[Illustration]
Thirty seconds passed. During that time, Malone did nothing at all. He
just sat there, while a confused montage of pictures tumbled through his
head. Sometimes he saw double exposures, and sometimes a couple of
pictures overlapped, but it didn't seem to make any difference, because
none of the pictures meant anything anyhow.
The reason for that was obvious. He was no longer sane. He had cracked
up. At a crucial moment, his brain had failed him, and now people would
have to come in and cart him away and put him in a straitjacket. It was
perfectly obvious to Malone that he was no longer capable of dealing
with everyday life. The blow on the head had probably taken final
effect, and it had been more serious than the doctor had imagined.
He had always distrusted doctors anyhow.
And now he was suffering from a delayed reaction. He wasn't living in
the real world any more. He had gone off to dreamland, where people
disappeared when you looked at them. There was no hope for him.
It was a nice theory, and it was even comforting, in a way. There was
only one thing wrong with it.
The room around him didn't look dreamlike at all. It was perfectly solid
and real, and it looked just the way it had looked before Mike Fueyo had
... well, Malone amended, before whatever had happened had happened. It
was a perfectly complete little room, and it had four chairs in it.
Malone was sitting in one of the chairs and all the others were empty.
There was absolutely nothing else in the room.
With some regret, Malone abandoned the theory that he had gone mad. This
left him with no ideas at all. Because if he hadn't become insane, then
what _had_ happened?
After another second or two, some ideas began to filter through the
daze. Perhaps he'd just blacked out for a minute and the kid had gone
out the door. That was possible, wasn't it?
Sure it was. And maybe he had just not seen the kid go. His eyes had
failed for a second or two. That could certainly happen, after a blow on
the head. Malone tried to remember where the sight centers of the brain
were. Maybe whoever had hit him had disturbed them, and he'd had a
sudden blackout.
Come to think of it, that made pretty good sense. If he had blacked out,
then Mike would have seen it as he went groggy, and Mike had just walked
out the door. It had to be the door, of course--the windows were out of
the question, since there weren't any windows. And six-inch-wide
air-conditioner ducts do not provide reasonable space for an exit, not
if you happen to be a human being.
That, Malone told himself, was settled--and a good thing, too. He had
begun to worry about it. But now he knew just what had happened, and he
felt relieved. He got up from his chair, walked over to the door and
opened it.
Lieutenant Lynch nearly fell into the room. He'd obviously had his ear
pressed tightly to the door and hadn't expected it to open. The other
two cops stood behind him, just about filling the hallway with their
broad shoulders.
"Well, well," Malone said.
Lynch recovered his balance and glared at the FBI agent. He said
nothing.
"Where is he?" Malone said.
"Where is he?" Lynch repeated, and blinked. "Where's _who_?"
Malone shook his head impatiently. "Fueyo," he said.
Lynch's expression was the same as that on the faces of the other two
cops: complete and utter bafflement. Malone stopped and stared. It was
suddenly very obvious that the lovely theory he had worked out for
Mike's disappearance wasn't true in the least. If Mike Fueyo had come
out the door, then these cops would know about it. But they obviously
knew nothing at all about it.
Therefore, he hadn't come out through the door.
Malone took a deep breath.
"What are you talking about?" Lynch said. "Isn't the kid in there with
you? What's happened?"
There was only one thing to do and, straight-faced, Malone went ahead
and did it. "Of course not," he snapped, trying to sound impatient and
official. "I released him."
"You _what_?"
"Released him," Malone said. He stepped out into the hall and closed the
door of the interrogation room firmly behind him. "I got all the
information I needed, so I let him go."
"Thanks," Lynch said bitterly. "After all, I was the one who--"
"You called him in for questioning, didn't you, lieutenant?" Malone
said.
"Yes, I did, and I--"
"Well," Malone said, "I questioned him."
There was a little silence. Then Lynch asked, in a strangled voice:
"What did he say?"
"Sorry," Malone said at once. "That's classified information." He pushed
his way into the corridor, trying to look as if he had fifteen other
jobs to accomplish within the next hour. Being an FBI agent was going to
help a little, but he still had to look good in order to really carry it
off.
"But--"
"Thanks for your co-operation, lieutenant," Malone said. "You've all
been very helpful." He smiled at them in what he hoped was a superior
manner. "So long," he said, and started walking.
"Wait!" Lynch said. He flung open the door of the interrogation room.
There was no doubt that it was empty. "Wait! Malone!"
Malone turned slowly, trying to look calm and in control of the
situation. "Yes?" he said.
Lynch looked at him with puzzled, pleading eyes. "Malone, _how_ did you
release him? We were right here. He didn't come through the door. There
isn't any other exit. So how did you get him out?"
There was only one answer to that, and Malone gave it with a quiet,
assured air. "I'm terribly sorry, lieutenant," he said, "but that's
classified information, too." He gave the cops a little wave and walked
slowly down the corridor. When he reached the stairs he began to speed
up, and he was out of the precinct station and into a taxicab before any
of the cops could have realized what had happened.
He took a deep breath, feeling as if it were the first he'd had in
several days. "Breathe air," he told himself. "It's _good_ for you." Not
that New York had any real air in it. It was mostly carbon fumes and the
like. But it was the nearest thing to air that Malone could find at the
moment, and he determined to go right on breathing it until something
better and cleaner showed up.
But that wasn't important now. As the cab tooled along down Broadway
toward Sixty-ninth Street, Malone closed his eyes and began going over
the whole thing in his mind.
Mike Fueyo had vanished.
Of that, Malone told himself, there was no shadow of doubt. No probable,
possible shadow of doubt.
No possible doubt--as a matter of fact--whatever.
Dismissing the Grand Inquisitor with a negligent wave of his hand, he
concentrated on the main question. It was a good question. Malone could
have sat and looked at it admiringly for a long time.
As a matter of fact, that was all he could think of to do, as the cab
turned up Seventieth Street and headed east. He certainly didn't have
any answers for it.
But it was a lovely question:
_Where does that leave Kenneth J. Malone?_
And, possibly even more important:
_Where was Miguel Fueyo?_
It was obvious that he'd vanished on purpose. And it hadn't just been
something he'd recently discovered. He had known all along that he could
pull the trick; if he hadn't known that, he wouldn't have done what he
had done beforehand. No seventeen-year-old boy, no matter what he was,
would give the FBI the raspberry unless he were pretty sure he could get
away with it.
Malone remembered the raspberry and winced slightly. The cab driver
called back: "Anything wrong, buddy?"
"Everything," Malone said. "But don't worry about it."
The cab driver shrugged and turned back to the wheel. Malone went back
to Mike Fueyo.
The kid could make himself vanish at will.
Invisibility?
Malone thought about that for a while. The fact that it was impossible
didn't decide him against it. Everything was impossible; that much was
clear. But he didn't think Mike Fueyo had just become invisible. No.
There had been the sense of a presence actually leaving the room. If
Mike had become invisible and stayed, Malone was sure he wouldn't have
felt the boy leave.
Mike had not just become invisible. (And what do I mean, "just"? Malone
asked himself unhappily.) He had gone--elsewhere.
This brought him back full circle to his original question: where was
the boy now? But he ignored it for a minute or two as another, even more
difficult query presented itself.