The summer sun beat down on the white city of Washington, D. C. as if
it had mistaken its instructions slightly, and was convinced that the
city had been put down somewhere in the Sahara. The sun seemed
confused, Malone thought. If this were the Sahara, obviously there was
no reason whatever for the Potomac to be running through it. The sun
was doing its best to correct this small error, however, by exerting
even more heat in a valiant attempt to dry up the river.
Its attempt was succeeding, at least partially. The Potomac was still
there, but quite a lot of it was not in the river bed any more.
Instead, it had gone into the air, which was so humid by now that
Malone was willing to swear that it was splashing into his lungs at
every inhalation. Resisting an impulse to try the breast-stroke, he
stood in the full glare of the straining sun, just outside the Senate
Office Building. He looked across at the Capitol, squinting his eyes
manfully against the glare of its dome in the brightness.
The Capitol was, at any rate, some relief from the sight of Thomas
Boyd and a group of agents busily grilling two technicians. That was
going on in the Senate Office Building, and Malone had come over to
watch the proceedings. Everything had been set up in what Malone
considered the most complicated fashion possible. A big room had been
turned into a projection chamber, and films were being run off over
and over. The films, taken by hidden cameras watching the
computer-secretaries, had caught two technicians red-handed punching
errors into the machines. Boyd had leaped on this evidence, and he and
his crew were showing the movies to the technicians and questioning
them under bright lights in an effort to break down their resistance.
But it didn't look as though they were going to have any more success
than the sun was having, turning Washington into the Sahara. After
all, Malone told himself, wiping his streaming brow, there were no
Pyramids in Washington. He tried to discover whether that made any
sense, but it was too much work. He went back to thinking about Boyd.
The technicians were sticking to their original stories, that the
mistakes had been honest ones. It sounded like a sensible idea to
Malone; after all, people did make mistakes. And the FBI didn't have a
single shred of evidence to prove that the technicians were engaged in
deliberate sabotage. But Boyd wasn't giving up. Over and over he got
the technicians to repeat their stories, looking for discrepancies or
slips. Over and over he ran off the films of their mistakes, looking
for some clue, some shred of evidence.
Even the sight of the Capitol, Malone told himself sadly, was better
than any more of Boyd's massive investigation techniques.
He had come out to do some thinking. He believed, in spite of a good
deal of evidence to the contrary, that his best ideas came to him
while walking. At any rate, it was a way of getting away from four
walls and from the prying eyes and anxious looks of superiors. He
sighed gently, crammed his hat onto his head and started out.
Only a maniac, he reflected, would wear a hat on a day like the one he
was swimming through. But the people who passed him as he trudged
onward to no particular destination didn't seem to notice; they gave
him a fairly wide berth, and seemed very polite, but that wasn't
because they thought he was nuts, Malone knew. It was because they
knew he was an FBI man.
That was the result of an FBI regulation. All agents had to wear hats.
Malone wasn't sure why, and his thinking on the matter had only
dredged up the idea that you had to have a hat in case somebody asked
you to keep something under it. But the FBI was firm about its
rulings. No matter what the weather, an agent wore a hat. Malone
thought bitterly that he might just as well wear a red, white and blue
luminous sign that said _FBI_ in great winking letters, and maybe a
hooting siren, too. Still, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was not
supposed to be a secret organization--no matter what occasional
critics might say. And the hats, at least as long as the weather
remained broiling, were enough proof of that for anybody.
Malone could feel water collecting under his hat and soaking his head.
He removed the hat quickly, wiped his head with a handkerchief and
replaced the hat, feeling as if he had become incognito for a few
seconds. The hat was back on now, feeling official but terrible, and
about the same was true of the fully-loaded Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum
revolver which hung in his shoulder holster. The harness chafed at his
shoulder and chest and the weight of the gun itself was an added and
unwelcome burden.
But even without the gun and the hat, Malone did not feel exactly
chipper. His shirt and undershirt were no longer two garments, but
one, welded together by seamless sweat and plastered heavily and not
too skillfully to his skin. His trouser legs clung damply to calves
and thighs, rubbing as he walked, and at the knees each trouser leg
attached and detached itself with the unpleasant regularity of a wet
bastinado. Inside Malone's shoes, his socks were completely awash, and
he seemed to squish as he walked. It was hard to tell, but there
seemed to be a small fish in his left shoe. It might, he told himself,
be no more than a pebble or a wrinkle in his sock. But he was willing
to swear that it was swimming upstream.
And the forecast, he told himself bitterly, was for continued warm.
He forced himself to take his mind off his own troubles and get back
to the troubles of the FBI in general, such as the problem at hand. It
was an effort, but he frowned and kept walking, and within a block he
was concentrating again on the _psi_ powers.
* * * * *
_Psi_, he told himself, was behind the whole mess. In spite of Boyd's
horrified refusal to believe such a thing, Malone was sure of it.
Three years ago, of course, he wouldn't have considered the notion
either. But since then a great many things had happened, and his
horizons had widened. After all, capturing a double handful of totally
insane, if perfectly genuine telepaths, from asylums all over the
country, was enough by itself to widen quite a few stunned horizons.
And then, later, there had been the gang of juvenile delinquents. They
had been perfectly normal juvenile delinquents, stealing cars and
bopping a stray policeman or two. It just happened, though, that they
had solved the secret of instantaneous teleportation, too. This made
them just a trifle unusual.
In capturing them, Malone, too, had learned the teleportation secret.
Unlike Boyd, he thought, or Burris, the idea of psionic power didn't
bother him much. After all, the psionic spectrum--if it was a spectrum
at all--was just as much a natural phenomenon as gravity, or
magnetism.
It was just a little hard for some people to get used to.
And, of course, he didn't fully understand _how_ it worked, or _why_.
This put him in the position, he told himself, of an Australian
aborigine. He tried to imagine an Australian aborigine in a hat on a
hot day, decided the aborigine would have too much sense, and got back
off the subject again.
However, he thought grimly, there was this Australian aborigine. And
he had a magnifying glass, which he'd picked up from the wreck of some
ship. Using that--assuming that experience, or a friendly missionary,
taught him how--he could manage to light a fire, using the sun's
thermonuclear processes to do the job. Malone doubted that the
aborigine knew anything about thermonuclear processes, but he could
start a fire with them.
As a matter of fact, he told himself, the aborigine didn't understand
oxidation, either. But he could use that fire, when he got it going.
In spite of his lack of knowledge, the aborigine could use that nice,
hot, burning fire ...
Hurriedly, Malone pried his thoughts away from aborigines and heat,
and tried to focus his mind elsewhere. He didn't understand psionic
processes, he thought; but then, nobody did, really, as far as he
knew. But he could use them.
And, obviously, somebody else could use them, too.
Only what kind of force was being used? What kind of psionic force
would it take to make so many people in the United States goof up the
way they were doing?
That, Malone told himself, was a good question, a basic and an
important question. He was proud of himself for thinking of it.
Unfortunately, he didn't have the answer.
But he thought he knew a way of getting one.
It was perfectly true that nobody knew much about how psionics worked.
For that matter, nobody knew very much about how gravity worked. But
there was still some information--and, in the case of psionics, Malone
knew where it was to be found.
It was to be found in Yucca Flats, Nevada.
It was, of course, true that Nevada would probably be even hotter than
Washington, D. C. But there was no help for that, Malone told himself
sadly; and, besides, the cold chill of the expert himself would
probably cool things off quite rapidly. Malone thought of Dr. Thomas
O'Connor, the Westinghouse psionics expert and frowned. O'Connor was
not exactly what might be called a friendly man.
But he did know more about psionics than anyone else Malone could
think of. And his help had been invaluable in solving the two previous
psionic cases Malone had worked on.
For a second he thought of calling O'Connor, but he brushed that
thought aside bravely. In spite of the heat of Yucca Flats, he would
have to talk to the man personally. He thought again of O'Connor's
congealed personality, and wondered if it would really be effective in
combating the heat. If it were, he told himself, he would take the man
right back to Washington with him, and plug him into the
air-conditioning lines.
He sighed deeply, thought about a cigar and decided regretfully
against it, here on the public street where he would be visible to
anyone. Instead, he looked around him, discovered that he was only a
block from a large, neon-lit drugstore and headed for it. Less than a
minute later he was in a phone booth.
* * * * *
The operators throughout the country seemed to suffer from heat
prostration, and Malone was hardly inclined to blame them. But, all
the same, it took several minutes for him to get through to Dr.
O'Connor's office, and a minute or so more before he could convince a
security-addled secretary that, after all, he would hardly blow
O'Connor to bits over the long-distance phone.
Finally the secretary, with a sigh of reluctance, said she would see
if Dr. O'Connor were available. Malone waited in the phone booth,
opening the door every few seconds to breathe. The booth was
air-conditioned, but remained for some mystical reason an even ten
degrees above the boiling point of Malone's temper.
Finally Dr. O'Connor's lean, pallid face appeared on the screen. He
had not changed since Malone had last seen him. He still looked, and
acted, like one of Malone's more disliked law professors.
"Ah," the scientist said in a cold, precise voice. "Mr. Malone. I am
sorry for our precautions, but you understand that security must be
served."
"Sure," Malone said.
"Being an FBI man, of course you would," Dr. O'Connor went on, his
face changing slightly and his voice warming almost to the boiling
point of nitrogen. It was obvious that the phrase was Dr. O'Connor's
idea of a little joke, and Malone smiled politely and nodded. The
scientist seemed to feel some friendliness toward Malone, though it
was hard to tell for sure. But Malone had brought him some fine
specimens to work with--telepaths and teleports, though human, being
no more than specimens to such a very precise scientific mind--and he
seemed grateful for Malone's diligence and effort in finding such
fascinating objects of study.
That Malone certainly hadn't started out to find them made, it
appeared, very little difference.
"Well, then," O'Connor said, returning to his normal, serious tone,
"what can I do for you, Mr. Malone?"
"If you have the time, doctor," Malone said respectfully, "I'd like to
talk to you for a few minutes." He had the absurd feeling that
O'Connor was going to tell him to stop by after class, but the
scientist only nodded.
"Your call is timed very well," he said. "As it happens, Mr. Malone, I
do have a few seconds to spare just now."
"Fine," Malone said.
"I should be glad to talk with you," O'Connor said, without looking
any more glad than ever.
"I'll be right there," Malone said. O'Connor nodded again, and blanked
out. Malone switched off and took a deep, superheated breath of phone
booth air. For a second he considered starting his trip from outside
the phone booth, but that was dangerous--if not to Malone, then to
innocent spectators. Psionics was by no means a household word, and
the sight of Malone leaving for Nevada might send several citizens
straight to the wagon. Which was not a place, he thought judiciously,
for anybody to be on such a hot day.
He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second. In that time he
reconstructed from memory a detailed, three-dimensional, full-color
image of Dr. O'Connor's office in his mind. It was perfect in detail;
he checked it over mentally and then, by a special effort of will, he
gave himself the psychic push that made the transition possible.
When he opened his eyes, he was in O'Connor's office, standing in
front of the scientist's wide desk. He hoped nobody had been looking
into the phone booth at the instant he had disappeared; but he was
reasonably sure he'd been unobserved. People didn't go around peering
into phone booths, after all, and he had seen no one.
O'Connor looked up without surprise. "Ah," he said. "Sit down, Mr.
Malone." Malone looked around for the chair, which was an
uncomfortably straight-backed affair, and sat down in it gingerly.
Remembering past visits to O'Connor, he was grateful for even the
small amount of relaxation the hard wood afforded him. O'Connor had
only recently unbent to the point of supplying a spare chair in his
office for visitors, and, apparently, especially for Malone. Perhaps,
Malone thought, it was more gratitude for the lovely specimens.
Malone still felt uncomfortable, but tried bravely not to show it. He
felt slightly guilty, too, as he always did when he popped into
O'Connor's office without bothering to stay spacebound. By law, after
all, he knew he should check in and out at the main gate of the huge,
ultra-top-secret government reservation whenever he visited Yucca
Flats. But that meant wasting a lot of time and going through a lot of
trouble. Malone had rationalized it out for himself that way, and had
got just far enough to do things the quick and easy way, and not quite
far enough to feel undisturbed about it. After all, he told himself
grimly, anything that saved time and trouble increased the efficiency
of the FBI, so it was all to the good.
He swallowed hard. "Dr. O'Connor--" he began.
O'Connor looked up again. "Yes?" he said. He'd had plenty of practice
in watching people appear and disappear, between Malone and the
specimens Malone had brought him; he was beyond surprise or shock by
now.
"I came here to talk to you," Malone began again.