Examining hospital records was not an easy job. The inalienable right of a physician to refuse to disclose confidences respecting a patient applied even to idiots, imbecile and morons. But Malone had a slight edge, due to Dr. Blake's embarrassment, and he put it mercilessly to work. For all the good it did him he might as well have stayed in his cell. There wasn't even the slightest suspicion in any record that any of the Rice Pavilion patients were telepathic. "Are you sure that's what you're looking for?" Blake asked him, some hours later. "I'm sure," Malone said. "When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." "Oh," Blake said. After a second he added: "What does that mean?" Malone shrugged. "It's an old saying," he told the doctor. "It doesn't have to mean anything. It just sounds good." "Oh," Blake said again. After a while, Malone said farewell to good old Rice Pavilion, and headed back to Washington. There, he told himself, everything would be peaceful. And so it was. Peaceful and dispiriting. Every agent had problems getting reports from hospitals--and not even the FBI could open the private files of a licensed and registered psychiatrist. But the field agents did the best they could and, considering the circumstances, their best was pretty good. Malone, meanwhile, put in two weeks sitting glumly at his Washington desk and checking reports as they arrived. They were uniformly depressing. The United States of America contained more sub-normal minds than Malone cared to think about. There seemed to be enough of them to explain the results of any election you were unhappy over. Unfortunately, subnormal was all you could call them. Like the patients at Rice Pavilion, not one of them appeared to possess any abnormal psionic abilities whatever. There were a couple who were reputed to be poltergeists--but in neither case was there a single shred of evidence to substantiate the claim. At the end of the second week, Malone was just about convinced that his idea had been a total washout. He himself had been locked up in a padded cell, and other agents had spent a full fortnight digging up imbeciles, while the spy at Yucca Flats had been going right on his merry way, scooping information out of the men at Project Isle as though he were scooping beans out of a pot. And, very likely, laughing himself silly at the feeble efforts of the FBI. Who could he be? Anyone, Malone told himself unhappily. Anyone at all. He could be the janitor who swept out the buildings, one of the guards at the gate, one of the minor technicians on another project, or even some old prospector wandering around the desert with a scintillation counter. Is there any limit to telepathic range? The spy could even be sitting quietly in an armchair in the Kremlin, probing through several thousand miles of solid earth to peep into the brains of the men on Project Isle.