Burris sighed. “I see your problem,” he said. “But what happened to this imbecile boy of yours?”
“Very sad,” Dr. O’Connor said. “Six months ago, at the age of fifteen, the boy simply died. He simply — gave up, and died.”
“Gave up?”
“That was as good an explanation as our medical department was able to provide, Mr. Burris. There was some malfunction — but — we like to say that he simply gave up. Living became too difficult for him.”
“All right,” Burris said after a pause. “This telepath of yours is dead, 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 to this 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 on that problem at Westinghouse, Mr. Burris, but we haven’t yet been able to find a method of actually detecting telepaths.”
“But you can detect—”
“That’s right,” Dr. O’Connor said. “We can detect the fact that a man’s mind is being read.” He stopped, and his face became suddenly morose. When he spoke again, he sounded guilty, as if he were making an admission that pained him. “Of course, Mr. Burris, there’s nothing we can do about a man’s mind being read. Nothing whatever.” He essayed a grin that didn’t look very healthy. “But at least,” he said, “you know you’re being spied on.”
Burris grimaced. There was a little silence while Dr. O’Connor stroked the 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 warm and friendly as a Christmas party by comparison. It was a look that froze the air of the room into a solid chunk, Malone thought, a chunk you could have chipped pieces from, for souvenirs, later, when Dr. O’Connor had gone and you could get into the room without any danger of being quick-frozen by the man’s unfriendly eye.
“Mr. Burris,” Dr. O’Connor said in a voice that matched the temperature of his gaze, “please. Remember our slogan.”
Malone sighed. He fished in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes, found one, and extracted a single cigarette. He stuck it in his mouth and started fishing in various pockets for his lighter.
He sighed again. Perfectly honestly, he preferred cigars, a habit he’d acquired 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 agent didn’t include a cigar. Somehow, remembering his father as neither fearless nor, exactly, alert — anyway, not the way the movies and the TV screens liked to picture the words — he had the impression that cigars looked out of place on FBI agents.
And it was, in any case, a small sacrifice to make. He found his lighter and shielded it from the brisk wind. He looked out over water at the Jefferson Memorial, and was surprised that he’d managed to walk as far as he had. Then he stopped thinking about walking, and took a puff of his cigarette, and forced himself to think about the job in hand.
Naturally, the Westinghouse gadget had been declared Ultra Top Secret as soon as it had been worked out. Virtually everything was, these days. And the whole group involved in the machine and its workings had been transferred without delay to the United States Laboratories out in Yucca Flats, Nevada.
Out there in the desert, there just wasn’t much to do, Malone supposed, except to play with the machine. And, of course, look at the scenery. 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 a discovery of a kind they hadn’t been looking for.
Somebody, they discovered, was picking the brains of the scientists there.
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 the new and highly classified non-rocket space drive.
In other words, the Yucca Flats plant was infested with a telepathic spy. And how do you go about finding a telepath? Malone sighed. Spies that got information in any of the usual ways were tough enough to locate. A telepathic spy was a lot tougher proposition.
Well, one thing about Andrew J. Burris. He had an answer for everything. Malone thought of what his chief had said: “It takes a thief to catch a thief. And if the Westinghouse machine won’t locate a telepathic spy, I know what will.”
“What?” Malone had asked.
“It’s simple,” Burris had said. “Another telepath. There has to be one around somewhere. Westinghouse did have one, after all, and the Russians still have one. Malone, that’s your job: go out and find me a telepath.”
Burris had an answer for everything, all right, Malone thought. But he couldn’t see where the answer did him very much good. After all, if it takes a telepath to catch a telepath, how do you catch the telepath you’re going to use to catch the first telepath?
Malone ran that through his mind again, and then gave it up. It sounded 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 toe of his shoe. Then he looked up.
Out there, over the water, was the Jefferson Memorial. It stood, white in the floodlights, beautiful and untouchable in the darkness. Malone stared at it. What would Thomas Jefferson have done in a crisis like this?
Jefferson, he told himself without much conviction, would have been just as confused as he was.
But he’d have had to find a telepath, Malone thought. Malone determined 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?
Chapter 2
Early the next morning, Malone awoke on a plane, heading across the continent toward Nevada. He had gone home to sleep, and he’d had to wake up to get on the plane, and now here he was, waking up again. It seemed, somehow, like a vicious circle.
The engines hummed gently as they pushed the big ship through the middle stratosphere’s thinly distributed molecules. Malone looked out at the purple-dark sky and set himself to think out his problem again.
He was still mulling things over when the ship lowered its landing gear and rolled to a stop on the big field near Yucca Flats. Malone sighed and climbed slowly out of his seat. There was a car waiting for him at the airfield, though, and that scemed to presage a smooth time; Malone remembered calling Dr. O’Connor the night before, and congratulated himself on his foresight.
Unfortunately, when he reached the main gate of the high double fence that surrounded the more than ninety square miles of United States Laboratories, he found out that entrance into that sanctum sanctorum of 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 had always thought people reserved for disputed art masterpieces, and it was with a great show of reluctance that the Special Security guards passed him inside as far as the office of the Chief Security Officer.
There, the Chief Security Officer himself, a man who could have doubled for Torquemada, eyed MaIone with ill-concealed suspicion while he called Burris at FBI headquarters back in Washington.