Brain Twister
Page 3
pause. "This telepath of yours isdead, and there aren't any more where he came from. Or if there are,you don't know how to look for them. All right. But to get back tothis machine of yours: it couldn't detect the boy's ability?"
Dr. O'Connor shook his head. "No, I'm afraid not. We've worked hard onthat problem at Westinghouse, Mr. Burris, but we haven't yet been ableto find a method of actually detecting telepaths."
"But you can detect--"
"That's right," Dr. O'Connor said. "We can detect the fact that aman's mind is being read." He stopped, and his face became suddenlymorose. When he spoke again, he sounded guilty, as if he were makingan admission that pained him. "Of course, Mr. Burris, there's nothingwe can do about a man's mind being read. Nothing whatever." He essayeda grin that didn't look very healthy. "But at least," he said, "youknow you're being spied on."
Burris grimaced. There was a little silence while Dr. O'Connor strokedthe metal box meditatively, as if it were the head of his beloved.
At last, Burris said: "Dr. O'Connor, how sure can you be of all this?"
The look he received made all the previous conversation seem as warmand friendly as a Christmas party by comparison. It was a look thatfroze the air of the room into a solid chunk, Malone thought, a chunkyou could have chipped pieces from, for souvenirs, later, when Dr.O'Connor had gone and you could get into the room without any dangerof being quick-frozen by the man's unfriendly eye.
"Mr. Burris," Dr. O'Connor said in a voice that matched thetemperature of his gaze, "please. Remember our slogan."
* * * * *
Malone sighed. He fished in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes, foundone, and extracted a single cigarette. He stuck it in his mouth andstarted fishing in various pockets for his lighter.
He sighed again. Perfectly honestly, he preferred cigars, a habit he'dacquired from the days when he'd filched them from his father's cigar-case. But his mental picture of a fearless and alert young FBI agentdidn't include a cigar. Somehow, remembering his father as neitherfearless nor, exactly, alert--anyway, not the way the movies and theTV screens liked to picture the words--he had the impression thatcigars looked out of place on FBI agents.
And it was, in any case, a small sacrifice to make. He found hislighter and shielded it from the brisk wind. He looked out over waterat the Jefferson Memorial, and was surprised that he'd managed to walkas far as he had. Then he stopped thinking about walking, and took apuff of his cigarette, and forced himself to think about the job inhand.
Naturally, the Westinghouse gadget had been declared Ultra Top Secretas soon as it had been worked out. Virtually everything was, thesedays. And the whole group involved in the machine and its workings hadbeen transferred without delay to the United States Laboratories outin Yucca Flats, Nevada.
Out there in the desert, there just wasn't much to do, Malonesupposed, except to play with the machine. And, of course, look at thescenery. But when you've seen one desert, Malone thought confusedly,you've seen them all.
So, the scientists ran experiments on the machine, and they made adiscovery of a kind they hadn't been looking for.
Somebody, they discovered, was picking the brains of the scientiststhere.
Not the brains of the people working with the telepathy machine.
And not the brains of the people working on the several other Earth-limited projects at Yucca Flats.
They'd been reading the minds of some of the scientists working on thenew and highly classified non-rocket space drive.
In other words, the Yucca Flats plant was infested with a telepathicspy. And how do you go about finding a telepath? Malone sighed. Spiesthat got information in any of the usual ways were tough enough tolocate. A telepathic spy was a lot tougher proposition.
Well, one thing about Andrew J. Burris. He had an answer foreverything. Malone thought of what his chief had said: "It takes athief to catch a thief. And if the Westinghouse machine won't locate atelepathic spy, I know what will."
"What?" Malone had asked.
"It's simple," Burris had said. "Another telepath. There has to be onearound somewhere. Westinghouse did have one, after all, and theRussians _still_ have one. Malone, that's your job: go out and find mea telepath."
Burris had an answer for everything, all right, Malone thought. But hecouldn't see where the answer did him very much good. After all, if ittakes a telepath to catch a telepath, how do you catch the telepathyou're going to use to catch the first telepath?
Malone ran that through his mind again, and then gave it up. Itsounded as if it should have made sense, somehow, but it just didn't,and that was all there was to that.
He dropped his cigarette to the ground and mashed it out with the toeof his shoe. Then he looked up.
Out there, over the water, was the Jefferson Memorial. It stood, whitein the floodlights, beautiful and untouchable in the darkness. Malonestared at it. What would Thomas Jefferson have done in a crisis likethis?
Jefferson, he told himself without much conviction, would have beenjust as confused as he was.
But he'd have had to find a telepath, Malone thought. Malonedetermined that he would do likewise, If Thomas Jefferson could do it,the least he, Malone, could do was to give it a good try.
There was only one little problem:
_Where_, Malone thought, _do I start looking?_
2
Early the next morning, Malone awoke on a plane, heading across thecontinent toward Nevada. He had gone home to sleep, and he'd had towake up to get on the plane, and now here he was, waking up again. Itseemed, somehow, like a vicious circle.
The engines hummed gently as they pushed the big ship through themiddle stratosphere's thinly distributed molecules. Malone looked outat the purple-dark sky and set himself to think out his problem again.
He was still mulling things over when the ship lowered its landinggear and rolled to a stop on the big field near Yucca Flats. Malonesighed and climbed slowly out of his seat. There was a car waiting forhim at the airfield, though, and that seemed to presage a smooth time;Malone remembered calling Dr. O'Connor the night before, andcongratulated himself on his foresight.
Unfortunately, when he reached the main gate of the high double fencethat surrounded the more than ninety square miles of United StatesLaboratories, he found out that entrance into that sanctum sanctorumof Security wasn't as easy as he'd imagined--not even for an FBI man.His credentials were checked with the kind of minute care Malone hadalways thought people reserved for disputed art masterpieces, and itwas with a great show of reluctance that the Special Security guardspassed him inside as far as the office of the Chief Security Officer.
There, the Chief Security Officer himself, a man who could havedoubled for Torquemada, eyed Malone with ill-concealed suspicion whilehe called Burris at FBI headquarters back in Washington.
Burris identified Malone on the video screen and the Chief SecurityOfficer, looking faintly disappointed, stamped the agent's pass andthanked the FBI chief. Malone had the run of the place.
Then he had to find a courier jeep. The Westinghouse division, itseemed, was a good two miles away.
As Malone knew perfectly well, the main portion of the entire YuccaFlats area was devoted solely to research on the new space drive whichwas expected to make the rocket as obsolete as the blunderbuss--atleast as far as space travel was concerned. Not, Malone thoughtuneasily, that the blunderbuss had ever been used for space travel,but--
He got off the subject hurriedly. The jeep whizzed by buildings, mostof them devoted to aspects of the non-rocket drive. The other projectsbased at Yucca Flats had to share what space was left--and thatincluded, of course, the Westinghouse research project.
It turned out to be a single, rather small white building with a fencearound it. The fence bothered Malone a little, but there was no needto worry; this time he was introduced at once into Dr. O'Connor'soffice. It was paneled in wallpaper manufactured to look like pine,and the telepathy expert sat b
ehind a large black desk bigger than anyMalone had ever seen in the FBI offices. There wasn't a scrap of paperon the desk; its surface was smooth and shiny, and behind it thenearly transparent Dr. Thomas O'Connor was close to invisible.
He looked, in person, just about the same as he'd looked on the FBItapes. Malone closed the door of the office behind him, looked for achair and didn't find one. In Dr. O'Connor's office, it was perfectlyobvious, Dr. O'Connor sat down. You stood, and were uncomfortable.
Malone took off his hat. He reached across the desk to shake handswith the telepathy expert, and Dr. O'Connor gave him a limp fragilepaw. "Thanks for giving me a little time," Malone said. "I reallyappreciate it." He smiled across the desk. His feet were alreadybeginning to