And looked at it. Now it didn’t remind him quite so much of the
Monster. But it didn’t look familiar, either. Who did he know, he
thought, who was large, old, disguised and efficient?
It sounded like an improbable combination. He set the list down again,
clearing off some of the papers the PRS had sent him to make room for
it.
Then he stopped.
The papers the PRS had sent him....
And he’d gotten them so quickly, so efficiently....
They were a large organization....
And an old one....
He tossed the cigar in the general direction of the ashtray, grabbed
the phone and jabbed at buttons.
The girl who answered the phone looked familiar. She did not look very
old, but she was large and she had to be disguised, Malone thought.
Nobody could naturally have that many teeth.
“Psychical Research Society,” she said. “Oh, Mr. Malone, good
evening.”
“Sir Lewis,” Malone said. “Sir Lewis Carter. President. I want to talk
to him. Hurry.”
“Sir Lewis?” the girl said slowly. “Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Malone, but the
office is closed now for the day. And Sir Lewis has gone already. It’s
after six o’clock, Mr. Malone, and the office is closed.”
“Home number,” Malone said desperately. “I’ve got to.”
“Well, I can do that, Mr. Malone,” she said, “but it wouldn’t do you
any good, really. Because he went away on his vacation, and when he
goes on his vacation he never tells us where. You know? He won’t be
back for two or three weeks.”
“Oog,” Malone said, and thought for less than a second. “Miss
Garbitsch,” he said. “Lou. Got to talk to her. Now.”
“Oh, I can’t do that, either, Mr. Malone,” the toothy girl said. “All
of the executive officers, they left already on their vacation. And
that includes Miss Garbitsch, too. They just left a skeleton force
here at the office.”
“They’re all gone?” Malone said hollowly.
“That’s right,” she said cheerfully. “As a matter of fact, I’m in
charge now, and that’s why I’m staying so late. To sort of catch up on
things. You know?”
“It’s very important,” Malone said tensely. “You don’t know where any
of them went? You don’t have any address?”
“None at all,” she said. “I’m sorry, but that’s how it is. Maybe it’s
strange, and maybe you’d ask questions, but I obey orders, and
those’re my orders. To take over until they get back. They didn’t tell
me where they went, and I didn’t ask.”
“Great,” Malone said. He wanted to shoot himself.
Lou was one of them. Of course she was; that was obvious now, when he
thought about it. Lou was one of the secret group that was sabotaging
practically everything.
And now they’d all gone. For two weeks—or for good.
The girl’s voice broke in on his thoughts.
“Oh, Mr. Malone,” she said, “I’m sorry, but I just remembered. They
left a note for you.”
“A note?” Malone said.
“Sir Lewis said you might call,” the girl said, “and he left a
message. If you’ll hold on a minute I’ll read it to you.”
Malone waited tensely. The girl found a slip of paper, blinked at it
and read:
“My dear Malone, I’m afraid you are perfectly correct in your
deductions; and, as you can see, that leaves us no alternative. Sorry.
Miss G. sends her apologies to you, as do I.” The girl looked up.
“It’s signed by Sir Lewis,” she said. “Does that mean anything to you,
Mr. Malone?”
“I’m afraid it does,” Malone said bleakly. “It means entirely too
much.”
12
After the great mass of teeth, vaguely surrounded by a face, had faded
from Malone’s screen, he just sat there, looking at the dead, grey
screen of the visiphone and feeling about twice as dead and at least
three times as grey.
Things, he told himself, were terrible. But even that sentence, which
was a good deal more cheerful than what he actually felt, didn’t do
anything to improve his mood. All of the evidence, after all, had been
practically living on the tip of his nose for nearly twenty-four
hours, and not only had he done nothing about it, but he hadn’t even
seen it.
Two or three times, for instance, he’d doubted the possibility of
teleporting another human being. All his logic had told him it wasn’t
so. But, he’d thought, he and Her Majesty had teleported Lou, and so,
obviously, his logic was wrong.
No, it wasn’t, he thought now. There _would_ be too much mental
resistance, even if the person were unconscious. Teleportation of
another human being _would_ be impossible.
Unless, of course, the other human being was able to teleport on her
own.
True, she had been no more than semiconscious. She probably couldn’t
have teleported on her own. But Malone and Her Majesty had, ever so
kindly and ever so mistakenly, helped her, and Lou had managed to
teleport to the plane.
And that wasn’t all, he thought dismally. That was far from all.
“Let’s take another for-instance,” he said savagely, in what he
thought was a caricature of the Manelli voice. In order for all three
to teleport, there had to be perfect synchronization.
Otherwise, they’d have arrived either at different places, or at the
same place but at different times.
And perfect synchronization on a psionic level meant telepathy. At
least two of the three had to be telepathic. Her Majesty was, of
course. Malone wasn’t.
So Lou had to be telepathic, too.
Malone told himself bitterly to quit calling the girl Lou. After the
way she’d deceived him, she didn’t deserve it. Her name was Luba
Garbitsch, and from now on he was going to call her Luba Garbitsch. In
his own mind, anyway.
Facts came tumbling in on him like the side of a mountain, falling on
a hapless traveler during a landslide. And, Malone told himself, he
had never had less help in all of his ill-starred life.
Her Majesty had never, never suspected that Luba Garbitsch was
anything other than the girl she pretended to be. That was negative
evidence, true, and taken alone it meant nothing at all. But when you
added the other facts to it, it showed, with perfect plainness, that
Luba Garbitsch was the fortunate possessor of a mind shield as tough,
as strong and as perfect as any Malone, O’Connor or good old Cartier
Taylor had ever even thought of dreaming up.
And then, very suddenly, another fact arrived, and pushed the rest out
into the black night of Malone’s bitter mind. He punched hard on the
intercom button and got the desk of the agent-in-charge.
“Now what’s wrong?” the A-in-C said. “Ghosts got loose? Or do you want
some help with a beautiful blonde heiress?”
“What would I be doing,” Malone snapped, “with a beautiful blonde
heiress?”
The agent-in-charge looked thoughtful. It was obvious that he had been
saving his one joke up for several hours. “You might be holding her,”
he suggested, “for ransom, of course.”
“That’s not funny,” Malone said. “Nothing is funny any more.”
“Oh, all right,” the A-in-C said. “You Washington boys are just too
good for the rest of us. What’s on your mind?”
“You’ve got a twenty-four-hour watch on Luba Garbitsch, haven’t you?”
Malone said.
“Sure we have,” the A-in-C said. “Boyd said—”
“Yes, I know what he said,” Malone cut in. “Give me a check on those
men. I want to find out where she is right now. Right this minute.”
The agent-in-charge shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “It’s none of my
business. Hang on a second.”
The screen went blank, but it didn’t go silent. Each of the agents, on
a stakeout job like the Garbitsch one, would be carrying personal
communicators, and Malone could hear the voice of the agent-in-charge
as he spoke to them.
He couldn’t make out all the words, and it wasn’t important anyhow.
He’d know soon enough, he kept telling himself; just as soon as the
A-in-C came back and reported.
It seemed like about twelve years before he did.
“She’s all right,” he said. “Nothing to worry about; she’s probably
working late at her office, that’s all. She hasn’t gone home yet.”
“Want to bet?” Malone snapped.
“Don’t tempt me,” the A-in-C said. “I wouldn’t take your money—it’s
probably counterfeit, printed in Washington.”
“I’ll give you ten to one,” Malone said.
“Ten to one, I’ll take,” the A-in-C said rapidly. “Ten to one is like
taking candy from a traffic cop. I’m no amateur, even if I am stuck
away in dull little old New York—and I know the boys I’ve got on
stakeout. I’ll check, and—”
“Let me know when you do,” Malone said. “I’ve got some long-distance
calls to make.”
* * * * *
Forty-five minutes later, he had all the news he needed. Spot checks
on PRS offices on the West Coast, where it wasn’t closing time yet,
showed that all the executive officers had suddenly felt the need of
extended vacations to parts unknown.
That, if not exactly cheering news, was still welcome; Malone had more
backing for his theory.
An overseas call to New Scotland Yard in London took a little more
time, and several arguments with bored overseas operators who,
apparently, had nothing better to do than to confuse the customers.
But Malone finally managed to get Assistant Commissioner C. E. Teal,
who promised to check on Malone’s inquiry at once.
It seemed like years before he called back, and Malone leaped to the
phone.
“Yes?” he said.
Teal, red-faced and apparently masticating a stick of gum, said: “I
got C. I. D. Commander Gideon to follow up on that matter, Mr. Malone.
It is rather late here, as you must realize—”
“Yes?” Malone said. “And they’ve all gone?”
“Why, no,” Teal said, surprised. “A spot check shows that most of the
executives of the London branch of the Psychical Research Society are
spending quiet evenings in their homes. Our Inspector Ottermole
actually spoke to Dr. Carnacki, the head of the office here.”
“Oh,” Malone said.
“They haven’t skipped,” Teal went on. “Is this in connection with
anything serious, Mr. Malone?”
“Not yet,” Malone said. “But I’ll let you know at once if there are
any further developments. Thanks very much, Mr. Teal.”
“A pleasure, Mr. Malone,” Teal said. “A pleasure.” And then, still
masticating, he switched off.
And that, Malone told himself, was definitely that. Of course the
British PRS hadn’t gone underground; why should they? The British
police weren’t on to them, as Scotland Yard showed. And, no matter
what opinions Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I might hold in the matter,
the FBI had absolutely no jurisdiction in the British Isles.
Malone buried his face in his hands, thought about a cigar and decided
that even a cigar might make him feel worse. Where were they? What
were they doing now? What did they plan to do?
Where had they gone?
“Out of the everywhere,” he said in a hollow, sepulchral voice, “into
the here.”
But where was the here?
He tried to make up his mind whether or not that made sense.
Superficially, it sounded like plain bad English, but he wasn’t sure
of anything any more. Things were getting much too confused.
There was a knock at the door.
Malone, without any hope at all, called: “Come in,” and the door
opened.
The agent-in-charge came in, and dropped a dollar on Malone’s desk.
“So you checked,” Malone said.
“I checked,” the A-in-C said sadly. “The boys went through the entire
damned building. Not a sign of her. Not even a trace.”
“There wouldn’t be one,” Malone said, shoving the dollar back to
waiting hands. “Take the money; I knew what would happen. It was a
sucker bet.”
“Well, I feel like the sucker, all right,” the A-in-C said. “I don’t
know how she did it.”
“I do,” Malone said quietly. “Teleportation.”
The A-in-C whistled. “Well,” he said, “it was a great secret as long
as it was FBI property. But now, friend, all hell is going to bust
loose.”
“It already has,” Malone said hollowly.
“Great,” the A-in-C said. “What now?”
“Now,” Malone said, “I am going to go back to Washington. Take care of
poor little old New York for me.”
He closed his eyes, and vanished.
When he opened them, he was in his Washington apartment. He went over
to the big couch and sat down, feeling that if he were going to curse
he might as well be comfortable while he did it. But when the air was
bright blue, some minutes later, he didn’t feel any better. Cursing
was not the answer.
Nothing seemed to be.
What was his next move?
Where did he go from here?
The more he thought about it, the more his mind spun. He was, he
realized, at an absolute, total, dead end.
Oh, there were things he could do. Malone knew that very well. He
could make a lot of noise and go through a lot of waste motion—that
was what it would amount to. He could have all the homes of all the
missing PRS members checked. That would result, undoubtedly, in the
discovery that the PRS members involved weren’t in their homes. He
could have their files impounded, which would clutter everything with
a great many more pieces of paper, and none of the pieces of paper
would do any good to him. In general, he could have the entire FBI
chasing all over hell and gone—and finding nothing whatever.
No, it would be a waste of time, he told himself. That much was
certain.
And, though he probably had enough evidence to get the FBI in motion,
he had nowhere near enough to carry the case into court, much less
make a try at getting the case to stand up in court. That was one
thing he couldn’t do, even if he wanted to: issue warrants for arrest
on any basis whatever.
But Malone was an FBI agent, and his motto was: “There’s always a
way.” No normal method of tracking down the PRS members, and finding
their present whereabouts, was going to work. They’d been covering
themselves for such an emergency, undoubtedly, for a good many years
and, due to telepathy, they certainly knew enough not to leave any
clues around, of any kind.
But nobody, Malone told himself, was perfect. There were clues lying
around somewhere, he was sure of that; there had to be. The problem
was, simply, to figure out where to look, and what to look for.
Somewhere, the clues were sitting quietly and waiting for him to find
them. The thought cheered him slightly, but not very much. Instead, he
went into the kitchen and started heating water for coffee. He thought
there might be a long night ahead of him, and sighed gently. But there
was no help for it. The work had to be done, and done quickly.
But when eight cigars had been reduced to ash, and what seemed like
several gallons of coffee had sloshed their way into Malone’s interior
workings, his mind was as blank as a baby’s. The lovely, opalescent
dawn began to show in the East, and Malone swore at it. Then, haggard,
red-eyed, confused, violently angry, and not one inch closer to a
solution, he fell into a fitful doze on his couch.
* * * * *
When he awoke the sun was high in the sky, and outside his window the
cheerful sound of traffic floated in the air. Downstairs somebody was
playing a television set too loudly, and the voice reached Malone’s
semi-aware mind in a great tinny shout:
“And now, the makers of Bon-Ton B-Complex Bolsters—the blanket of
health—present Mother Kohler’s Chit-Chat Hour!”
The invisible audience screamed and howled. Malone ripped out a
particularly foul oath and sat up on the couch. “That,” he muttered,
“is a fine thing to wake up to.” He focused his eyes, with only
slight difficulty, on his watch. The time was exactly noon.
“But first,” the announcer burbled downstairs, “a word from Mother
Kohler herself, about the brand new special B-Complex _Irradiated_
Bolster you can get at your neighborhood stores....”
“Shut up,” Malone said. He had wasted a lot of time doing nothing but
sleeping, he told himself. This was no time to be listening to
television. He got up and found, to his vague surprise, that he felt a
lot better and more clear-headed than he’d been feeling. Maybe the
sleep had done him some good.
He yawned, blinked and stretched, and then he padded into the
bathroom, showered and shaved and put on fresh clothes. He thought
about having a morning cup of coffee, but last night’s dregs appeared
to have taken up permanent residence in his digestive tract, and he
decided against it at last. He swallowed some orange juice and toast
and then, heaving a great sigh of resignation and brushing crumbs off
his shirt, he teleported himself over to his office.
He was going to have to face Burris eventually, he knew.
And now was just as good, or as bad, a time as any.
Malone didn’t hesitate. He punched the button on his intercom for
Burris’ office and then sat back, with his eyes closed, for the
well-known voice.
It didn’t come.
Instead, Wolf, the director’s secretary, spoke up.
“Burris isn’t in, Malone,” he said. “He had to fly to Miami. I can get
a call through to him on the plane, if it’s urgent, but he’ll be
landing in about fifteen minutes. And he did say he’d call this
afternoon.”
“Oh,” Malone said. “Sure. Okay. It isn’t urgent.” He was just as glad
of the reprieve; it gave him one more chance to work matters through
to a solution, and report success instead of failure. “But what’s
going on in Miami?” he added.
“Don’t you read the papers?” Wolf asked.
Everybody, Malone reflected, seemed to be asking him that lately. “I
haven’t had time,” he said.
“The governor of Mississippi was assassinated yesterday, at Miami
Beach,” Wolf said.
“Ah,” Malone said. He thought about it for a second. “Frankly,” he
said, “this does not strike me as an irreparable loss to the nation.
Not even to Mississippi.”
“You express my views precisely,” Wolf said.
“How about the killer?” Malone said. “I gather they haven’t got him
yet, or Burris wouldn’t be on his way down.”
“No,” Wolf said. “The killer would be on his way here instead. They
haven’t got him, Malone. It seems Governor Flarion was walking along
Collins Avenue when somebody fired at him, using a high-powered rifle
with, I guess, a scope sight.”
“Professional,” Malone commented.
“It looks like it,” Wolf said. “Nobody even heard the sniper’s shot;
the governor just fell over, right there in the street. And by the
time his bodyguards found out what had happened, it was impossible
even to be sure just which way he was facing when the shot had been
fired.”
“And, as I remember Collins Avenue—” Malone started.
“Right,” Wolf said. “Out where Governor Flarion was taking his stroll,
there’s an awful lot of it to search. The boys are trying to find
somebody who might have seen a man acting suspicious in any of the
nearby buildings, or heard a shot, or seen anybody at all lurking or
loitering anywhere remotely close to the scene.”
“Lovely,” Malone said. “Sounds like a nice complicated job.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Wolf said. “There’s also the Miami
Beach Chamber of Commerce. According to them, Flarion died of a heart
attack, and not even in Miami Beach. The bullet and the body are
supposed to be written off as just coincidences, to keep the fair name
of Miami Beach unsullied.”
“All I can say,” Malone offered, “is good luck. This is the saddest
day in American history since the assassination of Huey P. Long.”
“Agreed,” Wolf said. “Want me to tell Burris you called?”
“Right,” Malone said. He flicked off.
Now, he asked himself, how did the assassination of Governor Nemours
P. Flarion fit in with anything? Granted, good old Nemours P. had been
a horrible mistake, a paranoid, self-centered, would-be dictator whose
talents as a rabble-rouser and a fearmonger had somehow managed to get
him elected to a governorship. Certainly nobody felt particularly
unhappy about his death. But he wouldn’t fit into the pattern. Malone
reminded himself that that was one more thing he had to find out when
he got the chance.
The trouble lay in finding an opportunity, he thought—and then he
corrected himself.
Not _finding_ it—_making_ it. Nobody was going to hand him anything
on a silver serving salver.
He punched the intercom again and got the Records office.
“Yes, sir?” a familiar voice said.
“Potter?” Malone said. “This is Malone. I want facsimiles of
everything we have on the Psychical Research Society, on Sir Lewis
Carter, and on Luba Vasilovna Garbitsch. Both of those last are
connected with the Society.”
“Right,” Potter said. “They’ll be up at once.”
Then he punched again, and asked for the latest copy of the Washington
_Post_. He gave the article on Governor Flarion one quick glance, but
it didn’t contain anything in the way of facts that he hadn’t already
had from Wolf. After that, he left it and concentrated on the more
prosaic, human-interest news, the smaller stories.