“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 undersand 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, sub-normal 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 other 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.