“We can’t find any,” Burris said. “We—”
There was a knock at the office door.
“Who’s there?” Burris called.
“Dr. Gamble,” said the man’s surprisingly baritone voice.
Burris called: “Come in, Doctor,” and the door opened. Dr. Gamble’s lean face looked almost haggard.
“Mr. Burris,” he said, extending his arms a trifle, “can’t anything be done?” Malone had seen Gamble speaking before, and had wondered if it would be possible for the man to talk with his hands tied behind his back. Apparently it wouldn’t be. “We feel that we are approaching a critical stage in Project Isle,” the scientist said, enclosing one fist within the other hand. “If anything more gets out to the Soviets, we might as well publish our findings—” a wide, outfiung gesture of both arms — “in the newspapers.”
Burris stepped back. “We’re doing the best we can, Dr. Gamble,” he said. All things considered, his obvious try at radiating confidence was nearly successful. “After all,” he went on, “we know a great deal more than we did four days ago. Miss Thompson has assured us that the spy is right here, within the compound of Yucca Flats Labs. We’ve bottled everything up in this compound, and I’m confident that no information is at present getting through to the Soviet Government. Miss Thompson agrees with me.”
“Miss Thompson?” Gamble said, one hand at his bearded chin.
“The Queen,” Burris said.
Gamble nodded and two fingers touched his forehead. “Ah,” he said. “Of course.” He rubbed at the back of his neck. “But we can’t keep everybody who’s here now locked up forever. Sooner or later we’ll have to let them-” His left hand described the gesture of a man tossing away a wad of paper — ”go.” His hands fell to his sides. “We’re lost, unless we can find that spy.”
“We’ll find him,” Burris said with a show of great confidence.
“But—”
“Give her time,” Burris said. “Give her time. Remember her mental condition.”
Boyd looked up. “Rome,” he said in an absent fashion, “wasn’t built in a daze.”
Burris glared at him, but said nothing. Malone filled the conversational hole with what he thought would be nice, and hopeful, and untrue.
“We know he’s someone on the reservation, so we’ll catch him eventually,” he said. “And as long as his information isn’t getting into Soviet hands, we’re safe.” He glanced at his wristwatch.
Dr. Gamble said: “But—”
“My, my,” Malone said. “Almost lunchtime. I have to go over and have lunch with Her Majesty. Maybe she’s dug up something more.”
“I hope so,” Dr. Gamble said, apparently successfully deflected. “I do hope so.”
“Well,” Malone said, “pardon me.” He shucked off his coat and trousers. Then he proceeded to put on the doublet and hose that hung in the little office closet. He shrugged into the fur-trimmed, slash-sleeved coat, adjusted the plumed hat to his satisfaction with great care, and gave Burris and the others a small bow. “I go to an audience with Her Majesty, gentlemen,” he said in a grave, well-modulated voice. “I shall return anon.”
He went out the door and closed it carefully behind him. When he had gone a few steps he allowed himself the luxury of a deep sigh.
Then he went outside and across the dusty street to the barracks where Her Majesty and the other telepaths were housed. No one paid any attention to him, and he rather missed the stares he’d become used to drawing. But by now, everybody was used to seeing Elizabethan clothing. Her Majesty had arrived at a new plateau.
She would now allow no one to have audience with her unless he was properly dressed. Even the psychiatrists — whom she had, with a careful sense of meiosis, appointed Physicians to the Royal House — had to wear the stuff.
Malone went over the whole case in his mind — for about the thousandth time, he told himself bitterly.
Who could the telepathic spy be? It was like looking for a needle in a rolling stone, he thought. Or something. He did remember clearly that a stitch in time saved nine, but he didn’t know nine what, and suspected it had nothing to do with his present problem.
How about Dr. Harry Gamble, Malone thought. It seemed a little unlikely that the head of Project Isle would be spying on his own men — particularly since he already had all the information. But, on the other hand, he was just as probable a spy as anybody else.
Malone moved onward. Dr. Thomas O’Connor, the Westinghouse psionics man, was the next nominee. Before Malone had actually found Her Majesty, he had had a suspicion that O’Connor had cooked the whole thing up to throw the FBI off the trail and confuse everybody, and that he’d intended merely to have the FBI chase ghosts while the real spy did his work undetected.
But what if O’Connor were the spy himself — a telepath? What if he were so confident of his ability to throw the Queen off the track that he had allowed the FBI to find all the other telepaths? There was another argument for that: he’d had to report the findings of his machine no matter what it cost him; there were too many other men on his staff who knew about it.
O’Connor was a perfectly plausible spy, too. But he didn’t seem very likely. The head of a government project is likely to be a much-investigated man. Could any tie-up with Russia — even a psionic one — stand up against that kind of investigation? It was possible. Anything, after all, was possible. You eliminated the impossible, and then whatever remained, however improbable…
Malone told himself morosely to shut up and think.
O’Connor, he told himself, might be the spy. It would be a pleasure, he realized, to go to the office of that superior scientist and arrest him. “I know your true name,” he muttered. “It isn’t O’Connor, it’s Moriarty.” He wondered if the Westinghouse man had ever done any work on the dynamics of an asteroid. Then he wondered what the dynamics of an asteroid were.
But if O’Connor were the spy, nothing made sense. Why would he have disclosed the fact that people were having their minds read in the first place?
Sadly, Malone gave up the idea.
But, then, there were other ideas.
The other psychiatrists, for instance…
The only trouble with them, Malone realized, was that there seemed to be neither motive nor anything else to connect them to the case. There was no evidence, none in any direction.
Why, there was just as much evidence that the spy was really Kenneth J. Malone, he told himself. And then he stopped.
Maybe Tom Boyd had been thinking that way about him. Maybe Boyd suspected that he, Malone, was really the spy.
Certainly it worked in reverse. Boyd…
No, Malone told himself firmly. That was silly.
If he were going to consider Boyd, he realized, he might as well go whole hog and think about Andrew J. Burris.
And that really was ridiculous. Absolutely ridic…
Well, Queen Elizabeth had seemed pretty certain when she’d pointed him out in Dr. Dowson’s office. And the fact that she’d apparently changed her mind didn’t have to mean very much. After all, how much faith could you place in Her Majesty at the best of times? If she’d made a mistake about Burris in the first place, she could just as well have made a mistake in the second place. Or about the spy’s being at Yucca Flats at all.
In which case, Malone thought sadly, they were right back where they’d started from.
Behind their own goal line.
One way or another, though, Her Majesty had made a mistake. She’d pointed Burris out as the spy, and then she’d said she’d been wrong. Either Burris was a spy, or else he wasn’t. You couldn’t have it both ways.
And if Burris really were the spy, Malone thought, then why had he started the investigation in the first place? You came back to the same question with Burris, he realized, that you had with Dr. O’Connor: it didn’t make sense for a man to play one hand against the other. Maybe the right hand sometimes didn’t know what the left hand was doing, but this was ridiculous.