But, vacation or no vacation, he thought solemnly, he was an FBI Agent, and his motto was: "There's always a way." No normal method of tracking down the PRS members, or finding their present whereabouts, was going to work. They'd been covering themselves for such an emergency, undoubtedly, for a good many years—and if anyone got close, a burst of mental energy was quite enough to turn the seeker aside.
Nobody, Malone told himself grimly, 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 how 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. He stood up slowly and went into the kitchen to start heating water for coffee. There was, he told himself, a long night ahead of him. He 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 tendered it some extremely rude words. 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 too much traffic floated in the air. Downstairs somebody was playing a television set too loudly, and the voice reached Malone's semiaware mind in a great tinny shout:
"The President, taking action on the current crisis, has declared martial law throughout the nation," a voice said in an important-sounded monotone. "Exempt from this proclamation are members of the Armed Services, Special Agents and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The proclamation, issued this morning, was made public in a special news conference which—"
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 a little after two.
"Later developments will be reported as and when they occur," the announcer was saying, "and in one hour a special panel of newscasters will be assembled here to discuss this latest action in the light of present happenings. Any special rules and regulations will be broadcast over this station—"
"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 clearer-headed than he had been. Maybe the sleep had actually done him some good.
He yawned, blinked and stretched, and then padded into the bathroom for a shower and shave. After he'd changed he thought about a morning or afternoon 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.
Now he knew that, sooner or later, he was going to have to talk to Burris. Burrishadto know, even if there was nothing to be done.
And now was just as good—or as bad—a time as any.
He didn't hesitate. He punched the button on his intercom for Burris' office and then sat back, with his eyes closed, waiting 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 in this afternoon."
"Oh," Malone said. "Sure. O.K. 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 hand it to Burris on a silver platter. "But why Miami?" he added.
"Don't you hear about anything any more?" Wolf asked.
"I've been on vacation."
"Oh," Wolf said. "Well, the Governor of Mississippi was assassinated yesterday, at Miami Beach."
"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. But you know how things are—everything's confused. 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. "And he picked the right time for it, too—the way things are he was just one more confusion among the rest. 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. "But it's even worse now, with everything going nuts. 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 saw a man acting suspicious in any of the nearby buildings, or heard a shot, or saw anybody at all lurking or loitering anywhere near 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. Everything happening down there isn't happening, according to them; Miami Beach is the one unsullied beauty spot in a mixed-up United States."
"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, and switched off.
The assassination of Nemours P. Flarion, he told himself, obviously meant something. It pointed straight toward some entirely new kind of answer. Granted, old Nemours P. had been a horrible mistake, a paranoid, self-centered, would-be, dictator whose final act was quite in keeping with the rest of his official life. Who else would be in Miami Beach, far away from his home state, while the President was declaring nationwide martial law?
But that, Malone told himself, wasn't the point. Or not quite the point, anyhow.
Maybe some work would dig up more facts. Anyhow, Malone was reasonably sure that he could reassign himself from vacation time, at least until he called Burris. And he had work to do; 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 Ardanko. Both of these last are connected with the Society."
"You're back on duty, Malone?" Potter said.
"Right," Malone said. "Make that fast, will you?"
Potter nodded. "Right away," he said.
It didn't take long for the facsimile records to arrive, and Malone went right to work on them. Maybe somewhere in those records was the clue he had desperately needed. Where was the PRS? What were they doing now? What did they plan to do?
And why had they started the whole row in the first place?
The PRS, he saw, was even more widely spread than he had thought. 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 nonmaterialistic, 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, hardly mattered. Maybe in Russia they called themselves the Lenin Study Group, or the Better Borschch League. He was fairly sure, from all the evidence, that the PRS had some kind of organization even behind the Iron Curtain.
Money backing 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 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; 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 nothing in the way of usable clues.
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 claw its way to the bottom of the best-seller list.
And that was that. Malone tried to figure out whether all this information did him any good, and the answer came very quickly. The answer was no. He opened the second dossier.
Luba Ardanko had been born in New York. Her mother had been a woman of Irish descent named Mary Foley, and had died in '69. Her father had been a Hungarian named Chris Yorgen Ardanko, and had died in the same year.
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. But, as the entire structure of facts became clear, and then turned right upside down in his mind and changed into something else entirely—something that told him not only who, and where, but also why, he became absolutely sure of one thing.
He knew the final answer.
And itwasobvious. Obvious as all hell!
There was, of course, only one thing to do and only one place to go. Malone teleported to the New York offices of the FBI and went immediately downstairs to the garage, where a specially-built Lincoln awaited him at all times.
One of the mechanics looked up curiously as Malone headed for the car. "Want a driver?" he said.
Malone thanked his lucky stars that he didn't have to get into any lengthy and time-consuming argument about whether or not he was on vacation. "No, thanks," he said. "This is a solo job."
That, he told himself, was for sure. He drove out onto the streets and into the heavy late-afternoon traffic of New York. The Lincoln handled smoothly, but Malone didn't press his luck in the traffic which he thought was even worse than the mess he'd driven through with the happy cab driver two days before. He wasn't in any hurry now, after all. He had all the time in the world, and he knew it. They—and, for once, Malone could put real names to that "they"—would still be waiting for him when he got there.
Ifhe got there, he thought suddenly, turning a corner and being confronted with a great mass of automobiles wedged solidly fender to fender as far as the eye could see. The noise of honking horns was deafening, and great clouds of smoke rose up to make the scene look like the circle of Hell devoted to hot-rod drivers. Malone cursed and sweated until the line began to move, and then cursed and sweated some more until he was out of the city at last.
It took quite a lot of time. New York traffic, in the past forty-eight hours, hadn't gotten better; it had gotten a lot worse. He was nearly exhausted by the time he finally crossed the George Washington Bridge and headed west. And, while he drove, he began to let his reflexes take over most of the automotive problems now that New York City was behind him.
He took all his thoughts from behind the shield that had sheltered them and arrayed them neatly before him. They were beamed, he told himself firmly, to one particular group of persons and to no one else. 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, which was perfectly all right by itself. But they always had a whole crowd of suspects listening to them, too. Malone knew perfectly well that he could never manage a setup like that. People would interrupt him. Things would happen. Two dogs would rush in and start a battle royal on the floor. There would be an earthquake or an invasion of little green Venusians, or else somebody would just decide to faint and cause a furor.
But now, at long last, he realized, he had his chance. Nobody could interrupt him. And he could explain to his heart's content.
Because the members of the PRS were telepathic. And Kenneth J. Malone, he thought happily, was not.
Luba, he was sure, would be tuned in on him as he drove toward their Pennsylvania hiding place. At least, he wanted to think so; it made things much more pleasant. And he hoped that Luba, or whoever was really tuned in, would alert everybody else, so they could all hook in and hear his grand final explanation of everything.
He opened his mind in that one special direction, beaming his thoughts to nobody else but the group he'd decided on. A second of silence passed.
And then a sound began. Malone had passed a company of soldiers some yards back, but he hadn't noticed them particularly; with the country under martial law, soldiers were going to be as common as tree frogs. Now, however, something different was happening.
Malone felt the car tremble slightly, and stopped. Past him, rolling along the side of the highway he was on, came a parade of thirty-ton tanks. They rumbled and roared their slow, elephantine way down the highway and, after what seemed about three days, disappeared from sight. Malone wondered what the tanks were for, and then dismissed it from his mind. It certainly wasn't very pleasant to think about, no matter how necessary it turned out to be.
He started up again. There were few cars on the road, although a lot of them were parked along the sides. A series ofClosedsigns on filling stations explained that, and Malone began to be grateful for the national emergency. It allowed him to drive without much interference, anyhow.
And a hearty good afternoon to all, he thought—especially to Miss Luba Ardanko. I hope she's tuned in ... and, if she isn't, I hope somebody alerts her. Frankly, I'd rather talk to her than to anyone else I can think of at the moment. As a matter of fact, it's a little easier to concentrate if I talk out loud, so I think I'll do that.
He swerved the car at this point, neatly avoiding a broken wooden crate that crouched in wait for him. "Road hog," he told it bitterly, and went on.
"Nothing personal," he went on after a second. "I don't care if you'realllistening in, as a matter of fact. And I'm not going to hide anything." He thought a second, and then added: "Frankly, I'm not sure I've got anything to hide."
He paused and, in his imagination, he could almost hear Luba's voice.
I'm listening, Kenneth,she said.Go on.
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 said, speaking earnestly to his windshield, "has been going on for a good many years now—since the 1880's, as a matter of fact. That's a long time and it adds up to a lot of Psychical Research. A lot of famous and intelligent people have belonged to the Society. And, with all that, it's hardly surprising that, after nearly a hundred years of work, something finally turned up."
At this point, there was another interruption. A couple of sawhorses blocked the road ahead of Malone. As he stared at them, he felt his prescience begin to itch. He took out his .44 Magnum and slowed the car, memorizing the road as he passed it. He stopped the car before the sawhorses. Three enlisted men carrying M-1 rifles, and a stern, pale captain, his bars pointing sideways and glittering on his shoulders, appeared from the sides of the road.
The captain's voice was a military bark. "Out of the car!"
Malone began to obey.
"With your hands up!" the captain snapped. Malone dropped the .44 unobtrusively into his jacket pocket and complied. Then, as he came out of the car, he teleported himself back to a section of the road he'd memorized, ten feet behind the car. The four men were gaping, dumbfounded, as Malone drew his gun and shot them. Then he removed the sawhorses, got back in his car, reloaded the .44, put it back in his holster and drove on.
"Now," he said in a thoughtful tone. "Where was I?"
He imagined Luba's voice saying:You were telling us how, all this time, it's hardly surprising—
"Oh, yes," he said. "Well, then. So you solved some of the problems, you'd set. You learned how to use and control telepathy and teleportation, maybe, long before scientific boys like Dr. O'Connor became interested. But you never announced it publicly. You kept the knowledge all to yourself. 'Is this what the common folk call telepathy, Lord Bromley?' 'Yes, Lady Bromley.' 'Much too good for them, isn't it?' And maybe it is, at that; I don't know."
His thoughts, he recognized, were veering slightly. After a second he got back on the track.
"At any rate," he went on, "you—all of your out there—are responsible for what's happening to this country and all of Europe and Asia—and, for all I know, the suburbs of Hell.
"I remember one of the book facsimiles you got me, for instance," he said. "The writer tried for an 'expose' of the Society, in which he attempted to prove that Sir Lewis Carter and certain other members were trying to take over the world and run it to suit themselves, using their psionic powers to institute a rather horrible type of dictatorship over the world.
"It was a pretty convincing book in a lot of ways. The author evidently know a lot about what he was dealing with."
At this point, Malone ran into another roadblock. There had been a fight of some kind up ahead, and a lot of cars with what looked like shell-holes in them were piled on one side of the road. The State Police were working under the confused direction of an Army major to straighten things out, while a bulldozer pushed the cars off the road onto the grass bordering it. The major stopped what he was doing and came to meet Malone as the car stopped.
"Get off the road," the major said surlily.
Malone looked up at him. "I've got some identification here," he said. "Mind if I get it out?"
The major reached for a gun and held it. "Go ahead," he said. "Don't try anything funny. It's been hell up and down this road, mister."
Malone flipped out his wallet and showed the identification.
"FBI?" the Major said. "What're you doing out here?"
"Special assignment," Malone said. "Oh ... by the way ... you might send some men back a ways. There are four dead mean in military uniforms lying on the road near a couple of sawhorses."
The major stared. "Dead?" he said at last. "Dead how?"
"I shot them," Malone said.
"You—" The major's finger tightened on the trigger of his gun.
"Now wait a minute," Malone said. "I said they were in military uniforms. I didn't say they were soldiers."
"But—"
"Three enlisted men carrying M-1 rifles?" Malone said. "When the M-1's out of date? And a captain with his bars on sideways? No, major. Those were renegades. Looters of some kind; they wanted to kill me and get the car and any valuables I happened to have."
The major, very slowly, relaxed his grip on the gun and his arm fell to his side. "You did the smart thing, Mr. Malone," he said.
"And I've got to go on doing it," Malone said. "I'm in a hurry."
He noticed a newspaper fluttering at the side of the road, not too near the cars. Somehow it made everything seem even more lonely and strange. The headlines fluttered into sight:
MARTIAL LAW EDICT"MUST BE OBEYED," SAYS GOVERNORBut Riots Are Feared In Outlying TownsMAN AND WIFE CONFESS KILLING OF RELATIVES ABOARD PRIVATE PLANE:Force Kin To Drop Off
MARTIAL LAW EDICT
"MUST BE OBEYED," SAYS GOVERNOR
But Riots Are Feared In Outlying Towns
MAN AND WIFE CONFESS KILLING OF RELATIVES ABOARD PRIVATE PLANE:
Force Kin To Drop Off
There was a photo of a woman there, too, and Malone could read just a little of the caption:
"Obeying the edict of martial law laid down by the President, Miss Helen A.—"
He wondered vaguely if her last name were Handbasket.
The major was looking at him. "O.K., then," he said.
"I can go on?" Malone said.
The major looked stern. "Drive on," he said.
Malone got the car going; the roadblock was lifted for him and he went on by.
After a moment, he said: "Pardon the interruption. I trust that all the devoted listeners to Uncle Kenneth's Happy Hour are still tuned in."
Go ahead,said Lou's voice.
"All right, let's take a look at what you've been doing. You've caused people to change their minds about what they've been intending to do. You can cause all sorts of hell to break loose that way. You have a lot of people you want to get rid of, so you play on their neuroses and concoct errors for them to fight. You rig things so that they quit, or get fired, or lose elections, or get arrested, or just generally get put out of circulation. Some of the less stable ones just up and did away with themselves.
"Sometimes, it's individuals who have to go. Sometimes, it's whole groups or maybe even whole nations. And sometimes it's in between, and you manage to foul up organizational moves with misplaced papers, mis-sent messages, errors, changed minds, and everything else you can think of.
"You know," he went on, "at first I couldn't see any pattern in what was going on—though I remember telling myself that there was a kind of justice in the way this thing was just as hard on gangsters as it was on businessmen and Congressmen.
"The Congressman from Gahoochie County, Arkansas, gets himself in a jam over fraudulent election returns on the same day that the accountant for the Truckers Union sends Mike Sands' books to the Attorney General. Simple justice, I call it.
"And, you know, seen from that viewpoint, this whole caper might come out looking pretty good. If most of the characters you've taken care of are just the boys who needed taking care of, I'd say more power to you—except for one thing. It's all right to get rid of all the fools, idiots, maniacs, blockheads, morons, psychopaths, paranoids, timidity-ridden, fear-worshipers, fanatics, thieves, and the rest of the general, all-round, no-good characters; I'm all for it. But not this way. Oh, no.
"You've pressed the panic button, that's what you've done.
"You've done more damage in two weeks than all those fumblebrains have been able to do in several myriads of lifetimes. You've loused up the economy of this nation and every other civilized nation. You've caused riots in which innocent people have died; you've caused thousands more to lose their businesses and their savings. And only God Himself knows how many more are going to die of starvation and murder before this thing is over.
"And you can't tell me thatallof those people deserve to die."
He slowed down as he came to a small town, and for the first time in many miles he focused on the road ahead with his full mind. The town, he saw, looked like a shambles. There were four cars tastefully arranged on the lawn of what appeared to be the local library. Across the street, a large drugstore was in flames, and surprised people were hurrying to put it out. There didn't seem to be any State Police or Army men around, but they'd passed through; Malone saw a forgotten overseas cap lying on the road ahead.
With a shock, he realized that he was now in Pennsylvania, close to where he wanted to go. A signboard told him the town he was looking at was Milford. It was a mess, and Malone hoped fervently that it was a mess that could eventually be cleaned up.
The town was a small one, and Malone was glad to get out of it so quickly.
"That's the kind of thing I mean," he said aloud. Then he paused. "Are you there, anybody?"
He imagined he heard Luba's voice saying:Yes, Ken. Yes, I'm here. Listening to you.
Imagination was fine but, of course, there was no way for them to get through to him. They were telepathic, but Kenneth J. Malone, he told himself sadly, was not.
"Hello, out there," he went on. "I hope you've been listening so far, because there isn't too much more for me to say.
"Just this: you've wrecked my country, and you've wrecked almost all of the rest of civilization. You've brought my world down around my ears.
"I have every logical reason to hate your guts. By all the evidence I have, you are a group of the worst blackguards who ever existed; by all the evidence, I should be doing everything in my power to exterminate you.
"But I'm not.
"My prescience tells me that what you've been doing is right and necessary. I'm damned if I can see it, but there it is. I just hope you can explain it to me."
Soon, he was in the midst of the countryside. It was, of course, filled with country. It spread around him in the shape of hills, birds, trees, flowers, grass, billboards and other distractions to the passing motorist.
It took Malone better than two hours more to find the place he was looking for. Long before he found it, he had come to the conclusion that finding country estates in Pennsylvania was only a shade easier than finding private homes in the Borough of Brooklyn. In both cases, he had found himself saddled with the same frantic search down what seemed likely routes which turned out to lead nowhere. He had found, in both cases, complete ignorance of the place on the part of local citizens, and even strong doubts that the place could possibly have any sort of existence.
The fact that is was growing dark didn't help much, either.
But he found it at last. Rounding a curve in a narrow, blacktop road, he saw the home behind 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 minute shouting: "Rhett! The children's mush is on fire!" or something equally inappropriate.
Inside it, however, if Malone were right, was not the magnetic Scarlett. Inside the house were some of the most important members of the PRS—and one person who was not a member.
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 realized, thinking of "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 tract of land. Now, all that remained of the vast acreage was the small portion 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 people he'd been beaming to really here? Or had he been led astray by them? Had he been manipulated, in spite of his shield, 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 group was 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 could 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 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.
Finally 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.
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 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 Ardanko.
Sir Lewis softly exhaled a cloud of smoke as he removed the briar from his mouth. "Malone," he asked gently, "how did you know we would be here?"
"Well," Malone said, "I just ... I mean, it was obvious as soon as I—" He stopped, frowning. "I had one thing to go on, anyway," he said. "I figured out the PRS was responsible for all the troubles because it was so efficient. And then, while I was sitting and staring at the file reports, it suddenly came to me: the FBI was just as efficient. So it was obvious."
"What was?" Burris said.
Malone shrugged. "I thought you'd been keeping me on vacation because your mind was being changed," he said. "Now I can see you were doing it of your own free will."
"Yes," Sir Lewis said. "But how did you know you'd find ushere, Malone?"
There was a shadow in the room, but not a visible one. Malone felt the chill of sudden danger. Whatever was going to happen, he realized, he would not be around for the finish. He, Kenneth Joseph Malone, the cuddly, semi-intrepid FBI Agent he had always known and loved, would never get out of this deadly situation. If he lived, he would be so changed that—
He didn't even want to think about it.
"What sort of logic," Sir Lewis was saying, "led you to the belief that we would all be here, in Andrew's house?"
Malone forced his mind to consider the question. "Well," he began, "it isn't exactly logic, I guess."
Luba smiled at him. He felt a little reassured, but not much. "You should have phrased that differently," she said. "It's: 'It isn't exactly logic. I guess.'"
"Not guess," Sir Lewis said. "You know. Prescience, Malone. Your precognitive faculty."
"All right," Malone said. "All right. So what?"
"Take it easy," Burris put in. "Relax, Malone. Everything's going to be all right."
Sir Lewis waved a hand negligently. "Let's continue," he said. "Tell me, Malone: if you were a mathematics professor, teaching a course in calculus, how would you grade a paper that had all the answers but didn't show the work?"
"I never took calculus," Malone said. "But I imagine I'd flunk him."
"Why?" Sir Lewis said.
"Because if he can't back up his answer," Malone said slowly, "then it's no better than a layman's guess. He has to give reasons for his answers; otherwise nobody else can understand him."
"Fine," Sir Lewis said. "Perfectly fine. Now—" he puffed at his pipe—"can you give me a logical reason for arriving at the decision you made a few hours ago?"
The danger was coming closer, Malone realized. He didn't know what it was or how to guard himself against it. All he could do was answer, and play for time.
"While I was driving up here," he said, "I sent you a message. I told you what I knew and what I believed about the whole world picture as it stands now. I don't know if you received it, but I—"
Luba spoke without the trace of a smile. "You mean you didn't know?" she said. "You didn't know I was answering you?"
That was the first pebble of the avalanche, Malone knew suddenly—the avalanche that was somehow going to destroy him. "You forced your thoughts into my mind, then," he said as coolly as he could. "Just as you forced decision on the rest of society."
"Now, dammit, Malone!" Burris said suddenly. "You know those bursts take a lot of energy, and only last for a fraction of a second!"
Malone blinked. "Then you ... didn't—"
Of course I didn't force anything on you, Kenneth. I can't. Not all the power of the entire PRS could force anything through your shield. But you opened it to me.
It was Luba's mental "voice." Malone opened his mouth, shut it and then, belatedly, snapped shut the channel through which he'd contacted her. Luba gave him a wry look, but said nothing. "You mean I'm a telepath?" Malone asked weakly.
"Certainly," Sir Lewis snapped. "At the moment, you can only pick up Luba—but you are certainly capable of picking up anyone, eventually. Just as you learned to teleport, you can learn to be a telepath. You—"
The room was whirling, but Malone tried to keep his mind steady. "Wait a minute," he said. "If you received what I sent, then you know I've got a question to ask."
There was a little silence.
Finally Sir Lewis looked up. "You want to know why you felt we—the PRS—were innocent of the crimes you want to charge us with. Very well." He paused. "We have wrecked civilization: granted. We could have done it more smoothly: granted."
"Then—"
Sir Lewis' face was serious and steady. Malone tensed.
"Malone," Sir Lewis said, "do you think you're the only one with a mental shield?"
Malone shook his head. "I guess stress—fixity of mind or purpose—could develop it in anyone," he said. "At least, in some people."
"Very well," Sir Lewis said. "Now, among the various people of the world who have, through one necessity or another, managed to develop such shields—"
Burris broke in impatiently. His words rang, and then echoed in the old house.
"Some fool," he said flatly, "was going to start the Last War."
"So you had to stop it," Malone said after a long second. "But I still don't see—"
"Of course you don't," Sir Lewis said. "But you've got to understand why you don't see it first."
"Because I'm stupid," Malone said.
Luba was shaking her head. Malone turned to face her. "Not stupid," she said. "But some people, Kenneth, have certain talents. Others have—other talents. There's no way of equating these talents; all are useful, each performs a different function."
"And my talent," Malone said, "is stupidity. But—"
She lit a cigarette daintily. "Not at all," she said. "You've done a really tremendous job, Kenneth. I was trained ever since I was a baby to use my psionic abilities—the PRS has known how to train children in that line ever since 1970. Only Mike Fueyo developed a system for instruction independently; the boy was, and is, a genius, as you've noticed."
"Agreed," Malone said. "But—"
"You, however," Luba said, "have the distinction of being the first human being who has, as an adult, achieved his full powers without childhood training. In addition, you're the only human being who has ever developed to the extent you have—in precognition, too."
She puffed on the cigarette. Malone waited.
"But what you don't have," she said at last, very carefully, "is the ability to reason out the steps you've taken, after you've reached the proper conclusion."
"Like the calculus student," Malone said. "I flunk." Something inside him grated over the marrow in his bones. It was as though someone had decided that the best cure for worry was coarse emery in the joints, and he, Kenneth J. Malone, had been picked for the first experiment.
"You're not flunking," Luba said. "You're a very long way from flunking, Kenneth."
Burris cleared his throat suddenly. Malone turned to him. The Head of the FBI stuck an unlighted cigar into his mouth, chewed it a little, and then said: "Malone, we've been keeping tabs on you. Your shield was unbreakable—but we have been able to reach the minds of people you've talked to: Mike Sands, Primo Palveri, and so on. And Her Majesty, of course: you opened up a gap in your shield to talk to her, and you haven't closed it down. Until you started broadcasting here on the way up, naturally."
"All right," Malone said, waiting with as much patience as possible for the point.
"I tried to take you off the case," Burris went on, "because Sir Lewis and the others felt you were getting too close to the truth. Which you were, Malone, which you were." He lit his cigar and looked obscurely pleased. "But they didn't know how you'd take it," he said. "They ... we ... felt that a man who hadn't been trained since childhood to accept the extrasensory abilities of the human mind couldn't possibly learn to accept the reality of the job the PRS has to do."
"I still don't," Malone said. "I'm stupid. I flunk. Remember?"
"Now, now," Burris said helplessly. "Not at all, Malone. But we were worried. I lied to you about those three spies—I put the drug in the water-cooler. I tried to keep you from learning the Fueyo method of teleportation. I didn't want you to learn that you were telepathic."
"But I did," Malone said, "And what does that make me?"
"That," Sir Lewis cut in, "is what we're attempting to find out."
Malone felt suitably crushed, but he wasn't sure by what. "I've got some questions," he said after a second. "I want to know three things."
"Go ahead," Sir Lewis said.
"One:" Malone said, "How come Her Majesty and the other nutty telepaths didn't spot you? Two: How come you sent me out on these jobs when you were afraid I was dangerous? And three: What was it that was so safe about busting up civilization? How did that save us from the Last War?"
Sir Lewis nodded. "First," he said, "we've developed a technique of throwing up a shield and screening it with a surface of innocuous thoughts—like hiding behind a movie screen. Second ... well, we had to get the jobs done, Malone. And Andrew thought you were the most capable, dangerous or not. For one thing, we wanted to get all the insane telepaths in one place; it's difficult to work when the atmosphere's full of such telepathic ravings."
"But wrecking the world because of a man with a mind-shield—why not just work things so his underlings wouldn't obey him?" Malone shook his head. "That sounds more reasonable."
"It may," Sir Lewis said. "But it wouldn't work. As a matter of fact, it was tried, and it didn't work. You see, the Sino-Soviet top men were smart enough to see that their underlings were being tampered with. And they've developed a system, partly depending on automatic firing systems, partly on individuals with mind-blocks—that is, people who aren't being tampered with—which we can't disrupt directly. So we had to smash them."
"And the United States at the same time," Burris said. "The economic balance had to be kept; a strong America would be forced in to fill the power vacuum otherwise, and that would make for an even worse catastrophe. And if we weren't in trouble, the Sino-Soviet Bloc would blame their mess on us. And that would start the Last War before collapse could get started. Right, Malone?"
"I see," Malone said, thinking that he almost did. He told himself he could feel happy now; the danger—which hadn't been danger to him, really, but danger from him toward the PRS, toward civilization—was over. But he didn't feel happy. He didn't feel anything.
"There's a crisis building in New York," Sir Lewis said suddenly, "that's going to take all our attention. Malone, why don't you ... well, go home and get some rest? We're going to be busy for a while, and you'll want to be fresh for the work coming up."
"Sure," Malone said listlessly. "Sure."
As the others rose, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Then he vanished.
Two hours passed, somehow. Bourbon and soda helped them pass, Malone discovered; he drank two high-balls slowly, trying not to think about anything. He felt terrible. After a while he made himself a third high-ball and started on it. Maybe this would make him feel better. Maybe he thought, he ought to break out his cigars and celebrate.
But there didn't seem to be very much to celebrate somehow. He felt like an amoeba on a slide being congratulated on having successfully conquered the world.
He drank some more bourbon-and-soda. Amoebae, he told himself, didn't drink bourbon-and-soda. He was better off than an amoeba. He was happier than an amoeba. But somehow he couldn't imagine any amoeba in the world, no matter how heart-broken, feeling any worse than Kenneth J. Malone.
He looked up. There was another amoeba in the room.
Then he frowned. She wasn't an amoeba, he thought. She was the scientist the amoeba was supposed to fall in love with, so the scientist could report on everything he did, so all the other scien—psiontists could know all about him. But whoever heard of a scien—psiontist—falling in love with an amoeba? Nobody. It was fate. And fate was awful. Malone had often suspected it, but now he was sure. Now he was looking at things from the amoeba's side, and fate was terrible.
"No, Ken," the psiontist said. "It needn't be at all like that."
"Oh, yes, it need," Malone said positively. "It need be even worse. When I have some more to drink, it'llbeeven worse. Wait and see."
"Ken," Luba said softly, "you don't have to suffer this way."
"No," Malone said agreeably, "I don't. You could shoot me and then I'd be dead. Just quit all this amoebing around, O.K.?"
"You're already half shot," Luba said sharply. "Now be quiet and listen. You're angry because you've fallen in love with me and you're all choked up over the futility of it all."
"Exactly," Malone said. "Ex-positively-actly. You're a psionic super-man—woman. You can figure things out in your own little head instead of just getting along on dum psionic luck like us amoebae. You're too far above me."
"Ken, listen!" Luba snapped. "Look into my mind. You can link up with me: go ahead and do it. You can read me clear down to the subconscious if you want to."
Malone blinked.
"Now, Ken!" Luba said.
Malone looked. For a long time.
Half an hour later, Kenneth J. Malone, alone in his room, was humming happily to himself as he brushed a few specks of dust from the top of his best royal blue bowler. He faced the mirror on the wall, puffed on the cigar clenched between his teeth, and adjusted the bowler to just the right angle.
There was a knock on the door. He went and opened it, carefully disposing of the cigar first. "Oh," he said. "What are you doing here?"
"Just saying hello," Thomas Boyd grinned. "Back at work?"
Boyd didn't know, of course, what had happened. Nor need he ever know. "Just about," Malone said. "Spending the evening relaxing, though."
"Hm-m-m," Boyd said. "Let me guess. Her name begins with L?"
"It does not," Malone said flatly.
"But—" Boyd began.
Malone cast about in his mind for an explanation. Telling Boyd the truth—that Luba and Kenneth J. Malone just weren't equals as far as social intercourse went—would leave him exactly nowhere. But, somehow, it had to be said. "Tom," he said, "suppose you met a beautiful girl—charming, wonderful, brilliant."
"Great," Boyd said. "I like it already."
"Suppose she looked about ... oh ... twenty-three," Malone went on.
"Do any more supposing," Boyd said, "and I'll be pawing the ground."
"And then," Malone said, very carefully, "suppose you found out, after you'd been out with her ... well, when you took her out, say, you met your grandmother."
"My grandmother," Boyd said virtuously, "doesn't go to joints like that."
"Use your imagination," Malone snapped. "And suppose your grandmother recognized the girl as an old schoolmate of hers."
Boyd swallowed hard. "As a what?"
"An old schoolmate," Malone said. "Suppose this girl were so charming and everything just because she'd had ... oh, ninety years or so to practice in."
"Malone," Boyd said in a depressed tone, "you can spoil more ideas—"
"Well," Malone said, "would you go out with her again?"
"You kidding?" Boyd said. "Of course not."
"But she's the same girl," Malone said. "You've just found out something new about her, that's all."
Boyd nodded. "So," he said, "you found out something new about Luba. Like, maybe, she's ninety years old?"
"No," Malone said. "Nothing like that. Just—something." He remembered Queen Elizabeth's theory of politeness toward superiors: people, she'd said, act as if they believed their bosses were superior to them, but they didn't believe it.
On the other hand, he thought, when a man knows and believes that someone actuallyissuperior—then, he doesn't mind at all. He can depend on that superiority to help him. And love, ordinary man-and-woman love, just can't exist.
Nor, Malone told himself, would anyone want it to. It would, after all, be damned uncomfortable.
"So who's the girl?" Boyd said. "And where? The clubs are all closed, and the streets probably aren't very safe just now."
"Barbara Wilson," Malone said, "and Yucca Flats. I ought to be able to get a fast plane." He shrugged. "Or maybe teleport," he added.
"Sure," Boyd said. "But on a night with so many troubles—"
"Oh, King Henry," Malone said, "hearken. A man who looks as historical as you do ought to know a little history."
"Such as?" Boyd said, bristling slightly.
"There have always been troubles," Malone said. "In the Eighth Century, it was Saracens; in the Fourteenth, the Black Death. Then there was the Reformation, and the Prussians in 1870, and the Spanish in 1898, and—"
"And?" Boyd said.
Malone took a deep breath. He could almost feel the court dress flowing over him, as the court manners did. Lady Barbara, after all, attendant to Her Majesty, would expect a certain character from him.
After a second, he had it.
"In 1914, it was enemy aliens," said Sir Kenneth Malone.