* * *
Dr. O'Connor paused. Something, Malone realized, was expected of him. He thought of several responses and chose one. "I see," he said.
"But the important thing here," Dr. O'Connor said, "is the timing. You see, Charlie was incapable of continued concentration. He could not keep his mind focused on another mind for very long, before he hopped to still another. The actual amount of time concentrated on any given mind at any single given period varied from a minimum of one point three seconds to a maximum of two point six. The timing samples, when plotted graphically over a period of several months, formed a skewed bell curve with a mode at two point oh seconds."
"Ah," Malone said, wondering if a skewed bell curve was the same thing as a belled skew curve, and if not, why not?
"It was, in fact," Dr. O'Connor continued relentlessly, "a sudden variation in those timings which convinced us that there was another telepath somewhere in the vicinity. We were conducting a second set of reading experiments, in precisely the same manner as the first set, and, for the first part of the experiment, our figures were substantially the same. But—" He stopped.
"Yes?" Malone said, shifting his feet and trying to take some weight off his left foot by standing on his right leg. Then he stood on his left leg. It didn't seem to do any good.
"I should explain," Dr. O'Connor said, "that we were conducting this series with a new set of test subjects: some of the scientists here at Yucca Flats. We wanted to see if the intelligence quotients of the subjects affected the time of contact which Charlie was able to maintain. Naturally, we picked the men here with the highest IQ's, the two men we have who are in the top echelon of the creative genius class." He cleared his throat. "I did not include myself, of course, since I wished to remain an impartial observer, as much as possible."
"Of course," Malone said without surprise.
"The other two geniuses," Dr. O'Connor said, "happen to be connected with the project known as Project Isle—an operation whose function I neither know, nor care to know, anything at all about."
Malone nodded. Project Isle was the non-rocket spaceship. Classified. Top Secret. Ultra-Secret. And, he thought, just about anything else you could think of.
"At first," Dr. O'Connor was saying, "our detector recorded the time periods of ... ah mental invasion as being the same as before. Then, one day, anomalies began to appear. The detector showed that the minds of our subjects were being held for as long as two or three minutes. But the phrases repeated by Charlie during these periods showed that his own contact time remained the same; that is, they fell within the same skewed bell curve as before, and the mode remained constant if nothing but the phrase length were recorded."
"Hm-m-m," Malone said, feeling that he ought to be saying something.
Dr. O'Connor didn't notice him. "At first we thought of errors in the detector machine," he went on. "That worried us not somewhat, since our understanding of the detector is definitely limited at this time. We do feel that it would be possible to replace some of the electronic components with appropriate symbolization like that already used in the purely psionic sections, but we have, as yet, been unable to determine exactly which electronic components must be replaced by what symbolic components."
Malone nodded, silently this time. He had the sudden feeling that Dr. O'Connor's flow of words had broken itself up into a vast sea of alphabet soup, and that he, Malone, was occupied in drowning in it.
"However," Dr. O'Connor said, breaking what was left of Malone's train of thought, "young Charlie died soon thereafter, and we decided to go on checking the machine. It was during this period that we found someone else reading the minds of our test subjects—sometimes for a few seconds, sometimes for several minutes."
"Aha," Malone said. Things were beginning to make sense again. Someone else. That, of course, was the spy.
"I found," Dr. O'Connor said, "on interrogating the subjects more closely, that they were, in effect, thinking on two levels. They were reading the book mechanically, noting the words and sense, but simply shuttling the material directly into their memories without actually thinking about it. The actual thinking portions of their minds were concentrating on aspects of Project Isle."
* * *
"In other words," Malone said, "someone was spying on them for information about Project Isle?"
"Precisely," Dr. O'Connor said with a frosty, teacher-to-student smile. "And whoever it was had a much higher concentration time than Charlie had ever attained. He seems to be able to retain contact as long as he can find useful information flowing in the mind being read."
"Wait a minute," Malone said. "Wait a minute. If this spy is so clever, how come he didn't read your mind?"
"It is very likely that he has," O'Connor said. "What does that have to do with it?"
"Well," Malone said, "if he knows you and your group are working on telepathy and can detect what he's doing, why didn't he just hold off on the minds of those geniuses when they were being tested in your machine?"
Dr. O'Connor frowned. "I'm afraid that I can't be sure," he said, and it was clear from his tone that, if Dr. Thomas O'Connor wasn't sure, no one in the entire world was, had been, or ever would be. "I do have a theory, however," he said, brightening up a trifle.
Malone waited patiently.
"He must know our limitations," Dr. O'Connor said at last. "He must be perfectly well aware that there's not a single thing we can do about him. He must know that we can neither find nor stop him. Why should he worry? He can afford to ignore us—or even bait us. We're helpless, and he knows it."
That, Malone thought, was about the most cheerless thought he had heard in some time.
"You mentioned that you had an insulated room," the FBI agent said after a while. "Couldn't you let your men think in there?"
Dr. O'Connor sighed. "The room is shielded against magnetic fields and electromagnetic radiation. It is perfectly transparent to psionic phenomena, just as it is to gravitational fields."
"Oh," Malone said. He realized rapidly that his question had been a little silly to begin with, since the insulated room had been the place where all the tests had been conducted in the first place. "I don't want to take up too much of your time, doctor," he said after a pause, "but there are a couple of other questions."
"Go right ahead," Dr. O'Connor said. "I'm sure I'll be able to help you."
Malone thought of mentioning how little help the doctor had been to date, but decided against it. Why antagonize a perfectly good scientist without any reason? Instead, he selected his first question, and asked it. "Have you got any idea how we might lay our hands on another telepath? Preferably one that's not an imbecile, of course."
Dr. O Connor's expression changed from patient wisdom to irritation. "I wish we could, Mr. Malone. I wish we could. We certainly need one here to help us with our work—and I'm sure that your work is important, too. But I'm afraid we have no ideas at all about finding another telepath. Finding little Charlie was purely fortuitous—purely, Mr. Malone, fortuitous."
"Ah," Malone said. "Sure. Of course." He thought rapidly and discovered that he couldn't come up with one more question. As a matter of fact, he'd asked a couple of questions already, and he could barely remember the answers. "Well," he said, "I guess that's about it, then, doctor. If you come across anything else, be sure and let me know."
He leaned across the desk, extending a hand. "And thanks for your time," he added.
Dr. O'Connor stood up and shook his hand. "No trouble, I assure you," he said. "And I'll certainly give you all the information I can."
Malone turned and walked out. Surprisingly, he discovered that his feet and legs still worked. He had thought they'd turned to stone in the office long before.
* * *
It was on the plane back to Washington that Malone got his first inkling of an idea.
The only telepath that the Westinghouse boys had been able to turn up was Charles O'Neill, the youthf
ul imbecile.
All right, then. Suppose there were another one like him. Imbeciles weren't very difficult to locate. Most of them would be in institutions, and the others would certainly be on record. It might be possible to find someone, anyway, who could be handled and used as a tool to find a telepathic spy.
And—happy thought!—maybe one of them would turn out to be a high-grade imbecile, or even a moron.
Even if they only turned up another imbecile, he thought wearily, at least Dr. O'Connor would have something to work with.
He reported back to Burris when he arrived in Washington, told him about the interview with Dr. O'Connor, and explained what had come to seem a rather feeble brainstorm.
"It doesn't seem too productive," Burris said, with a shade of disappointment in his voice, "but we'll try it."
At that, it was a better verdict than Malone had hoped for. He had nothing to do but wait, while orders went out to field agents all over the United States, and quietly, but efficiently, the FBI went to work. Agents probed and pried and poked their noses into the files and data sheets of every mental institution in the fifty states—as far, at any rate, as they were able.
It was not an easy job. The inalienable right of a physician to refuse to disclose confidences respecting a patient applied even to idiots, imbeciles, and morons. Not even the FBI could open the private files of a licensed and registered psychiatrist.
But the field agents did the best they could and, considering the circumstances, their best was pretty good.
Malone, meanwhile, put in two weeks sitting glumly at his Washington desk and checking reports as they arrived. They were uniformly depressing. The United States of America contained more subnormal minds than Malone cared to think about. There seemed to be enough of them to explain the results of any election you were unhappy over. Unfortunately, subnormal was all you could call them. Not one of them appeared to possess any abnormal psionic abilities whatever.
There were a couple who were reputed to be poltergeists—but in neither case was there a single shred of evidence to substantiate the claim.
At the end of the second week, Malone was just about convinced that his idea had been a total washout. A full fortnight had been spent on digging up imbeciles, while the spy at Yucca Flats had been going right on his merry way, scooping information out of the men at Project Isle as though he were scooping beans out of a pot. And, very likely, laughing himself silly at the feeble efforts of the FBI.
Who could he be?
Anyone, Malone told himself unhappily. Anyone at all. He could be the janitor that swept out the buildings, one of the guards at the gate, one of the minor technicians on another project, or even some old prospector wandering around the desert with a scintillation counter.
Is there any limit to telepathic range?
The spy could even be sitting quietly in an armchair in the Kremlin, probing through several thousand miles of solid earth to peep into the brains of the men on Project Isle.
That was, to say the very least, a depressing idea.
Malone found he had to assume that the spy was in the United States—that, in other words, there was some effective range to telepathic communication. Otherwise, there was no point in bothering to continue the search.
Therefore, he found one other thing to do. He alerted every agent to the job of discovering how the spy was getting his information out of the country.
He doubted that it would turn up anything, but it was a chance. And Malone hoped desperately for it, because he was beginning to be sure that the field agents were never going to turn up any telepathic imbeciles.
He was right.
They never did.
* * *
III
The telephone rang.
Malone rolled over on the couch and muttered under his breath. Was it absolutely necessary for someone to call him at seven in the morning?
He grabbed at the receiver with one hand, and picked up his cigar from the ashtray with the other. It was bad enough to be awakened from a sound sleep—but when a man hadn't been sleeping at all, it was even worse.
He'd been sitting up since before five that morning, worrying about the telepathic spy, and at the moment he wanted sleep more than he wanted phone calls.
"Gur?" he said, sleepily and angrily, thankful that he'd never had a visiphone installed in his apartment.
A feminine voice said: "Mr. Kenneth J. Malone?"
"Who's this?" Malone said peevishly, beginning to discover himself capable of semirational English speech.
"Long distance from San Francisco," the voice said.
"It certainly is," Malone said. "Who's calling?"
"San Francisco is calling," the voice said primly.
Malone repressed a desire to tell the voice off, and said instead: "Who in San Francisco?"
There was a momentary hiatus, and then the voice said: "Mr. Thomas Boyd is calling, sir. He says this is a scramble call."
Malone took a drag from his cigar and closed his eyes. Obviously the call was a scramble. If it had been clear, the man would have dialed direct, instead of going through what Malone now recognized as an operator.
"Mr. Boyd says he is the Agent-in-Charge of the San Francisco office of the FBI," the voice offered.
"And quite right, too," Malone told her. "All right. Put him on."
"One moment." There was a pause, a click, another pause and then another click. At last the operator said: "Your party is ready, sir."
Then there was still another pause. Malone stared at the audio receiver. He began to whistle "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling."
* * *
"Hello? Malone?"
"I'm here, Tom," Malone said guiltily. "This is me. What's the trouble?"
"Trouble?" Boyd said. "There isn't any trouble. Well, not really. Or maybe it is. I don't know."
Malone scowled at the audio receiver, and for the first time wished he had gone ahead and had a video circuit put in, so that Boyd could see the horrendous expression on his face.
"Look," he said. "It's seven here and that's too early. Out there, it's four, and that's practically ridiculous. What's so important?"
He knew perfectly well that Boyd wasn't calling him just for the fun of it. The man was a good agent. But why a call at this hour?
Malone muttered under his breath. Then, self-consciously, he squashed out his cigar and lit a cigarette while Boyd was saying: "Ken, I think we may have found what you've been looking for."
It wasn't safe to say too much, even over a scrambled circuit. But Malone got the message without difficulty.
"Yeah?" he said, sitting up on the edge of the couch. "You sure?"
"Well," Boyd said, "no. Not absolutely sure. Not absolutely. But it is worth your taking a personal look, I think."
"Ah," Malone said cautiously. "An imbecile?"
"No," Boyd said flatly. "Not an imbecile. Definitely not an imbecile. As a matter of fact, a hell of a fat long way from an imbecile."
Malone glanced at his watch and skimmed over the airline timetables in his mind. "I'll be there nine o'clock, your time," he said. "Have a car waiting for me at the field."
* * *
As usual, Malone managed to sleep better on the plane than he'd been able to do at home. He slept so well, in fact, that he was still groggy when he stepped into the waiting car.
"Good to see you, Ken," Boyd said briskly, as he shook Malone's hand.
"You, too, Tom," Malone said sleepily. "Now what's all this about?" He looked around apprehensively. "No bugs in this car, I hope?" he said.
Boyd gunned the motor and headed toward the San Francisco Freeway. "Better not be," he said, "or I'll fire me a technician or two."
"Well, then," Malone said, relaxing against the upholstery, "where is this guy, and who is he? And how did you find him?"
Boyd looked uncomfortable. It was, somehow, both an awe-inspiring and a slightly risible sight. Six feet one and on
e half inches tall in his flat feet, Boyd ported around over two hundred and twenty pounds of bone, flesh and muscle. He swung a potbelly of startling proportions under the silk shirting he wore, and his face, with its wide nose, small eyes and high forehead, was half highly mature, half startlingly childlike. In an apparent effort to erase those childlike qualities, Boyd sported a fringe of beard and a mustache which reminded Malone of somebody he couldn't quite place.
But whoever the somebody was, his hair hadn't been black, as Boyd's was—
He decided it didn't make any difference. Anyhow, Boyd was speaking.
"In the first place," he said, "it isn't a guy. In the second, I'm not exactly sure who it is. And in the third, Ken, I didn't find it."
There was a little silence.
"Don't tell me," Malone said. "It's a telepathic horse, isn't it? Tom, I just don't think I could stand a telepathic horse—"
"No," Boyd said hastily. "No. Not at all. No horse. It's a dame. I mean a lady." He looked away from the road and flashed a glance at Malone. His eyes seemed to be pleading for something—understanding, possibly, Malone thought. "Frankly," Boyd said, "I'd rather not tell you anything about her just yet. I'd rather you met her first. Then you could make up your own mind. All right?"
"All right," Malone said wearily. "Do it your own way. How far do we have to go?"
"Just about an hour's drive," Boyd said. "That's all."
Malone slumped back in the seat and pushed his hat over his eyes. "Fine," he said. "Suppose you wake me up when we get there."
But, groggy as he was, he couldn't sleep. He wished he'd had some coffee on the plane. Maybe it would have made him feel better.
Then again, coffee was only coffee. True, he had never acquired his father's taste for gin, but there was always bourbon.
He thought about bourbon for a few minutes. It was a nice thought. It warmed him and made him feel a lot better. After a while, he even felt awake enough to do some talking.
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