Malone nodded. Carefully, two of the attendants began to unbuckle him while the third stood by for reinforcements. Malone made no fuss.
In five minutes he was naked as—he told himself—a jay-bird. What was so completely nude about those particular birds escaped him for the moment, but it wasn’t important. The three men were all holding various parts of the strait-jacket or of his clothing.
They were still watching him warily.
“Look in the pockets,” Malone said.
“Sure,” one said. The man holding the jacket reached into it and dropped it as if it were hot.
“Hey,” he announced in a sick voice, “the guy’s carrying a gun.”
“A gun?” the second one asked.
The first one gestured toward the crumpled jacket on the floor. “Look for yourself,” he said. “A real honest-to-God gun. I could feel it.”
Malone leaned against one wall, looking as nonchalant as it was possible for him to look in the nude. The room being cool, he felt he was succeeding reasonably well. “Try the other pocket,” he suggested.
The first attendant gave him a long stare. “What’ve you got in there, buddy?” he asked. “A howitzer?”
“Jesus,” the second attendant said, without moving toward the jacket. “An armed nut. What a world.”
“Try the pocket,” Malone said.
A second went by. The first attendant bent down slowly, picked up the jacket and slipped his hand into the other inside pocket. He came out with a wallet and flipped it open.
The others looked over his shoulder.
There was a long minute of silence.
“Jesus,” the second attendant said, as if it were the only word left in the language.
Malone sighed. “There, now,” he said. “You see? Suppose you give me back my clothes and let’s get down to brass tacks.”
* * * *
It wasn’t that simple, of course.
First the attendants had to go and get Dr. Blake, and everybody had to explain everything three or four times, until Malone was just as sick of being an FBI agent as he had ever been of being a padded-cell case. But, at last, he stood before Dr. Blake in the corridor outside, once again fully dressed. Slightly rumpled, of course, but fully dressed. It did, Malone thought, make a difference, and if clothes didn’t exactly make the man they were a long way from a hindrance.
“Mr. Malone,” Blake was saying, “I want to offer my apologies—”
“Perfectly okay,” Malone said agreeably. “But I would like to know something. Do you treat all your visitors like this? I mean—the milkman, the mailman, relatives of patients—”
“It’s not often we get someone here who claims to be from the FBI,” Blake said. “And naturally our first thought was that—well, sometimes a patient will come in, just give himself up, so to speak. His unconscious mind knows that he needs help, and so he comes to us. We try to help him.”
Privately, Malone told himself that it was a hell of a way to run a hospital. Aloud, all he said was: “Sure. I understand perfectly, Doctor.”
Dr. Blake nodded. “And now,” he said, “what did you want to talk to me about?”
“Just a minute.” Malone closed his eyes. He’d told Burris he would check in, and he was late. “Have you got a phone I can use?”
“Certainly,” Blake said, and led him down the corridor to a small office. Malone went to the phone at one end and began dialing even before Blake shut the door and left him alone.
The screen lit up instantly with Burris’ face. “Malone, where the hell have you been?” the head of the FBI roared. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you—”
“Sorry,” Malone said. “I was tied up.”
“What do you mean, tied up?” Burris said. “Do you know I was just about to send out a general search order? I thought they’d got you.”
“They?” Malone said, interested. “Who?”
“How the hell would I know who?” Burris roared.
“Well, nobody got me,” Malone said. “I’ve been investigating Rice Pavilion, just like I’m supposed to do.”
“Then why didn’t you check in?” Burris asked.
Malone sighed. “Because I got myself locked up,” he said, and explained. Burris listened with patience.
When Malone was finished, Burris said: “You’re coming right on back.”
“But—”
“No arguments,” Burris told him. “If you’re going to let things like that happen to you you’re better off here. Besides, there are plenty of men doing the actual searching. There’s no need—”
Secretly, Malone felt relief. “Well, all right,” he said. “But let me check out this place first, will you?”
“Go ahead,” Burris said. “But get right on back here.”
Malone agreed and snapped the phone off. Then he turned back to find Dr. Blake.
* * * *
Examining hospital records was not an easy job. The inalienable right of a physician to refuse to disclose confidences respecting a patient applied even to idiots, imbecile and morons. But Malone had a slight edge, due to Dr. Blake’s embarrassment, and he put it mercilessly to work.
For all the good it did him he might as well have stayed in his cell. There wasn’t even the slightest suspicion in any record that any of the Rice Pavilion patients were telepathic.
“Are you sure that’s what you’re looking for?” Blake asked him, some hours later.
“I’m sure,” Malone said. “When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
“Oh,” Blake said. After a second he added: “What does that mean?”
Malone shrugged. “It’s an old saying,” he told the doctor. “It doesn’t have to mean anything. It just sounds good.”
“Oh,” Blake said again.
After a while, Malone said farewell to good old Rice Pavilion, and headed back to Washington. There, he told himself, everything would be peaceful.
And so it was. Peaceful and dispiriting.
Every agent had problems getting reports from hospitals—and 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 sub-normal 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. Like the patients at Rice Pavilion, 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. He himself had been locked up in a padded cell, and other agents had spent a full fortnight 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 who 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 oth
er 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.
CHAPTER 3
The telephone rang.
Malone rolled over on the couch and muttered four words 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 taste for blondes was apparently hereditary. At any rate, Malone felt he had inherited it from his father, and he didn’t want any visible strangers calling him at odd hours to interfere with his process of collection and research.
He blinked at the audio circuit, and 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 that he didn’t want to talk to St. Francis, not even in Spanish, 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.
… And the sound of Irish laughter…. “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 damned 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 one-half inches tall in his flat feet, Boyd posted around over two hundred and twenty pounds of bone, flesh and muscle. He swung a pot-belly 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 moustache 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 (and imagined, therefore, that it wasn’t hereditary, like a taste for blondes), 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.
He pushed his hat back and struggled to a reasonable sitting position. “I don’t suppose you have a drink hidden away in the car somewhere?” he said tentatively. “Or would the technicians have found that, too?”
“Better not have,” Boyd said in the same tone as before, “or I’ll fire a couple of technicians.” He grinned without turning. “It’s in the door compartment, next to the forty-five cartridges and the Tommy- gun.”
Malone opened the compartment in the thick door of the car and extracted a bottle. It was Christian Brothers Brandy instead of the bou
rbon he had been thinking about, but he discovered that he didn’t mind at all. It went down as smoothly as milk.
Boyd glanced at it momentarily as Malone screwed the top back on.
“No,” Malone said in answer to the unspoken question. “You’re driving.” Then he settled back again and tipped his hat forward.
He didn’t sleep a wink. He was perfectly sure of that. But it wasn’t over two seconds later that Boyd said: “We’re here, Ken. Wake up.”
“Whadyamean, wakeup,” Malone said. “I wasn’t asleep.” He thumbed his hat back and sat up rapidly. “Where’s ‘here?’”
“Bayview Neuropsychiatric Hospital,” Boyd said. “This is where Dr. Harman works, you know.”
“No,” Malone said. “As a matter of fact, I don’t know. You didn’t tell me—remember? And who is Dr. Harman, anyhow?”
The car was moving up a long, curving driveway toward a large, lawn- surrounded building. Boyd spoke without looking away from the road.
“Well,” he said, “this Dr. Wilson Harman is the man who phoned us yesterday. One of my field agents was out here asking around about imbeciles and so on. Found nothing, by the way. And then this Dr. Harman called, later. Said he had someone here I might be interested in. So I came on out myself for a look, yesterday afternoon—after all, we had instructions to follow up every possible lead.”
“I know,” Malone said. “I wrote them.”
“Oh,” Boyd said. “Sure. Well, anyhow, I talked to this dame. Lady.”
“And?”
“And I talked to her,” Boyd said. “I’m not entirely sure of anything myself. But—well, hell. You take a look at her.”
He pulled the car up to a parking space, slid nonchalantly into a slot marked Reserved—Executive Director Sutton, and slid out from under the wheel while Malone got out the other side.
They marched up the broad steps, through the doorway and into the glass-fronted office of the receptionist.
Boyd showed her his little golden badge, and got an appropriate gasp. “FBI,” he said. “Dr. Harman’s expecting us.”
The wait wasn’t over fifteen seconds. Boyd and Malone marched down the hall and around a couple of corners, and came to the doctor’s office. The door was opaqued glass with nothing but a room number stenciled on it. Without ceremony, Boyd pushed the door open. Malone followed him inside.
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