Lenny, eyes still closed, said: "Five feet ten, heavy set, gray hair,
dark-rimmed glasses, brown suit, flashy necktie. By the cut of his
clothes, I'd say he was either British or American, probably American.
Fifty-five or fifty-six years old."
It was obvious to the Secretary of Defense and to Colonel Spaulding that
the President was suppressing some inward excitement.
"Very good, Mr. Poe!" he said. "Now, you will find a box of colored
pencils and a sketch pad in that desk over there. Can you draw me a fairly
accurate sketch of that man?"
"Yeah, sure." Lenny opened his eyes, moved over to the desk, took out the
pencils and sketch pad, and went to work. He had to close his eyes
occasionally, but his work was incredibly rapid and, at the same time,
almost photographically accurate.
As the picture took form, the President's inward excitement increased
perceptibly. When it was finally finished, Lenny handed the sketch to the
President without a word.
The President took it eagerly and his face broke out in his famous grin.
"Excellent! Perfect!" He looked at Lenny. "Your brother hasn't attracted
the man's attention in any way, has he?"
"Nope," said Lenny.
"Fine. The experiment is over. Relay my thanks to your brother. He can go
ahead with whatever he was doing now."
"I don't quite understand," said the Secretary of State.
"I felt it necessary to make one final experiment of my own devising," the
President said. "I wanted Raphael Poe to go to a particular place at a
particular time, with no advance warning, to transmit a picture of
something he had never seen before. I arranged this test myself, and I am
positive that there could be no trickery."
"Never seen before?" the Secretary repeated bewilderedly. He gestured at
the sketch. "Why, that's obviously Bill Donovan, of the Moscow delegation.
Poe could have seen a photograph of him somewhere before."
"Even so," the President pointed out, "there would be no way of knowing
that he would be at that spot. But that's beside the point. Look at that
necktie!"
"I had noticed it," the Defense Secretary admitted.
It was certainly an outstanding piece of neckwear. As drawn by Leonard
Poe, it was a piece of brilliant chartreuse silk, fully three and a half
inches wide at its broadest. Against that background, rose-pink nude girls
were cavorting with pale mauve satyrs.
"That tie," said the President, "was sent to me fifteen years ago by on of
my constituents, when I was in Congress. I never wore it, of course, but
it would have been criminal to have thrown away such a magnificently
obscene example of bad taste as that.
"I sent it to Donovan in a sealed diplomatic pouch by special courier,
with instructions to wear it at this time. He, of course, has no idea why
he is standing there. He is merely obeying orders.
"Gentlemen, this is completely convincing to me. Absolutely no one but
myself knew what I had in mind. It would have required telepathy even to
cheat.
"Thank you very much, Mr. Poe. Colonel Spaulding, you may proceed with
Operation Mapcase as planned."
* * * * *
"Dr. Malekrinova, will you initial these requisition forms, please."
Dr. Sonya Malekrinova, a dowdy-looking, middle-aged woman with unplucked
eyebrows and a mole on her chin, adjusted her steel-rimmed glasses, took
the proffered papers from the clerk, ran her eyes over them, and then put
her initials on the bottom of each page.
"Thank you, Comrade Doctor," said the clerk when she handed back the sheaf
of papers.
"Certainly, Comrade."
And the two of them went about their business.
Not far away, in the Cathedral of St. Basil, Vladimir Turenski, alias
Raphael Poe, was also apparently going about his business. The cathedral
had not seen nor heard the Liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church or any
other church, for a good many decades. The Bolsheviks, in their zeal to
protect the citizens of the Soviet Unions from the pernicious influence of
religion, had converted it into a museum as soon as possible.
It was the function of _Tovarishch_ Turenski to push a broom around the
floors of the museum, and this he did with great determination and
efficiency. He also cleaned windows and polished metalwork when the
occasion demanded. He was only one of a large crew of similarly employed
men, but he was a favorite with the Head Custodian, who not only felt
sorry for the simple-minded deaf-mute, but appreciated the hard work he
did. If, on occasion, Comrade Turenski would lean on his broom and fall
into a short reverie, it was excusable because he still managed to get all
his work done.
Behind Comrade Turenski, a guide was explaining a display to a group of
tourists, but Turenski ignored the distraction and kept his mind focused
on the thoughts of Dr. Sonya Malekrinova.
After nearly ten months of patient work, Raphael Poe had hit upon
something that was, to his way of thinking, more important than all the
information he had transmitted to Washington thus far.
Picking brains telepathically was not, even for him, an easy job. He had
the knack and the training but, in addition, there was the necessity of
establishing a rapport with the other mind. Since he was a physicist and
not a politician, it was much easier to get information from the mind of
Sonya Malekrinova than to get it from the Premier. The only person with
whom he could keep in contact over any great distance was his brother, and
that only because the two of them had grown up together.
He could pick up the strongest thoughts of any nearby person very easily.
He did not need to hear the actual words, for instance, of a nearby
conversation in order to follow it perfectly, because the words of verbal
communication were strong in a person's mind.
But getting deeper than that required an increasing amount of
understanding of the functioning of the other person's mind.
His ability to eavesdrop on conversations had been of immense benefit to
Washington so far, but is was difficult for him to get close enough to the
higher-ups in the Soviet government to get all the data that the President
of the United States wanted.
But now that he had established a firm mental linkage with one of the
greatest physicists in the Soviet Union, he could begin to send
information that would be of tremendous value to the United States.
He brushed up a pile of trash, pushed it into a dust pan, and carried it
off toward the disposal chute that led to the trash cans. In the room
where the brooms were kept, he paused and closed his eyes.
_Lenny! Are picking this up?_
_Sure, Rafe. I'm ready with the drawing board anytime you are._
As Dr. Sonya Malekrinova stood in her laboratory looking over the
apparatus she was perfecting for the glory of the Soviet State, she had no
notion that someone halfway around the world was also looking at it over
her shoulder--or rather, through her own eyes.
* * * * *
Lenny started with the fives first, and worked his way up to the larger
denominations.
"Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty--forty, fifty, sixty...."
he muttered happily to himself. "Two fifty, three, three-fifty, four,
four-fifty."
It was all there, so he smiled benevolently at the man in the pay window.
"Thank you muchly." Then he stepped aside to let another lucky man cash a
winning ticket.
His horse had come in at fifteen, six-ten, four-fifty for Straight, Place,
and Show, and sixty bucks on the nose had paid off very nicely.
Lenny Poe took out his copy of the _Daily Racing Form_ and checked over
the listing for the next race.
_Hm-m-m, ha. Purse, $7500. Four-year-olds and up: handicap. Seven
furlongs. Turf course. Hm-m-m, ha._
Lenny Poe had a passion for throwing his money away on any unpredictable
event that would offer him odds. He had, deep down, an artistic soul, but
he didn't let that interfere with his desire to lay a bet at the drop of
an old fedora.
He had already decided, several hours before, that Ducksoup, in the next
race, would win handily and would pay off at something like twenty or
twenty-five to one. But he felt it his duty to look one last time at the
previous performance record, just to be absolutely positive.
Satisfied, he folded the _Racing Form_, shoved it back into his pocket,
and walked over to the fifty-dollar window.
"Gimmie nine tickets on Ducksoup in the seventh," he said, plonking the
handful of bills down on the counter.
But before the man behind the window grating could take the money, a huge,
hamlike, and rather hairy hand came down on top of his own hand, covering
it and the money at the same time.
"Hold it, Lenny," said a voice at the same time.
Lenny jerked his head around to his right and looked up to see a largish
man who had "cop" written all over him. Another such individual crowded
past Lenny on his left to flash a badge on the man in the betting window,
so that he would know that this wasn't a holdup.
"Hey!" said Lenny. His mind was thinking fast. He decided to play his
favorite role, that of the indignant Italian. "Whatsa da matta with you,
hah? Thisa no a free country? A man gotta no rights?"
"Come on, Mr. Poe," the big man said quietly, "this is important."
"Poe? You outta you mind? Thatsa name of a river----or a raven. I'm a
forgetta which. My namesa Manelli!"
"_Scusi, signore_," the big man said with exaggerated politeness, "_ma se
lei è veramente italiano, non' è l'uomo che cerchiamo._"
Lenny's Italian was limited to a handful of words. He know he was trapped,
but he faced the situation with aplomb. "Thatsa lie! I was inna Chicago
that night!"
"_Ah! Cosè credero. Avanti, saccentone._" He jerked his thumb toward the
gate. "Let's go."
Lenny muttered something that the big man didn't quite catch.
"What'd you say?"
"Upper United States--the northern United States," Lenny said calmly
shoving his four hundred fifty dollars into his pocket. "That's where
Chicago is. Never mind. Come in, boys; back to the drawing board."
The two men escorted Lenny to a big, powerful Lincoln; he climbed into the
back seat with the big one while the other one got behind the wheel.
As soon as they had left the racetrack and were well out on the highway,
the driver said: "You want to call in, Mario? This traffic is pretty
heavy."
The big man beside Lenny leaned forward, over the back of the front seat,
unhooked the receiver of the scrambler-equipped radiophone, and sat back
down. He thumbed a button on the side of the handset and said: "This is
Seven Oh Two." After a short silence, he said: "You can call off the net.
You want him brought in?" He listened for a moment. "O.K. Are we cleared
through the main gate? O.K. Off."
He leaned forward to replace the receiver, speaking to the driver as he
did so. "Straight to the Air Force base. They've got a jet waiting there
for him."
He settled back comfortably and looked at Lenny. "You could at least tell
people where you're going."
"Very well," said Lenny. He folded his arms, closed his eyes, and relaxed.
"Right now, I'm going off to dreamland."
He waited a short while to see if the other would say anything. He didn't,
so Lenny proceeded to do exactly what he had promised to do.
He went off to dreamland.
He had not been absolutely sure, when he made the promise, that he would
actually do just that, but the odds were in favor of it. It was now one
o'clock in the morning in Moscow, and Lenny's brother, Raphael, was a man
of regular habits.
Lenny reached out. When he made contact, all he got was a jumble of hash.
It was as though someone had made a movie by cutting bits and snippets
from a hundred different films, no bit more than six or seven frames long,
with a sound track that might or might not match, and projected the result
through a drifting fog, using an ever-changing lens that rippled like the
surface of a wind-ruffled pool. Sometimes one figure would come into sharp
focus for a fraction of a second, sometimes in color, sometimes not.
Sometimes Lenny was merely observing the show, sometimes he was in it.
_Rafe! Hey, Rafe! Wake up!_