The Randall Garrett Omnibus

by Randall Garrett

  "Listen, dear," the Queen said. "Your Kenneth has seen the truth of the matter. Listen to him."

  "Her Majesty not only caught the spy," Malone said, "but she turned the spy right over to us."

  He turned at once and went back down the long red carpet to the door. I really ought to get a sword, he thought, and didn't see Her Majesty smile. He opened the door with a great flourish and said quietly: "Bring him in, boys."

  * * *

  The FBI men from Las Vegas marched in. Between them was their prisoner, a boy with a vacuous face, clad in a strait jacket that seemed to make no difference at all to him. His mind was—somewhere else. But his body was trapped between the FBI agents: the body of William Logan.

  "Impossible," one of the psychiatrists said.

  Malone spun on his heel and led the way back to the throne. Logan and his guards followed closely.

  "Your Majesty," Malone said, "may I present the prisoner?"

  "Perfectly correct, Sir Kenneth," the Queen said. "Poor Willie is your spy. You won't be too hard on him, will you?"

  "I don't think so. Your Majesty," Malone said. "After all—"

  "Now wait a minute," Burris exploded. "How did you know any of this?"

  Malone bowed to Her Majesty, and winked at Barbara. He turned to Burris. "Well," he said, "I had one piece of information none of the rest of you had. When we were in the Desert Edge Sanitarium, Dr. Dowson called you on the phone. Remember?"

  "Sure I remember," Burris said. "So?"

  "Well," Malone said, "Her Majesty said she knew just where the spy was. I asked her where—"

  "Why didn't you tell me?" Burris screamed. "You knew all this time and you didn't tell me?"

  "Hold on," Malone said. "I asked her where—and she said: 'He's right there.' And she was pointing right at your image on the screen."

  Burris opened his mouth. Nothing came out. He closed it and tried again. At last he managed one word.

  "Me?" he said.

  "You," Malone said. "But that's what I realized later. She wasn't pointing at you. She was pointing at Logan, who was in the next room."

  Barbara whispered: "Is that right, Your Majesty?"

  "Certainly, dear," the Queen said calmly. "Would I lie to Sir Kenneth?"

  Malone was still talking. "The thing that set me off this noon was something you said, Sir Andrew," he went on. "You said there weren't any sane telepaths—remember?"

  Burris, incapable of speech, merely nodded.

  "But according to Her Majesty," Malone said, "we had every telepath in the United States right here. She told me that—and I didn't even see it!"

  "Don't blame yourself, Sir Kenneth," the Queen put in. "I did do my best to mislead you, you know."

  "You sure did!" Malone said. "And later on, when we were driving here, you said the spy was 'moving around.' That's right; he was in the car behind us, going eighty miles an hour."

  Barbara stared. Malone got a lot of satisfaction out of that stare. But there was still more ground to cover.

  "Then," he said, "you told us he was here at Yucca Flats—after we brought him here! It had to be one of the other six telepaths."

  The psychiatrist who'd muttered: "Impossible," was still muttering it. Malone ignored him.

  "And when I remembered her pointing at you," Malone told Burris, "and remembered that she'd only said: 'He's right there,' I knew it had to be Logan. You weren't there. You were only an image on a TV screen. Logan was there—in the room behind the phone."

  Burris had found his tongue. "All right," he said. "O.K. But what's all this about misleading us—and why didn't she tell us right away, anyhow?"

  Malone turned to Her Majesty on the throne. "I think that the Queen had better explain that—if she will."

  * * *

  Queen Elizabeth Thompson nodded very slowly. "I ... I only wanted you to respect me," she said. "To treat me properly." Her voice sounded uneven, and her eyes were glistening with unspilled tears. Lady Barbara tightened her arm about the Queen's shoulders once more.

  "It's all right," she said. "We do—respect you."

  The Queen smiled up at her.

  Malone waited. After a second Her Majesty continued.

  "I was afraid that as soon as you found poor Willie you'd send me back to the hospital," she said. "And Willie couldn't tell the Russian agents any more once he'd been taken away. So I thought I'd just ... just let things stay the way they were as long as I could. That's ... that's all."

  Malone nodded. After a second he said: "You see that we couldn't possibly send you back now, don't you?"

  "I—"

  "You know all the State Secrets, Your Majesty," Malone said. "We would rather that Dr. Harman in San Francisco didn't try to talk you out of them. Or anyone else."

  The Queen smiled tremulously. "I know too much, do I?" she said. Then her grin faded. "Poor Dr. Harman," she said.

  "Poor Dr. Harman?"

  "You'll hear about him in a day or so," she said. "I ... peeked inside his mind. He's very ill."

  "Ill?" Lady Barbara asked.

  "Oh, yes," the Queen said. The trace of a smile appeared on her face. "He thinks that all the patients in the hospital can see inside his mind."

  "Oh, my," Lady Barbara said—and began to laugh. It was the nicest sound Malone had ever heard.

  "Forget Harman," Burris snapped. "What about this spy ring? How was Logan getting his information out?"

  "I've already taken care of that," Malone said. "I had Desert Edge Sanitarium surrounded as soon as I knew what the score was." He looked at one of the agents holding Logan.

  "They ought to be in the Las Vegas jail within half an hour," the agent said in confirmation.

  "Dr. Dowson was in on it, wasn't he, Your Majesty?" Malone said.

  "Certainly," the Queen said. Her eyes were suddenly very cold. "I hope he tries to escape. I hope he tries it."

  Malone knew just how she felt.

  One of the psychiatrists spoke up suddenly. "I don't understand it," he said. "Logan is completely catatonic. Even if he could read minds, how could he tell Dowson what he'd read? It doesn't make sense."

  "In the first place," the Queen said patiently, "Willie isn't catatonic. He's just busy, that's all. He's only a boy, and ... well, he doesn't much like being who he is. So he visits other people's minds, and that way he becomes them for a while. You see?"

  "Vaguely," Malone said. "But how did Dowson get his information? I had everything worked out but that."

  "I know you did," the Queen said, "and I'm proud of you. I intend to award you with the Order of the Bath for this day's work."

  Unaccountably, Malone's chest swelled with pride.

  "As for Dr. Dowson," the Queen said, "that traitor ... hurt Willie. If he's hurt enough, he'll come back." Her eyes weren't hard any more. "He didn't want to be a spy, really," she said, "but he's just a boy, and it must have sounded rather exciting. He knew that if he told Dowson everything he'd found out, they'd let him go—go away again."

  There was a long silence.

  "Well," Malone said, "that about wraps it up. Any questions?"

  He looked around at the men, but before any of them could speak up Her Majesty rose.

  "I'm sure there are questions," she said, "but I'm really very tired. My lords, you are excused." She extended a hand. "Come, Lady Barbara," she said. "I think I really may need that nap, now."

  * * *

  Malone put the cuff links in his shirt with great care. They were great stones, and Malone thought that they gave his costume that necessary Elizabethan flair.

  Not that he was wearing the costume of the Queen's Court now. Instead, he was dressed in a tailor-proud suit of dark blue, a white-on-white shirt and no tie. He selected one of a gorgeous peacock pattern from his closet rack.

  Boyd yawned at him from the bed in the room they were sharing. "Stepping out?" he said.

  "I am," Malone said with restraint. He
whipped the tie round his neck and drew it under the collar.

  "Anybody I know?"

  "I am meeting Lady Barbara, if you wish to know," Malone said.

  "Come down," Boyd said. "Relax. Anyhow, I've got a question for you. There was one little thing Her Everlovin' Majesty didn't explain."

  "Yes?" said Malone.

  "Well, about those hoods who tried to gun us down," Boyd said. "Who hired 'em? And why?"

  "Dowson," Malone said. "He wanted to kill us off, and then kidnap Logan from the hotel room. But we foiled his plan—by killing his hoods. By the time he could work up something else, we were on our way to Yucca Flats."

  "Great," Boyd said. "And how did you find out this startling piece of information? There haven't been any reports in from Las Vegas, have there?"

  "No," Malone said.

  "O.K.," Boyd said. "I give up, Mastermind."

  Malone wished Boyd would stop using that nickname. The fact was—as he, and apparently nobody else, was willing to recognize—that he wasn't anything like a really terrific FBI agent. Even Barbara thought he was something special.

  He wasn't, he knew.

  He was just lucky.

  "Her Majesty informed me," Malone said.

  "Her—" Boyd stood with his mouth dropped open, like a fish waiting for some bait. "You mean she knew?"

  "Well," Malone said, "she did know the guys in the Buick weren't the best in the business—and she knew all about the specially-built FBI Lincoln. She got that from our minds." He knotted his tie with an air of great aplomb, and went, slowly to the door. "And she knew we were a good team. She got that from our minds, too."

  "But," Boyd said. After a second he said: "But," again, and followed it with: "Why didn't she tell us?"

  Malone opened the door.

  "Her Majesty wished to see the Queen's Own FBI in action," said Sir Kenneth Malone.

  THE END

  HANGING BY A THREAD

  Jayjay Kelvin was sitting in the lounge of the interplanetary cargo vessel Persephone, his feet propped up on the low table in front of the couch, and his attention focused almost totally on the small book he was reading. The lounge itself was cozily small; the Persephone had not been designed as a passenger vessel, and the two passengers she was carrying at the time had been taken on as an accommodation rather than as a money-making proposition. On the other hand, the Persephone and other ships like her were the only method of getting to where Jayjay Kelvin wanted to go; there were no regular passenger runs to Pluto. It's hardly the vacation spot of the Solar System.

  On the other side of the table, Jeffry Hull was working industriously with pencil and paper. Jayjay kept his nose buried in his book—not because he was deliberately slighting Hull, but because he was genuinely interested in the book.

  "Now wait," said Masterson, looking thoughtfully at the footprints on the floor of the cabin where Jed Hooker had died. "Jest take another look at these prints, Charlie. Silver Bill Greer couldn't have got much more than his big toe into boots that small! Somethin' tells me the Pecos Kid has...."

  "... Traveled nearly two billion miles since then," said Hull.

  Jayjay lifted his head from his book. "What?" He blinked. "I'm sorry; I wasn't listening. What did you say?"

  The younger man was still grinning triumphantly. "I said: We are approaching turnover, and, according to my figures, nine days of acceleration at one standard gee will give us a velocity of seventeen million, five hundred and fifty miles per hour, and we have covered a distance of nearly two billion miles." Then he added: "That is, if I remembered my formulas correctly."

  Jayjay Kelvin looked thoughtfully at the ceiling while he ran through the figures in his head. "Something like that. It's the right order of magnitude, anyway."

  Hull looked a little miffed. "What answer did you get?"

  "A little less than eight times ten to the third kilometers per second. I was just figuring roughly."

  Hull scribbled hastily, then smiled again. "Eighteen million miles an hour, that would be. My memory's better than I thought at first. I'm glad I didn't have to figure the time; doing square roots is a process I've forgotten."

  That was understandable, Jayjay thought. Hull was working for his doctorate in sociology, and there certainly wasn't much necessity for a sociologist to remember his freshman physics, much less his high-school math.

  Still, it was somewhat of a relief to find that Hull was interested in something besides the "sociological reactions of Man in space". The boy had spent six months in the mining cities in the Asteroid Belt, and another six investigating the Jovian chemical synthesis planes and their attendant cities. Now he was heading out to spend a few more months observing the "sociological organization Gestalt" of the men and women who worked at the toughest job in the System—taking the heavy metals from the particularly dense sphere of Pluto.

  Hull began scribbling on his paper again, evidently lost in the joys of elementary physics, so Jayjay Kelvin went back to his book.

  He had just read three words when Hull said: "Mr. Kelvin, do you mind if I ask a question?"

  Jayjay looked up from his book and saw that Jeffry Hull had reverted to his role of the earnest young sociologist. Ah, well. "As I've told you before, Mr. Hull, questions do not offend me, but I can't guarantee that the answers won't offend you."

  "Yes; of course," Hull said in his best investigatory manner. "I appreciate that. It's just that ... well, I have trained myself to notice small things. The little details that are sometimes so important in sociological investigations. Not, you understand, as an attempt to pry into the private life of the individual, but to round out the overall picture."

  Jayjay nodded politely. To his quixotic and pixie-like mind, the term overall picture conjured up the vision of a large and carefully detailed painting of a pair of dirty overalls, but he kept the smile off his face and merely said: "I understand."

  "Well, I've noticed that you're quite an avid reader. That isn't unusual in a successful businessman, of course; one doesn't become a successful businessman unless one has a thirst for knowledge."

  "Hm-m-m," said Jayjay.

  "But," Hull continued earnestly, "I noticed that you've read most of the ... uh ... historical romances in the library...."

  "You mean Westerns," Jayjay corrected quietly.

  "Uh ... yes. But you don't seem to be interested in the modern adventure fiction. May I ask why?"

  "Sure." Jayjay found himself becoming irrationally irritated with Hull. He knew that the young sociologist had nothing to do with his own irritation, so he kept the remarks as impersonal as possible. "In the first place, you, as a sociologist, should know what market most fiction is written for."

  "Why ... uh ... for people who want to relax and—"

  "Yes," Jayjay cut in. "But what kind? The boys on Pluto? The asteroid slicers? No. There are four billion people on Earth and less than five million in space. The market is Earth.

  "Also, most writers have never been any farther off the surface of Earth than the few miles up that an intercontinental cruiser takes them.

  "And yet, the modern 'adventure' novel invariably takes place in space.

  "I can read Westerns because I neither know nor care what the Old American West was really like. I can sit back and sink into the never-never land that the Western tells about and enjoy myself because I am not forced to compare it with reality.

  "But a 'space novel' written by an Earthside hugger is almost as much a never-never land, and I have to keep comparing it with what is actually going on around me. And it irritates me."

  "But, aren't some of them pretty well researched?" Hull asked.

  "Obviously, you haven't read many of them," Jayjay said. "Sure, some of them are well researched. Say one half of one per cent, to be liberal. The rest don't know what they're talking about!"

  "But—"

  "For instance," Jayjay continued heatedly, "you take a look at every blasted o
ne of them that has anything to do with a spacecraft having trouble. They have to have an accident in space in order to disable the spaceship so that the hairy-chested hero can show what a great guy he is. So what does the writer do? He has the ship hit by a meteor! A meteor!"

  Hull thought that over for a second. "Well," he said tentatively, "a ship could get hit by a meteor, couldn't it?"

  Jayjay closed his eyes in exasperation. "Of course it could! And an air-ship can run into a ruby-throated hummingbird, too. But how often does it happen?

  "Look: We're hitting it up at about one-fortieth of the velocity of light right now. What do you think would happen if we got hit by a meteor? We'd be gone before we knew what had happened.

  "Why doesn't it happen? Because we can spot any meteor big enough to hurt us long before it contacts us, and we can dodge it or blast it out of the way, depending on the size.

  "You've seen the outer hull of this ship. It's an inch thick shell of plastic, supported a hundred feet away from the steel hull by long booms. Anything small enough to get by the detectors will be small enough to burn itself out on that hull before it reaches the ship. The—"

  * * *

  Jayjay Kelvin was not ordinarily a man to make long speeches, especially when he knew he was telling someone something that they already knew. But this time, he was beating one of his favorite drums, and he went on with his tirade in a fine flush of fury.

  Alas ... poor Jayjay.

  Actually, Jayjay Kelvin can't be blamed for his attitude. All he was saying was that it was highly improbable that a spaceship would be hit by a meteor. In one way, he was perfectly right, and, in another, he was dead wrong.

  How small must a piece of matter be before it is no longer a meteor?

  Fortunately, the big hunks rarely travel at more than about two times ten to the sixth centimeters per second, relative to Sol, in the Solar System. But there are little meteors—very tiny ones—that come in, hell-bent-for-leather, at a shade less than the velocity of light. They're called cosmic rays, but they're not radiation in the strict sense of the word. A stripped hydrogen atom, weighing on the order of three point three times ten to the minus twenty-second grams, rest mass, can come galumping along at a velocity so close to that of light that the kinetic energy is something colossal for so small a particle. Protons with a kinetic energy of ten to the nineteenth electron volts, while statistically rare, are not unusual.