mongol to collide with except
+empty tables and chairs. But he did manage to swipe one of the
+lumpy-faced men on the side of the head with one flail of his arms.
+The lumpy-faced man said “Yoop!” and went staggering away into
+Petkoff, who spun him around and threw him away in the general
+direction of the bandstand. The diversion provided Malone with just
+enough time to start moving again.</p>
+
+<p>Four uniformed men were making their way toward the ladies’ room from
+the opposite side of the restaurant. They were carrying a stretcher,
+which seemed pitifully inadequate for the carnage Malone had just
+left.</p>
+
+<p>He blocked their path. “Where are you going?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“You are American?” one of them said. “I speak English good, no?”</p>
+
+<p>Behind him, Malone heard a yowl and a crunch, as of a body striking
+wood. It sounded as if somebody had fetched up against the bar. “You
+speak English fine,” he said, feeling wildly out of place. “Have you
+been taking lessons?”</p>
+
+<p>“Me?” the man said. “It is no time for talk. We got to get lady for
+hospital.”</p>
+
+<p>“Lady?” Malone said. “For hospital?”</p>
+
+<p>“Miss Garbitsch her name is,” the stretcher-man said, trying to get
+past Malone. The FBI agent shifted slightly, blocking the path. “We
+wait outside one revolution—”</p>
+
+<p>“One what?”</p>
+
+<p>“When hands revolve once,” the man said. “One hour. Now we get call so
+we take her to hospital.”</p>
+
+<p>It sounded suspicious to Malone. He heard more yells behind him, and
+they sounded a little closer. The sound of running men came to his
+ears. “Well,” he said happily, “goodbye all.”</p>
+
+<p>The stretcher-bearer said, “Vot?” Malone shoved him backward into the
+approaching mob, grabbed the stretcher away from the other three men,
+who were acting a little dazed, and swung it in a wide arc. He caught
+an MVD man in the stomach, and the man doubled up with a weird
+whistling groan, turned slightly in agony, and hit another MVD man
+with his bowed head. The second man fell; Malone heard more crashes
+and screaming, but he didn’t find out any details. Instead, he threw
+the stretcher at the milling mob and turned, already in motion, racing
+for the ladies’ room.</p>
+
+<p>He had no notion of what he was going to do when he got there, or what
+he was going to find. Her Majesty and Lou were in there, all right,
+but how were they going to get out without being arrested, clubbed,
+disemboweled or taken to a Russian hospital for God alone knew what
+novel purposes?</p>
+
+<p>His mind was still a little foggy from the vast amounts of vodka he
+had poured down, and he wasn’t in the least sure that teleportation
+would even work. He tried to figure out whether Her Majesty had
+already carried Lou off that way—but he doubted it. Lou was quite a
+burden for the old woman. And besides, he wasn’t at all sure whether
+it was possible to teleport a human being. A lump of inanimate matter
+is one thing; an intelligent woman with a mind of her own is
+definitely something else.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed to take forever for him to reach the door, and he was
+panting heavily when he reached for it. Suddenly, another hand shot in
+front of his, turning the doorknob. Malone looked up.</p>
+
+<p>It was impossible to figure out where she had come from, or what she
+thought she was doing, but a bulging, slightly intoxicated Russian
+matron with bluish hair piled high on her head, a rusty orange dress
+and altogether too many jewels scattered here and there about her
+ample person, stood regarding him with a mixture of scorn, surprise
+and shock.</p>
+
+<p>Malone crowded her aside without a thought and jerked the door open.
+Behind her he could see the melee still continuing, though it looked
+by now as if the Russians weren’t very sure who they were supposed to
+be fighting. The Mongol’s great head rose for a second above the
+storm, shouting something unintelligible, and dropped again into the
+crowd.</p>
+
+<p>Malone focused on the matron, who was standing with her mouth open
+staring at him.</p>
+
+<p>“Madam,” he said with stern dignity, “wait your turn!”</p>
+
+<p>He ducked inside and slammed the door behind him. There was a small
+knob to bolt the door with, and he used it. But it wasn’t going to
+hold long, he knew. If the mob outside ever got straightened out, the
+door would go down like a piece of cardboard, bolt or no bolt.
+Undoubtedly the gigantic Mongol could do the job with one hand tied
+behind his back.</p>
+
+<p>Malone turned around and put his own back to the door. Women were
+looking up and making up their minds whether or not to scream. Time
+stood absolutely still, and nobody seemed to be moving—not even the
+two directly before him: a frightened-looking little old lady, who was
+trying to hold up a semiconscious redhead.</p>
+
+<p>And, somewhere behind him, he knew, was a howling mob of thoroughly
+maddened Russians.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c8">8</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>The door rattled against Malone’s back as a hand twisted the knob and
+shook it. He braced himself for the next assault, and it came: the
+shudder of a heavy body slamming up against it. Miraculously, the door
+held, at least for the moment. But the roars outside were growing
+louder and louder as the second team came up.</p>
+
+<p>Where was the Mongol? he wondered. But there was no time for idle
+contemplation. The scene inside the room demanded his immediate
+attention.</p>
+
+<p>He was in the anteroom, a gilded and decorated parlor filled with
+overstuffed chairs and couches. There was a door at the far side of
+the room, and a woman suddenly came out of it holding a pocketbook in
+one hand and a large powder-puff in the other. She saw Malone and
+reacted instantly.</p>
+
+<p>Her scream seemed to be a signal. The two other women sitting on
+couches screamed, too, and jumped up with their hands to their faces.
+Malone shouted something unintelligible but very loud at them and
+brandished a fist menacingly. They shrieked again and ran for the
+interior room.</p>
+
+<p>Malone heard the roaring outside, and pressed his back tighter against
+the door. Then, suddenly, he broke away from it and ran over to Her
+Majesty and Lou. He looked down. Lou was apparently completely
+unconscious by this time, and there was a peaceful look on her face.
+The Queen looked down at her, then up at Malone.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m sorry, Sir Kenneth,” she said, “but we really haven’t time for
+romantic thoughts just now.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone passed a hand over his brow. “We haven’t got time for
+anything,” he said. “You can see what’s going on outside.”</p>
+
+<p>“My goodness,” Her Majesty said. “Oh, yes. My goodness, yes.”</p>
+
+<p>“Okay,” Malone said. “We’ve got to teleport out, if we can—and if we
+can take Lou with us.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know, Sir Kenneth,” the Queen said.</p>
+
+<p>“We’ve got to try,” Malone said grimly, looking down. There was a
+crash as something hit the door. It shuddered, creaked, and held.
+Malone took a breath. Lou was too beautiful to leave behind, no matter
+what.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll mesh my mind with yours,” Her Majesty said, “so we’ll be
+synchronized.”</p>
+
+<p>“Right,” Malone said. “The plane. Let’s go.”</p>
+
+<p>There was another crash, but he hardly heard it. He closed his eyes
+and tried to visualize the interior of the plane that was waiting for
+them at the airfield. He wasn’t sure he could do it; the vodka might
+have clouded his mental processes just enough to make teleporting
+impossible. He concentrated. The crash came again, and a shout. He
+almost had it ... he almost had it....</p>
+
+<p>The last sound he heard was the splintering of the door, and a great
+shout that was cut off in the middle.</p>
+
+<p>Malone opened his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“We made it,” he said softly. “And I wonder what the MVD is going to
+think.”</p>
+
+<p>Her Majesty took a deep breath. “My goodness,” she said. “That <i>was</i>
+exciting, wasn’t it?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not half as exciting as it’s going to be if we don’t hurry now,”
+Malone said. “If you know what I mean.”</p>
+
+<p>“I do,” Her Majesty said.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s good,” Malone said at random. “I don’t.” He helped the Queen
+ease the unconscious body of Luba Garbitsch into one of the padded
+seats, and Malone pushed a switch. The seat gave a tiny squeak of
+protest, and then folded back into a flat bedlike arrangement. Lou was
+arranged on this comfortable surface, and Malone took a deep breath.
+“Take care of her for a minute, Your Majesty,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course,” the Queen said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone nodded. “I’m going to see who’s up front,” he said. He walked
+through the corridors of the plane and rapped authoritatively on the
+door of the pilot’s cabin. A second passed, and he raised his hand to
+knock again.</p>
+
+<p>It never reached the door, which opened very suddenly. Malone found
+himself facing a small black hole.</p>
+
+<p>It was the muzzle and the bore of the barrel of an M-2 .45 revolver,
+and it was pointing somewhere in the space between Malone’s eyes.
+Behind the gun was a hard-eyed air force colonel with a grim
+expression.</p>
+
+<p>“You know,” Malone said pleasantly, “they’re good guns, but they
+really can’t compare to the .44 Magnum.”</p>
+
+<p>The pilot blinked, and his gun wavered just a little. “What?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Malone said, “if you’d only join the FBI, like me, you’d have
+a .44 Magnum, and you could compare the guns.”</p>
+
+<p>The pilot blinked again. “You’re—”</p>
+
+<p>“Malone,” Malone said. “Kenneth J. Malone, FBI. My friends call me
+Snookums, but don’t try it. Why not let’s put the gun away and be
+friends?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” the colonel said weakly. “Mr.—sure. I’m sorry, Mr. Malone.
+Didn’t recognize you for a second there.”</p>
+
+<p>“Perfectly all right,” Malone said. The gun was still pointing at him,
+and in spite of the fact that he felt pleasantly like Philip Marlowe,
+or maybe the Saint, he was beginning to get a little nervous. “The
+gun,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>The colonel stared at it for a second, then reholstered it in a hurry.
+“I am sorry,” he said. “But we’ve been worried about Russians coming
+aboard. I’ve got my copilot and navigator outside, guarding the plane,
+and they were supposed to let me know if anybody came in. When they
+didn’t let me know, and you knocked, I assumed you were Russians. But,
+of course, you—”</p>
+
+<p>Conversation came to a sudden dead stop.</p>
+
+<p>“About these Russians—” Malone said desperately. But the pilot’s eyes
+got a little glazed. He wasn’t listening.</p>
+
+<p>“Now, wait a minute,” he said. “Why <i>didn’t</i> they notify me?”</p>
+
+<p>“Maybe they didn’t see me,” Malone said. “I mean us.”</p>
+
+<p>“But—”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m not very noticeable,” Malone said hopefully, trying to look small
+and undistinguished. “They could just have ... not noticed me. Okay?”
+He gave the pilot his most friendly smile.</p>
+
+<p>“They’d have noticed you,” the pilot said. “If they’re still out
+there. If nothing’s happened to them.” He leaned forward. “Did you see
+them, Malone?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone shrugged. “How would I know?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“How would you—” The pilot seemed at a loss for words. Malone waited
+patiently, trying to look as if everything were completely and
+perfectly normal. “Mr. Malone,” the pilot said at last, “how <i>did</i> you
+get aboard this aircraft?”</p>
+
+<p>He didn’t wait for an answer, and Malone was grateful for that.
+Instead, he stepped over to a viewport and looked out. On the field,
+two air force officers were making lonely rounds about the plane.
+Fifty yards farther away, a squad of Russian guards also patrolled the
+brightly-lit area. There was nothing else in sight.</p>
+
+<p>“There isn’t any way you could have done it,” the pilot said without
+turning.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s the FBI for you,” Malone said. “We’ve got our little trade
+secrets, you know.” Somehow, the pilot’s back looked unconvinced.
+“Disguise,” Malone added. “We’re masters of disguise.”</p>
+
+<p>The pilot turned very slowly. “Now what the hell would you disguise
+yourself as?” he said. “A Piper Cub?”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s a military secret,” Malone said hurriedly.</p>
+
+<p>The pilot didn’t say anything for what seemed a long time. “A military
+secret?” he asked at last, in a hushed voice. “And you can’t tell me?
+You’re a civilian, and I’m a colonel in the United States Air Force,
+and you can’t tell me a military secret?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone didn’t hesitate a second. “Well, Colonel,” he said cheerfully,
+“that’s the way things are.”</p>
+
+<p>The pilot threw up his hands. “It’s none of my business,” he said
+loudly. “I’m not even going to think about it. Because if I do, you’ll
+have a mad pilot on your hands, and you wouldn’t like that, would
+you?”</p>
+
+<p>“I would hate it,” Malone said sincerely, “like hell. Particularly
+since I’ve got a sick woman aboard.”</p>
+
+<p>“Disguised,” the pilot offered, “as Lenin, I suppose.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone shook his head. “I’m not kidding now,” he said. “She is sick,
+and I want a doctor for her.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why didn’t you bring one with you?” the pilot said. “Or wasn’t the
+disguise big enough for three?”</p>
+
+<p>“Four,” Malone said. “We’ve got three now; me and Miss Garbitsch and
+Miss Thompson. Lou—Miss Garbitsch is the one who’s sick. But I want a
+doctor from the American Embassy.”</p>
+
+<p>“I think we could all use one,” the pilot said judiciously. “But you’d
+better tell me what’s the matter with the girl.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone gave him a brief and highly censored version of the melee at
+Trotkin’s, particularly omitting the details of the final escape from
+the MVD men.</p>
+
+<p>When he had finished, the pilot gave a long, low whistle. “You have
+been having fun,” he said. “Can I go on your next adventure, or is it
+only for accredited Rover Boys?”</p>
+
+<p>“You have to buy a pin and a special compass that works in the dark,”
+Malone said. “I don’t think you’d like it. How about that doctor?”</p>
+
+<p>The pilot nodded wearily. “I’ll send my navigator over to the airfield
+phone,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I’ll tell him to tell the
+doctor I’m the one who’s sick, so the Russians don’t get suspicious.
+It may even be true.”</p>
+
+<p>“Just so he gets here,” Malone said. The pilot was flagging his
+navigator through the viewport as Malone went out, closing the door
+gently behind him. He went back down the plane corridor to Her Majesty
+and Lou.</p>
+
+<p>Lou was still lying on the makeshift bed, her eyes closed. She looked
+more beautiful and defenseless than ever, and Malone wanted to do
+something big and terrible to all the Russians who had tried to take
+her away or dope her. With difficulty, he restrained himself. “How is
+she?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“She seems to be all right,” the Queen said. “The substance they put
+in her drink doesn’t appear to have had any other effect than putting
+her to sleep and making her a little sick—and that was a good thing.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, sure,” Malone said. “That was fine.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Her Majesty said, “she did get rid of quite a bit of the drug
+in the ladies’ room.” She smiled, just a trifle primly. “I think
+she’ll be all right,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“There’s a doctor on the way, anyhow,” Malone said, staring down at
+her. He tried to think of something he could do for her—fan her, or
+bring her water, or cool her fevered brow. But she didn’t look very
+fevered. She just looked helpless and beautiful. He felt sorry for all
+the nasty things he had said to her, and all the nasty things she had
+said to him. If she got well—and of course she was going to get well,
+he told himself firmly—things would be different. They’d be sweet and
+kind to each other all the time, and do nice things for each other.</p>
+
+<p>And she was definitely going to get well. He wouldn’t even think about
+anything else. She was going to be fine again, and very soon. Why, she
+was hardly hurt at all, he told himself, hardly hurt at all.</p>
+
+<p>“Sir Kenneth,” Her Majesty said. “I’ve been thinking: while we were
+about it, why didn’t we just teleport all the way back home?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone turned. “Because,” he said, “we’d have had the devil of a time
+explaining just how we managed to do it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” she said. “I see. Of course.”</p>
+
+<p>“This teleportation gimmick is supposed to be a secret,” Malone went
+on. “We don’t want to let out anything more about it than we have to.
+As it is, there’s going to be some fierce wondering among the Russians
+about how we got out of that restaurant.”</p>
+
+<p>“Obviously,” the Queen said, entirely unexpectedly, “a bourgeois
+capitalistic trick.”</p>
+
+<p>“Obviously,” Malone agreed. “But we don’t want to start up any more
+questions than we have to.”</p>
+
+<p>“And how about the plane itself?” Her Majesty went on. “Do you think
+they’ll let us take off?”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know how they can stop us,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“You don’t?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, they don’t want to cause any incidents now,” Malone said. “At
+least, I don’t think they do. If they could have captured us—me, or
+Lou, or both of us, depending on which side of the argument you want
+to take—anyhow, if they could have grabbed us on their own home
+grounds, they’d have had an excuse. Lou got sick, they’d say, and they
+just took her to the hospital. They wouldn’t have to call it an arrest
+at all.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I see,” Her Majesty said. “But now we’re not on their home
+grounds.”</p>
+
+<p>“Not so long as we stay in this plane, we’re not,” Malone said. “And
+we’re going to stay here until we take off.”</p>
+
+<p>Her Majesty nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“I wish I knew what they thought they were doing, though,” Malone
+mused. “They certainly couldn’t have held us for very long, no matter
+how they worked things.”</p>
+
+<p>“I know what was on their minds,” Her Majesty said. “At least partly.
+It was all so confused it was difficult to get anything really
+detailed or complete.”</p>
+
+<p>“There,” Malone said fervently, “I agree with you.”</p>
+
+<p>“The whole trouble was,” the Queen said, “that nobody knew about
+anybody else.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’d gathered something like that,” Malone said. “But what exactly was
+it all about?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” the Queen said, “Major Petkoff was supposed to tell Lou, in
+effect, that if she didn’t agree to do espionage work for the Soviet
+Union, things would go hard with her father.”</p>
+
+<p>“Nice,” Malone said. “Very friendly gentleman.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” the Queen continued, “he was supposed to tell her about that
+at the bar, when he had her alone. But she got that drugged drink
+before he could begin to say anything.”</p>
+
+<p>“Then who drugged it?” Malone said. “Lou?”</p>
+
+<p>The Queen shrugged. “Someone else,” she said. “Major Petkoff didn’t
+know anything about the drugged drink.”</p>
+
+<p>“A nice surprise for him, anyhow,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“It was a surprise for everybody,” the Queen said. “You see, the
+drugged drink was meant to get her to the hospital, where they’d have
+her alone for a long time and could really put some pressure on her.”</p>
+
+<p>“And then,” Malone said, “there were the men who wanted to arrest me.
+And the ones who wanted to take Lou to jail. And the mad Mongol who
+just wanted to fight, I guess.”</p>
+
+<p>“There were so many different things, all going on at once,” the Queen
+said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone nodded. “There seems to be quite a lot of confusion in the
+Soviet Union, too,” he said. “That does not sound to me like an
+efficient operation.”</p>
+
+<p>“It wasn’t, very,” the Queen said. “You see, they have Garbitsch now,
+but they can’t do anything to him because they can’t get to Lou. And
+it doesn’t do them any good to do anything to her father, unless she
+knows about it first.”</p>
+
+<p>“It sounds,” Malone said, “as if the USSR is going along the same
+confused road as the good old United States.”</p>
+
+<p>The Queen nodded agreement. “It’s terrible,” she said. “I get those
+same flashes of telepathic static, too.”</p>
+
+<p>“You do?” Malone said, leaning forward.</p>
+
+<p>“Just the same,” the Queen said. “Whatever is operating in the United
+States is operating over here, too.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone sat down in a seat on the aisle. “Everything,” he announced,
+“is now perfectly lovely. The United States is being confused and
+mixed up by somebody, and the Somebody looked like a Russian spy. But
+now Russia is being confused, too.”</p>
+
+<p>“Do you think there are some American spies working here?” the Queen
+said.</p>
+
+<p>“If they’re using psionics,” Malone said, “as they obviously are—and
+I don’t know about them, Burris doesn’t know about them, O’Connor
+doesn’t know about them and nobody else I can find knows about them—
+then they don’t exist. That’s flat.”</p>
+
+<p>“How about outer space?” the Queen said. “I mean, spies from outer
+space trying to take over the Earth.”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s a nice idea,” Malone said sourly. “I wish they’d hurry up and do
+it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Then you don’t think—”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know what to think,” Malone said. “There’s some perfectly
+simple explanation for all this. And somewhere, in all the running
+around and looking here and there I’ve been doing, I’ve got all the
+facts I need to come up with that answer.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, my,” the Queen said. “That’s wonderful.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure it is,” Malone said. “There’s only one trouble, as a matter of
+fact. I don’t know what the explanation is, and I don’t know which
+facts are important and which ones aren’t.”</p>
+
+<p>There was a short silence.</p>
+
+<p>“I wish Tom Boyd were here,” Malone said wistfully.</p>
+
+<p>“Really?” the Queen said. “Why?”</p>
+
+<p>“Because,” Malone said, “I feel like hearing some really professional
+cursing.”</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Three-quarters of an hour passed, each and every minute draped in some
+black and gloomy material. Malone sat in his seat, his head supported
+by both hands, and stared at the back of the seat ahead of him. No
+great messages were written on it. The Queen, respecting his need for
+silent contemplation, sat and watched Lou and said nothing at all.</p>
+
+<p>It was always possible, of course, Malone thought, that he would fall
+asleep and dream of an answer. That kind of thing kept happening to
+detectives in books. Or else a strange man in a black trenchcoat would
+sidle up to him and hand him a slip of paper. The words: “Five
+o’clock, watch out, the red snake, doom,” would be written on the
+paper and these words would provide him with just the clues he needed
+to solve the whole case. Or else he would go and beat somebody up, and
+the exercise would stimulate his brain and he would suddenly arrive at
+the answer in a blinding flash.</p>
+
+<p>Wondering vaguely if a blinding flash were anything like a dungeon,
+because people kept being in them and never seemed to come out, Malone
+sighed. Detectives in books were great, wonderful people who never had
+any doubts or worries. Particularly if they were with the FBI. Only
+Kenneth J. Malone was different.</p>
+
+<p>Maybe someday, he thought, he would be a real detective, instead of
+just having a few special gifts that he hadn’t really worked for,
+anyhow. Maybe someday, in the distant future, he would be the equal of
+Nick Carter.</p>
+
+<p>Right now, though, he had a case to solve. Nick Carter wasn’t around
+to help.</p>
+
+<p>And Kenneth J. Malone, FBI, was getting absolutely nowhere.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, his reverie was broken by the sounds of argument outside the
+plane door. There were voices speaking both English and Russian, very
+loudly. Malone went to the door and opened it. A short, round,
+grey-haired man who looked just a little like an over-tired bear who
+had forgotten to sleep all winter almost fell into his arms. The man
+was wearing a grey overcoat that went nicely with his hair, and
+carrying a small black bag.</p>
+
+<p>Malone said: “Oog,” replaced the man on his own feet and looked past
+him at the group on the landing ramp outside. The navigator was there,
+arguing earnestly with two men in the uniform of the MVD.</p>
+
+<p>“Damn it,” the navigator said, “you can’t come in here. Nobody comes
+in but the doctor. This is United States territory.”</p>
+
+<p>The MVD men said something in Russian.</p>
+
+<p>“No,” the navigator said. “Definitely no.”</p>
+
+<p>One of the MVD men spat something that sounded like an insult.</p>
+
+<p>The navigator shrugged. “I don’t understand Russian,” he told them.
+“All I know is one word. No. <i>Nyet</i> Definitely, absolutely irrevocably
+<i>nyet</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Sikin sin Amerikanyets!</i>”</p>
+
+<p>The MVD men turned, as if they’d been a sister act, and went down the
+steps. The navigator followed them, wiping his forehead and breathing
+deeply. Malone shut the door.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, well, well,” the doctor said, in a burbling sort of voice.
+“Somehow, we thought it might be you. Anyhow, the ambassador did.”</p>
+
+<p>“Really?” Malone said, trying to sound surprised.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes,” the doctor assured him. “You have raised something of a
+stench in and around good old Moscow, you know.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m innocent,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor nodded. “Undoubtedly,” he said judiciously. “Who isn’t? And
+where, by the way, is the girl?”</p>
+
+<p>“Over there.” Malone pointed. News apparently traveled with great
+speed in Moscow, MVD and censorship notwithstanding. At any rate, he
+thought, it traveled with great speed to the ears of the Embassy
+staff.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor lifted Lou’s limp wrist to time her pulse, his lips pursed
+and his eyes focused on a far wall.</p>
+
+<p>“What have you heard?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“The MVD boys are extremely worried,” the doctor said. “Extremely.” He
+didn’t let go of the wrist, a marvel of which Malone had never grown
+tired. Doctors always seemed to be able, somehow, to examine a patient
+and carry on a conversation about totally different things, without
+even showing the strain. This one was no exception. Malone watched in
+awe.</p>
+
+<p>“According to the reports we got from them,” the doctor said, “you
+wandered off from <i>Trotkin’s</i> without your escort.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Malone said at random, “I didn’t think to leave them a
+farewell note. I hope they don’t think I disliked their company.”</p>
+
+<p>“Officially,” the doctor said, lifting Lou’s left eyelid and gazing
+thoughtfully into the blue iris thus exposed, “they’re afraid you’re
+lost, and they were apologetic as all hell about it to the
+ambassador.” The iris appeared to lose its fascination; the doctor
+dropped the eyelid and fished in his black bag, which he had put on
+the seat next to Lou.</p>
+
+<p>“And unofficially?” Malone asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Unofficially,” the doctor said, “we’ve got news of a riot at
+<i>Trotkin’s</i> tonight, in which you seem to have been involved. Mr.
+Malone, you must be quite a barroom brawler when you’re at home.”</p>
+
+<p>“Frankly,” Malone said, “I’m a little out of practice. And I hope I
+never have the chance to get back <i>into</i> practice.”</p>
+
+<p>The doctor nodded, removing a stethoscope from the bag and applying it
+to Lou’s chest. He waited a second, frowned and then took the plugs
+out of his ears. “I know just what you mean,” he said. “You might be
+interested to know the first unofficial score of that little match.”</p>
+
+<p>“Score?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor nodded again. “Three concussions,” he said, “one possible
+skull fracture, a broken arm, two bitten hands, and a large and varied
+assortment of dental difficulties and plain hysteria. No dead,
+however. I really don’t understand why not.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Malone said, “nobody wanted to create an international
+incident.”</p>
+
+<p>“Hmf,” the doctor said. “I see. Or I think I do, which is as far as I
+care to go in the matter. The Russians suspect, by the way, that
+you’ve managed to get aboard the plane. They do know, of course, about
+the girl, and when the pilot called for me they put two and two
+together. In spite of his story about being sick. What they can’t
+figure out is how you managed to <i>get</i> aboard the plane.”</p>
+
+<p>“Neither can I,” Malone said at random. The doctor gave him a single
+bright stare.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” he said at last, “I suppose you know your own business best.
+By the way, my examination accords pretty well with our unofficial
+information about the girl—that she was given some sort of drug in a
+drink. Is that what happened?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone nodded. “As far as we know,” he said. “She did get rid of a lot
+of it within a few minutes, though.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good,” the doctor said. “Very sensible.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sense had nothing to do with it,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“In any case,” the doctor went on doggedly, “there can’t be too much
+left in her system. Her pulse is good, she’s breathing easily and
+there don’t seem to be any complications, so I should doubt strongly
+that there’s been much damage done. Besides all which, of course, the
+Russians would hardly have wanted to hurt her; what they gave her
+would probably have done little more harm even if she’d ingested it
+all, and kept it down.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good,” Malone said sincerely.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll give you some pills,” the doctor said, fishing in his bag again,
+“and you can give them to her when she wakes up.”</p>
+
+<p>“Is that all?” Malone said, vaguely disappointed.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor eyed him keenly. “Well,” he said, “I could give her an
+injection, but I’d be a little afraid to. If it had a synergistic
+action with the drug, she might be worse off than before.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” Malone said. “By all means. Just the pills.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m glad you agree,” the doctor said. “Oh, and about leaving—”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes?” Malone said. “We want to get out of here in a hurry, if we
+can.”</p>
+
+<p>“I think you can,” the doctor said. “The ambassador mentioned that
+he’d try to arrange it with the Russians. I don’t know what he’ll tell
+them—but then, that’s why he’s an ambassador, and I’m a doctor.” He
+straightened up and handed Malone an envelope containing three green
+capsules. “Give her these if she wakes up with a headache,” he said.
+“If she feels all right, just forget all about them.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Malone said. “And thanks, Doctor. Tell the ambassador we’d
+appreciate it if he got us out of here as soon as possible.”</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly,” the doctor said. “After all, I might as well take on the
+job of a diplomatic courier.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone nodded. “Well,” he said, “goodbye, Mr. Courier.”</p>
+
+<p>The doctor went to the door, opened it and turned.</p>
+
+<p>“Absolutely,” he said, “Mr. Ives.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c9">9</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Lou didn’t wake up until the plane was dropping toward the Washington
+airfield, and when she did awaken it was as if she had merely come out
+of an especially deep sleep. Malone was standing over her, which was
+far from a coincidence; he had been waiting and watching virtually
+every minute since takeoff.</p>
+
+<p>During his brief periods of rest, Her Majesty had taken over, and she
+was now peacefully asleep at the back of the plane, looking a little
+more careworn, but just as regal as ever. She looked to Malone as if
+she had weathered a small revolution against her rule, but had managed
+to persuade the populace (by passing out cookies to the children,
+probably) that all was, in the last analysis, for the best in this
+best of all possible worlds. She looked, he thought, absolutely
+wonderful.</p>
+
+<p>So did Lou. She blinked her eyes open and moved one hand at her side,
+and then she came fully awake. “Well,” she said. “And a bright hello
+to you, Sleuth. If it’s not being too banal, where am I?”</p>
+
+<p>“It is,” Malone said, “but you’re in an airplane, coming into
+Washington. We ought to be there in a few minutes.”</p>
+
+<p>Lou shook her head slowly from side to side. “I have never heard any
+news that sounded better in my entire life,” she said. “How long ago
+did we leave Moscow?”</p>
+
+<p>“Our trip to Beautiful Moskva,” Malone said, “ended right after they
+tried to get you to the hospital, by giving you a drugged drink. Do
+you remember that?”</p>
+
+<p>“I remember it, all right,” she said. “I’m never going to forget that
+moment.”</p>
+
+<p>“How do you feel?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Fine,” Lou said. “And how are <i>you</i>?”</p>
+
+<p>“Me?” Malone said. “I’m all right. I’ve <i>been</i> all right. Don’t worry
+about <i>me</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, one never knows,” Lou said. “With your cold and all.”</p>
+
+<p>“I think that’s better,” Malone said hastily. “But you’re sure you
+feel fine?”</p>
+
+<p>Lou nodded. “A little tired, maybe, but that’s all.” She paused. “I
+remember Miss Thompson taking me to the ladies’ room. I got pretty
+sick. But from there on, I’m not sure what happened.”</p>
+
+<p>“I came in,” Malone said, “and got you out.”</p>
+
+<p>“How brave!” Lou said.</p>
+
+<p>“Not very,” Malone said casually. “After all, what could happen to me
+in a ladies’ room?”</p>
+
+<p>“You’d be surprised,” Lou murmured. “And you came and got me, and took
+me to the plane and all. And I—” She hesitated, and for a second she
+looked very small and wistful. “Do you—do you think they’ll do
+anything to Dad?” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t see why,” Malone said confidently. “After all, the only thing
+he did wrong was to get caught, and that’s an occupational risk if
+you’re in the spy business. Lots of people get caught. Happens all the
+time. Don’t worry about it.”</p>
+
+<p>“I—all right,” she said. “I won’t, then.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good,” Malone said. He fished in his pocket. “I’ve got some pills
+here,” he said, “in case you have a headache. The doctor said I could
+give them to you if you had a headache, but otherwise I should just
+forget about them.”</p>
+
+<p>Lou smiled. “I think you’d better just forget about them,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone’s hand came out of his pocket empty. “I just want to make sure
+you’re okay,” he said. “Probably very silly. Of course you’re okay.”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course I am,” she said. “But I don’t think you’re silly.” She
+smiled again, a very warm smile. Malone took a deep breath and
+discovered that he hadn’t been breathing at all regularly for several
+minutes. Lou’s smile increased a trifle in intensity and he stopped
+breathing all over again. “All things considered,” she said, “I think
+you’re pretty wonderful, Ken.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone’s voice sounded to him as if it were coming from a great
+distance. He wondered if the strange feeling in his stomach were the
+pangs of love, or the descent of the plane. Then he realized that he
+didn’t care. “Well, well,” he said airily. “Well, well, well. Frankly,
+Lou, I’m inclined to agree with you. Though I’m not sure about the
+qualification.”</p>
+
+<p>“Fine thing,” she said. “Tell a man he’s wonderful and he just nods
+his head as if he knew it all along.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone swallowed hard. “Maybe I did,” he said. “And how did you come
+to this startling conclusion?”</p>
+
+<p>It was Lou who broke the light mood of their speech first. “Look,
+Ken,” she said seriously, “I’m the daughter of an enemy spy. You know
+that. You’re an FBI agent.”</p>
+
+<p>“So what?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“So,” she said, “you don’t treat me like the daughter of a spy. You
+treat me just like anybody else.”</p>
+
+<p>“I do not,” Malone said instantly.</p>
+
+<p>“All right,” she said, and shrugged. “But I’m sure none of this is in
+the FBI manual for daughters of convicted spies.”</p>
+
+<p>“Now, you look,” Malone said. “Just what do you think this is? The
+McCarthy era? Any way I treat you, it has nothing to do with your
+father. He’s a spy, and we caught him and we sent him back to Moscow.
+That’s our job. But all this about the sins of the fathers being
+visited on the heads of the children, even unto the seventh
+generation—this is just plain silly. You’re you; you’re not your
+father. You haven’t done anything—why should I treat you as if you
+have?”</p>
+
+<p>“How do you know I’m not a spy, too?” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“Because,” Malone said flatly, “I know.”</p>
+
+<p>“Really?” she said softly. “Do you really?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone opened his mouth, shut it and then started again. “Strictly
+speaking,” he said carefully, “I don’t know. But we’re in the United
+States now, where a person is considered innocent until proven
+guilty.”</p>
+
+<p>“And that,” Lou said, “is all you’re going on, I suppose.”</p>
+
+<p>“Not all,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“I didn’t think so,” Lou said, still smiling.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t ask me how,” Malone said, “but we’re pretty sure you knew
+nothing about your father’s activities. Forget it.”</p>
+
+<p>Lou looked suddenly slightly disappointed. Malone wondered why. Of
+course, there was one more reason, and maybe she’d thought of that.
+“It does make it easier,” he said, “that you happen to be a beautiful
+girl.”</p>
+
+<p>She smiled again, and started to say something, but she never got the
+chance. The landing gear of the aircraft bumped gently against the
+runway, and the ship rolled slowly in to a stop.</p>
+
+<p>A second passed. From the back of the plane a voice said: “Are we back
+in Washington, S—Mr. Malone?”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s right, Miss Thompson,” Malone told the Queen.</p>
+
+<p>“And Miss Garbitsch—”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m fine, Miss Thompson,” Luba said. She swung her feet around to the
+deck.</p>
+
+<p>“Wait a minute,” Malone said. “Do you think you ought to get up?”</p>
+
+<p>Lou’s smile seemed to reduce him to small, very hot ashes. “Ken,” she
+said, “the doctor said I was fine, so what are you worrying about? I
+can get up. I’ll be all right.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, okay,” he said, and stepped back. Her Majesty had already left
+the plane. Lou got up, and wavered just a little. Malone held out his
+arms, and found her in them before he had thought about it.</p>
+
+<p>A long time seemed to pass. Malone wasn’t sure whether he was standing
+still because he wanted to, or because he was absolutely incapable of
+motion. Lou didn’t seem in any hurry to break away, either.</p>
+
+<p>Then she put her arms around his neck.</p>
+
+<p>“Sleuth,” she said, “don’t you ever follow up a hint?”</p>
+
+<p>“Hint?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Damn it,” Lou said in a soft, sweet voice, “kiss me, Ken.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone had no answer to that—at least, no verbal answer.</p>
+
+<p>One didn’t seem to be needed.</p>
+
+<p>When he finally came up for air, he said: “Lou....”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Ken?”</p>
+
+<p>“Lou, where are you going from here?”</p>
+
+<p>Lou stepped back a pace. “What?” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“I mean, back to New York?” Malone said. “Or someplace else? I mean—
+well, what are you going to do?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” Lou said. “Oh, yes. I’ll be going back to New York. After all,
+Ken, I do have a living to make, such as it is, and Sir Lewis is
+expecting me.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know,” Malone said, “but it still sounds funny. A girl like
+you working for—well, for the Psychical Research people. Ghosts and
+ectoplasm and all that.”</p>
+
+<p>Lou stepped back another pace. “Now, wait a minute,” she said. “You
+seemed to need their information, all right.”</p>
+
+<p>“But that was—oh, well,” Malone said. “Never mind. Maybe I’m silly.
+It really doesn’t matter.”</p>
+
+<p>“I guess it doesn’t, now,” she said. “Except that it does mean I’ve
+got to leave for New York almost at once.”</p>
+
+<p>“Can you cut out that ‘almost’?” Malone said. “Because I’ve got to be
+there myself, and right away. If you hurry, we can get the same
+plane.”</p>
+
+<p>“That would be great,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“Okay, then,” Malone said. “Don’t you worry about a thing, I’ll take
+care of reservations and everything.”</p>
+
+<p>“My, my,” Lou said. “What it must be like to have all that pull and
+influence.”</p>
+
+<p>“What?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Lou grinned. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing.”</p>
+
+<p>“Then it’s all settled. I’ll take care of the reservations, and we’ll
+go in together,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Fair enough,” Lou said, “my fine feathered Fed.”</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Actually, it took Malone nearly three hours to get everything set in
+Washington for his New York departure. He had to make a verbal report
+to Andrew J. Burris first, and that consumed quite a lot of time,
+since Burris was alternately shocked, horrified, gleeful and confused
+about the whole trip, and spent most of his time interrupting Malone
+and crying out for God’s vengeance, mercy, justice or understanding.</p>
+
+<p>Then Malone had to dictate a longer report for the written record.
+This didn’t take quite as long, since there were no interruptions, but
+by the time it was over he felt as if he were going out to become a
+Carthusian monk. He felt, as he rubbed his raw throat, that it
+wouldn’t be a bad idea at all to take a nice vow of silence for
+awhile. He could write people little notes, and they would all treat
+him kindly and gently. He would be pointed out to strangers, and
+people would try to do him favors.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately, he couldn’t take the vow at once. During his absence,
+his desk log showed, several calls had come in, all of which had to be
+taken care of at once. Some of them dealt with evidence or statements
+from old cases, some were just nuisances. The most urgent was from Dr.
+O’Connor at Yucca Flats.</p>
+
+<p>“If you’re not too busy,” O’Connor said in his icily polite tone, “I
+would like to have Miss Thompson back as soon as possible.” He sounded
+as if Malone had borrowed his scalpel.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll see what I can do,” Malone said carefully.</p>
+
+<p>“There is a new series of tests,” O’Connor said, “on which I am now at
+work; the assistance of Miss Thompson would be invaluable to me at
+this time.”</p>
+
+<p>After he’d hung up, Malone called Her Majesty at her Washington hotel.
+She was very glad of the chance to return to Yucca Flats, she said.
+There, Malone knew, she would be able to return to her accustomed
+dignity as Queen of the Greater English Commonwealth, a district
+which, in her mind, seemed to include the greater part of the Western
+world. On her present mission, she was plain Miss Thompson and, though
+the idea of going about incognito had its charms, it became a little
+dull after awhile. The adventuring was fine, although a little rougher
+than she’d thought it would be; the sight of the Queen’s Own FBI in
+action was still a powerful attraction for Her Majesty. But the peace
+and quiet and dignity of Her Own Royal Palace won out without too much
+trouble.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course,” Malone said, “you’ll be on call in case I need you.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am always in touch with my subjects,” Her Majesty said with
+dignity, “and most especially with you, Sir Kenneth. I shall so
+remain.”</p>
+
+<p>And then there was a little paperwork to take care of. By the time
+Malone had finished, he would have been glad to teleport to New York
+on his own. But on reflection he decided that he would much rather
+travel with Lou, and hurried down to the airport.</p>
+
+<p>By the time the plane landed at La Guardia, and they’d taken
+a ’copter to the East Side Terminal and a taxi to the big
+blue-aluminum-and-glass Ravell Building, Malone had reached a new
+decision. It would be nothing short of wonderful, he felt, if he
+could spend the rest of his life traveling around with Luba Garbitsch.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, that name was something of a handicap. It was hardly a
+romantic one. He wondered, very briefly, whether or not “Luba Malone”
+were an improvement. But he buried the thought before it got any
+further. Enough, he told himself firmly, was enough.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s been a nice trip,” Lou said. She, too, sounded subdued, as if
+she were thinking about something terribly serious.</p>
+
+<p>“Great,” Malone said happily. “A wonderful trip.”</p>
+
+<p>“I enjoyed being with you,” Lou said.</p>
+
+<p>“Me, too,” Malone said. He paid off the taxi-driver and they got out
+at the corner. Malone went to the newsstand there and picked up a copy
+of the <i>Post</i>.</p>
+
+<p>“That,” Lou said over his shoulder, “is one whole hell of a headline.”</p>
+
+<p>It filled the entire page, four lines of thick black capitals:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent1">JUDGE</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">DROPS</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">UNION</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">SUIT!</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>“Well, well,” Malone said. “Let’s see what this is all about.” He
+flipped to page three. Lou craned her neck over his shoulder and they
+read the start of the story together.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>DISTRICT COURT RULES UNION HAS NO CASE</p>
+
+<p>New York [AP], August 23. Judge James Lefkowitz
+of the New York Supreme Court ruled today that
+the International Truckers’ Brotherhood had no
+grounds for their suit against the United Transport
+Corp. and its officers. The action, a bitterly
+fought contest, involved a complaint by the
+Brotherhood that UTC had violated their contract
+with the Brotherhood by hiring “unqualified drivers”
+to work for the corporation.</p>
+
+<p>In a statement made immediately after the ruling,
+Judge Lefkowitz said: “It is obvious that a man with
+a state-certified chauffeur’s license is not an
+‘unqualified driver.’”</p>
+
+<p>Effects of this ruling are thought to be
+far-reaching. Comment from the international
+Truckers’ Brotherhood....</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>There was more to it, a lot more, but Malone didn’t feel like reading
+it. It sounded just as confused as he expected news to sound these
+days, but it also sounded a little dull. He could feel Lou’s breathing
+against his ear as he read, and he lost interest in the paper almost
+at once.</p>
+
+<p>“My, my,” she said. “And I expected a real exposé of a story, after
+that headline.”</p>
+
+<p>“This is an exposé,” Malone said. “But I’m not sure what of.”</p>
+
+<p>“It sounds pretty confused,” Lou said.</p>
+
+<p>“Everything seems to, these days,” Malone said. “Including any story
+of what’s been happening during the last little while.”</p>
+
+<p>“Agreed,” Lou said. “Without argument.”</p>
+
+<p>“Listen,” Malone said suddenly. “Would it help if I went up and told
+Sir Lewis that there’s no mark against your record?”</p>
+
+<p>“Mark?” Lou said. “Against my record?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Malone said, “I mean—well, he isn’t the sort of man who’d
+fire somebody, because of—because of something like this?”</p>
+
+<p>“You mean because I know an FBI man?” Lou said.</p>
+
+<p>“I—”</p>
+
+<p>“Never mind,” she said. “I know what you mean. And he won’t. He’ll
+understand.” She came round to face him, and patted his cheek.
+“Thanks,” she said. “Thanks a lot, anyway.”</p>
+
+<p>“If there’s anything I can do—”</p>
+
+<p>“There won’t be,” Lou said. “You’ll call me, though, about tonight?”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure I will,” Malone said. He hoped that the tentative date he’d made
+with her for that evening wouldn’t be broken up because of a sudden
+onslaught of work. “I’ll let you know before five, for sure.”</p>
+
+<p>“Fine,” Lou said. “I’ll wait to hear from you.”</p>
+
+<p>She turned to walk away.</p>
+
+<p>“Hey,” Malone said. “Wait a minute.”</p>
+
+<p>“What?” she said, turning again.</p>
+
+<p>Malone looked judicious. “I think,” he said weightily, “that,
+considering all the fun we’ve had, and all the adventuring and
+everything else, the least you could do would be to kiss me goodbye.”</p>
+
+<p>“On Fifth Avenue?”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” Malone said. He tapped his lips. “Here.”</p>
+
+<p>She laughed, bent closer and pecked him on the cheek. Then, before he
+could say anything else, she was gone.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c10">10</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>On the way to FBI Headquarters on 69th Street, he read the <i>Post</i> a
+little more carefully. The judge and his union suit weren’t the only
+things that were fouled up, he saw. Things were getting pretty bad all
+over.</p>
+
+<p>One story dealt with the recent factional fights inside the American
+Association for the Advancement of Medicine. A new group, the United
+States Medical-Professional Society, appeared to be forming as a
+competitor to the AAAM, and Malone wasn’t quite so sure, when he
+thought about it, that this news was as bad as it appeared on the
+surface. Fights between doctors, of course, were reasonably rare, at
+least on the high hysterical level the story appeared to pinpoint. But
+the AAAM had held a monopoly in the medical field for a long time;
+maybe it was about time some competition showed itself. From what he
+could find out in the story, the USMPS seemed like a group of fairly
+sensible people.</p>
+
+<p>But that was one of the few rays of light Malone could discern amid
+the encircling bloom of the news. The gang wars had reached a new
+high; the <i>Post</i> was now publishing what it called a Daily Scoreboard,
+which consisted in this particular paper of six deaths, two
+disappearances and ten hospitalizations. The six deaths were evenly
+scattered throughout the country: two in New York, one each in Chicago
+and Detroit, and two more in San Francisco. The disappearances were in
+Los Angeles and in Miami, and the hospitalizations were pretty much
+all over.</p>
+
+<p>The unions had been having trouble, too. Traditional forms of
+controversy appeared to have gone out the window, in favor of
+startling disclosures, beatings, wild cries of foul and great masses
+of puzzling evidence. How, for instance, Malone wondered, had the
+president of Local 7574 of the Fishermen’s Fraternal Brotherhood
+managed to mislay a pile of secret records, showing exactly how the
+membership was being bilked of dues, on a Boston subway train? But,
+somehow, he had, and the records were now causing shakeups, denials
+and trouble among the fishermen.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, the news was not all bad. There were always the comic
+strips. Pogo was busily staving off an approaching wedding between
+Albert Alligator and a new character named Tranquil Portly, who
+appeared to be a brown bear. He was running into some resistance,
+though, from a wolflike character who planned to abscond with Albert’s
+cigars while Albert was honeymooning. This character, Don Coyote by
+name, looked like a trouble-maker, and Malone vowed to keep a careful
+eye on him.</p>
+
+<p>And then there were other headlines:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent1">FUSION POWER SOON COMMERCIALLY</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">AVAILABLE SAYS AEC HEAD</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">Sees Drastic Cut in Power Rates</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent1">UN POLICE CONTINGENT OKAYED:</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">MILLION MEN TO FORM 1ST GROUP</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">Member Countries Pledge $20</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">Billion in Support Moneys</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent1">OFFICIAL STATES: “WE’RE AHEAD AFTER 17 YEARS!”</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">US Space Program Tops Russian Achievements</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent1">ARMED FORCES TO TOUGHEN TRAINING PROGRAM IN 1974</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">Gen. Foote: “Our aim is to train fighting men,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">not to run a country club.”</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent1">GOVERNMENT TO SAVE $1 BILLION ANNUALLY?</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">Senator Hits Duplication of Effort in Government,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">Vows Immediate Reform</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Malone read that one a little more carefully, because it looked, at
+first sight, like one of the bad-news items. There had been
+government-spending reforms before, almost all of which had resulted
+in confusion, panic, loss of essential services—and twice as many men
+on the payroll, since the government now had to hire useless
+efficiency experts, accountants and other such supernumerary workers.</p>
+
+<p>But this time, the reform looked as if it might do some good. Of
+course, he told himself sadly, it was still too early to tell.</p>
+
+<p>The senator involved was Deeks, of Massachusetts, who was also in the
+news because of a peculiar battle he had had with Senator Furbisher of
+Vermont. Congress, Malone noted, was still acting up. Furbisher
+claimed that the moneys appropriated for a new Vermont dam were really
+being used for the dam. But Deeks had somehow come into possession of
+several letters written by a cousin of Furbisher’s, detailing some of
+the graft that was going on in the senator’s home state. Furbisher was
+busily denying everything, but his cousin was just as busy confessing
+all to anybody who would listen. It was building up into an extremely
+interesting fracas, and, Malone thought, it would have been even
+funnier than Pogo except that it was happening in the Congress of the
+United States.</p>
+
+<p>He heaved a sigh, folded up the paper and entered the building that
+housed the New York contingent of the FBI.</p>
+
+<p>Boyd was waiting in his office when he arrived.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, there, Kenneth,” he said. “And how are all our little Slavic
+brothers?”</p>
+
+<p>“Unreasonable,” Malone said, “and highly unpleasant.”</p>
+
+<p>“You refer, no doubt,” Boyd said, “to the <i>Meeneestyerstvoh
+Vnootrenikh Dyehl</i>?”</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Gesundheit</i>,” Malone said kindly.</p>
+
+<p>“The MVD,” Boyd said. “I’ve been studying for days to pull it on you
+when you got back.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone nodded. “Very well, then,” he said in a stately, orotund tone.
+“Say it again.”</p>
+
+<p>“Damn it,” Boyd said, “I <i>can’t</i> say it again.”</p>
+
+<p>“Cheer up,” Malone said. “Maybe some day you’ll learn. Meantime,
+Thomas, did you get the stuff we talked about?”</p>
+
+<p>Boyd nodded. “I think I got enough of it,” he said. “Anyhow, there is
+a definite trend developing. Come on into the private office, and I’ll
+show you.”</p>
+
+<p>There, on Boyd’s massive desk, were several neat piles of paper.</p>
+
+<p>“It looks like enough,” Malone said. “As a matter of fact, it looks
+like too much. Haven’t we been through all this before?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not like this, we haven’t,” Boyd said. “Information from all over,
+out of the everywhere, into the here.” He picked up a stack of papers
+and handed them to Malone.</p>
+
+<p>“What’s this?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“That,” Boyd said, “is a report on the Pacific Merchant Sailors’
+Brotherhood.”</p>
+
+<p>“Goody,” Malone said doubtfully.</p>
+
+<p>Boyd came over, pulling at his beard thoughtfully, and took the top
+few sheets out of Malone’s hands. “The report,” he said, looking down
+at the sheets, “includes the checks we made on the office of the
+president of the Brotherhood, as well as the Los Angeles local and the
+San Francisco local.”</p>
+
+<p>“Only two?” Malone said. “That seems as if you’ve been lying down on
+the job.”</p>
+
+<p>“They’re the top two in membership,” Boyd said. “But listen to this:
+the president and three of his underlings resigned day before
+yesterday, and not quite in time. The law—by which I mean us, and a
+good many other people—is hot on their tails. It seems somebody
+accidentally mixed up a couple of envelopes.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sounds like a case for the Post Office,” Malone said brightly.</p>
+
+<p>“Not these envelopes,” Boyd said. “There was a letter that was
+supposed to go to the head of the San Francisco local, dealing with a
+second set of books—not the ones used for tax purposes, but the real
+McCoy. The letter didn’t get to the San Francisco man. Instead, it
+went to the attorney general of the state of California.”</p>
+
+<p>“Lovely,” Malone said. “Meanwhile, what was San Francisco doing?”</p>
+
+<p>Boyd smiled. “San Francisco was getting confused,” he said. “Like
+everybody else. The San Francisco man got a copy of an affidavit
+dealing with merchant-ship tonnage. That was supposed to go to the
+attorney general.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good work,” Malone said. “So when the Frisco boys woke up to what was
+happening—”</p>
+
+<p>“They called the head man, and he put two and two together, resigned
+and went into hiding. Right now, he’s probably living an undercover
+life as a shoe salesman in Paris, Kentucky.”</p>
+
+<p>“And, after all,” Malone added, “why not? It’s a peaceful life.”</p>
+
+<p>“The attorney general, of course, impounded the second set of books,”
+Boyd went on. “A grand jury is hearing charges now.”</p>
+
+<p>“You know,” Malone said reflectively, “I almost feel sorry for the
+man. Almost, but not quite.”</p>
+
+<p>“I see what you mean,” Boyd said. “It is a hell of a thing to happen.”</p>
+
+<p>“On the other hand—” Malone leafed through the papers in a hurry,
+then put them back on Boyd’s desk with a sigh of relief. “I’ve got the
+main details now,” he said. “I can go through the thing more
+thoroughly later. Anything else?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, lots,” Boyd said. “And all in the same pattern. The FPM, for
+instance, literally dropped one in our laps.”</p>
+
+<p>“Literally?” Malone said. “What was the Federation of Professional
+Musicians doing in your lap?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not mine,” Boyd said hastily. “Not mine. But it seems that some
+secretary put a bunch of file folders on the windowsill of their
+second-floor offices, and they fell off. At the same time, an agent
+was passing underneath, slipped on a banana peel and sat down on the
+sidewalk. Bingo, folders in lap.”</p>
+
+<p>“Wonderful,” Malone said. “The hand of God.”</p>
+
+<p>“The hand of something, for sure,” Boyd said. “Those folders contain
+all the ammunition we’ve ever needed to get after the FPM. Kickbacks,
+illegal arrangements with night-clubs, the whole works. We’re putting
+it together now, but it looks like a long, long term ahead for our
+friends from the FPM.”</p>
+
+<p>And Boyd went to his desk, picked up a particularly large stack of
+papers. “This,” he said, “is really hot stuff.”</p>
+
+<p>“What do you call the others?” Malone said. “Crime on ice?”</p>
+
+<p>“The new show at the Winter Garden,” Boyd said blithely. “Don’t miss
+it if you can.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Malone said. “So what’s so hot?”</p>
+
+<p>Boyd smiled. “The police departments of seven major cities,” he said.
+“They’re all under attack either by the local prosecuting attorney or
+the state’s attorney general. It seems there’s a little graft and
+corruption going on.”</p>
+
+<p>“This,” Malone said, “is not news.”</p>
+
+<p>“It is to the people concerned,” Boyd said. “Four police chiefs have
+resigned, along with great handfuls of inspectors, captains and
+lieutenants. It’s making a lovely wingding all over the country, Ken.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll bet,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“And I checked back on every one,” Boyd went on. “Your hunch was
+absolutely right, Ken. The prosecuting attorneys and the attorneys
+general are all new men—all the ones involved in this stuff. Each one
+replaced a previous incumbent in a recent election. In two cases, the
+governor was new, too—elected last year.”</p>
+
+<p>“That figures,” Malone said. “What about the rest?”</p>
+
+<p>Boyd’s grandiose wave of a hand took in all the papers on the desk.
+“It’s all the same,” he said. “They all follow a pattern, Ken, <i>the</i>
+pattern. The one you were looking for.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone blinked. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “I’ll be doubly damned.”</p>
+
+<p>“And how about the Russians?” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>“You mean the <i>Meeneestyerstvoh Vnootrenikh Dyehl</i>?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Now,” Boyd said, “I’ll be damned. And after I practiced for days.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah,” Malone said. “But I was <i>there</i>. The Russians are about as mixed
+up as a group of Transylvanian villagers with two vampires to track
+down and not enough flambeaux for all. Here, for instance, is just one
+example: the conflicting sets of orders that were given about me and
+Her Majesty and L—Miss Garbitsch.”</p>
+
+<p>Briefly, he outlined what had happened.</p>
+
+<p>“Sounds like fun,” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>“They were so busy arguing with each other,” Malone finished, “that I
+have a feeling we hardly needed the teleportation to escape. It would
+just have taken longer, that’s all.” He paused. “By the way, Tom,
+about the stakeout—”</p>
+
+<p>“Luba Garbitsch is being protected as if she were Fort Knox,” Boyd
+said. “If any Soviet agent tries to approach her with a threat of any
+kind, we’ll have him nabbed before he can say Ivan Robinovitch.”</p>
+
+<p>“Or,” Malone suggested, “<i>Meeneestyerstvoh</i>—”</p>
+
+<p>“If we waited for that one,” Boyd said, “we might have to wait all
+day.” He paused. “But who’s doing it?” he went on. “That’s still the
+question. Martians? Venerians? Or is that last one Venusians?”</p>
+
+<p>“Aphrodisiacs,” Malone suggested diplomatically.</p>
+
+<p>“Thank you, no,” Boyd said politely. “I never indulge while on duty.”</p>
+
+<p>“Thomas,” Malone said, “you are a Rover Boy First-Class.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good,” Boyd said. “But, meanwhile, who is doing all this? Would you
+prefer Evil Beings from the Planet Ploor?”</p>
+
+<p>“I would not,” Malone said firmly.</p>
+
+<p>“But I have a strange feeling,” Boyd said, “that, in spite of all the
+evidence to the contrary, you do not hold with the Interplanetary
+Alien Theory.”</p>
+
+<p>“Frankly,” Malone said, “I’m not sure of anything. Not really. But I
+do want to know why, if it’s interplanetary aliens doing this stuff,
+they’re picking such a strange way of going about it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Strange?” Boyd said. “What’s strange about it? You wouldn’t expect
+Things from Ploor to come right out and <i>tell</i> us what they want,
+would you? It’s against custom. It may even be against the law.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, maybe,” Malone said. “But it is pretty strange. The difference
+between what’s happening in Russia and what’s happening here—”</p>
+
+<p>“What difference?” Boyd said. “Everybody’s confused. Here, and over
+there. It all looks the same to me.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, it isn’t,” Malone said. “Take a look at the paper, for
+instance.” He tossed the <i>Post</i> at Boyd, who caught it with a
+spasmodic clutching motion and reassembled it slowly.</p>
+
+<p>“Why throw things?” Boyd said. “You sore or something?”</p>
+
+<p>“I guess I am,” Malone said. “But not at you. It’s—somebody or
+something. Person or persons unknown.”</p>
+
+<p>“Or Ploorians,” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>“Whatever,” Malone said. “But take a look at the paper and see if you
+see what I see.” He paused. “Does that mean anything?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Probably,” Boyd said. “We’ll figure it out later.” He leafed through
+the newspaper slowly, pulling thoughtfully at his beard from time to
+time. Malone watched him in breathless silence.</p>
+
+<p>“See it?” he said at last.</p>
+
+<p>Boyd looked up and, very slowly, nodded. “You’re right, Ken,” he said
+in a quiet voice. “You’re absolutely right. It’s as plain as the nose
+on your face.”</p>
+
+<p>“And that,” Malone said, “sounds like an insult. It’s much plainer
+than that. Suppose you tell me.”</p>
+
+<p>Boyd considered. “Over here,” he said at last, “there are a lot of
+confused jerks and idiots. Right?”</p>
+
+<p>“Correct,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“And in Russia,” Boyd went on, “there’s a lot of confusion. Right?”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Boyd said. “It’s perfectly clear. I wonder why I didn’t see it
+before.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s it!” Malone cried. “That’s the difference!”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Boyd said. “It’s perfectly clear. I wonder why I didn’t see it
+before.”</p>
+
+<p>“Because you weren’t looking for it,” Malone said. “Because nobody
+was. But there’s one more check I want to make. There’s one area I’m
+not sure of, simply because I don’t have enough to go on.”</p>
+
+<p>“What area is that?” Boyd said. “It seems to me we did a pretty good
+job—”</p>
+
+<p>“The Mafia,” Malone said. “We know they’re having trouble, but—”</p>
+
+<p>“But we don’t know what kind of trouble,” Boyd finished. “Right you
+are.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone nodded. “I want to talk to Manelli,” he said. “Can we set it
+up?”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t see why not,” Boyd said. “The A-in-C can give us the latest
+on him. You want me with you?”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” Malone said after some thought. “No. You go and see Mike Sand,
+heading up the International Truckers’ Union. We know he’s tied up
+with the Syndicate, and maybe you can get some information from him.
+You know what to dig for?”</p>
+
+<p>“I do now,” Boyd said. He reached for the intercom phone.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Cesare Antonio Manelli was a second-generation Prohibition mobster,
+whose history can most easily be described by reference to the various
+affairs of State which coincided with his development. Thus:</p>
+
+<p>When Cesare was a small toddler of uncertain gait and chubby visage,
+the Twenty-First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States
+canceled out not only the Eighteenth Amendment, but the thriving
+enterprises conducted by Manelli, Sr., and many of his friends.</p>
+
+<p>When Cesare was a young schoolboy, poring over the multiplication
+tables, his father and his father’s friends were busy dividing. They
+were dividing, to put it more fully, husbands from families as a means
+of requesting ransom, and money from banks as a means of getting the
+same cash without use of the middleman, or victim. This was the period
+of the Great Readjustment, and the frenzied search among gangland’s
+higher echelons for a substitute for bootlegging.</p>
+
+<p>And when Cesare was an innocent high-schooler, sporting a Paleolithic
+switchblade knife and black leather jacket, his father and his
+father’s friends had reached a new plateau. They consolidated into a
+Syndicate, and began to concentrate on gambling and the whole,
+complex, profitable network of unions.</p>
+
+<p>And then World War II had come along, and it was time for Cesare to do
+his part. Bidding a fond farewell to his father and such of his
+father’s friends as had survived the disagreements of Prohibition, the
+painful legal processes of the early Thirties and the even more
+painful consolidations of the years immediately before the war, young
+Cesare went off to foreign lands, where he distinguished himself by
+creating and running the largest single black-market ring in all of
+Southern Europe.</p>
+
+<p>Cesare had followed in his father’s footsteps. And, before his sudden
+death during a disagreement in Miami, Giacomo “Jack the Ripper”
+Manelli was proud of his son.</p>
+
+<p>“Geez,” he often said. “Whattakid, huh? Whattakid!”</p>
+
+<p>At the war’s end, young Cesare, having proven himself a man, took unto
+himself a nickname and a shotgun. He did not have to use the shotgun
+very much, after the first few lessons; soon he was on his way to the
+top.</p>
+
+<p>There was nowhere for Cesare “Big Cheese” Antonio Manelli to go,
+except up.</p>
+
+<p>Straight up.</p>
+
+<p>Now, in 1973, he occupied a modestly opulent office on Madison Avenue,
+where he did his modest best to pretend to the world at large that he
+was only a small cog—indeed, an almost invisible cog—in a large
+advertising machine. His best was, for all practical purposes, good
+enough.</p>
+
+<p>Though it was common knowledge among the spoil-sport law enforcement
+officers who cared to look into the matter that Manelli was the real
+owner of the agency, there was no way to prove this. He didn’t even
+have a phone under his own name. The only way to reach him was by
+going through his front man in the agency, a blank-faced, truculent
+Arab named Atif Abdullah Aoud.</p>
+
+<p>According to the agent-in-charge of the New York office, Malone had
+his choice of two separate methods of getting to Manelli. One, more
+direct, was to walk in, announce that he was an agent of the FBI, and
+insist on seeing Manelli. If he had a search warrant, the A-in-C told
+him, he might even get in. But, even if he did, he would probably not
+get anything out of Manelli.</p>
+
+<p>The second and more diplomatic way was to call up Atif Abdullah Aoud
+and arrange for an appointment.</p>
+
+<p>Malone made his decision in a flash. He flipped on the phone and
+punched for a PLaza exchange.</p>
+
+<p>The face that appeared on the screen was that of a fairly pretty, if
+somewhat vapid, brunette. “Rodger, Willcoe, O’Vurr and Aoud, good
+afternoon,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone blinked.</p>
+
+<p>“Who is calling, please?” the girl said. She snapped gum at the screen
+and Malone winced and drew away.</p>
+
+<p>“This is Kenneth J. Malone,” he said from what he considered a safe
+distance. “I want to talk to Mr. Aoud.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Aoud?” she said in a high, unhelpful whine.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s right,” Malone said patiently. “You can tell him that there
+may be some government business coming his way.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” she said. “But Mr. Aoud isn’t in.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Aoud wasn’t in. Mr. Aoud was out. Malone turned that over in his
+mind a few times, and decided to try and forget it just as quickly as
+possible. “Then,” he said, “let me talk to one of the other partners.”</p>
+
+<p>“Partners?” the girl said. She popped her gum again. Malone moved back
+another inch.</p>
+
+<p>“You know,” he said. “The other people he works with. Rodger, or
+Willcoe, or O’Vurr.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” the girl said. “Them.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s right,” Malone said patiently.</p>
+
+<p>“How about Mr. Willcoe?” the girl said after a second of deep and
+earnest thought. “Would he do?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why not let’s try him and see?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Okay,” the girl said brightly. “Let’s.” She flashed Malone a dazzling
+smile, only slightly impeded by the gum, and flipped off. Malone
+stared at the blank screen for a few seconds, and then the girl’s
+voice said, invisibly: “Mr. Willcoe will speak to you now, Mr. Melon.
+Thank you for waiting.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m not—” Malone started to say, and then the face of Frederick
+Willcoe appeared on the screen.</p>
+
+<p>Willcoe was a thin, wrinkle-faced man with very pale skin. He seemed
+to be in his sixties, and he looked as if he had just lost an
+all-night bout with Count Dracula. Malone looked interestedly for
+puncture marks, but failed to find any.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah,” Willcoe said, in a voice that sounded like crinkled paper. “Mr.
+Melon. Good afternoon.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m not Mr. Melon,” Malone said testily.</p>
+
+<p>Willcoe looked gently surprised, like a man who has discovered that
+his evening sherry contains cholesterol. “Really?” he said. “Then I
+must be on the wrong line. I beg your pardon.”</p>
+
+<p>“You’re not on the wrong line,” Malone said. “I am Mr. Melon in a
+way.” That didn’t sound very clear when he got it out, so he added:
+“Your secretary got my name wrong. She thinks I’m Mr. Melon—Kenneth
+J. Melon.”</p>
+
+<p>“But you’re not,” Willcoe said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone resisted an impulse to announce that he was really Lamont
+Cranston. “I’m Kenneth J. Malone,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah,” Willcoe said. “Quite amusing. Imagine my mistaking you for a Mr.
+Melon, when you’re really Mr. Malone.” He paused, and his face got
+even more wrinkled. “But I don’t know you under either name,” he said.
+“What do you want?”</p>
+
+<p>“I want to talk to Mr. Manelli,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“But Mr. Aoud—”</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Aoud,” Malone said, wondering if it sounded as silly to Willcoe
+as it did to him, “isn’t in. So I thought you might be able to arrange
+an appointment for this afternoon.”</p>
+
+<p>Willcoe bit his lip. “Mr. Manelli isn’t in just now,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” Malone said. “I didn’t think he would be. That’s why I want to
+arrange an appointment for later, when he <i>will</i> be in.”</p>
+
+<p>“Does Mr. Manelli know you?” Willcoe said suspiciously, the wrinkles
+deepening again.</p>
+
+<p>“He knows my boss,” Malone said carefully. “You just tell him that
+this is something that ought to be worth time and money to him. His
+time, and his money.”</p>
+
+<p>“Hmm,” Willcoe said. “I see. Would you wait a moment, Mr. Mel—Mr.
+Malone?”</p>
+
+<p>The screen blanked out immediately. The wait this time was slightly
+longer.</p>
+
+<p>And the next face that appeared on the screen was that of Cesare “Big
+Cheese” Antonio Manelli, the nearly invisible cog.</p>
+
+<p>For a cog, the face was not a bad one. It was strong and well-muscled,
+and it had dark, wavy hair running along the top. At the sides of the
+face, the hair was greying slightly, and behind the grey two large
+ears stuck out. Manelli’s nose was a long, faintly aquiline affair and
+his eyes were very pleasant and candid. They were light grey.</p>
+
+<p>“Aha,” Manelli said. “You are Mr. Malone, right?” His voice was
+guttural, but it was obvious that he was trying for control. “I regret
+announcing that I was out, Mr. Malone,” he said. “But a man in my
+position—I like privacy, Mr. Malone, and I try to keep privacy for
+myself. Let me request you to answer a question, Mr. Malone: do I know
+you, Mr. Malone?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not personally,” Malone said. “I—”</p>
+
+<p>“But I’m supposed to know your boss,” Manelli said. “I don’t know him,
+either, so far.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone shrugged. “I’m sure you do,” he said, and dropped the name
+almost casually: “Andrew J. Burris.”</p>
+
+<p>Manelli raised his eyebrows. “So that’s who you are,” he said. “I
+ought to have known, Mr. Malone. And you want to talk to me a little
+bit, right?”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s right,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“But this is no way to act, Mr. Malone,” Manelli said reproachfully.
+“After all, we understand each other, you and me. What you should do,
+you should come in through channels, in the correct way, so everything
+it would be open and above the board.”</p>
+
+<p>“Through channels?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Manelli regarded him with a pitying glance. “You must be new on your
+job, Mr. Malone,” he said. “Because there is an entire system built
+up, and you don’t know about it. The way things work, we sit around
+and we don’t see people. And then somebody comes and presents his
+credentials, you might say—search warrants, for instance, or
+subpoenas. And then we know where we are.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone shook his head. “This isn’t that kind of call,” he said. “It’s
+more a friendly type of call.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Malone,” Manelli said. The reproach was stronger in his voice.
+“You must be very new at your job.”</p>
+
+<p>“Nevertheless,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Manelli hesitated only a second. “Because I like you,” he said, “and
+to teach you how things operate around here, I could do you a favor.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good,” Malone said patiently.</p>
+
+<p>“In an hour,” Manelli said. “My place. Here.”</p>
+
+<p>The screen blanked out before Malone could even say goodbye.</p>
+
+<p>Malone got up, went out to the corridor, and decided that, since he
+had time to kill, he might as well walk on down to Manelli’s office.
+That, he told himself, would give him time to decide what he wanted to
+say.</p>
+
+<p>He toyed at first with the idea of a nice bourbon and soda in a
+Madison Avenue bar, but he discarded that idea in a hurry. It was
+always possible for him to get into a tight spot and have to teleport
+his way out, and he didn’t want to be fuzzy around the edges in case
+that happened. <i>Trotkin’s</i> had showed him that, under enough stress,
+he could manage the job with quite a lot of vodka in him. But there
+was absolutely no sense, he told himself sadly, in taking chances.</p>
+
+<p>He started off downtown along Fifth. Soon he was standing in front of
+the blue-and-crystal tower of the Ravell Building.</p>
+
+<p>That made up his mind for him. He checked his watch, mentally flipped
+a coin and then cheated a little to make the answer come out right. He
+went inside and stepped into an elevator.</p>
+
+<p>“Six,” he said with decision.</p>
+
+<p>Lou was sitting at the Psychical Research Society desk, talking to the
+tweedy Sir Lewis Carter. Malone waved at Carter, decided that
+conversation with Lou was out, and started to walk away. Then he
+realized that he couldn’t have Carter thinking he was crazy. He had to
+figure out something to tell the man—and in a hurry, too.</p>
+
+<p>Carter smiled and gestured to him. “Ah, Mr. Malone,” he said. “I’m
+glad you brought our Lou home safely. I’ve heard a little about your—
+ah—escapade. Astounding, really.”</p>
+
+<p>“Not for the FBI,” Malone said modestly. “We’ve been through too
+much.”</p>
+
+<p>“But—”</p>
+
+<p>“No, really,” Malone said. “We never call anything astounding any
+more.”</p>
+
+<p>“I can well imagine,” Carter said. “Is there anything I can do for
+you?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone thought fast. He had to have something, and he didn’t have much
+time. “Why—uh—” he said, and then it came to him. “Yes, as a matter
+of fact you can,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Glad to be of service,” Carter said. “I’m sure we can do anything you
+request.”</p>
+
+<p>“Have you got any more data on telepathic projection?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Lewis Carter frowned. “Telepathic projection?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“The stuff—the phenomenon Cartier Taylor mentioned,” Malone said, “in
+<i>Minds and Morons</i>. I think it was page eighty-four.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” Carter said. “Oh, yes. Of course. Well, Mr. Malone, we’ll see
+what we can do for you.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone sighed. “Thanks,” he said mournfully. “I guess—I guess that’s
+all, then.” He smiled at Lou, and turned the smile into a terrifying
+scowl when his eye caught Carter’s. “Oh,” Malone said. “So long. So
+long, everybody.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ken—”</p>
+
+<p>This was not, he told himself sadly, either the time or the place.
+“Goodbye, Sir Lewis,” he said. “Goodbye, Lou.”</p>
+
+<p>The elevator opened its doors and received him.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Exactly fifty-nine minutes after Cesare Manelli had hung up on him,
+Malone showed up in the stately and sumptuous suite that belonged, for
+a stiff fee every month, to the firm of Rodger, Willcoe, O’Vurr and
+Aoud. The girl at the desk was his old Spearmint friend.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Manelli,” Malone said. “I’ve got an appointment. My name is
+Malone and his is Manelli. He works here.” That, he told himself, was
+an understatement; but at least he had a chance of getting his point
+across.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” the girl said. Her gum popped. “Certainly. Right away, Mr.
+Maloney.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone opened his mouth, then shut it again. It just wasn’t worth the
+trouble, he thought.</p>
+
+<p>The girl did things with a switchboard, then turned to him again. “Mr.
+Manelli’s office is right down there in back,” she said, pointing
+vaguely. “Think you can find it, Mr. Maloney?”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll try,” Malone promised. He went down the long corridor and
+stopped at an unmarked door. It was at least an even chance, he told
+himself, and opened the door.</p>
+
+<p>The room inside appeared to be mostly desk. The gigantic slab of wood
+sat against the far wall of the room, in the right-hand corner and
+spreading over toward the center. It appeared, in the soft half-light
+of the room, to be waiting for somebody to walk into its lair. Malone
+was sure, at first sight, that this desk ate people; it was just the
+type: big and dark and glowering and massive.</p>
+
+<p>There wasn’t anybody seated behind it, which reinforced his belief.
+The desk had eaten its master. Now it was out of control and they
+would have to have it shot. Malone took a deep breath and tried not to
+veer.</p>
+
+<p>Then he heard a voice.</p>
+
+<p>“Sit down, Mr. Malone,” the voice said. “How about you having a drink
+while we talk? If this is going to be so friendly.”</p>
+
+<p>The voice didn’t belong to the desk. It belonged, unmistakably, to Big
+Cheese himself. Malone turned and saw him, sitting in the left-hand
+corner of the room behind a low table. There was another empty chair
+facing Manelli, and Malone went over and sat in it.</p>
+
+<p>“A drink?” he said. “Okay. Sure.”</p>
+
+<p>“Bourbon and soda, isn’t it?” Manelli said. He stood up.</p>
+
+<p>“Your research department gets fast answers,” Malone said. “Bourbon
+and soda it is.”</p>
+
+<p>“After all,” Manelli said, shrugging slightly, “a person in my
+position, he has to make sure he knows what is what, and all the time.
+It’s routine, what you call S. O. P. Standard Operating Procedure,
+they call it.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m sure they do,” Malone murmured politely.</p>
+
+<p>“And besides,” Manelli said, “you are a well-known type. I thought I
+knew the name when old Fred mentioned it, or I would never talk to
+you. You know how it is.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone nodded. “Well,” he said, as Manelli went over to a small
+portable bar at the back of the room and got busy, “we’re being frank,
+anyway.”</p>
+
+<p>“And why shouldn’t we be frank, Mr. Malone?” Manelli said. “It’s a
+nice, friendly conversation, and what have we got on our minds?”</p>
+
+<p>For the first time, as he turned, Malone got a glimpse of something
+behind the structured and muscular face. There was panic there, just a
+tiny seed under iron control, but it showed in the eyes and in the
+muscles of the cheek.</p>
+
+<p>“Just a nice, friendly conversation,” Malone said. Manelli brought the
+drinks over and set them on the table.</p>
+
+<p>“Take your pick,” he said. “That’s not what a good host should do, ask
+the guest to pick one, like a game; but I got into the habit. People
+get nervous about arsenic in the drinks. Which is silly.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure it is,” Malone agreed. He picked up the left-hand glass and
+regarded it carefully. “If you wanted to kill me, you’d need a motive
+and an opportunity, and you don’t have either at the moment. Besides,
+you’d make sure to be far away when it happened.” He hoped he sounded
+confident. He took a sip of the drink, but it tasted like bourbon and
+soda.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Malone,” Manelli said, “you say these things about me, and it
+hurts. It hurts me, right here.” He pressed a hand over the checkbook
+side of his jacket. “I’m a legitimate businessman, and no different
+from any other legitimate businessman. You can’t prove anything else.”</p>
+
+<p>“I know I can’t,” Malone said. “But I want to talk to you about your
+real business.”</p>
+
+<p>“This is my real business,” Manelli said. “The advertising agency. I
+work here. Advertising is in my blood. And I don’t understand the
+least little bit why you have to do things to me all the time.”</p>
+
+<p>“Do things?” Malone said. “What did I do?”</p>
+
+<p>“Now, Mr. Malone,” Manelli said. He took a swallow of his drink. “You
+said let’s be frank, so I’m frank. Why not you?”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Malone said, telling part of
+the truth.</p>
+
+<p>Manelli took another swallow of his drink, fished in a jacket pocket
+and brought out two cigars. “Smoke, Mr. Malone?” he said. “The very
+best, from Havana, Cuba. Cost me a dollar and a half each.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone looked with longing at the cigar. But it was okay for Manelli
+to smoke cigars, he thought bitterly. Manelli was a gangster, and who
+cared how he looked? Malone was an FBI man, and FBI men didn’t smoke
+cigars. Particularly Havana cigars. That, he told himself with
+regretful firmness, was that.</p>
+
+<p>“No, thanks,” he said. “I never smoke on duty.”</p>
+
+<p>Manelli shrugged and put one cigar away. He lit the other one and
+dense clouds of smoke began to rise in the room. Malone breathed
+deeply.</p>
+
+<p>“I understand you’ve been having troubles,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Manelli nodded. “Now, you see, Mr. Malone?” he said. “You tell me you
+don’t know what’s happening, but you know I got troubles. How come,
+Mr. Malone? How come?”</p>
+
+<p>“Because you have got troubles,” Malone said. “But I have nothing to
+do with them.” He hesitated, thought of adding: “Yet,” and decided
+against it.</p>
+
+<p>“Now, Mr. Malone,” Manelli said. “You know better than that.”</p>
+
+<p>“I do?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Manelli sighed, took another swallow of his drink and dragged deeply
+on the cigar. “Let’s take a for-instance,” he said. “Now, you
+understand my business is advertising, Mr. Malone?”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s in your blood,” Malone said, involuntarily.</p>
+
+<p>“Right,” Manelli said. “But I think about things. I like to figure
+things out. In a sort of a theoretical way, like a for-instance.
+Understand?”</p>
+
+<p>“What sort of theoretical story are you going to tell me?” Malone
+said.</p>
+
+<p>Manelli leaned back in his chair. “Let’s take, for instance, some
+numbers runners who had some trouble the other day, got beat up and
+money taken from them. Maybe you read about it in the papers.”</p>
+
+<p>“I haven’t been following the papers much,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s all right,” Manelli said grandly. “Maybe it wasn’t <i>in</i> the
+papers. But anyhow, I figured out maybe that happened. I had nothing
+to do with this, Mr. Malone; you understand that? But I figured out
+how maybe it happened.”</p>
+
+<p>“How?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Manelli took another puff on his cigar. “Maybe there was an error at a
+racetrack—we could say Jamaica, for instance, just for laughs. And
+maybe two different totals were published for the pari-mutuel numbers,
+and both got given out. So the numbers runners got all fouled up, so
+they got beat up and money taken from them.”</p>
+
+<p>“It could have happened that way,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“I figure maybe the FBI had something to do with this,” Manelli said.</p>
+
+<p>“We didn’t,” Malone said. “Frankly.”</p>
+
+<p>“And that’s not all,” Manelli said. “Let’s say at Jamaica one day
+there was a race.”</p>
+
+<p>“All right,” Malone said agreeably. “That doesn’t require a whole lot
+of imagination.”</p>
+
+<p>“And let’s say,” Manelli went on, “that the bookies—if there are any
+bookies in this town; who knows?—that they got the word about who
+came in, win, place and show.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sounds natural,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Sure it does,” Manelli said. “But there was a foul-up someplace,
+because the win animal was disqualified and nobody heard about it
+until after a lot of payoffs were made. That costs money.” He stopped.
+“I mean it would cost money, if it happened,” he finished.</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Malone said. “Certainly would.”</p>
+
+<p>“And you tell me it’s not the FBI?” Manelli said.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s right,” Malone said. “As a matter of fact, we’re investigating
+things like these confusions and inefficiencies all over.”</p>
+
+<p>Manelli finished his drink in one long, amazed swallow. “Now, wait a
+minute,” he said. “Let’s say for a joke, like, for laughs, that I am
+some kind of a wheel in these things, in bookies and numbers boys and
+like that.”</p>
+
+<p>“Let’s call it a syndicate,” Malone said. “Just for laughs.”</p>
+
+<p>“Okay, then,” Manelli said, with a suspicious gaze at Malone.
+“Whatever you call it, a man like me today, he wouldn’t be some
+two-bit chiseler without brains. He would be a businessman, a
+smooth-operating smart businessman. Right?”</p>
+
+<p>“Right,” Malone said. “And what I want to know is: how’s business?”</p>
+
+<p>“You’re kidding?” Manelli said.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m not kidding,” Malone said. “I mean it. The FBI’s investigating
+mix-ups just like the ones you’re telling me about. We want to stop
+them.”</p>
+
+<p>Manelli blinked. “You know, Mr. Malone,” he said softly, “I heard
+about government interference in private enterprise, but don’t you
+think this is a little too far out?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone shrugged. “That’s what I’m here for,” he said. “Take it or
+leave it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Just so it’s understood,” Manelli said, “that we’re talking about
+imaginary things. Theoretical.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Malone said. “Imagine away.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Manelli said slowly, “you heard about this wrecked night-club
+in Florida? It happened maybe a month ago, in Miami?”</p>
+
+<p>“I heard about it,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“This is just a for-instance, you know,” Manelli said. “But suppose
+there was a roulette wheel in that club. Just a wheel.”</p>
+
+<p>“Okay,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“And suppose the wheel was rigged a little bit,” Manelli said. “Not
+seriously, just a little bit.”</p>
+
+<p>“Fine,” Malone said. “This is going to explain a wrecked club?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, sure,” Manelli said. “Because something went wrong with the
+machinery, or maybe the operator goofed up. And number seven came up
+eight times in a row.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good old lucky seven,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“So there was a riot,” Manelli said. “Because some people had money on
+the number, and some people got suspicious, and like that. And there
+was a riot.”</p>
+
+<p>“And the club got wrecked,” Malone said. “That’s what I call bad
+luck.”</p>
+
+<p>“Luck?” Manelli said. “What does luck have to do with roulette?
+Somebody goofed, that’s all.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” Malone said. “Sure.”</p>
+
+<p>“And that’s the way it’s been going,” Manelli said. He puffed on his
+cigar, put it in a nearby ashtray, and blew out a great Vesuvian spout
+of smoke.</p>
+
+<p>“Too bad,” Malone said sympathetically.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s all over,” Manelli said. “Mistakes and people making the
+mistakes, goofing up here and there and everyplace. There have been
+guys killed because they made mistakes, and nobody can afford guys
+being killed all the time.”</p>
+
+<p>“It does run into expense,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“And time, and hiring guys to do the killing, and then they goof up,
+too,” Manelli said. “It’s terrible. Some guys have even been killed
+without they made any mistakes at all. Just by accident, sort of.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Malone said carefully, “you can depend on the government to do
+everything in its power to straighten things out.”</p>
+
+<p>Manelli frowned. “You mean that, Mr. Malone?”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course I do,” Malone said honestly. He hadn’t, he reminded
+himself, promised to help Manelli. He had only promised to straighten
+things out. And he could figure out what that might mean later, when
+he had the time.</p>
+
+<p>“All I say is, it’s funny,” Manelli said. “It’s crazy.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s the way it is,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Manelli looked at him narrowly. “Mr. Malone,” he said at last, “maybe
+you mean it at that. Maybe you do.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure I do,” Malone said. “After all, the government is supposed to
+help its citizens.”</p>
+
+<p>Manelli shook his head. “Mr. Malone,” he said, “you can call me
+Cesare. Everybody does.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, they don’t,” Malone said. “They call you Cheese. I’ve got a
+research staff too.”</p>
+
+<p>“So call me Cheese,” Manelli said. “I don’t mind.”</p>
+
+<p>“There’s only one little trouble,” Malone said. “If I called you
+Cheese, you’d call me Ken. And word would get around.”</p>
+
+<p>“I see what you mean,” Manelli said.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t think either one of us wants his associates to think we’re
+friends,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“I guess not,” Manelli said. “It would cause uneasiness.”</p>
+
+<p>“And a certain lack of confidence,” Malone said. “So suppose I go on
+calling you Mr. Manelli?”</p>
+
+<p>“Fine,” Manelli said. “And I’ll call you Mr. Malone, like always.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone smiled and stood up. “Well, then,” he said, “goodbye, Mr.
+Manelli.”</p>
+
+<p>Manelli rose, too. “Goodbye, Mr. Malone,” he said. “And good luck, if
+you really mean what you said.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I do,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Because things are terrible,” Manelli said. “And they’re getting
+worse every day. You should only know.”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t worry,” Malone said. “Things will be straightened out pretty
+soon.” He hoped, as he went out the door and down the corridor, that
+he was telling the truth there, at least. He’d sounded fairly
+confident, he thought, but he didn’t feel quite so confident. The
+secretary was busy on the switchboard when he came out into the
+anteroom, and he went by without a greeting, his mind busy, churning
+and confused.</p>
+
+<p>He felt as if his head were on just a little crooked. Or as if, maybe,
+he had a small hole in it somewhere and facts were leaking out onto
+the sidewalk.</p>
+
+<p>If he only looked at the problem in the right way, he told himself, he
+would see just what was going on.</p>
+
+<p>But what was the right way?</p>
+
+<p>“That,” Malone murmured as he hailed a cab for the ride back to 69th
+Street, “is the big, sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. And how much
+time do I have for an answer?”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c11">11</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>“Boyd?” the agent-in-charge said. “He went out to talk to Mike Sand
+down at the ITU a while ago, and he hasn’t come back yet.”</p>
+
+<p>“Fine,” Malone said. “I’ll be in my office if he wants me.”</p>
+
+<p>The agent-in-charge picked up a small package. “A messenger brought
+this,” he said. “It’s from the Psychical Research Society, and if it’s
+ghosts, they’re much smaller than last time.”</p>
+
+<p>“Dehydrated,” Malone said. “Just add ectoplasm and out they come,
+shouting <i>boo</i> at everybody and dancing all over the world.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sounds wonderful,” the agent-in-charge said. “Can I come to the
+party?”</p>
+
+<p>“First,” Malone said judiciously, “you’d have to be dead. Of course, I
+can arrange that—”</p>
+
+<p>“Thanks,” the agent-in-charge said, leaving in a hurry. Malone went on
+down to his office and opened the package. It contained more
+facsimiles from Sir Lewis Carter, all dealing with telepathic
+projection. He spent a few minutes looking them over and trying to
+make some connected sense out of them, and then he just sat and
+thought for awhile.</p>
+
+<p>Finally he picked up the phone. In a few minutes he was talking to Dr.
+Thomas O’Connor, at Yucca Flats.</p>
+
+<p>“Telepathic projection?” O’Connor said when Malone asked him the
+question he’d thought of. “Well, now. I should say that—no. First,
+Mr. Malone, tell me what evidence you have for this phenomenon.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone felt almost happy, as if he had done all his homework before
+the instructor called on him. “According to what I’ve been able to get
+from the PRS,” he said, “ordinary people—people who aren’t
+telepaths—occasionally receive some sort of messages from other
+people.”</p>
+
+<p>“I assume,” O’Connor said frostily, “that you are speaking of
+telepathic messages?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone nodded guiltily. “I didn’t mean the phone,” he said, “or
+letters or things like that. Telepathic messages, or something very
+like it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed,” O’Connor said. “Mr. Malone, I believe you will find that
+such occurrences, when accurately reported, are confined to close
+relatives or loved ones of the person projecting the message.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone thought back. “That’s right,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“And, further,” O’Connor went on, “I think you’ll find that the—ah—
+message so received is one indicating that the projector of such a
+message is in dire peril. He has, for instance, been badly injured, or
+is rapidly approaching death, or else he has narrowly escaped death.”</p>
+
+<p>“True,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Under such circumstances,” O’Connor said coldly, “it is possible that
+the mind of the person projecting the communication might be capable
+of generating immense psionic power, thereby forcing even a
+non-telepath to recognize the content of the message.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good,” Malone said. “That’s wonderful, Doctor, and I—”</p>
+
+<p>“But,” O’Connor said sharply, “the amount of psionic energy necessary
+for such a feat is tremendous. Usually, it is the final burst of
+energy, the outpouring of all the remaining psionic force immediately
+before death. And if death does not occur, the person is at the least
+greatly weakened; his mind, if it ever does recover, needs time and
+rest to do so.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone let that sink in slowly. “Then a person couldn’t do it very
+often,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Hardly,” O’Connor said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone nodded. “It’s like—like giving blood to a blood bank. Giving,
+say, three quarts of blood. It might not kill you. But if it didn’t,
+you’d be weak for a long time.”</p>
+
+<p>“Exactly,” O’Connor said. “A good analogy, Mr. Malone.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone hated himself for it, but he felt pleased when O’Connor praised
+him. “Well,” he said, “that winds up Cartier Taylor’s theory pretty
+thoroughly.”</p>
+
+<p>“I should think so,” O’Connor said. “I am surprised, Mr. Malone, that
+you would put any credence whatever in that man’s theories. His
+factual data, I will admit, is fairly reliable. But his theories are—
+well, they are hardly worth the time it takes to read them.”</p>
+
+<p>“I see,” Malone said. “It did seem like a good answer, though.”</p>
+
+<p>“It undoubtedly is a good one,” O’Connor said. “It is clever and has
+the advantage of being simple. It is contradicted, Mr. Malone, only by
+the facts.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Malone said sadly. “But—hey. Wait a minute.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes?” O’Connor said.</p>
+
+<p>“One person couldn’t do this alone, at least, not very often and not
+without serious harm to himself. Right?”</p>
+
+<p>“That is what I said,” O’Connor agreed. “Yes, Mr. Malone.”</p>
+
+<p>“But how about several people?” Malone said. “I mean, well, let’s look
+at that blood bank again. You need three quarts of blood. But one
+person doesn’t have to give it. Suppose twelve people gave half a pint
+each. Suppose twenty-four people gave a quarter of a pint each.
+Suppose—”</p>
+
+<p>“There is,” O’Connor said, “a point of diminishing returns. But I do
+see your point, Mr. Malone.” He thought for a second. “It might just
+be possible,” he said. “At least theoretically. But it would take a
+great deal of mental co-ordination among the participants. They would
+have to be telepathic themselves, for one thing.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why?” Malone said, feeling stupid.</p>
+
+<p>“Because they would have to mesh their thoughts closely enough to
+direct them properly and at the correct time.” O’Connor nodded. “But,
+given that, I imagine that it could be done.”</p>
+
+<p>“Wonderful,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“However,” O’Connor said, apparently glad to throw even a little cold
+water on the notion, “it could not be done for very long periods of
+time, you realize.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Malone said happily.</p>
+
+<p>“By the way, Mr. Malone,” O’Connor said. “Does this have anything to
+do with the hypothesis you presented to me some time ago? Mass
+hypnotism, as I recall—”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” Malone said. “I’ve given that idea up for good. I think this is
+being done on an individual basis—working on one person at a time.”
+Then another idea hit him. “You say these people would have to be
+telepaths?”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s right,” O’Connor said.</p>
+
+<p>“Then wouldn’t Her Majesty know about them? If they’re telepaths? Or
+is there some kind of a mind shield or something that a telepath could
+work out?”</p>
+
+<p>“Mind shield?” O’Connor said. “Ah, yes. Miss Thompson might be fooled
+by such a shield. It would have to be an exceptional one, but such
+things do seem to be possible. They belong to the realm of mental
+disciplines, of course, rather than psionics.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Malone said. “But there could be that kind of shield?”</p>
+
+<p>“There could,” O’Connor said. “The mind which created the shield for
+itself would have to be of tremendous power and a really high order of
+control. A strong, sane mind might conceivably create such a block
+that even Miss Thompson, let us say, might believe that she was
+picking up a real mind, when she was only picking up surface thoughts,
+with the real thought hidden behind the telepathic block.”</p>
+
+<p>“Fine,” Malone said. “Thanks. Thanks a lot, Dr. O’Connor.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am always happy to put my extensive knowledge of science at your
+disposal, Mr. Malone,” O’Connor said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone watched the image collapse without really seeing it. Instead,
+he was busily talking to himself, or rather to his other self.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, now, Sir Kenneth,” he said. “Let’s pull all the facts together
+and see what happens.”</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed, Mr. Malone,” said Sir Kenneth Malone, “it is time that we
+did. Proceed, Sirrah. I shall attend.”</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>“Let’s start from the beginning,” Malone said. “We know there’s
+confusion in all parts of the country, in all parts of the world, I
+guess. And we know that confusion is being caused by carefully timed
+accidents and errors. We also know that these errors appear to be
+accompanied by violent bursts of psionic static—violent energy. And
+we know, further, that on three specific occasions, these bursts of
+energy were immediately followed by a reversal of policy in the mind
+of the person on the receiving end.”</p>
+
+<p>“You mean,” Sir Kenneth put in, “that they changed their minds.”</p>
+
+<p>“Correct,” Malone said. “I refer, of course, to the firm of Brubitsch,
+Borbitsch and Garbitsch, Spying Done Cheap.”</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed,” Sir Kenneth said. “Then the operators of this force,
+whatever it may be, have some interest in allowing these spies to
+confess?”</p>
+
+<p>“Maybe,” Malone said. “Let’s leave that for later. To get back to the
+beginning of all this: it seems to me to follow that the accidents and
+errors which have caused all the confusion through the United States
+and Russia are caused by somebody’s mind being changed at exactly the
+right moment. A man does something just a little differently than he
+decided to—or else he forgets to do it at all.”</p>
+
+<p>“Correct,” Sir Kenneth said. “And you feel, Mr. Malone, that a
+telepathic command is the cause of this confusion?”</p>
+
+<p>“A series of them,” Malone said. “But we also know, from Dr. O’Connor,
+that it takes a great deal of psychic energy to perform this
+particular trick—more than a person can normally afford to expend.”</p>
+
+<p>“Marry, now,” Sir Kenneth exclaimed, “such a statement does not seem
+to have reason in it. Changing the mind of a man seems a small thing
+in comparison to teleportation, or psychokinesis, or levitation. And
+yet it takes more power than any of these?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone thought for a second. “Sure it does,” he said. “I’d say it was
+a matter of resistance. Moving an inanimate object is pretty simple—
+comparatively, anyhow—because inert matter has no mental resistance.”</p>
+
+<p>“And moving yourself?” Sir Kenneth said.</p>
+
+<p>“There is some resistance there, probably,” Malone said. “But you’ll
+remember that part of the Fueyo training system for teleportation
+involved overcoming your own mental resistance to the idea.”</p>
+
+<p>“True,” Sir Kenneth said. “Quite true. Then let us say that it
+requires enormous power to effect these changes. What is our next
+step, Mr. Malone?”</p>
+
+<p>“Next, Sir Kenneth,” Malone said, “We have to do a little supposing.
+This project must be handled by a fairly large group, since no
+individual can work it. This large group has to be telepathic, and not
+only for the precise timing O’Connor specified.”</p>
+
+<p>“There is another reason?” Sir Kenneth said.</p>
+
+<p>“There is,” Malone said. “They’ve also got to know exactly when to
+make their victim change his mind. Right?”</p>
+
+<p>“Absolutely,” said Sir Kenneth. “Now, Sirrah, where does all this
+leave us? We have had the orderly presentation of the case; where,
+Sirrah, is your summation?”</p>
+
+<p>“Coming up,” Malone said. “We’ve got to look for a widespread
+organization of telepaths, with enough mental discipline to hold a
+mental shield that Her Majesty can’t crack, and can’t even recognize
+the existence of. We thought she’d found all the telepaths. She said
+so, and she obviously thought so. But she didn’t. These are strong,
+trained—and sane.”</p>
+
+<p>“Aha,” said Sir Kenneth.</p>
+
+<p>“Her Majesty,” Malone said, “found us only the crazy telepaths, the
+weak ones, the nuts.”</p>
+
+<p>“Fine,” said Sir Kenneth. “And this, Mr. Malone, leaves us with only
+one question. Her Majesty—may God bless her—stated that she first
+spotted these flashes of telepathic static by listening in on our
+minds.”</p>
+
+<p>“Our mind,” Malone said. “I hope.”</p>
+
+<p>“Very well,” Sir Kenneth said. “This means that some force is being
+directed in this way, toward us. And how do we know that all the
+deduction, all the careful case-building we have done, hasn’t been
+influenced by this group? That might mean, of course, that we are
+miles, or even light-years, from the solution.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone said: “Yeep.” The sound was echoed by Sir Kenneth, and the two
+halves of the coruscating mind of Kenneth J. Malone were once more
+one.</p>
+
+<p><i>Your Majesty</i>, the minds thought, <i>I’d like to talk to you.</i></p>
+
+<p>Nothing happened. Evidently, Her Majesty was temporarily out of mental
+contact with him.</p>
+
+<p>“Hell,” Malone said. “Not to mention od’s blood.” He flipped on the
+visiphone and dialed Yucca Flats.</p>
+
+<p>The figure that appeared on the screen was that of a tall,
+solidly-built man with a red face and the uniform of a Beefeater. This
+Tower Warder had the British royal crest embroidered on his chest, and
+the letters: “E. R.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good evening, Sir Kenneth,” he said politely.</p>
+
+<p>Malone had sometimes wondered what it would be like to be on the
+Queen’s permanent, personal staff. Evidently, it soaked in so
+thoroughly that one began to stay in character all the time. The
+little old lady’s delusion was such a pleasant one that it was
+painlessly infectious.</p>
+
+<p>“I’d like to speak to Her Majesty, Colonel Fairfax,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Her Majesty,” Colonel Fairfax said with regret, “is asleep, sir. I
+understand that she has had rather a trying time, of late.”</p>
+
+<p>“Then I must ask you to wake her,” Malone said. “I don’t want to
+disturb her any more than you do, Colonel, but this is important.”</p>
+
+<p>“Her Majesty’s rest,” Colonel Fairfax said gently, “is also important,
+Sir Kenneth.”</p>
+
+<p>“This is more important,” Malone said. “I know how you feel, but it’s
+necessary to wake her.”</p>
+
+<p>The screen blanked out.</p>
+
+<p>Malone sighed and began to sing softly to himself while he waited:</p>
+
+<p>“The soldiers of the Queen are linked in friendly tether—
+And if she’s off her bean, we’ll all go nuts together....”</p>
+
+<p>Her Majesty appeared at this point, dressed in a silken robe bearing
+her crest and initials (E. R., rather than R. T., of course), and
+wearing a silken Mother Hubbard cap on her head. “Oh, dear,” she said
+instantly. “Are you still worried about them?”</p>
+
+<p>“The flashes?” Malone said. “That’s right. You tuned in on my mind
+right away, didn’t you?”</p>
+
+<p>“As soon as I got your message,” she said. “I like your little song,
+at least, I think I do.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone blushed faintly. “Sorry,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, don’t be, Sir Kenneth,” Her Majesty said. “After all, I do allow
+my subjects a good deal of liberty; it is theirs to make use of.” She
+smiled at him. “Actually, I should have told you, Sir Kenneth. But it
+seemed so natural that I—that I forgot it.”</p>
+
+<p><i>Oh, no</i>, Malone thought.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m afraid so,” Her Majesty said. “When I told you about the
+interference, your mind quite automatically began to build what I
+think of as a—as a defense against it. A shield, so to speak.”</p>
+
+<p><i>Me?</i> Malone thought.</p>
+
+<p>“Most certainly,” Her Majesty said. “You know, Sir Kenneth, you have a
+very strong mind.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I don’t know,” Malone said aloud. “Sometimes I don’t feel so
+bright.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m not talking about intelligence,” Her Majesty said. “The two
+properties are interconnected, of course, but they are not identical.
+After all ... well, never mind. But you have strength of will, Sir
+Kenneth, and strength of purpose. As a matter of fact, you have been
+building your strength in the last few days.”</p>
+
+<p>“Really?” Malone said, surprised.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s become more and more difficult,” Her Majesty said, “to see into
+the depths of your mind, during the past few days. The surface of your
+mind is as easy to read as ever, but it’s hard to see what’s going on
+in the depths.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m not doing it deliberately,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“In any case,” Her Majesty said, “this process has been going on ever
+since you knew that telepathy was possible, two years ago. But in the
+past forty-eight hours matters have accelerated tremendously.”</p>
+
+<p>“That sounds good,” Malone said. “Does it mean these mind-changers
+I’ve been thinking about can’t get through to me?”</p>
+
+<p>“What mind-changers?” the Queen said. “Oh. I see.” She paused. “Well,
+I can’t be positive about this, Sir Kenneth; it’s all so new, you
+know. All I can tell you is that there haven’t been any flashes of
+telepathic energy in your mind in the last forty-eight hours.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Malone said doubtfully, “that’s something. And I am sorry I
+had to wake you, Your Majesty.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, that’s perfectly all right,” she said. “I know you’re working
+hard to restore order to the realm, and it is the duty of any
+Sovereign to give such aid as she can to her Royal subjects.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone cleared his throat. “I trust,” he said, “Your Majesty will ever
+find me a faithful servant.”</p>
+
+<p>Her Majesty smiled. “I’m sure I shall,” she said. “Good night, Sir
+Kenneth.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good night,” he said, and flipped off. At once, the phone chimed
+again.</p>
+
+<p>He flipped the switch on. “Malone here,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Boyd’s face appeared on the screen. “Ken,” he said fervently, “I am
+very glad you’re still in town.”</p>
+
+<p>“Thanks,” Malone said politely. “But what about Mike Sand? Any
+information?”</p>
+
+<p>“Plenty,” Boyd said. “I damn near didn’t believe it.”</p>
+
+<p>“What do you mean, you didn’t believe it?” Malone said. “Isn’t the
+information any good?”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s good, all right,” Boyd said. “It’s great. He practically talked
+his head off to me. Gave me all his books, including secret sets. And
+I’ve put him under arrest as a material witness—at his own request.”</p>
+
+<p>“It sounds,” Malone said, “as if Mike Sand has had a sudden and
+surprising change of heart.”</p>
+
+<p>“Doesn’t it, though,” Boyd said. “We can crack the ITU wide open now,
+and I mean really wide open.”</p>
+
+<p>“Same pattern?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course it is,” Boyd said. “What does it sound like? Same pattern.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good,” Malone said. “Get on up here. I’ll talk to you later.”</p>
+
+<p>He cut off in a hurry, leaned back in his chair and started to think.
+At first, he thought of a cigar. Boyd, he figured, couldn’t be back in
+the office for some time, and nobody else would come in. He locked the
+door, drew out the cigar-laden box he kept in his desk in New York,
+and lit up with great satisfaction.</p>
+
+<p>When the cloud of smoke around his head was dense enough to cut with a
+knife, he went back to more serious subjects. He didn’t have to worry
+too much about his mind being spied on; if Her Majesty couldn’t read
+his deepest thoughts, and the mind-changers weren’t throwing any bolts
+of static in his direction, he was safe.</p>
+
+<p>Now, then, he told himself—and sneezed.</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head, cursed slightly, and went on.</p>
+
+<p>Now, then....</p>
+
+<p>There was an organization, spread all over the Western world, and with
+secret branches, evidently, in the Soviet Union. The organization had
+to be an old one, because it had to have trained telepaths of such a
+high degree of efficiency that they could evade Her Majesty’s probing
+without her even being aware of the evasion. And training took time.</p>
+
+<p>There was something else to consider, too. In order to organize to
+such a degree that they could wreak the efficient, complete havoc they
+were wreaking, the organization couldn’t be completely secret; there
+are always leaks, always suspicious events, and a secret society that
+covered all of those up would have no time for anything else.</p>
+
+<p>So the organization had to be a known one, a known group, masquerading
+as something else.</p>
+
+<p>So far, everything made sense. Malone took another deep, grateful puff
+on the cigar, and frowned. Where, he wondered, did he go from here?</p>
+
+<p>He reached for a pencil and a piece of paper. He headed the paper:
+<i>Organization.</i> Then he started putting down what he knew about it,
+and what he’d figured out.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent1">1. Large</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">2. Old</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">3. Disguised</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>It sounded just a little like Frankenstein’s Monster, so far. But what
+else did he know about it?</p>
+
+<p>After a second’s thought, he murmured: “Nothing,” and took another
+puff.</p>
+
+<p>But that wasn’t quite true.</p>
+
+<p>He knew one more thing about the organization. He knew they’d probably
+be immune to the confusion everybody else was suffering from. The
+organization would be—had to be—efficient. It would be composed of
+intelligent, superbly cooperative people, who could work together as a
+unit without in the least impairing their own individuality.</p>
+
+<p>He reached for the list again, put down:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent1">4. Efficient</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>And looked at it. Now it didn’t remind him quite so much of the
+Monster. But it didn’t look familiar, either. Who did he know, he
+thought, who was large, old, disguised and efficient?</p>
+
+<p>It sounded like an improbable combination. He set the list down again,
+clearing off some of the papers the PRS had sent him to make room for
+it.</p>
+
+<p>Then he stopped.</p>
+
+<p>The papers the PRS had sent him....</p>
+
+<p>And he’d gotten them so quickly, so efficiently....</p>
+
+<p>They were a large organization....</p>
+
+<p>And an old one....</p>
+
+<p>He tossed the cigar in the general direction of the ashtray, grabbed
+the phone and jabbed at buttons.</p>
+
+<p>The girl who answered the phone looked familiar. She did not look very
+old, but she was large and she had to be disguised, Malone thought.
+Nobody could naturally have that many teeth.</p>
+
+<p>“Psychical Research Society,” she said. “Oh, Mr. Malone, good
+evening.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sir Lewis,” Malone said. “Sir Lewis Carter. President. I want to talk
+to him. Hurry.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sir Lewis?” the girl said slowly. “Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Malone, but the
+office is closed now for the day. And Sir Lewis has gone already. It’s
+after six o’clock, Mr. Malone, and the office is closed.”</p>
+
+<p>“Home number,” Malone said desperately. “I’ve got to.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I can do that, Mr. Malone,” she said, “but it wouldn’t do you
+any good, really. Because he went away on his vacation, and when he
+goes on his vacation he never tells us where. You know? He won’t be
+back for two or three weeks.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oog,” Malone said, and thought for less than a second. “Miss
+Garbitsch,” he said. “Lou. Got to talk to her. Now.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I can’t do that, either, Mr. Malone,” the toothy girl said. “All
+of the executive officers, they left already on their vacation. And
+that includes Miss Garbitsch, too. They just left a skeleton force
+here at the office.”</p>
+
+<p>“They’re all gone?” Malone said hollowly.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s right,” she said cheerfully. “As a matter of fact, I’m in
+charge now, and that’s why I’m staying so late. To sort of catch up on
+things. You know?”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s very important,” Malone said tensely. “You don’t know where any
+of them went? You don’t have any address?”</p>
+
+<p>“None at all,” she said. “I’m sorry, but that’s how it is. Maybe it’s
+strange, and maybe you’d ask questions, but I obey orders, and
+those’re my orders. To take over until they get back. They didn’t tell
+me where they went, and I didn’t ask.”</p>
+
+<p>“Great,” Malone said. He wanted to shoot himself.</p>
+
+<p>Lou was one of them. Of course she was; that was obvious now, when he
+thought about it. Lou was one of the secret group that was sabotaging
+practically everything.</p>
+
+<p>And now they’d all gone. For two weeks—or for good.</p>
+
+<p>The girl’s voice broke in on his thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Mr. Malone,” she said, “I’m sorry, but I just remembered. They
+left a note for you.”</p>
+
+<p>“A note?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Sir Lewis said you might call,” the girl said, “and he left a
+message. If you’ll hold on a minute I’ll read it to you.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone waited tensely. The girl found a slip of paper, blinked at it
+and read:</p>
+
+<p>“My dear Malone, I’m afraid you are perfectly correct in your
+deductions; and, as you can see, that leaves us no alternative. Sorry.
+Miss G. sends her apologies to you, as do I.” The girl looked up.
+“It’s signed by Sir Lewis,” she said. “Does that mean anything to you,
+Mr. Malone?”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m afraid it does,” Malone said bleakly. “It means entirely too
+much.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c12">12</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>After the great mass of teeth, vaguely surrounded by a face, had faded
+from Malone’s screen, he just sat there, looking at the dead, grey
+screen of the visiphone and feeling about twice as dead and at least
+three times as grey.</p>
+
+<p>Things, he told himself, were terrible. But even that sentence, which
+was a good deal more cheerful than what he actually felt, didn’t do
+anything to improve his mood. All of the evidence, after all, had been
+practically living on the tip of his nose for nearly twenty-four
+hours, and not only had he done nothing about it, but he hadn’t even
+seen it.</p>
+
+<p>Two or three times, for instance, he’d doubted the possibility of
+teleporting another human being. All his logic had told him it wasn’t
+so. But, he’d thought, he and Her Majesty had teleported Lou, and so,
+obviously, his logic was wrong.</p>
+
+<p>No, it wasn’t, he thought now. There <i>would</i> be too much mental
+resistance, even if the person were unconscious. Teleportation of
+another human being <i>would</i> be impossible.</p>
+
+<p>Unless, of course, the other human being was able to teleport on her
+own.</p>
+
+<p>True, she had been no more than semiconscious. She probably couldn’t
+have teleported on her own. But Malone and Her Majesty had, ever so
+kindly and ever so mistakenly, helped her, and Lou had managed to
+teleport to the plane.</p>
+
+<p>And that wasn’t all, he thought dismally. That was far from all.</p>
+
+<p>“Let’s take another for-instance,” he said savagely, in what he
+thought was a caricature of the Manelli voice. In order for all three
+to teleport, there had to be perfect synchronization.</p>
+
+<p>Otherwise, they’d have arrived either at different places, or at the
+same place but at different times.</p>
+
+<p>And perfect synchronization on a psionic level meant telepathy. At
+least two of the three had to be telepathic. Her Majesty was, of
+course. Malone wasn’t.</p>
+
+<p>So Lou had to be telepathic, too.</p>
+
+<p>Malone told himself bitterly to quit calling the girl Lou. After the
+way she’d deceived him, she didn’t deserve it. Her name was Luba
+Garbitsch, and from now on he was going to call her Luba Garbitsch. In
+his own mind, anyway.</p>
+
+<p>Facts came tumbling in on him like the side of a mountain, falling on
+a hapless traveler during a landslide. And, Malone told himself, he
+had never had less help in all of his ill-starred life.</p>
+
+<p>Her Majesty had never, never suspected that Luba Garbitsch was
+anything other than the girl she pretended to be. That was negative
+evidence, true, and taken alone it meant nothing at all. But when you
+added the other facts to it, it showed, with perfect plainness, that
+Luba Garbitsch was the fortunate possessor of a mind shield as tough,
+as strong and as perfect as any Malone, O’Connor or good old Cartier
+Taylor had ever even thought of dreaming up.</p>
+
+<p>And then, very suddenly, another fact arrived, and pushed the rest out
+into the black night of Malone’s bitter mind. He punched hard on the
+intercom button and got the desk of the agent-in-charge.</p>
+
+<p>“Now what’s wrong?” the A-in-C said. “Ghosts got loose? Or do you want
+some help with a beautiful blonde heiress?”</p>
+
+<p>“What would I be doing,” Malone snapped, “with a beautiful blonde
+heiress?”</p>
+
+<p>The agent-in-charge looked thoughtful. It was obvious that he had been
+saving his one joke up for several hours. “You might be holding her,”
+he suggested, “for ransom, of course.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s not funny,” Malone said. “Nothing is funny any more.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, all right,” the A-in-C said. “You Washington boys are just too
+good for the rest of us. What’s on your mind?”</p>
+
+<p>“You’ve got a twenty-four-hour watch on Luba Garbitsch, haven’t you?”
+Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Sure we have,” the A-in-C said. “Boyd said—”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I know what he said,” Malone cut in. “Give me a check on those
+men. I want to find out where she is right now. Right this minute.”</p>
+
+<p>The agent-in-charge shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “It’s none of my
+business. Hang on a second.”</p>
+
+<p>The screen went blank, but it didn’t go silent. Each of the agents, on
+a stakeout job like the Garbitsch one, would be carrying personal
+communicators, and Malone could hear the voice of the agent-in-charge
+as he spoke to them.</p>
+
+<p>He couldn’t make out all the words, and it wasn’t important anyhow.
+He’d know soon enough, he kept telling himself; just as soon as the
+A-in-C came back and reported.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed like about twelve years before he did.</p>
+
+<p>“She’s all right,” he said. “Nothing to worry about; she’s probably
+working late at her office, that’s all. She hasn’t gone home yet.”</p>
+
+<p>“Want to bet?” Malone snapped.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t tempt me,” the A-in-C said. “I wouldn’t take your money—it’s
+probably counterfeit, printed in Washington.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll give you ten to one,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Ten to one, I’ll take,” the A-in-C said rapidly. “Ten to one is like
+taking candy from a traffic cop. I’m no amateur, even if I am stuck
+away in dull little old New York—and I know the boys I’ve got on
+stakeout. I’ll check, and—”</p>
+
+<p>“Let me know when you do,” Malone said. “I’ve got some long-distance
+calls to make.”</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Forty-five minutes later, he had all the news he needed. Spot checks
+on PRS offices on the West Coast, where it wasn’t closing time yet,
+showed that all the executive officers had suddenly felt the need of
+extended vacations to parts unknown.</p>
+
+<p>That, if not exactly cheering news, was still welcome; Malone had more
+backing for his theory.</p>
+
+<p>An overseas call to New Scotland Yard in London took a little more
+time, and several arguments with bored overseas operators who,
+apparently, had nothing better to do than to confuse the customers.
+But Malone finally managed to get Assistant Commissioner C. E. Teal,
+who promised to check on Malone’s inquiry at once.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed like years before he called back, and Malone leaped to the
+phone.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Teal, red-faced and apparently masticating a stick of gum, said: “I
+got C. I. D. Commander Gideon to follow up on that matter, Mr. Malone.
+It is rather late here, as you must realize—”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes?” Malone said. “And they’ve all gone?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, no,” Teal said, surprised. “A spot check shows that most of the
+executives of the London branch of the Psychical Research Society are
+spending quiet evenings in their homes. Our Inspector Ottermole
+actually spoke to Dr. Carnacki, the head of the office here.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“They haven’t skipped,” Teal went on. “Is this in connection with
+anything serious, Mr. Malone?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not yet,” Malone said. “But I’ll let you know at once if there are
+any further developments. Thanks very much, Mr. Teal.”</p>
+
+<p>“A pleasure, Mr. Malone,” Teal said. “A pleasure.” And then, still
+masticating, he switched off.</p>
+
+<p>And that, Malone told himself, was definitely that. Of course the
+British PRS hadn’t gone underground; why should they? The British
+police weren’t on to them, as Scotland Yard showed. And, no matter
+what opinions Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I might hold in the matter,
+the FBI had absolutely no jurisdiction in the British Isles.</p>
+
+<p>Malone buried his face in his hands, thought about a cigar and decided
+that even a cigar might make him feel worse. Where were they? What
+were they doing now? What did they plan to do?</p>
+
+<p>Where had they gone?</p>
+
+<p>“Out of the everywhere,” he said in a hollow, sepulchral voice, “into
+the here.”</p>
+
+<p>But where was the here?</p>
+
+<p>He tried to make up his mind whether or not that made sense.
+Superficially, it sounded like plain bad English, but he wasn’t sure
+of anything any more. Things were getting much too confused.</p>
+
+<p>There was a knock at the door.</p>
+
+<p>Malone, without any hope at all, called: “Come in,” and the door
+opened.</p>
+
+<p>The agent-in-charge came in, and dropped a dollar on Malone’s desk.</p>
+
+<p>“So you checked,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“I checked,” the A-in-C said sadly. “The boys went through the entire
+damned building. Not a sign of her. Not even a trace.”</p>
+
+<p>“There wouldn’t be one,” Malone said, shoving the dollar back to
+waiting hands. “Take the money; I knew what would happen. It was a
+sucker bet.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I feel like the sucker, all right,” the A-in-C said. “I don’t
+know how she did it.”</p>
+
+<p>“I do,” Malone said quietly. “Teleportation.”</p>
+
+<p>The A-in-C whistled. “Well,” he said, “it was a great secret as long
+as it was FBI property. But now, friend, all hell is going to bust
+loose.”</p>
+
+<p>“It already has,” Malone said hollowly.</p>
+
+<p>“Great,” the A-in-C said. “What now?”</p>
+
+<p>“Now,” Malone said, “I am going to go back to Washington. Take care of
+poor little old New York for me.”</p>
+
+<p>He closed his eyes, and vanished.</p>
+
+<p>When he opened them, he was in his Washington apartment. He went over
+to the big couch and sat down, feeling that if he were going to curse
+he might as well be comfortable while he did it. But when the air was
+bright blue, some minutes later, he didn’t feel any better. Cursing
+was not the answer.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing seemed to be.</p>
+
+<p>What was his next move?</p>
+
+<p>Where did he go from here?</p>
+
+<p>The more he thought about it, the more his mind spun. He was, he
+realized, at an absolute, total, dead end.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, there were things he could do. Malone knew that very well. He
+could make a lot of noise and go through a lot of waste motion—that
+was what it would amount to. He could have all the homes of all the
+missing PRS members checked. That would result, undoubtedly, in the
+discovery that the PRS members involved weren’t in their homes. He
+could have their files impounded, which would clutter everything with
+a great many more pieces of paper, and none of the pieces of paper
+would do any good to him. In general, he could have the entire FBI
+chasing all over hell and gone—and finding nothing whatever.</p>
+
+<p>No, it would be a waste of time, he told himself. That much was
+certain.</p>
+
+<p>And, though he probably had enough evidence to get the FBI in motion,
+he had nowhere near enough to carry the case into court, much less
+make a try at getting the case to stand up in court. That was one
+thing he couldn’t do, even if he wanted to: issue warrants for arrest
+on any basis whatever.</p>
+
+<p>But Malone was an FBI agent, and his motto was: “There’s always a
+way.” No normal method of tracking down the PRS members, and finding
+their present whereabouts, was going to work. They’d been covering
+themselves for such an emergency, undoubtedly, for a good many years
+and, due to telepathy, they certainly knew enough not to leave any
+clues around, of any kind.</p>
+
+<p>But nobody, Malone told himself, was perfect. There were clues lying
+around somewhere, he was sure of that; there had to be. The problem
+was, simply, to figure out where to look, and what to look for.</p>
+
+<p>Somewhere, the clues were sitting quietly and waiting for him to find
+them. The thought cheered him slightly, but not very much. Instead, he
+went into the kitchen and started heating water for coffee. He thought
+there might be a long night ahead of him, and sighed gently. But there
+was no help for it. The work had to be done, and done quickly.</p>
+
+<p>But when eight cigars had been reduced to ash, and what seemed like
+several gallons of coffee had sloshed their way into Malone’s interior
+workings, his mind was as blank as a baby’s. The lovely, opalescent
+dawn began to show in the East, and Malone swore at it. Then, haggard,
+red-eyed, confused, violently angry, and not one inch closer to a
+solution, he fell into a fitful doze on his couch.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>When he awoke the sun was high in the sky, and outside his window the
+cheerful sound of traffic floated in the air. Downstairs somebody was
+playing a television set too loudly, and the voice reached Malone’s
+semi-aware mind in a great tinny shout:</p>
+
+<p>“And now, the makers of Bon-Ton B-Complex Bolsters—the blanket of
+health—present Mother Kohler’s Chit-Chat Hour!”</p>
+
+<p>The invisible audience screamed and howled. Malone ripped out a
+particularly foul oath and sat up on the couch. “That,” he muttered,
+“is a fine thing to wake up to.” He focused his eyes, with only
+slight difficulty, on his watch. The time was exactly noon.</p>
+
+<p>“But first,” the announcer burbled downstairs, “a word from Mother
+Kohler herself, about the brand new special B-Complex <i>Irradiated</i>
+Bolster you can get at your neighborhood stores....”</p>
+
+<p>“Shut up,” Malone said. He had wasted a lot of time doing nothing but
+sleeping, he told himself. This was no time to be listening to
+television. He got up and found, to his vague surprise, that he felt a
+lot better and more clear-headed than he’d been feeling. Maybe the
+sleep had done him some good.</p>
+
+<p>He yawned, blinked and stretched, and then he padded into the
+bathroom, showered and shaved and put on fresh clothes. He thought
+about having a morning cup of coffee, but last night’s dregs appeared
+to have taken up permanent residence in his digestive tract, and he
+decided against it at last. He swallowed some orange juice and toast
+and then, heaving a great sigh of resignation and brushing crumbs off
+his shirt, he teleported himself over to his office.</p>
+
+<p>He was going to have to face Burris eventually, he knew.</p>
+
+<p>And now was just as good, or as bad, a time as any.</p>
+
+<p>Malone didn’t hesitate. He punched the button on his intercom for
+Burris’ office and then sat back, with his eyes closed, for the
+well-known voice.</p>
+
+<p>It didn’t come.</p>
+
+<p>Instead, Wolf, the director’s secretary, spoke up.</p>
+
+<p>“Burris isn’t in, Malone,” he said. “He had to fly to Miami. I can get
+a call through to him on the plane, if it’s urgent, but he’ll be
+landing in about fifteen minutes. And he did say he’d call this
+afternoon.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” Malone said. “Sure. Okay. It isn’t urgent.” He was just as glad
+of the reprieve; it gave him one more chance to work matters through
+to a solution, and report success instead of failure. “But what’s
+going on in Miami?” he added.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t you read the papers?” Wolf asked.</p>
+
+<p>Everybody, Malone reflected, seemed to be asking him that lately. “I
+haven’t had time,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“The governor of Mississippi was assassinated yesterday, at Miami
+Beach,” Wolf said.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah,” Malone said. He thought about it for a second. “Frankly,” he
+said, “this does not strike me as an irreparable loss to the nation.
+Not even to Mississippi.”</p>
+
+<p>“You express my views precisely,” Wolf said.</p>
+
+<p>“How about the killer?” Malone said. “I gather they haven’t got him
+yet, or Burris wouldn’t be on his way down.”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” Wolf said. “The killer would be on his way here instead. They
+haven’t got him, Malone. It seems Governor Flarion was walking along
+Collins Avenue when somebody fired at him, using a high-powered rifle
+with, I guess, a scope sight.”</p>
+
+<p>“Professional,” Malone commented.</p>
+
+<p>“It looks like it,” Wolf said. “Nobody even heard the sniper’s shot;
+the governor just fell over, right there in the street. And by the
+time his bodyguards found out what had happened, it was impossible
+even to be sure just which way he was facing when the shot had been
+fired.”</p>
+
+<p>“And, as I remember Collins Avenue—” Malone started.</p>
+
+<p>“Right,” Wolf said. “Out where Governor Flarion was taking his stroll,
+there’s an awful lot of it to search. The boys are trying to find
+somebody who might have seen a man acting suspicious in any of the
+nearby buildings, or heard a shot, or seen anybody at all lurking or
+loitering anywhere remotely close to the scene.”</p>
+
+<p>“Lovely,” Malone said. “Sounds like a nice complicated job.”</p>
+
+<p>“You don’t know the half of it,” Wolf said. “There’s also the Miami
+Beach Chamber of Commerce. According to them, Flarion died of a heart
+attack, and not even in Miami Beach. The bullet and the body are
+supposed to be written off as just coincidences, to keep the fair name
+of Miami Beach unsullied.”</p>
+
+<p>“All I can say,” Malone offered, “is good luck. This is the saddest
+day in American history since the assassination of Huey P. Long.”</p>
+
+<p>“Agreed,” Wolf said. “Want me to tell Burris you called?”</p>
+
+<p>“Right,” Malone said. He flicked off.</p>
+
+<p>Now, he asked himself, how did the assassination of Governor Nemours
+P. Flarion fit in with anything? Granted, good old Nemours P. had been
+a horrible mistake, a paranoid, self-centered, would-be dictator whose
+talents as a rabble-rouser and a fearmonger had somehow managed to get
+him elected to a governorship. Certainly nobody felt particularly
+unhappy about his death. But he wouldn’t fit into the pattern. Malone
+reminded himself that that was one more thing he had to find out when
+he got the chance.</p>
+
+<p>The trouble lay in finding an opportunity, he thought—and then he
+corrected himself.</p>
+
+<p>Not <i>finding</i> it—<i>making</i> it. Nobody was going to hand him anything
+on a silver serving salver.</p>
+
+<p>He punched the intercom again and got the Records office.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, sir?” a familiar voice said.</p>
+
+<p>“Potter?” Malone said. “This is Malone. I want facsimiles of
+everything we have on the Psychical Research Society, on Sir Lewis
+Carter, and on Luba Vasilovna Garbitsch. Both of those last are
+connected with the Society.”</p>
+
+<p>“Right,” Potter said. “They’ll be up at once.”</p>
+
+<p>Then he punched again, and asked for the latest copy of the Washington
+<i>Post</i>. He gave the article on Governor Flarion one quick glance, but
+it didn’t contain anything in the way of facts that he hadn’t already
+had from Wolf. After that, he left it and concentrated on the more
+prosaic, human-interest news, the smaller stories.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent1">FIFTH SPLINTER GROUP FORMS IN DCA BATTLE</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>That was an interesting one, he thought. The Daughters of Colonial
+Americans had about reached the point of diminishing returns in their
+battle over the claims of Rose Carswell Elder, a descendant of a Negro
+freedman named William Elder who had lived in Boston in 1776 and
+fought on the side of the Colonies during the Revolution. One more
+splinter group, Malone thought, and there’d be as many splinters as
+members. Rose Carswell Elder was pressing her claim for membership,
+and the ladies were replying by throwing crockery and hard words at
+each other.</p>
+
+<p>Then there was the Legion of American War Veterans. The headline on
+this one read:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent1">LAWV OUSTS ‘ROWDIES’: AID MEETING CONTINUES</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The “rowdies,” Malone discovered, were a large minority group that
+wanted the good old days of electric canes, paper hats, whistles and
+pretty girls. “The Legion has grown up,” a spokesman told them. “This
+convention is being held to discuss the possibility of increased
+technological aid to India and Africa. There is no place for
+tomfoolery or high jinks.”</p>
+
+<p>The expulsion order had been carried by a record majority.</p>
+
+<p>And then there were two items, on different pages, that seemed to
+contradict each other. The first was a small headline on page
+fourteen:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent1">RESIGNATIONS REACH NEW HIGH IN U.S. COLLEGE FACULTIES</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Teachers were apparently resigning all over the place, in virtually
+every department of virtually every college. That made sense. And the
+other item, on page three, made just as much sense:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent1">HIGHER TAXES VOTED THROUGHOUT U.S.</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">FOR TEACHER INCOME RISE</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">State and Federal Aid Also Promised</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">in Drive to Raise Salaries Now</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Apparently, teachers were resigning just as they were about to get
+more money than they’d ever seen before. But Malone could fit that
+into the pattern easily enough; it was perfectly obvious, once he
+thought about it.</p>
+
+<p>Malone didn’t have time to go through much more of the paper; the
+facsimile records he’d been waiting for arrived, and he put the <i>Post</i>
+aside and concentrated on them instead. Maybe somewhere in the records
+was the clue he desperately needed.</p>
+
+<p>The PRS was widely spread, all right. It had branches in almost every
+major city in the United States, in Europe, South Africa, South
+America and Australia. There was even a small branch society in
+Greenland. True, the Communist disapproval of such non-materialistic,
+un-Marxian objectives as Psychical Research showed up in the fact that
+there were no registered branches in the Sino-Soviet bloc. But that,
+Malone thought, didn’t really matter. Maybe in Russia they called
+themselves the Lenin Study Group, or the Better Borshcht League. He
+was fairly sure, from what he’d experienced, that the PRS had some
+kind of organization even behind the Iron Curtain.</p>
+
+<p>Money didn’t seem to be much of a problem, either. Malone checked for
+the supporters of the organization and found a microfilmed list that
+ran into the hundreds of thousands of names, most of them ordinary
+people who seemed to be interested in spiritualism and the like, and
+who donated a few dollars apiece each year to the PRS. Besides this
+mass of small donations, of course, there were a few large ones, from
+independently wealthy men who gave support to the organization and
+seemed actively interested in its aims.</p>
+
+<p>It wasn’t an unusual picture; it was just an exceptionally big one.</p>
+
+<p>Malone sighed and went on to the personal dossiers.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Lewis Carter himself was a well-known astronomer and
+mathematician. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal
+Astronomical Society and the Royal Mathematical Society. He had been
+knighted for his contributions in higher mathematics only two years
+before he had come to live in the United States. Malone went over the
+papers dealing with his entry into the country carefully, but they
+were all in order and they contained absolutely no clues he could use.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Lewis’ books on political and historical philosophy had been
+well-received, and he had also written a novel, <i>But Some Are More
+Equal</i>, which, for a few weeks after publication, had managed to reach
+the bottom of the best-seller list.</p>
+
+<p>And that was that. Malone tried to figure out whether all this
+information did him any good at all, and he didn’t have to think for
+very long. The answer was no. He opened the next dossier.</p>
+
+<p>Luba Vasilovna Garbitsch had been born in New York. Her mother had
+been a woman of Irish descent named Mary O’Keefe, and had died in ’68.
+Her father, of course, had now been revealed as a Russian agent, and
+was at present making his home, such as it probably was, in good old
+Moscow.</p>
+
+<p>Malone sighed. Somewhere in the dossiers, he was sure, there was a
+clue, the basic clue that would tell him everything he needed to know.
+His prescience had never been so strong; he knew perfectly well that
+he was staring at the biggest, most startling and most complete
+disclosure of all. And he couldn’t see it.</p>
+
+<p>He stared at the folders for a long minute. What did they tell him?
+What was the clue?</p>
+
+<p>And then, very slowly, the soft light of a prodigal sun illuminated
+his mind.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Malone,” Malone said gently, “you are a damned fool. There are
+times when it is necessary to discard the impossible after you have
+seen that the obscure is the obvious.”</p>
+
+<p>He wasn’t sure whether that meant anything, or even whether he knew
+what he was saying. He was sure of only one thing: the final answer.</p>
+
+<p>And it <i>was</i> obvious. Obvious as all hell.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c13">13</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>There was, of course, only one thing to do, and only one place to go.
+Malone went downstairs without even stopping to wave farewell to the
+agent-in-charge, and climbed into the big, specially-built FBI Lincoln
+that waited for him.</p>
+
+<p>“Want a driver?” one of the mechanics asked.</p>
+
+<p>“No, thanks,” Malone said. “This one’s a solo job.”</p>
+
+<p>That was for sure. He drove out onto the streets and into the heavy
+late afternoon traffic of Washington, D. C. The Lincoln handled
+smoothly, but Malone didn’t press his luck among the rushing cars. He
+wasn’t in any hurry. He had all the time in the world, and he knew it.
+They—and, for once, Malone knew just who “they” were—would still be
+waiting for him when he got there.</p>
+
+<p><i>If</i> he got there, he thought suddenly, dodging a combination
+roadblock consisting of a green Plymouth making an illegal turn, a
+fourteen-year-old boy on a bicycle and a sweet young girl pushing a
+baby carriage. He managed to get past and wiped his forehead with one
+hand. He continued driving, even more carefully, until he was out of
+the city.</p>
+
+<p>It took quite a lot of time. Washington traffic was getting worse and
+worse with every passing month, and the pedestrians were as nonchalant
+as ever. As Malone turned a corner, a familiar face popped into view,
+practically in front of his car. He swerved and got by without
+committing homicide, and a cheerful voice said: “Thanks, sorry.”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s okay, Chester,” Malone said. The big man skipped back to the
+sidewalk and watched the car go by. Malone knew him slightly, a
+private eye who did some work on the fringes of Washington crime;
+basically a nice guy, but a little too active for Malone’s taste.</p>
+
+<p>For a second he thought of asking the man to accompany him, but the
+last thing Malone needed was muscle. What he wanted was brains, and he
+even thought he might be developing some of those.</p>
+
+<p>He was nearly sure of it by the time he finally did leave the city and
+get out onto the highway that went south into the depths of Virginia.
+And, while he drove, he began to use that brain, letting his reflexes
+take over most of the driving problems now that the Washington traffic
+tangle was behind him.</p>
+
+<p>He took all his thoughts from behind the shield that had sheltered
+them and arrayed them neatly before him. Everything was perfectly
+clear; all he had to do now was explain it.</p>
+
+<p>Malone had wondered, over the years, about the detectives in books.
+They always managed to wrap everything up in the last chapter—and
+that was all right. But they always had a whole crowd of suspects
+listening to them, too. And Malone knew perfectly well that he could
+never manage a set-up like that. People would be interrupting him.
+Things would happen. Dogs would rush in and start a fight on the
+floor. There would be earthquakes, or else somebody would suddenly
+faint and interrupt him.</p>
+
+<p>But now, at long last, he realized, he had his chance.</p>
+
+<p>Nobody, he thought happily, could interrupt him. And he could explain
+to his heart’s content.</p>
+
+<p>Because the members of the PRS were telepathic. And Malone, he thought
+cheerfully, was not.</p>
+
+<p>Somebody, he was sure, would be tuned in on him as he drove toward
+their Virginia hiding place. And he hoped that that somebody would
+alert everybody else, so they could all tune in and hear his grand
+final explanation of everything.</p>
+
+<p><i>And a hearty good afternoon to everybody</i>, he thought. <i>A very hearty
+and happy and sunny good afternoon to all—and most especially to Miss
+Luba Garbitsch. I hope she’s the one who’s tuned in—or that somebody
+has alerted her by now, because I’d rather talk to her than to anyone
+else I can think of out there.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Nothing personal, you understand. It’s just that I’d like to show off
+a little. I don’t need to hide anything from you—as a matter of
+plain, simple fact, I can’t. Not with my shield down.</i></p>
+
+<p>He paused then, and, in his imagination, he could almost hear Lou’s
+voice.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m listening, Kenneth,” the voice said. “Go on.”</p>
+
+<p><i>Well, then</i>, he thought. He fished around in his mind for a second,
+wondering exactly where to start. Then he decided, in the best
+traditions of the detective story, not to mention <i>Alice in
+Wonderland</i>, to start at the beginning.</p>
+
+<p><i>The dear old Psychical Research Society</i>, he thought, <i>had been going
+along for a good many years now—since the 1880’s, as a matter of
+fact, or somewhere near there. That’s a long time and a lot of
+research. A lot of famous and intelligent men and women have belonged
+to the Society. And in all that time, they’ve worked hard, and worked
+sincerely, in testing every kind of psychic phenomenon. They’ve worked
+impartially and scientifically to find out whether a given unusual
+incident was explicable in terms of known natural laws, or was the
+result of some unknown force.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>And it’s hardly surprising that, after about a hundred years of work,
+something finally came of it.</i></p>
+
+<p>“Not surprising at all,” he imagined Lou’s voice saying. “You’re
+making things very clear, Kenneth.”</p>
+
+<p>Or had that been “Sir Kenneth”? Malone wasn’t sure, but it didn’t
+really matter. He spun the car around a curve in the highway, smiled
+gently to himself, and went on.</p>
+
+<p><i>Naturally, to the average man in the street, the Society was just a
+bunch of crackpots, and the more respected and famous the people who
+belonged to it, the happier he was; it just proved his superiority to
+them. He didn’t deal with crackpot notions, did he?</i></p>
+
+<p><i>No, the Society did. And nobody except the members paid much
+attention to what was going on.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>I remember one of the book facsimiles you gave me, for instance. Some
+man, whose name I can’t recall, wrote a great “exposé” of the Society,
+in which he tried to prove that Sir Lewis Carter and certain other
+members were trying to take over the world and run it to suit
+themselves, making a sort of horrible dictatorship out of their power
+and position. At that, he wasn’t really far from the truth, though he
+had it turned around a little. But the book shows that he has no
+knowledge whatever of what psionics is, or how it works. He seems to
+me to be just a little afraid of it, which probably adds to his
+ignorance. And, as a result, he got a twisted idea of what the PRS is
+actually doing.</i></p>
+
+<p>He could almost hear Lou’s voice again. “Yes,” she was saying. “I
+remember the book. It was put in our reference library for its
+humorous aspects.”</p>
+
+<p><i>That’s right</i>, Malone thought. <i>It would be only funny to you. But it
+would be frightening and terrible to an awful lot of people simply
+because they wouldn’t understand what the Society was all about.</i></p>
+
+<p>“All right,” Lou’s voice said helpfully. “And what <i>is</i> it all about?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone settled back in the driver’s seat as the car continued to spin
+along the road. <i>It seems to me</i>, he thought carefully, <i>that any
+telepath has to go one of two ways. Either, like Her Majesty or the
+others we found when we discovered her two years ago, the telepath
+ends up insane—or perhaps commits suicide, which is simply one step
+further in retreat—or else he learns to understand and control his
+own powers, and to understand other human beings so well that, if he
+actually did control the world, everyone would benefit in the long
+run.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>The difference between the two kinds is the difference between Her
+Majesty and the PRS.</i></p>
+
+<p>“That’s good thinking,” he could hear Lou say.</p>
+
+<p><i>No, it isn’t</i>, he thought; <i>it’s no more than guessing, and it could
+be just as wild as you please. But there is one thing I do know: the
+way to get a better world, or anyhow the first step, is to clear the
+road ahead. And that means getting rid of the fools, idiots, maniacs,
+blockheads, morons, psychopaths, paranoids, timidity-ridden,
+fear-worshipers, fanatics, thieves, criminals and a whole lot more.</i></p>
+
+<p>“Get rid of them?” Lou’s voice said.</p>
+
+<p><i>Well</i>, Malone thought, <i>I don’t mean they’ve got to be killed or
+driven out of the civilized world. You’ve just got to get them out of
+any place where their influence is heavily felt on society as a
+whole.</i></p>
+
+<p>“All right,” Lou’s voice said pleasantly. “And how could we go about
+that? Do we write nasty letters to the editor?”</p>
+
+<p><i>There’s a much more effective way</i>, Malone thought. <i>There’s no
+trouble in getting rid of a man if you can make him expose himself.
+And you’ve managed that pretty well. You’ve thwarted their idiotic
+plans, made them stumble over their own fumble-mindedness, played on
+their neuroses, concocted errors for them to fight and, in general,
+rigged things in any possible way so that they’d quit, or get fired,
+or lose elections, or get arrested, or just generally get put out of
+circulation somehow.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>It’s extremely effective—and it works very well.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Sometimes, you’ve only had to put the blocks to individuals.
+Sometimes whole nations have had to go. And sometimes it’s been
+in-between, and you’ve managed to foul up whole organizations with
+misplaced papers missent messages, error, and changed minds and
+everything else you can think of.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>As a matter of fact, it sounds like fun.</i></p>
+
+<p>“Well,” he imagined Lou saying, “it is fun, in away. But it’s a deadly
+serious business, too.”</p>
+
+<p><i>Sure it is</i>, Malone thought. <i>I think the first time that came home
+to me was when I saw what was happening in Russia, and compared it to
+what had been going on over here. Tom Boyd saw that, too, when I
+pointed it out to him—as you probably know if you were spying on my
+mind at the time.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Not that I mind that in the least.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Come more often, by all means.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>But Tom, in case you weren’t listening, said: “Over here there are a
+lot of confused jerks and idiots.... And in Russia there’s a lot of
+confusion.”</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Now, that’s perfectly true, and it spells out the difference. Over
+here, you’ve been confusing the jerks and the idiots, getting rid of
+them so the system can work properly. Over in Russia, on the other
+hand, you’ve left the jerks and the idiots all alone to do their dirty
+work, and you’ve just added to the confusion where necessary, so that
+the system will break down of its own weight.</i></p>
+
+<p>“But, after all,” Lou said, “things look pretty bad over here, too.
+Look at the papers.”</p>
+
+<p><i>Everybody</i>, Malone thought, <i>has been telling me to go and look at the
+newspapers. And when I do look at them I find all sorts of evidence of
+confusion. Teachers resigning, senators and representatives goofing up
+bills on Congress, gang wars cluttering up the streets with cadavers
+and making things tough for the Sanitation Department, factional fights
+in various organizations. Now, all of that looks pretty horrible in the
+papers, but do you know something? It isn’t horrible at all.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>It’s pretty damn good, as a matter of fact.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>The teachers who are resigning, for instance, are the nincompoops
+who’ve got to be pruned out so that competent teachers can come in.
+And, with the higher salaries, more and more competent men and women
+are going to be attracted to the job. The universities are going to be
+freer and better places to work in; they won’t be monopolies any
+more.</i></p>
+
+<p>“Monopolies?” Lou said.</p>
+
+<p><i>In restraint of knowledge</i>, Malone thought. <i>The old monopoly was in
+restraint of trade, and legal action helped to kill that kind. The
+monopoly in restraint of knowledge took a little more killing, but
+you’re doing the job quite nicely. And not only in the schools.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>The factional fights are having the same result. Look at the AAAM,
+for instance. That organization is a monopoly, pure and simple.
+Simple, anyhow. And what the factional fights are doing to it is just
+breaking up the monopoly and letting knowledge free again.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>And then we come to Congress. Senators and representatives are having
+a terrible time, some of them. There’s a fight going on between
+Furbisher and Deeks because Deeks has discovered some evidence against
+Furbisher. Who’s having the terrible time?</i></p>
+
+<p><i>All of them?</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Nope. Furbisher is. Deeks isn’t.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>And that’s the way it’s going all over. The useful, necessary
+legislation is going through Congress now without being cluttered up
+by stupid dam bills and water bills and other idiocies that simply
+clog the works.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>And then, of course, there are the gang wars. Now, I feel as sorry
+for the Sanitation Department as anybody, but at least they’re
+cleaning the streets for good now. The boys who are dying off and
+getting sent to hospitals and jails are just the ones who should have
+been sent away long ago. Everybody knows that, but nobody can prove
+it.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Except the PRS.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>And the PRS is busy doing just what it can about that proof.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>And all it takes is a few of you. I don’t know how many—I don’t know
+how many of you there really are, for that matter. But it must be a
+fair number to stock all your branches with “top-level” executives and
+the lower-level men and women who really believe in the PRS blind, and
+do their best to keep it working.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>There are probably a lot of ways it might work, but the simplest and
+best way I can think of is this one: there’s a clearing-house sort of
+set-up, and information comes in from various telepathic spies working
+for the PRS, about various projected activities of the imbecile
+contingent.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>And, from this information, you figure out the best time and place
+for lightning to strike, and you select the kind of lightning it’s
+going to be. Here it’s a misplaced letter, there some “facts” that
+aren’t facts, and somewhere else a dropped package of secret records.
+Somebody goofs—and is exposed.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Maybe it works on the local-organization level. Maybe there are teams
+all over the country, all ready to synchronize their minds and jab
+somebody in the thought processes at just the right time, in just the
+right way, as soon as they get the word. That’s one way of doing it,
+maybe the best way.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>There are others, but it doesn’t really matter how that end of it
+works. The important thing is that it does work.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>And, when it works, it can certainly create quite a mess. Yes-sirree,
+Bob. Or Lou, as the case may be.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>I sure hope somebody’s picking all this up, because I’d hate to have
+to explain it again when I get there.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Are you there, anybody?</i></p>
+
+<p>Malone imagined he heard Lou’s voice. “Yes, Ken,” she said. “Yes, I’m
+here.”</p>
+
+<p>But, of course, there was no way for them to get through to him. They
+were telepathic, but Kenneth J. Malone wasn’t he told himself sadly.</p>
+
+<p><i>Hello, out there</i>, he thought. <i>I hope you’ve been listening so far,
+because there isn’t going to be too much more. But there are a couple
+of things that still need to be cleared up. I’ve got some answers, but
+there are others I’m going to need.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>There’s Russia, for instance. It does seem to me as if your teams in
+Russia, whatever they’re calling themselves, are having a lot more fun
+than the U. S. teams. For one thing they’ve got an easier job.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>In this country, the teams are looking for ways to get rid of the
+blockheads, and there are a lot of them. In Russia, you don’t have to
+get rid of the blockheads. All you have to do is clear the road for
+them. And you can do that by fouling up the more intelligent people.</i></p>
+
+<p>“Intelligent people?” he could hear Lou say.</p>
+
+<p><i>Intelligence doesn’t mean good sense</i>, Malone thought. <i>I don’t doubt
+that the men who are maintaining Russia’s power are intelligent men—
+but what they’re doing is bad for the world as a whole, in the long
+run.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>So you foul them up, and leave the blockheads a clear field to run
+the country into the ground. And that’s easier than fouling up the
+blockheads.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Sure it is.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>There are fewer intelligent, active people around than there are
+blockheads.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Always were.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>And maybe there always will be—but not if the PRS can help it.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Oh, and by the way</i>, Malone thought. <i>You do know how I spotted you,
+don’t you? You were tuned in then, weren’t you?</i></p>
+
+<p><i>And I don’t mean just Lou. I mean all of you.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>In a world of blind men, the man who can see stands out. In a world
+of the insane, the sane man stands out.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>And in a world where organizations are regularly being confused and
+fouled up—either as whole organizations, or through your attempts to
+get rid of individual members—a smooth-running, efficient
+organization stands out like a sore thumb.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Frankly, it took me longer to see it than it should have.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>But I’ve got the answer at last—the main answer. Though, as I say,
+there are some others I’d like to have.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Like, for instance, Russia. And exactly what did happen that night in
+Moscow.</i></p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c14">14</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>At this point Malone suddenly became aware of a sound that was not
+coming from his own mind. It was coming from somewhere behind his car,
+and it was a very loud sound. It was, he discovered when he looked
+back, the siren of a highway patrolman on a motorcycle, coming toward
+him at imminent risk of life and limb and waving frantically with an
+unbelievably free hand.</p>
+
+<p>Malone glanced down at the speedometer. With a sigh, he realized that
+his reflexes had allowed him a little leeway, and that he was going
+slightly over the legal speed limit for this Virginia highway. He
+shook his head, eased up on the accelerator, and began to apply the
+brakes.</p>
+
+<p>By the time he had pulled over to the side of the road, the highway
+patrolman was coming to a halt behind the big Lincoln. Malone watched
+him check the number on the rear plate and then walk slowly around to
+the window on the driver’s side. “Can’t you hurry?” Malone muttered
+under his breath. “All this Virginian ease is okay in its place,
+but—” In the meanwhile he was getting out his identification, and by
+the time the patrolman reached him he had it in his hand.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m sorry,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Sorry?” the patrolman said, frowning. He had an open, boyish face
+with freckles and a pug nose. He looked like somebody’s kid brother,
+very dependable but just a little cute. “What for?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone shrugged. “What else?” he said. “Speeding.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, that,” the patrolman said. “Why, don’t you worry about that.”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t worry about it?” Malone said. This particular kid brother was
+obviously a little nuts, and should have been put away years ago. He
+ground his teeth silently, but he didn’t make any complaints. It was
+never wise, he knew, to irritate a traffic cop of any sort.</p>
+
+<p>“Sure not,” the patrolman said. “Why, we don’t pay any attention out
+here until a fella hits ten miles over the posted limit. That’s okay.”</p>
+
+<p>“Fine,” Malone said cheerily. “Then I can drive on?”</p>
+
+<p>“Now, just hold it a second there,” the patrolman said. “Let’s see
+your identification if you don’t mind.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone held it out wordlessly. The patrolman, obviously intent on
+finding out just what kind of paper the card was made of, who had
+printed it and whether there were any germs on it, gave it a long,
+careful scrutiny. Malone shifted slightly in his seat, counted to ten
+and managed to say nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Then the patrolman started reading the card aloud. “Kenneth J.
+Malone,” he said in a tone of some surprise. “Special Agent of the
+FBI.” He looked up. “That right?” he said. “What it says here?”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s right,” Malone said. “And you can have my autograph later.” He
+regretted the last sentence as soon as it was out of his mouth, but
+the patrolman didn’t seem to notice.</p>
+
+<p>“Then you’re the man, all right,” he said happily. “I caught your
+plate number as you went on by me, back there.”</p>
+
+<p>“Plate number?” Malone said. “What am I supposed to have done?” He’d
+overslept, he knew, but that was the only violation of even his
+personal code that he could think of. And it didn’t seem likely that
+the Virginia Highway Patrol was sending out its men to arrest people
+who overslept.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, Mr. Malone,” the patrolman said with honest surprise written all
+over his Norman Rockwell face, “as far as I know you didn’t do a thing
+wrong.”</p>
+
+<p>“But—”</p>
+
+<p>“They just told us to be on the watch for a black 1973 Lincoln with
+your number, and see if you were driving it. They did say you’d
+probably be driving it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good,” Malone said. “And I am. And I’d like to continue doing so.” He
+paused and then added, “But what happened?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” the patrolman said, in exactly the manner of a man starting
+out to tell a long, interesting story about the Wars of the Spanish
+Succession, “well, sir, it seems FBI Headquarters in Washington, they
+got in touch with the Highway Patrol Headquarters, down in Richmond,
+and Highway Patrol Headquarters—”</p>
+
+<p>“Down in Richmond,” Malone muttered resignedly.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s right,” the patrolman said in a pleased voice. “Well, they
+called all the local barracks, and then we got the message on our
+radios.” He stopped, exactly as if he thought he had finished.</p>
+
+<p>Malone counted to ten again, made it twenty and then found that he was
+capable of speech. “What?” he said in a calm, patient voice, “was the
+message about?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” the patrolman said, “it seems some fella down in Washington,
+fella name of Thomas Boyd, they said it was, wants to talk to you
+pretty bad.”</p>
+
+<p>“He could have called me on the car phone,” Malone said in what he
+thought was a reasonable tone of voice. “He didn’t have to—”</p>
+
+<p>“There’s no call for yelling at me, Mr. Malone,” the patrolman said
+reproachfully. “I only obeyed my orders, which were to locate your
+black 1973 Lincoln and see if you were driving it, and give you a
+message. That’s all.”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s enough,” Malone muttered. “He didn’t have to send out the
+militia to round me up.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, no, Mr. Malone,” the patrolman said. “Not the militia. Highway
+Patrol. We don’t rightly have any connection with the militia at all.”</p>
+
+<p>“Glad to hear it,” Malone said. He picked up the receiver of the car
+phone and waited for the buzz that would show that he was connected
+with Communications Central in Washington.</p>
+
+<p>It didn’t come.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes,” the patrolman said suddenly. “I suppose that’s why this Mr.
+Boyd, he couldn’t call you on the car telephone, Mr. Malone. The
+message we got, it also says that the fella at the FBI garage in
+Washington just forgot to plug in that phone there.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” Malone said. “Well, thanks for telling me.”</p>
+
+<p>“You’re right welcome, Mr. Malone,” the patrolman said “You can plug
+it in now.”</p>
+
+<p>“I intend to,” Malone said through his teeth. He closed his eyes for a
+long second, and then opened them again. He saw the interested face of
+the patrolman looking down at him. Hurriedly, he turned away, felt
+underneath the dashboard until he found the dangling plug, and
+inserted it into its socket.</p>
+
+<p>The buzz now arrived.</p>
+
+<p>Malone heaved a great sigh and punched for Boyd’s office. Then he
+looked around.</p>
+
+<p>The patrolman was still standing at the car window. He was looking
+down at Malone with an interested, slightly blank expression.</p>
+
+<p>Malone thought of several things to say, and chose the most harmless.
+“Thanks a lot,” he told the patrolman. “I appreciate your stopping off
+to let me know.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, that’s all right, Mr. Malone,” the patrolman said. “That was my
+orders, to do that. And even if they weren’t, it was no trouble at
+all. Any time. I’d always be glad to do anything for the FBI.”</p>
+
+<p>“Boyd here,” a tinny voice from the phone said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone eyed the patrolman sourly. “Malone here,” he said. “What’s the
+trouble, Tom? I—No, wait a minute.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ken!” Boyd’s voice said. “I’ve been trying to—”</p>
+
+<p>“Hold it a second,” Malone said. He opened his mouth, and then he saw
+a car go by. The patrolman hadn’t seen it. Malone felt sorry for the
+driver, but not too sorry. “Say!” he said to the patrolman.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, sir?” the patrolman said.</p>
+
+<p>“That boy was really going, wasn’t he?” Malone said. “He must have
+been doing at least ninety.”</p>
+
+<p>The patrolman jerked his head around to stare at the disappearing car.
+“Well—” he said, and then: “Yes, sir. Thank you, Mr. Malone. Thanks.
+I’ll see you later.” He raced for his machine, swung aboard and roared
+down the road, guiding with one hand and manipulating the controls of
+his radar set with the other.</p>
+
+<p>Malone waved him a cheery farewell, and got back to the phone.</p>
+
+<p>“Okay, Tom,” he said. “Go ahead.”</p>
+
+<p>“Who was that you were talking to?” Boyd asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, just a motorcycle patrolman,” Malone said. “He wanted to be
+helpful, so I told him to go chase a Buick.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why a Buick?” Boyd said, interestedly.</p>
+
+<p>“Why not?” Malone said. “There happened to be one handy at the time.
+Now, what’s on your mind?”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve been searching all over hell for you,” Boyd said. “I wish you’d
+just leave some word where you were going, and then I wouldn’t have
+to—”</p>
+
+<p>“Damn it,” Malone cut in. “Tom, just tell me what you want. In
+straightforward, simple language. It just took me ten minutes to pry a
+few idiotic facts out of a highway patrolman. Don’t make me go through
+it all over again with you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Okay, okay,” Boyd said. “Keep your pants on. But here’s the dope: I
+just flew in from New York, and I brought all the files on the case—
+the stuff you left in your office in New York, remember?”</p>
+
+<p>“Right,” Malone said. “Thanks.”</p>
+
+<p>“And I think we may be able to get the Big Cheese,” Boyd went on.</p>
+
+<p>“Manelli?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“None other than the famous Cesare Antonio,” Boyd said. “It seems two
+of his most valued lieutenants were found in a garage in Queens,
+practically weighted down with machine-gun bullets.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone thought of Manelli, complaining sadly about the high overhead
+of murder. “And where does that get us?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Boyd said, “whoever did the job forgot to search the bodies.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh-oh,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Very much oh-oh,” Boyd said. “They’re loaded down, not only with
+lead, but with paper. There are documents linking Manelli right up to
+the International Truckers’ Union—a direct tie-in with Mike Sand. And
+Sand now says he’s tied in with the Great Lakes Transport Union in
+Chicago.”</p>
+
+<p>“This sounds like a big one,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“You have no idea,” Boyd said. “And in the middle of all this, Burris
+called.”</p>
+
+<p>“Burris?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s right,” Boyd said. “He wants me to go on down to Florida and
+take over the investigation of the Flarion assassination. So it looks
+as if I’m going to miss most of the fun.”</p>
+
+<p>“Too bad,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“But maybe not all,” Boyd said. “It may tie in with the case we’re
+working on. At least, that’s what Burris thinks.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” Malone said. “I can see why he thinks so. Did he have any
+message for me, by the way?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not exactly,” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone blinked. “Not exactly?” he said. “What’s that supposed to
+mean?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Boyd said, “he says he does have something to tell you, but
+it’ll wait until he sees you. Then, he says, he’ll tell you
+personally.”</p>
+
+<p>“Great,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Maybe it’s a surprise,” Boyd said. “Maybe you’re fired.”</p>
+
+<p>“I wouldn’t have the luck,” Malone said. “But if I get any leads on
+the Flarion job, I’ll let you know right away.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Boyd said. “Thanks. And—by the way, what are you doing now?”</p>
+
+<p>“Me?” Malone said. “I’m driving.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I know,” Boyd said patiently. “To where, and why? Or is this
+another secret? Sometimes I think nobody loves me any more.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, don’t be silly,” Malone said. “The entire city of Miami Beach is
+awaiting your arrival with bated breath.”</p>
+
+<p>“But what are you doing?” Boyd said.</p>
+
+<p>Malone chose his words carefully. “I’m just checking a lead,” he said
+at last. “I don’t know if it’s going to pan out or not, but I thought
+I’d drive down to Richmond and check on a name I’ve got. I’ll call you
+about it in the morning, Tom, and let you know what the result is.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” Boyd said. “Okay. Sure. So long, Ken.”</p>
+
+<p>“So long,” Malone said. He hung up the phone, put the car into gear
+again and roared off down U. S. Highway Number One. He didn’t feel
+entirely happy about the way things had gone; he’d been forced to lie
+to Tom Boyd, and that just wasn’t right.</p>
+
+<p>However, there was no help for it. It was actually better this way, he
+told himself hopefully. After all, the less Tom knew from now on, the
+better off he was going to be. The better off everyone would be.</p>
+
+<p>He went on through Fredericksburg without incident, but he didn’t
+continue on to Richmond. Instead, he turned off U. S. 1 when he
+reached a little town called Thornburg, which was smaller than he had
+believed a town could be and live. He began following a secondary road
+out into the countryside.</p>
+
+<p>The countryside, of course, was filled with country, in the shape of
+hills, birds, trees, flowers, grass and other distractions to the
+passing motorist. It took Malone quite a bit longer than he expected
+to find the place he was looking for, and he finally came to the sad
+conclusion that country estates are just as difficult to find as
+houses in Brooklyn. In both cases, he thought, there was the same
+frantic search down what seemed to be a likely route, the same
+disappointment when the route turned out to lead nowhere, and the same
+discovery that no one had ever heard of the place and, in fact,
+doubted very strongly whether it even existed.</p>
+
+<p>But he found it at last, rounding a curve in a narrow black-top road
+and spotting the house beyond a grove of trees. He recognized it
+instantly.</p>
+
+<p>He had seen it so often that he felt as if he knew it intimately.</p>
+
+<p>It was a big, rambling, Colonial-type mansion, painted a blinding and
+beautiful white, with a broad, pillared porch and a great carved front
+door. The front windows were curtained in rich purples, and before the
+house was a great front garden, and tall old trees. Malone
+half-expected Scarlett O’Hara to come tripping out of the house at any
+moment.</p>
+
+<p>Inside it, however, if Malone were right, was not the magnetic
+Scarlett. Inside the house were some of the most important members of
+the Psychical Research Society.</p>
+
+<p>But it was impossible to tell from the outside. Nothing moved on the
+well-kept grounds, and the windows didn’t show so much as the flutter
+of a purple curtain. There was no sound. No cars were parked around
+the house, nor, Malone thought as he remembered <i>Gone With the Wind</i>,
+were there any horses or carriages.</p>
+
+<p>The place looked deserted.</p>
+
+<p>Malone thought he knew better, but it took a few minutes for him to
+get up enough courage to go up the long driveway. He stared at the
+house. It was an old one, he knew, built long before the Civil War and
+originally commanding a huge plantation. Now, all that remained of
+that vast parcel of land was the few acres that surrounded the house.</p>
+
+<p>But the original family still inhabited it, proud of the house and of
+their part in its past. Over the years, Malone knew, they had kept it
+up scrupulously, and the place had been both restored and modernized
+on the inside without harming the classic outlines of the
+hundred-and-fifty-year-old structure.</p>
+
+<p>A fence surrounded the estate, but the front gate was swinging open.
+Malone saw it and took a deep breath. Now, he told himself, or never.
+He drove the Lincoln through the opening slowly, alert for almost
+anything.</p>
+
+<p>There was no disturbance. Thirty yards from the front door he pulled
+the car to a cautious stop and got out. He started to walk toward the
+building. Each step seemed to take whole minutes, and everything he
+had thought raced through his mind again.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing seemed to move anywhere, except Malone himself.</p>
+
+<p>Was he right? Were the PRS people really here? Or had he been led
+astray by them? Had he been manipulated as easily as they had
+manipulated so many others?</p>
+
+<p>That was possible. But it wasn’t the only possibility.</p>
+
+<p>Suppose, he thought, that he was perfectly right, and that the PRS
+members were waiting inside. And suppose, too, that he’d misunderstood
+their motives.</p>
+
+<p>Suppose they were just waiting for him to get a little closer.</p>
+
+<p>Malone kept walking.</p>
+
+<p>In just a few steps, he would be close enough so that a bullet aimed
+at him from the house hadn’t a real chance of missing him.</p>
+
+<p>And it didn’t have to be bullets, either. They might have set a trap,
+he thought, and were waiting for him to walk right into it. Then they
+would hold him prisoner while they devised ways to....</p>
+
+<p>To what? He didn’t know. And that was even worse; it called up
+horrible terrors from the darkest depths of Malone’s mind. He
+continued to walk forward, feeling about as exposed as a restaurant
+lamb chop caught with its panty down.</p>
+
+<p>He reached the steps that led up to the porch, and took them one at a
+time.</p>
+
+<p>He stood on the porch. A long second passed.</p>
+
+<p>He took a step toward the high, wide and handsome oaken door. Then he
+took another step, and another.</p>
+
+<p>What was waiting for him inside?</p>
+
+<p>He took a deep breath, and pressed the doorbell button.</p>
+
+<p>The door swung open immediately, and Malone involuntarily stepped
+back.</p>
+
+<p>The owner of the house smiled at him from the doorway. Malone let out
+his breath in one long sigh of relief.</p>
+
+<p>“I was hoping it would be you,” he said weakly. “May I come in?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, certainly, Malone. Come on in. We’ve been expecting you, you
+know,” said Andrew J. Burris, director of the FBI.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c15">15</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Malone sat, quietly relaxed and almost completely at ease, in the
+depths of a huge, comfortable, old-fashioned Morris chair. Three
+similar chairs were clustered with his, around a squat, massive coffee
+table made of a single slab of dark wood set on short, curved legs.
+Malone looked around at the other three with a relaxed feeling of
+recognition: Andrew J. Burris, Sir Lewis Carter, and Luba Vasilovna
+Garbitsch.</p>
+
+<p>“That mind shield of yours,” Burris was saying, “is functioning very
+well. We weren’t entirely sure you had actually located us until you
+pulled into that driveway.”</p>
+
+<p>“I wasn’t entirely sure what I was locating,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“And so it’s over,” Burris said with a satisfied air. “Everything’s
+over.”</p>
+
+<p>“And just beginning,” Sir Lewis put in. He drew a pipe from an inside
+pocket and began to fill it.</p>
+
+<p>“And, of course,” Burris said, “just beginning. Things do that; they
+go round and round in circles. It’s what makes everything so
+confusing.”</p>
+
+<p>“And so much fun,” Lou said, leaning back in her chair. She didn’t
+look hostile now, Malone thought; she looked like a cat, wary but
+content. He decided that he liked this Lou even better than the old
+one. Lou, at home among her psionic colleagues, was even more than
+he’d ever thought she could be.</p>
+
+<p>“More what?” she said suddenly. Burris jerked upright a trifle.</p>
+
+<p>“What’s more what?” he said. “Damn it, let’s stick to one thing or the
+other. As soon as this thing starts mixing talk and thought it
+confuses me.”</p>
+
+<p>“Never mind,” Lou said. She smiled across the table at Malone.</p>
+
+<p>Malone jerked a finger under his collar.</p>
+
+<p>“What made you decide to come here?” Sir Lewis said. He had the pipe
+lit now, and blew a cloud of fragrant smoke over the table.</p>
+
+<p>Malone wondered where to start. “One of the clues,” he said at last,
+“was the efficiency of the FBI. It hit me the same way the efficiency
+of the PRS had hit me, while I was looking at the batch of reports
+that had been run off so rapidly.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah,” Sir Lewis said. “The dossiers.”</p>
+
+<p>“Dossiers?” Burris said.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Lewis puffed at his pipe. “Sorry,” he said. “I thought you had
+been tuned in for that.”</p>
+
+<p>“I was busy,” Burris said. “I can’t tune into everything. After all,
+I’ve only got one mind.”</p>
+
+<p>“And two hands,” Malone said at random.</p>
+
+<p>“At least,” Lou said. Their eyes met in a glance of perfect
+understanding.</p>
+
+<p>“What the hell do hands have to do with it?” Burris said.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Lewis shrugged. “Tune in and see,” he said. “It’s an old joke; but
+you’ll never really adjust to telepathy unless you practice.”</p>
+
+<p>“Damn it,” Burris said, “I practice. I’m always practicing. This and
+that and the other thing—after all, I am the director of the FBI.
+There’s a lot to be done.”</p>
+
+<p>Sir Lewis puffed at his pipe again. “At any rate,” he said smoothly,
+“Mr. Malone had requested some dossiers on us. On the PRS, myself, and
+Luba. They arrived very quickly. The efficiency of that arrival, and
+the efficiency he’d been noting about the FBI ever since he began work
+on this case, finally struck home to him.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah,” Burris said. “You see? The FBI’s a full-time job. It’s got to be
+efficient.”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course,” Sir Lewis said soothingly.</p>
+
+<p>“Anyhow,” Malone said, “Sir Lewis is right. While every other branch
+of the government was having its troubles with the Great Confusion,
+the FBI was ticking along like a transistorized computer.”</p>
+
+<p>“A good start,” Sir Lewis said.</p>
+
+<p>“Darn good,” Burris said. “Malone, I knew I could depend on you.
+You’re a good man.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone swallowed hard. “Well, anyway,” he said after a pause, “when I
+saw that I began to remember a few other things. Starting with a
+couple of years ago, when we first found Her Majesty, remember?”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll never forget it,” Burris said fervently. “She knighted me.
+Knight Commander of the Queen’s Own FBI. What a moment.”</p>
+
+<p>“Thrilling,” Malone said. “But you got to Yucca Flats for your
+knighting awfully quickly, a little too fast even for a modern plane.”</p>
+
+<p>“It had to be done,” Burris said. “Anyhow, I’ve never really liked
+planes. Basically unsafe. People crash in them.”</p>
+
+<p>“But you wouldn’t,” Malone said. “You could always teleport yourself
+out.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Burris said. “But that’s troublesome. Why bother? Anyhow, I’d
+been to Yucca Flats before, so I could teleport there—a little way
+down the road, where I could meet my car—without any trouble.”</p>
+
+<p>“Anyhow, that was one thing,” Malone said. “And then there was Her
+Majesty, when she pointed at that visiphone screen and accused you of
+being the telepathic spy. Remember?”</p>
+
+<p>“She wasn’t pointing at me,” Burris said. “She was pointing at the man
+in the next room. How about you doing some remembering?”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure she was,” Malone said. “But it was just a little coincidence.
+And I have a hunch she felt, subconsciously, that there was something
+not quite right about you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Maybe,” Burris conceded. “But that doesn’t answer my question.”</p>
+
+<p>“It doesn’t?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Now look, Malone,” Burris said. “None of this is proof. Not real
+proof. Not the kind the FBI has trained you to look for.”</p>
+
+<p>“But—”</p>
+
+<p>“What I want to know,” Burris said, “is why you came here, to my home?
+And in spite of everything you’ve said, that hasn’t been tied down.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone frowned. After a second’s thought he said, “Well.... All I know
+is that it just seemed obvious. That’s all.”</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed it is,” Sir Lewis said. “But one of the things we’ll have to
+teach you, my boy, is how to distinguish between a deduction from
+observed fact and a psionic intuition. You’ve been confusing them for
+some years now.”</p>
+
+<p>“I have?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Sure you have,” Burris said. “And, what’s more—”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, he’s no worse than you are, Andrew,” Lou said.</p>
+
+<p>Burris turned. “Me?” he said in a voice of withering scorn.</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly,” Lou said. “After all, you’ve never really become used to
+mixtures of thought and speech. And, what’s more, you’ve been using
+telepathy so long that when you try to communicate with nothing but
+words you only confuse yourself.”</p>
+
+<p>“And everybody else,” Sir Lewis added.</p>
+
+<p>“Hmpf,” Burris said. “I’m busy all the time. I haven’t got any extra
+time for practice.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone nodded, comparatively unsurprised. He’d wondered for years how
+a man so obviously unable to express himself clearly could run an
+organization like the FBI as well as he did. Having psionic abilities
+evidently led to drawbacks as well as advantages.</p>
+
+<p>“Actually,” he said, “my prescience made one mistake.”</p>
+
+<p>“Really?” Burris said, looking both worried and pleased about it.</p>
+
+<p>“I expected the place to be full of people,” Malone said. “I thought
+the elite corps of the PRS would be here.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” Burris said, looking crestfallen.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, that was no mistake,” Sir Lewis said. “As a matter of fact, they
+are all here. But they’re quite busy at the moment; things are coning
+to a head, you know, and they must work quite undisturbed.”</p>
+
+<p>“And this,” Burris added, “is a good place for it. There are sixty
+rooms in this house. Sixty.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s a lot of rooms,” Malone said politely.</p>
+
+<p>“A mansion,” Burris said. “A positive mansion. And my family has lived
+here ever since—”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m sure Ken isn’t very interested in your family just now,” Lou
+broke in.</p>
+
+<p>“My family,” Burris said with dignity, “is a very interesting family.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m sure it must be,” Lou said demurely. Sir Lewis choked with
+laughter suddenly and began waving his pipe. After a minute, Malone
+joined in.</p>
+
+<p>“Damn it,” Burris said. “Let’s stick to one thing or the other. Did I
+say that?”</p>
+
+<p>“Twice,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Sixty rooms,” Burris said. “All built by my family. And local
+contractors, of course. That’s enough to house sixty rooms full of
+people. And that number of people is a large houseful, I should
+think.”</p>
+
+<p>“It sounds like a lot,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“It is a lot,” Burris said. “All in my house. The house my family
+built.”</p>
+
+<p>“And we’re grateful for it,” Sir Lewis said soothingly. “We truly
+are.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good,” Burris said.</p>
+
+<p>“You must have had a large family,” Lou said.</p>
+
+<p>“A large family,” Burris said, “and many guests. Many, many guests.
+From all over. Including famous people. General Hood slept in this
+house, and he slept very well indeed.”</p>
+
+<p>“As a matter of fact,” Lou added, “he’s still sleeping. They call it
+being dead.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s not funny,” Burris snapped.</p>
+
+<p>“Sorry,” Lou said. “It was meant to be.”</p>
+
+<p>“I—” Burris shut his mouth and glared.</p>
+
+<p>Malone was far away, thinking of the sixty rooms full of people,
+sitting quietly, their minds ranging into the distance, meshed
+together in small units. It was a picture that frightened and
+comforted him at the same time. He wasn’t sure he liked it, but he
+certainly didn’t dislike it, either.</p>
+
+<p>After all, he told himself confusedly, too many cooks save a stitch in
+time.</p>
+
+<p>He veered away from that sentence quickly. “Tell me,” he said, “were
+you receiving my broadcast on the way here?”</p>
+
+<p>Burris and Sir Lewis nodded. Lou started to nod, too, but stopped and
+looked surprised. “You mean you didn’t know we were?” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“How could I know?” Malone said. “After all, I was just tossing it out
+and hoping that somebody was on the listening end.”</p>
+
+<p>“But of course somebody was,” Lou said. “I was.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good,” Malone said. “But I still don’t see how I was supposed to know
+that you—”</p>
+
+<p>“I answered you, silly,” Lou said. “I kept on answering you.
+Remember?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone blinked, focused and then said, very slowly, “That was my
+imagination. Please tell me it was my imagination before I go nuts.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sorry,” Lou said. “It wasn’t.”</p>
+
+<p>“But that kind of thing,” Malone said, “it takes a tremendous amount
+of power, doesn’t it?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not when the receiver is a telepath,” Lou said sweetly.</p>
+
+<p>Malone nodded slowly. “That,” he said, “is exactly what I’m afraid of.
+Don’t tell me—”</p>
+
+<p>There was silence.</p>
+
+<p>“Well?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“You said not to tell you,” Lou said instantly.</p>
+
+<p>“All right,” Malone said. “I rescind the order. Am I a telepath, or am
+I not?”</p>
+
+<p>Lou’s lips didn’t move. But then, they didn’t have to.</p>
+
+<p>The message came, unbidden, into Malone’s mind.</p>
+
+<p><i>Of course you are. That was the whole reason for Andrew’s assigning
+you to this type of case.</i></p>
+
+<p>“My God,” Malone said softly.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Lewis laid down his pipe in a handy ashtray. “Of course,” he said,
+“you will find it difficult to pick up anyone but Lou, at first. The
+rapport between you two is really quite strong.”</p>
+
+<p>“Very strong indeed,” Lou murmured. Malone found himself beginning to
+blush.</p>
+
+<p>“It will be some time yet,” Sir Lewis went on, “before you can really
+call yourself a telepath, my boy.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll bet it will,” Malone said. “Before I can call myself a telepath
+I’m going to have to get thoroughly used to the idea. And that’s going
+to take a long, long time indeed.”</p>
+
+<p>“You only think that,” Sir Lewis said. “Actually, you’re used to the
+idea now. That was Andrew’s big job.”</p>
+
+<p>“His big job?” Malone said. “Now, wait a minute—”</p>
+
+<p>“You don’t think I picked you for our first psionics case out of thin
+air, do you?” Burris said. “Before anything else, you had to be forced
+to accept the fact that such things as telepaths really existed.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, they do,” Malone said. “They certainly do.”</p>
+
+<p>“There’s me, for instance,” Burris said. “But you had to be convinced.
+So I ordered you to go out and find one.”</p>
+
+<p>“Like the Bluebird of Happiness,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>Burris frowned. “What’s like the Bluebird of Happiness?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“You are,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“I am not,” Burris said indignantly. “Bluebirds eat worms. My God,
+Malone.”</p>
+
+<p>“But the Bluebird,” Malone said doggedly, “was right at home all the
+time, while everyone searched for it far away. And I had to go far
+away to find a telepath, when you were the one who ordered me to do
+it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Right,” Burris said. “So you went and found Her Majesty. And, when
+you did find her, she forced acceptance on you simply by being Her
+Majesty and proving to you, once and for all, that she could read
+minds.”</p>
+
+<p>“Great,” Malone said. “Of course, I could have got myself killed
+taking these lessons—”</p>
+
+<p>“We were watching you,” Burris said. “If anything had happened, we’d
+have been right on the spot.”</p>
+
+<p>“In time to bury the body,” Malone said. “I think that’s very
+thoughtful of you.”</p>
+
+<p>“We would have arrived in time to save you,” Burris said. “Don’t
+quibble. You’re alive, aren’t you?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Malone said slowly, “if you’re not sure, I don’t know how I
+can convince you.”</p>
+
+<p>“There,” Burris said triumphantly. “You see?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone sighed wearily. “Okay,” he said. “So you sent me out to find a
+telepath and to prove to me that there were such things. And I did.
+And then what happened?”</p>
+
+<p>“You had a year,” Burris said, “to get used to the idea of somebody
+reading your mind.”</p>
+
+<p>“Thanks,” Malone said. “Of course, I didn’t know it was you.”</p>
+
+<p>“It was Her Majesty too,” Burris said. “Everybody.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good old Malone,” Malone said. “The human peep-show.”</p>
+
+<p>“Now, that’s what we mean,” Sir Lewis broke in. “Subconsciously, you
+disliked the idea of leaving your thoughts bare to anyone, even a
+sweet little old lady. To some extent, you still do. But that will
+pass.”</p>
+
+<p>“Goody,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“The residue is simply not important,” Sir Lewis went on. “Your
+telepathic talents prove that.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, fine,” Malone said. “Here I am reading minds and teleporting and
+all sorts of things. What will the boys back at Headquarters think
+now?”</p>
+
+<p>“We’ll get to that,” Burris said. “But that first case did one more
+thing for you. Because you didn’t like the idea of leaving your mind
+open, you began to develop a shield. That allowed you some sort of
+mental privacy.”</p>
+
+<p>“And then,” Malone said, “I met Mike Fueyo and his little gang of
+teleporting juvenile delinquents.”</p>
+
+<p>“So that you could develop a psionic ability of your own,” Burris
+said. “That completed your acceptance. But it took a threat to
+solidify that shield. That was step three. When you discovered your
+mind was being tampered with—”</p>
+
+<p>“The shield started growing stronger,” Malone said. “Sure. Her Majesty
+told me that, though she didn’t know why.”</p>
+
+<p>“Right,” Burris said.</p>
+
+<p>“But, wait a minute,” Malone said. “How could I do all that without
+knowing it? How would I know that some of my thoughts were safe behind
+a shield if I didn’t know the shield existed and couldn’t even tell if
+my mind were being read?” He paused. “Does that make sense?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“It does,” Burris said, “but it shouldn’t.”</p>
+
+<p>“What?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Two years ago, you had the answer to that one,” Burris said. “Dr.
+O’Connor’s machine. Remember why it did detect when a person’s mind
+was being read?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” Malone said. “Oh, sure. He said that any human being would know,
+subconsciously, whether his mind was being read.”</p>
+
+<p>“He did, indeed,” Burris said. “And then we came to the fourth step:
+to put you in rapport with some psionicist who could teach you how to
+control the shield, how to raise and lower it, you might say. To learn
+to accept other thoughts, as well as reject them. To learn to accept
+your full telepathic talent. That was Lou’s job.”</p>
+
+<p>“Lou’s ... job?” Malone said. He felt his own shield go up. The
+thoughts behind it weren’t pleasant. Lou had been ... well, hired to
+stay with him. She had pretended to like him; it was part of her job.</p>
+
+<p>That was perfectly clear now.</p>
+
+<p>Horribly clear.</p>
+
+<p>“You are now on your way,” Sir Lewis said, “to being a real
+psionicist.”</p>
+
+<p>“Fine,” Malone said dully. “But why me? Why not, oh, Wolfe Wolf? I’d
+think he’d have a better chance than I would.”</p>
+
+<p>“My secretary,” Burris said, “has talents enough of his own. But you,
+you’re something brand-new. It’s wonderful, Malone. It’s exciting.”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s a new taste thrill,” Malone murmured. “Try Bon-Ton B-Complex
+Bolsters. Learn to eat your blanket as well as sleep with it.”</p>
+
+<p>“What?” Burris said.</p>
+
+<p>“Never mind,” Malone said. “You wouldn’t understand.”</p>
+
+<p>“But I—”</p>
+
+<p>“I know you wouldn’t,” Malone said, “because I don’t.”</p>
+
+<p>Sir Lewis cleared his throat “My dear boy,” he said, “you represent a
+breakthrough. You are an adult.”</p>
+
+<p>“That,” Malone said testily, “is not news.”</p>
+
+<p>“But you are a telepathic adult,” Sir Lewis said. “Many of them are
+capable of developing it into a useful ability. Children who have the
+talent may accidentally develop the ability to use it, but that almost
+invariably results in insanity. Without proper guidance, a child is no
+more capable of handling the variety of impressions it receives from
+adult minds than it is capable of understanding a complex piece of
+modern music. The effort to make a coherent whole out of the
+impression overstrains the mind, so to speak, and the damage is
+permanent.”</p>
+
+<p>“So here I am,” Malone said, “and I’m not nuts. At least I don’t think
+I’m nuts.”</p>
+
+<p>“Because you are an adult,” Sir Lewis went on. “Telepathy seems to be
+almost impossible to develop in an adult, even difficult to test for
+it. A child may be tested comparatively simply; an adult, seldom or
+never.”</p>
+
+<p>He paused to relight his pipe.</p>
+
+<p>“However,” he went on, “the Psychical Research Society’s executive
+board discovered a method of bringing out the ability in a talented
+child as far back as 1931. All of us who are sane telepaths today owe
+our ability to that process, which was applied to us, in each case,
+before the age of sixteen.”</p>
+
+<p>“How about me?” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“You,” Sir Lewis said, “are the first adult ever to learn the use of
+psionic powers from scratch.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” Malone said. “And that’s why Mike Fueyo, for instance, could
+learn to teleport, though his older sister couldn’t.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mike was an experiment,” Sir Lewis said. “We decided to teach him
+teleportation without teaching him telepathy. You saw what happened.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure I did,” Malone said. “I had to stop it.”</p>
+
+<p>“We were forced to make you stop him,” Sir Lewis said. “But we also
+let him teach you his abilities.”</p>
+
+<p>“So I’m an experiment,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“A successful experiment,” Sir Lewis added.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” Malone said dully, “bully for me.”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t feel that way,” Sir Lewis said. “We have—”</p>
+
+<p>He stopped suddenly, and glanced at the others. Burris and Lou stood
+up, and Sir Lewis followed them.</p>
+
+<p>“Sorry,” Sir Lewis said in a different tone. “There’s something
+important that we must take care of. Something quite urgent, I’m
+afraid.”</p>
+
+<p>“You can go on home, Malone,” Burris said. “We’ll talk later, but
+right now there’s a crisis coming and we’ve got to help. Leave the
+car. I’ll take care of it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Malone said, without moving.</p>
+
+<p>Lou said, “Ken—” and stopped. Then the three of them turned and
+started up the long, curving staircase that led to the upstairs rooms.</p>
+
+<p>Malone sat in the Morris chair for several long minutes, wishing that
+he were dead. Nobody made a sound. He rubbed his hands over the soft
+leather and tried to tell himself that he was lucky, and talented, and
+successful.</p>
+
+<p>But he didn’t care.</p>
+
+<p>He closed his eyes at last, and took a deep breath.</p>
+
+<p>Then he vanished.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c16">16</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Two hours passed, somehow. Bourbon and soda helped them pass, Malone
+discovered; he drank two highballs slowly, trying not to think about
+anything, and kept staring around at the walls of his apartment
+without really seeing anything. He felt terrible.</p>
+
+<p>He made himself a third bourbon and soda and started in on it. Maybe
+this one would make him feel better. Maybe, he thought, he ought to
+break out the cigars and celebrate.</p>
+
+<p>But there didn’t seem to be very much to celebrate, somehow.</p>
+
+<p>He felt like a guinea pig being congratulated on having successfully
+resisted a germ during an experiment.</p>
+
+<p>He drank some more of the bourbon and soda. Guinea pigs didn’t drink
+bourbon and soda, he told himself. He was better off than a guinea
+pig. He was happier than a guinea pig. But he couldn’t imagine any
+guinea pig in the world, no matter how heartbroken, feeling any worse
+than Kenneth J. Malone.</p>
+
+<p>He looked up. There was another guinea pig in the room.</p>
+
+<p>Then he frowned. She wasn’t a guinea pig. She was one off the
+experimenters. She was the one the guinea pig was supposed to fall in
+love with, so the guinea pig could be nice and telepathic and all the
+other experimenters could congratulate themselves. But whoever heard
+of a scientist falling in love with a guinea pig? It was fate. And
+fate was awful. Malone had often suspected it, but now he was sure.
+Now he saw things from the guinea pig’s side, and fate was terrible.</p>
+
+<p>“But Ken,” the experimenter said. “It isn’t like that at all.”</p>
+
+<p>“It is, too,” Malone said. “It’s even worse, but that’ll have to wait.
+When I have some more to drink it will get worse. Watch and see.”</p>
+
+<p>“But Ken—” Lou hesitated, and then went on. “Don’t feel sad about
+being an experiment. We’re all experiments.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m the guinea pig,” Malone said. “I’m the only guinea pig. You said
+so.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, Ken,” she said. “Remember, all of us in the PRS got early
+training when it was new and untried. Some of those methods weren’t as
+good as we now have them; that’s why a man like your boss sometimes
+tends to have a little trouble.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” Malone said. “But I’m your guinea pig. You made me dance
+through hoops and do tricks and everything just for an experiment.
+That’s what.” He took another swallow of his drink. “See?” he said.
+“It’s getting worse already.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, it’s not,” Lou said. “It’s getting better, if you’ll only listen.
+I wasn’t given this job, Ken. I volunteered for it.”</p>
+
+<p>“That isn’t any better,” Malone said morosely.</p>
+
+<p>“I volunteered because I—because I liked you,” Lou said. “Because I
+wanted to work with you, wanted to be with you.”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s more experimenting,” Malone said flatly. “More guinea-pigging
+around.”</p>
+
+<p>“It isn’t, Ken,” Lou said. “Believe me. Look into my mind. Believe
+me.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone tried. A second passed....</p>
+
+<p>And then a long time passed, without any words at all.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, well,” Malone said at last. “If this is the life of a guinea
+pig, I’m all for it.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m all for guinea pigs’ rights,” Lou said. “Life, Liberty and the
+Pursuit of Me.”</p>
+
+<p>“Agreed,” Malone said. “How about that crisis, by the way? Are you
+going to have to leave suddenly again?”</p>
+
+<p>Lou stretched lazily on the couch. “That’s all over with, thank God,”
+she said. “We had to get our agent out of Miami Beach, and cover his
+tracks at the same time.”</p>
+
+<p>“Tricky,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Very,” Lou said.</p>
+
+<p>“But—” Malone blinked. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Your agent? You
+mean you had Governor Flarion killed?”</p>
+
+<p>Lou nodded soberly. “We had to,” she said. “That paranoid mind of his
+had built up a shield we simply couldn’t get through. He had plans for
+making himself president, you know—and all the terrifying
+potentialities of an embryonic Hitler.” She grimaced. “We don’t like
+being forced to kill,” she said, “but sometimes we’ve got to.”</p>
+
+<p>Malone thought of his own .44 Magnum, and the times he had used it,
+and nodded very slowly.</p>
+
+<p>“There are still a couple of questions, though,” he said. “For
+instance, there’s that trip to Russia. Why <i>did</i> you make it? Was it
+your father?”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course it was,” Lou said. “We had to get him back in and make sure
+he was safe.”</p>
+
+<p>“You mean that Vasili Garbitsch is a PSR member?” Malone said,
+stunned.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, really,” Lou said. “Did you think my father would really be a
+spy? We had to get him back to Russia; he was needed for work in the
+Kremlin. That’s why we nudged Boyd into making the arrest.”</p>
+
+<p>“And the others?” Malone said. “Brubitsch and Borbitsch?”</p>
+
+<p>“Real spies,” Lou said. “Bad ones, but real. Any more questions?”</p>
+
+<p>“Some,” Malone said. “Were you kidding about that drink in Moscow?”</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head. “I wish I had been,” she said. “But I was
+concentrating on Petkoff, who didn’t know a thing about the drugged
+drink. I didn’t catch anything else until after I’d swallowed it. And
+then it was too late.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good old Petkoff,” Malone said. “Always helpful. But he was right
+about one thing, anyway.”</p>
+
+<p>“What?” Lou said.</p>
+
+<p>“The FBI,” Malone said. “He told us it was a secret police
+organization. And, by God, in a way it is!”</p>
+
+<p>Lou grinned. Malone started to laugh outright. They found themselves
+very close and the laughter stopped, and there was some more time
+without words. When Malone broke free, he had a suddenly sobered
+expression on his face.</p>
+
+<p>“Hey,” he said. “What about Tom Boyd? He knows a lot but he hasn’t got
+any talents, as far as I know, and—”</p>
+
+<p>“He’ll be all right,” Lou said. “Andrew and the others have thought of
+that.”</p>
+
+<p>“But he knows an awful lot about the evidence I dug up.”</p>
+
+<p>“Andrew will give him a cover-up explanation they’re working out,” Lou
+said. “That will convince Boyd there’s nothing more to worry about. Of
+course, we may have to change his mind about a few things, but we can
+do that, probably through you, since you know him best. There’s
+nothing for you to worry over, Ken. Nothing at all.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good,” Malone said. He leaned over and kissed her. “Because I’m not
+in the least worried.”</p>
+
+<p>Lou sighed deeply, looking off into space.</p>
+
+<p>“Luba Malone,” she said. “It sounds nice. And, after all, my mother
+was Irish. At least it sounds better than Garbitsch.”</p>
+
+<p>“What doesn’t?” Malone said automatically. Then he blinked. “Hey,
+<i>I’m</i> Malone!” he said. “How could you be Malone?”</p>
+
+<p>“Me?” Lou said. She caroled happily. “I’m Malone because I love you,
+love you with all my heart.”</p>
+
+<p>“That,” Malone said, “does it. A woman after my own heart.”</p>
+
+<p>Lou made a low curtsy.</p>
+
+<p>“And a woman of grace and breeding,” Malone said. “Eftsoons, if that
+means anything.”</p>
+
+<p>“You know,” Lou said, “I like you even better when you’re being Sir
+Kenneth. Especially when you’re talking to yourself.”</p>
+
+<p>“My innate gallantry and all my good qualities come out,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” Lou said. “Indeed they do. All over the place. It’s nice to go
+back to Elizabethan times, anyhow, in the middle of all these
+troubles.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I don’t know,” Malone said. “There’s always been trouble. In the
+Middle Ages, it was witches. In the Seventeenth Century, it was
+demons. In the Nineteenth it was revolutions. In—”</p>
+
+<p>Lou cut him off with a kiss. When she broke away Malone raised his
+eyebrows.</p>
+
+<p>“I prithee,” he said, “interrupt me not. I am developing a scheme of
+philosophy. There have always been troubles. In the 1890’s there was a
+Depression and panic, and the Spanish-American War—”</p>
+
+<p>“All right, Sirrah,” Lou said. “And then what?”</p>
+
+<p>“Let’s see,” Malone said, reverting to 1973 for a second. “In 1903
+there was the airplane, and troubles abroad.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes?” Lou said. “Do go on, Sirrah. Your liege awaits your slightest
+word.”</p>
+
+<p>“Hmm,” Malone said.</p>
+
+<p>“That, Milord, was a very slight word indeed,” Lou said. “What’s after
+1903?”</p>
+
+<p>Malone smiled and went back to the days of the First Elizabeth
+happily.</p>
+
+<p>“In 1914, it was enemy aliens,” said Sir Kenneth Malone.</p>
+
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