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.
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 dialled 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.”