Chapter 15

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._