Chapter 8

Four days later, he was more than tired. He was exhausted. The six psychopaths--including Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I--had been housed in a converted dormitory in the Westinghouse area, together with four highly nervous and even more highly trained and investigated psychiatrists from St. Elizabeths in Washington. The Convention of Nuts, as Malone called it privately, was in full swing.

And it was every bit as strange as he’d thought it was going to be. Unfortunately, five of the six (Her Majesty being the only exception) were completely out of contact with the world. The psychiatrists referred to them in worried tones as “unavailable for therapy,” and spent most of their time brooding over possible ways of bringing them back into the real world for a while, at least far enough so that they could be spoken with.

Malone stayed away from the five who were completely psychotic. The weird babblings of fifty-year-old Barry Miles disconcerted him. They sounded like little Charlie O’Neill’s strange semi-connected jabber, but Westinghouse’s Dr. O’Connor said that it seemed to represent another phenomenon entirely. William Logan’s blank face was a memory of horror, but the constant tinkling giggles of Ardith Parker, the studied and concentrated way that Gordon Macklin wove meaningless patterns in the air with his waving fingers, and the rhythmless, melodyless humming that seemed to be all there was to the personality of Robert Cassiday were simply too much for Malone. Taken singly, each was frightening and remote; all together, they wove a picture of insanity that chilled him more than he wanted to admit.

When the seventh telepath was flown in from Honolulu, Malone didn’t even bother to see her. He let the psychiatrists take over directly, and simply avoided their sessions.

Queen Elizabeth I, on the other hand, he found genuinely likeable.

According to the psych boys, she had been (as both Malone and Her Majesty had theorized) heavily frustrated by being the possessor of a talent which no one else recognized. Beyond that, the impact of other minds was disturbing; there was a slight loss of identity which seemed to be a major factor in every case of telepathic insanity. But the Queen had compensated for her frustrations in the easiest possible way; she had simply traded her identity for another one, and had rationalized a single, overruling delusion: that she was Queen Elizabeth I of England, still alive and wrongfully deprived of her throne.

“It’s a beautiful rationalization,” one of the psychiatrists said with more than a trace of admiration in his voice. “Complete and thoroughly consistent. She’s just traded identities--and everything else she does--everything else--stems logically out of her delusional premise. Beautiful.”

She may have been crazy, Malone realized. But she was a long way from stupid.

The project was in full swing. The only trouble was that they were no nearer finding the telepath than they had been three weeks before. With five completely blank human beings to work with, and the sixth Queen Elizabeth (Malone heard privately that the last telepath, the girl from Honolulu, was no better than the first five; she had apparently regressed into what one of the psychiatrists called a “non- identity childhood syndrome.” Malone didn’t know what it meant, but it sounded terrible.)--with that crew, Malone could see why progress was their most difficult commodity.

Dr. Harry Gamble, the head of Project Isle, was losing poundage by the hour with worry. And, Malone reflected, he could ill afford it.

Burris, Malone and Boyd had set themselves up in a temporary office within the Westinghouse area. The Director had left his assistant in charge in Washington. Nothing, he said over and over again, was as important as the spy in Project Isle.

Apparently Boyd had come to believe that, too. At any rate, though he was still truculent, there were no more outbursts of rebellion.

But, on the fourth day:

“What do we do now?” Burris asked.

“Shoot ourselves,” Boyd said promptly.

“Now, look here--” Malone began, but he was overruled.

“Boyd,” Burris said levelly, “if I hear any more of that sort of pessimism, you’re going to be an exception to the beard rule. One more crack out of you, and you can go out and buy yourself a razor.”

Boyd put his hand over his chin protectively, and said nothing at all.

“Wait a minute,” Malone said. “Aren’t there any sane telepaths in the world?”

“We can’t find any,” Burris said. “We--”

There was a knock at the office door. “Who’s there?” Burris called. “Dr. Gamble,” said the man’s surprisingly baritone voice.

Burris called: “Come in, Doctor,” and the door opened. Dr. Gamble’s lean face looked almost haggard.

“Mr. Burris,” he said, extending his arms a trifle, “can’t anything be done?” Malone had seen Gamble speaking before, and had wondered if it would be possible for the man to talk with his hands tied behind his back. Apparently it wouldn’t be. “We feel that we are approaching a critical stage in Project Isle,” the scientist said, enclosing one fist within the other hand. “If anything more gets out to the Soviets, we might as well publish our findings--” a wide, outflung gesture of both arms--”in the newspapers.”

Burris stepped back. “We’re doing the best we can, Dr. Gamble,” he said. All things considered, his obvious try at radiating confidence was nearly successful. “After all,” he went on, “we know a great deal more than we did four days ago. Miss Thompson has assured us that the spy is right here, within the compound of Yucca Flats Labs. We’ve bottled everything up in this compound, and I’m confident that no information is at present getting through to the Soviet Government. Miss Thompson agrees with me.”

“Miss Thompson?” Gamble said, one hand at his bearded chin.

“The Queen,” Burris said.

Gamble nodded and two fingers touched his forehead. “Ah,” he said. “Of course.” He rubbed at the back of his neck. “But we can’t keep everybody who’s here now locked up forever. Sooner or later we’ll have to let them--” His left hand described the gesture of a man tossing away a wad of paper--”go.” His hands fell to his sides. “We’re lost, unless we can find that spy.”

“We’ll find him,” Burris said with a show of great confidence.

“But--”

“Give her time,” Burris said. “Give her time. Remember her mental condition.”

Boyd looked up. “Rome,” he said in an absent fashion, “wasn’t built in a daze.”

Burris glared at him, but said nothing. Malone filled the conversational hole with what he thought would be nice, and hopeful, and untrue.

“We know he’s someone on the reservation, so we’ll catch him eventually,” he said. “And as long as his information isn’t getting into Soviet hands, we’re safe.” He glanced at his wristwatch.

Dr. Gamble said: “But--”

“My, my,” Malone said. “Almost lunchtime. I have to go over and have lunch with Her Majesty. Maybe she’s dug up something more.”

“I hope so,” Dr. Gamble said, apparently successfully deflected. “I do hope so.”

“Well,” Malone said, “pardon me.” He shucked off his coat and trousers. Then he proceeded to put on the doublet and hose that hung in the little office closet. He shrugged into the fur-trimmed, slash- sleeved coat, adjusted the plumed hat to his satisfaction with great care, and gave Burris and the others a small bow. “I go to an audience with Her Majesty, gentlemen,” he said in a grave, well-modulated voice. “I shall return anon.”

He went out the door and closed it carefully behind him. When he had gone a few steps he allowed himself the luxury of a deep sigh.

Then he went outside and across the dusty street to the barracks where Her Majesty and the other telepaths were housed. No one paid any attention to him, and he rather missed the stares he’d become used to drawing. But by now, everybody was used to seeing Elizabethan clothing. Her Majesty had arrived at a new plateau.

She would now allow no one to have audience with her unless he was properly dressed. Even the psychiatrists--whom she had, with a careful sense of meiosis, appointed Physicians to the Royal House--had to wear the stuff.

Malone went over the whole case in his mind--for about the thousandth time, he told himself bitterly.

Who could the telepathic spy be? It was like looking for a needle in a rolling stone, he thought. Or something. He did remember clearly that a stitch in time saved nine, but he didn’t know nine what, and suspected it had nothing to do with his present problem.

How about Dr. Harry Gamble, Malone thought. It seemed a little unlikely that the head of Project Isle would be spying on his own men--particularly since he already had all the information. But, on the other hand, he was just as probable a spy as anybody else.

Malone moved onward. Dr. Thomas O’Connor, the Westinghouse psionics man, was the next nominee. Before Malone had actually found Her Majesty, he had had a suspicion that O’Connor had cooked the whole thing up to throw the FBI off the trail and confuse everybody, and that he’d intended merely to have the FBI chase ghosts while the real spy did his work undetected.

But what if O’Connor were the spy himself--a telepath? What if he were so confident of his ability to throw the Queen off the track that he had allowed the FBI to find all the other telepaths? There was another argument for that: he’d had to report the findings of his machine no matter what it cost him; there were too many other men on his staff who knew about it.

O’Connor was a perfectly plausible spy, too. But he didn’t seem very likely. The head of a government project is likely to be a much- investigated man. Could any tie-up with Russia--even a psionic one-- stand up against that kind of investigation? It was possible. Anything, after all, was possible. You eliminated the impossible, and then whatever remained, however improbable...

Malone told himself morosely to shut up and think.

O’Connor, he told himself, might be the spy. It would be a pleasure, he realized, to go to the office of that superior scientist and arrest him. “I know your true name,” he muttered. “It isn’t O’Connor, it’s Moriarty.” He wondered if the Westinghouse man had ever done any work on the dynamics of an asteroid. Then he wondered what the dynamics of an asteroid were.

But if O’Connor were the spy, nothing made sense. Why would he have disclosed the fact that people were having their minds read in the first place?

Sadly, Malone gave up the idea. But, then, there were other ideas. The other psychiatrists, for instance...

The only trouble with them, Malone realized, was that there seemed to be neither motive nor anything else to connect them to the case. There was no evidence, none in any direction.

Why, there was just as much evidence that the spy was really Kenneth J. Malone, he told himself.

And then he stopped.

Maybe Tom Boyd had been thinking that way about him. Maybe Boyd suspected that he, Malone, was really the spy.

Certainly it worked in reverse. Boyd...

No, Malone told himself firmly. That was silly.

If he were going to consider Boyd, he realized, he might as well go whole hog and think about Andrew J. Burris.

And that really was ridiculous. Absolutely ridic...

Well, Queen Elizabeth had seemed pretty certain when she’d pointed him out in Dr. Dowson’s office. And the fact that she’d apparently changed her mind didn’t have to mean very much. After all, how much faith could you place in Her Majesty at the best of times? If she’d made a mistake about Burris in the first place, she could just as well have made a mistake in the second place. Or about the spy’s being at Yucca Flats at all.

In which case, Malone thought sadly, they were right back where they’d started from.

Behind their own goal line.

One way or another, though, Her Majesty had made a mistake. She’d pointed Burris out as the spy, and then she’d said she’d been wrong. Either Burris was a spy, or else he wasn’t. You couldn’t have it both ways.

And if Burris really were the spy, Malone thought, then why had he started the investigation in the first place? You came back to the same question with Burris, he realized, that you had with Dr. O’Connor: it didn’t make sense for a man to play one hand against the other. Maybe the right hand sometimes didn’t know what the left hand was doing, but this was ridiculous.

So Burris wasn’t the spy. And Her Majesty had made a mistake when she’d said...

“Wait a minute,” Malone told himself suddenly.

Had she?

Maybe, after all, you could have it both ways. The thought occurred to him with a startling suddenness and he stood silent upon a peak in Yucca Flats, contemplating it. A second went by.

And then something Burris himself had said came back to him, something that--

“I’ll be damned,” he muttered.

He came to a dead stop in the middle of the street. In one sudden flash of insight, all the pieces of the case he’d been looking at for so long fell together and formed one consistent picture. The pattern was complete.

Malone blinked.

In that second, he knew exactly who the spy was.

A jeep honked raucously and swerved around him. The driver leaned out to curse and Malone waved at him, dimly recognizing a private eye he had once known, a middle-aged man named Archer. Wondering vaguely what Archer was doing this far East, and in a jeep at that, Malone watched the vehicle disappear down the street. There were more cars coming, but what difference did that make? Malone didn’t care about cars. After all, he had the answer, the whole answer...

“I’ll be damned,” he said again, abruptly, and wheeled around to head back to the offices.

On the way, he stopped in at another small office, this one inhabited by the two FBI men from Las Vegas. He gave a series of quick orders, and got the satisfaction, as he left, of seeing one of the FBI men grabbing for a phone in a hurry.

It was good to be doing things again, important things.

Burris, Boyd and Dr. Gamble were still talking as Malone entered.

“That,” Burris said, “was one hell of a quick lunch. What’s Her Majesty doing now--running a diner?”

Malone ignored the bait, and drew himself to his full height. “Gentlemen,” he said solemnly, “Her Majesty has asked that all of us attend her in audience. She has information of the utmost gravity to impart, and wishes this audience at once.”

Dr. Gamble made a puzzled, circular gesture with one hand. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Is something--”

The hand dropped--”wrong?”

Burris barely glanced at him. A startled expression came over his features. “Has she--” he began, and stopped, leaving his mouth open and the rest of the sentence unfinished.

Malone nodded gravely and drew in a breath. Elizabethan periods were hard on the lungs, he had begun to realize: you needed a lot of air before you embarked on a sentence. “I believe, gentlemen,” he said, “that Her Majesty is about to reveal the identity of the spy who has been battening on Project Isle.”

The silence lasted no more than three seconds. Dr. Gamble didn’t even make a gesture during that time. Then Burris spoke.

“Let’s go,” he snapped. He wheeled and headed for the door. The others promptly followed.

“Gentlemen!” Malone said, sounding, as far as he could tell, properly shocked and offended. “Your dress!”

“What?” Dr. Gamble said, throwing up both hands.

“Oh, no,” Boyd chimed in. “Not now.”

Burris simply said: “You’re quite right. Get dressed, Boyd--I mean, of course, Sir Thomas.”

While they were dressing, Malone put in a call to Dr. O’Connor’s office. The scientist was as frosty as ever.

“Yes, Mr. Malone?” The sound of that voice, Malone reflected, was enough to give anybody double revolving pneumonia with knobs on.

“Dr. O’Connor,” he said, “Her Majesty wants you in her court in ten minutes--and in full court dress.”

O’Connor merely sighed, like Boreas. “What is this,” he asked, “more tomfoolery?”

“I really couldn’t say,” Malone told him coyly. “But I’d advise you to be there. It might interest you.”

“Interest me?” O’Connor stormed. “I’ve got work to do here--important work. You simply do not realize, Mr. Malone--”

“Whatever I realize,” Malone cut in, feeling brave, “I’m passing on orders from Her Majesty.”

“That insane woman,” O’Connor stated flatly, “is not going to order me about. Good Lord, do you know what you’re saying?”

Malone nodded. “I certainly do,” he said cheerfully. “If you’d rather, I can have the orders backed up by the United States Government. But that won’t be necessary, will it?”

“The United States Government,” O’Connor said, thawing perceptibly about the edges, “ought to allow a man to do his proper work, and not force him to go chasing off after the latest whims of some insane old lady.”

“You will be there, now, won’t you?” Malone asked. His own voice reminded him of something, and in a second he had it: the cooing, gentle persuasion of Dr. Andrew Blake of Rice Pavilion, who had locked Malone in a padded cell. It was the voice of a man talking to a mental case.

It sounded remarkably apt. Dr. O’Connor went slightly purple, but controlled himself magnificently. “I’ll be there,” he said.

“Good,” Malone told him, and snapped the phone off.

Then he put in a second call to the psychiatrists from St. Elizabeths and told them the same thing. More used to the strange demands of neurotic and psychotic patients, they were readier to comply.

Everyone, Malone realized with satisfaction, was now assembling. Burris and the others were ready to go, sparklingly dressed and looking impatient. Malone put down the phone and took one great breath of relief.

Then, beaming, he led the others out.