Sweating, Malone stared grimly at the picture he had drawn on a page of his notebook. He'd been trying the stunt for four days, and so far all he had achieved was a nice profusion of perspiration. He was beginning to feel like an ad for a Turkish bath.
"No, Ken," Dorothea said patiently. "No. You can't do it that way. You've got tovisualizeit. That's how Mike could find red Cadillacs so easily. All he had to do was—"
"I know," Malone said, impatiently. "That's what the pictures are for. But I'm no artist. This doesn't even look muchlikemy office."
"It doesn't have to, Ken," Dorothea said. "All it has to do is give you enough details to enable you to visualize your destination. The better your memory is, the less detail you need. But you've got to grasp the whole area in your mind."
Malone lifted his eyes from thebook and stared into the darkness outside the window without seeing it. Midnight had come and gone a long time ago, and he was still working.
"If I don't crack this case pretty soon," he muttered, "Burris is going to find a special new assignment for me—like investigating the social life of a deserted space station."
"Now, that's just what's bothering you," Dorothea said. "Get your mind off Burris. You can't teleport when your mind is occupied with other things."
"Then how did the kids hop around so much during the fight at the warehouse?"
"Plenty of practice," Dorothea said. "They've been doing it longer than you have. It's like playing the piano. The beginner has to concentrate, but the expert can play a piece he's familiar with and hold a conversation at the same time. Now stop worrying—and start concentrating."
Malone looked at the book again. With an effort, he forced everything out of his mind except the picture. Burris' face came back once or twice, but he managed to get rid of it. He looked at the lopsided drawings that represented various items in the room, and made himself concentrate solely on visualizing the objects themselves and their surroundings.
Then, as the picture became clearer and achieved more reality, he began going over the other mental exercises that Dorothea had taught him.
He heard a clock tick.
It was gone.
There was nothing but the picture, and the room it stood for ... nothing ... nothing....
The lights went out.
Malone blinked and jerked his head up from the notebook. "What hap—" he began.
And then he stopped.
He was no longer in his hotel room at the Statler-Hilton. He was standing in the middle of his office at FBI headquarters, Washington, D.C.
It had worked!
Malone walked over to the wall switch and turned on the lights in the darkened room. He looked around. He was definitely in his office.
He was a teleport.
He blinked and wondered briefly if he were dreaming. He pinched himself, said: "Ow," and decided that the pain offered no certain proof.
But he didn't feel like part of a dream.
He felt real. So did the office.
Just as he had promised Dorothea, he went to the phone and dialed the Statler-Hilton.
It took a minute for the long-distance circuits to connect him with Manhattan. Then the pretty operator at the hotel was smiling at him from the screen. "Statler-Hilton Hotel," she said. "May we help you?"
"Ring Room 814," Malone said. "I'm probably asleep in it."
"What?" the operator said.
"Never mind," Malone said. "Just ring it."
"Yes, sir." The screen went blank.
The screen stayed blank for a long time.
And then the operator was back. "I'm sorry, sir," she said. "That room doesn't answer."
"You're sure?" Malone said.
"Certainly."
"Try it again," Malone said.
The operator did so. She returned with the same answer.
Malone frowned and hung up. It didn't sound right. Even a dream was supposed to make more sense than this was making. There was something wrong.
He had to get back to the hotel room.
There was only one trouble. He didn't have a picture of the room in his notebook.
Dorothea had said that it was almost impossible to go to a place one hadn't been to before. Mike Fueyo had been able to pick up any red Cadillac in the city because he'd concentrated solely on the symbol of a red Cadillac. But he never knew which Cadillac he'd end up at.
Malone closed his eyes and tried to remember the hotel room. He half-wished he had a photograph of it, but Dorothea had told him that photos wouldn't work. They were too complete; they required no effort of the mind. Only a symbol would do.
Of course, the job could be done without a symbol by somebody who'd had plenty of practice. But Malonehad made exactly one jump. Could he do it the second time with nothing to work with except his own recollection and visualization of the room?
He didn't know, but he was certainly going to try. He had to.
Something was wrong; something had happened to Dorothea.
He tried to imagine what it could be, and then realized that such thoughts were only delaying him by distracting his mind from its main job.
He kept his eyes tightly closed and tried to form the picture in his mind. The couch—there. The dresser—over there. The easy-chair, the rug, the walls, the table—wait a minute: he was losing the couch. There. Now. The table, the desk—all there. In color. And in detail.
Slowly they came, and he held them in place, visualizing his hotel room just as he had visualized his office minutes before. He concentrated. Harder. Harder.Harder.HAR—
"Sir Kenneth!" a voice said. "Will you please stop standing there with your eyes closed and help me with this poor child? She's fainted."
Malone's eyes popped open, but for a minute he wasn't entirely sure he'd opened them. His visualization blended almost perfectly with the reality of the room around him. There was only one jarring difference.
He had certainly never visualized the richly-dressed figure of Queen Elizabeth I standing in the center of the room.
"Now, now," she said. "Thinking like that can only lead to confusion. Come over here and help me."
Dorothea was on the couch. Between them, they managed to wake her gently, and she sat up and stared around at them and the room. "I'm sorry," she said dazedly. "It's just that I didn't expect you to turn into a little old lady in Elizabethan costume. Just a bit disconcerting." She blinked. "By the way, who is she?"
"This," Malone said with a sense of some foreboding, "is Queen Elizabeth I."
"She's dead," Dorothea said decisively.
"Not really, my dear," the Queen said. "Actually, you see ... well, it's too long to explain now." She gave everybody a bland smile.
"She's nuts, then," Dorothea said. "She is nuts, isn't she? Because if she isn't, I am."
"You're not crazy," Malone told her diplomatically. "But she—" He stopped. How could he explain everything, in front of the Queen herself?
"Don't worry about it," Her Majesty said. "Dorothea is a little confused—but it hardly matters. Perhaps there are other things to do."
"Sure," Malone said uncertainly. "By the way, how did you get here?"
"Now, why do you ask that?" the Queen said. "You've already figured it all out, Sir Kenneth."
"I don't get it," Dorothea put in.
"Simple," Malone said. "She's telepathic. She's been listening in on our sessions for the past four days—she must have been. So now she can teleport, too."
Dorothea looked at the little old lady in awe. "But how could you come to a place you'd never been to before?"
"I got all the information I needed, my dear, out of Sir Kenneth's mind."
"Sir Kenneth?" Dorothea said. "Sir ... Ken? His mind?"
"Never mind it," Malone said. "What do I do now?"
Her Majesty said: "Don't worry about anything. And use your own psionic talents. You can catch those dear boys now, you know. You're better than they are."
"Me?" Malone said. "But they've had—"
"Practice, of course," the Queen said. "But you have a talent they don't."
"I do?"
"Well," the Queen said, "you've been calling it 'luck' for years. You're much too modest, Sir Kenneth. If you'll think back, you'll remember that every time you had a bit of your so-called luck, it was because you were at the right place at the right time. There's no other way to explain the fact that you wandered at random through Greenwich Village—of all places!—and just happened to end up at the very same red Cadillac that young Mike was going to come to—before he got there!"
Malone felt the back of his head. "That," he said, "was luck?"
"You got the notebook, didn't you?" the Queen said. "But of course it wasn't luck. It's prescience—the ability to predict the future. You've had it all along, but you haven't been consciously using it. The only way you'll ever catch those boys is to know where they're going to be before they get there."
Malone sat down heavily on the couch next to Dorothea. His mind was whirling with a fine, dizzy rapidity. In a few seconds he was going to try and grab the brass ring.
"Oh, I'll help you," the Queen added. "Don't worry about that. I think I can pick up Mike's mind, now that I'm closer to him. And if we can figure out what their plans are, and where they're going to be, we can nab them all, Sir Kenneth. Won't that be nice?"
"Ducky," Malone said. "Simply ducky. All I have to do is predict the future while you read minds and we both teleport. And Dorothea can sit around sticking pins in dolls, I guess. Or—"
"Well, now," the Queen said, "I don't know. Perhaps she just doesn't have that talent. Besides, why would we want to do anything like that? It seems to me—"
"Never mind," Malone said hopelessly. "If we're going to do anything, let's get started."
Twelve hours later, Kenneth J. Malone was sitting quietly in a small room at the rear of a sporting-goodsstore on upper Madison Avenue, trying to remain calm and hoping that the finest, most beautiful and complete hunch—only now it wasn't a "hunch" any more, he reminded himself; now it was prescience—was going to pay off. With him were Boyd and two agents from the Sixty-ninth Street office. They were sitting quietly, too, but there was a sense of enormous excitement in the air. Malone wanted to get up and walk around, but he didn't dare. He clamped his hands in his lap and sat tight.
They waited in silence, not daring to talk. There wasn't a sound in the room. Malone felt like screaming, but he managed to control himself with an effort.
There was no reason why the plan shouldn't work, Malone told himself. According to all the theory he knew, it was fool proof. Her Majesty had no doubts about it, either. She assured him that he had prescience, and several other powers as well. Unfortunately, Malone wasn't quite as sure as she was.
Even if the theory seemed to back her up, he thought, there was still a chance that she was wrong, and the theory was wrong, and everything was wrong. His hunch—prescience, if you wanted to call it that, he amended—said definitely that this would be the place the Spooks would hit tonight. Her Majesty was quite sure of it. And Malone couldn't think of a single really good reason why either of them might be wrong. But maybe he'd got the address mixed up. Maybe the Spooks were somewhere else right now, robbing what they pleased, safe from capture—
It doesn't do much good to know where a teleporteris, Malone thought. But it's extremely handy to know where he's going to be. And if you also know what he plans to do when he gets where he's going, you've got an absolute lead-pipe cinch to work with.
The Queen and Malone had provided that lead-pipe cinch. They were sure that Mike planned to raid the sporting-goods store with the rest of the Spooks that night.
But, of course, they might all just be riding for some kind of horrible, unforeseen fall—
The main part of the sporting-goods store was fairly well lit, even at night, though it was by no means brightly illuminated. There were show-window lights on, and the street lamp from outside cast a nice glow. Malone was grateful for that. But the back room was dark, and the four men there were well-concealed. A curtain closed the room off, and Malone watched the front of the store through a narrow opening in it. He stared until his eyes ached, afraid to blink in case he missed the appearance of the Spooks. Everything had to go off just right, precisely on schedule.
And it was going to happen any minute, he told himself nervously. In just a few minutes, everything would be over.
Malone held his breath.
Then he saw the figure walk slowly by the glass front of the shop, looking in with over-elaborate casualness. He was casing the joint, making sure there was no one left in it.
Mike Fueyo.
Malone tried to breathe, and couldn't.
Seconds ticked by.
And then—almost magically—they appeared. Eight of them, almost simultaneously, in the center of the room.
Mike Fueyo spoke in a low, controlled voice. "O.K., now," he said. "Let's move fast. We haven't got much time. We—"
And that was all he said.
Malone concentrated on just one thing: holding an image of the room, with the eight Spooks in it.
There was a long second of silence.
Malone felt a bead of sweat trickle down his cheek. He held the image.
"What's wrong?" the tallest boy said suddenly—Ramon Otravez, Malone remembered. "What's wrong, Mike?"
Mike let out his breath in a ragged sigh. "I ... don't know," he said slowly. "I can't move—"
"It's a trap!" another boy shouted.
Malone bore down. He could feel power draining out of him, but he held on, willing the boys to remain in the room, blanking out their own teleportative abilities with his stronger ones.
The eight boys stood, frozen, in the center of the lit room.
Malone let another second go by, and then he stepped out from behind the curtains.
"Hello, boys," he said casually.
Mike stared at him. "It's Malone," he said.
"That's right," Malone said. "Hello, Mike. I've been waiting for you."
Mike gulped. "You found us," he said. "Somebody talked."
Malone shook his head. "Nobody talked," he said. Concentration was getting easier; the longer the situation remained the same, the less power it took to keep it that way. He wished he had brought a cigar, and compromised by fishing out a cigarette and lighting it.
Mike said: "But—" and was silent.
"I knew where you were going to be," Malone said. "You see, I've got a few—powers of my own, Mike."
Ramon Otravez said: "He's kidding. It's some kind of a trick."
"Shut up," Mike told him.
"It's no trick," Malone said. "I've been waiting for you for quite a while, boys." He paused. "And you can't move, can you? I've taken care of that."
"Some kind of gas," Mike said instantly.
"Gas?" Malone said. "Nope." He shook his head.
"Electricity," Mike said. It sounded desperate. "Some gimmick you've got set up back there behind the curtain, to—"
"No gimmick," Malone said. "It's just that I know a couple of tricks,too—and I'm a little better at them than you are." The next minute was going to be difficult, he knew, but it had to be done. He "froze" the picture of the room in his mind and, at the same time, pictured himself at the other side of the room. He made the effort, and at first nothing happened. Then—
"You can do the Vanish," Mike said, very slowly and softly.
"Oh, I can do more than that," Malone said cheerfully from the other side of the room. "I can do the Vanish, and I can also keep you from doing it. Right?"
It hung in the balance for a second, but Malone was barely worried about the final outcome. He'd beaten the boys, not with scientific gadgetry or trickery, but at their own game. He'd done it simply, easily and completely. And for boys who were sure they were something very special, boys who'd never been beaten on their own grounds before, the shock was considerable.
Malone knew, even before Mike said: "I guess so," in a defeated voice, that he had won.
"Now," he said briskly, "you boys are going to come down to the FBI offices with me. And you're not going to try any tricks—because you can't get away with a thing, and you know you can't. I've just proven that to you."
"I guess you have," Mike said.
Malone beckoned the three other men out of the back room and then, under his watchful guidance, the procession started for the street.
"The only thing we had to worry about," Malone said, pouring some more champagne into the hollow-stemmed glasses, "was whether the theory would actually prove out in practice. From all we knew, it seemed logical that I could concentrate on the room with the boys in it, and by that concentration prevent them from teleporting out—but there's a lot we don't know, too. And it didn't damage the kids any."
Dorothea relaxed in her chair and looked around at the hotel room walls with contentment. "Mike seemed pretty normal—except that he had that awfultrappedfeeling."
Malone handed her one of the filled glasses with an air. He was beginning slowly to feel less like the nervous, uncertain Kenneth J. Malone and more and more like good old Sir Kenneth Malone. "I can see why he felt trapped," he said. "If a guy's been unhampered by four walls all the time, even for only a year or so, he's certainly going to feel penned in when he's stopped from going through them. Especially when what stops him is just what he has—only more of the same. It might be a little ego-crushing, and just a trifle claustrophobic."
"The main thing is," Dorothea said, "that everybody's so happy. Commissioner Fernack, even—with Mr. Burris promising to give him a medal."
"And Lynch," Malone said reflectively. "He'll get a promotion out ofthis for sure. And good old Kettleman."
"Kettleman," Dorothea said. "Oh, sure. He's some kind of social worker, isn't he? Only we never knew what kind."
"And now he's getting a scroll from the FBI," Malone said. "A citation for coming up with the essential clue in this case. Even though he didn't know itwasthe essential clue. You know," he added reflectively, "one thing puzzles me about that man."
"Yes?"
"Well," Malone said, "he worked in your neighborhood. You knew him."
"Of course I did," Dorothea said. "We all knew Kettleman."
"He said he had a lot of success as a social worker," Malone said. "Now, I've met him. And talked with him. And I just can't picture—"
"Oh," Dorothea said. "We keep him around—kept him around, I mean—as a sort of joke. A pet, or a mascot. Of course, he never did catch on. I don't suppose he has yet."
Malone laughed. "Nope," he said. "He hasn't."
"Mike," Dorothea said.
"Mike what?"
"Mike," she repeated. "He's probably the happiest of all. After Mom and I talked to him for a while, anyhow, and he began to ... to get used to things. Now he's excited about being an FBI man." She looked worriedly at Malone for a second. "You weren't kidding about that, were you?" she asked.
She looked very pretty when she was worried, Malone decided. He leaned over and kissed her with great care. After a while he said: "You were saying?"
"Was I?" Dorothea said. "Oh, yes. I was. About Mike being an FBI man."
"Oh," Malone said. "Well, normally you've got to be a lawyer or an accountant, but there are a few special cases. And maybe Mike would fit in to the special-case bracket. If he doesn't—well, he'll be doing some kind of official work for the Government."
"What about Her Majesty, or whatever she is?" Dorothea asked. "Is she—convinced that teleportation's no good, the way Mike is?"
Malone looked unhappy. "I wish you hadn't mentioned it," he said.
"Then what will you do?" Dorothea said.
"Burris has it all down pat," Malone said bitterly. "Since I'm the only one who can predict where she's going to be, I'm going to be her permanent bodyguard from now on. She's promised me that she won't go teleporting all over the place—but we won't be able to keep her locked up all the time, either. So: whither she goes, I go—first."
"Well," Dorothea said, "don't feel bad. After all, you did what you set out to do."
"I suppose so," Malone said.
"Sure you did," Dorothea said."You got the boys. And they won't feel so bad after they get used to it."
"I suppose not," Malone said. "We had to prove one thing to them, anyway. We can stop them at any time. You see, they've got to think about teleporting, and as soon as they do that one of our telepaths—like Her Majesty or me, I guess—will know what they're thinking. And we can 'freeze' them. I mean, I can."
"It sounds all right," Dorothea said.
"Sure," Malone said. "After all, we did them quite a favor—getting them out of all the trouble they'd gotten themselves into."
"That reminds me, Ken," Dorothea said. "All the things that were stolen. The liquor and all of that. Money. What's going to happen to that?"
"Well," Malone said, "everything that can be returned—and that includes most of the liquor, because they hadn't had a chance to get rid of it to the bootleggers around this area—will be returned. What can't be returned—money, stuff they've used, broken or sold—well, I don't exactly know about that. It might take a special act of Congress," he said brightly.
"All for the boys?" Dorothea said.
"Well, they'll be at Yucca Flats," Malone said, "and they'll be pretty useful. And, as I said before we started all this, if they try to run away from Yucca Flats we'll just have to keep them 'frozen' all the time. I mean, I will. Little as we want to. They can be of some use that way, too. The Government isn't doing all this for nothing."
"But keeping them 'frozen'—"
"I said we didn't want to do it. And I don't think we'll have to. They'll be well taken care of, don't worry. Some of the best psychiatrists and doctors are out there. And Mike and the others—if they can show they're trustworthy—can come home every weekend, or even every night if they can teleport that far." Malone paused. "But it isn't charity," he added. "We need people with specialized psionic abilities—and, for a variety of reasons, they're pretty hard to find."
"You know," Dorothea said, "you're pretty wonderful, Mr. Malone."
Malone didn't answer her. He just kissed her again.
Dorothea pushed him gently away. "I'm envious," she announced. "Everybody gets a reward but me. Do I get left out just because I swiped your notebook?"
Malone kissed her again. "What kind of a reward do you want?"
She sighed. "Oh, well," she said, "I suppose this is good enough."
"Good enough?" Malone said. "Just good enough?"
His lips met hers for the fifth time. She reached one hand gently out to the light switch and pushed it.
The lights went out.