"It's as though you were almost invisible," she said. "I can see you with my eyes, of course, but mentally you are almost completely indetectable. Knowing you as well as I do, and being this close to you, it is just possible for me to detect very faint traces of activity." "Now, wait a minute," Malone said. "I am thinking. I know I am. Maybe it's not me. Your telepathy might be fading out temporarily, or something like that. It's possible, isn't it?" He was reasonably sure it wasn't, but it was a last try at making sense. Her Majesty shook her head. "I can still receive Sir Thomas, for instance, quite clearly," she said. She seemed a little miffed, but the irritation was overpowered by her worry. "I think, Sir Kenneth, that you just don't know your own power, that's all. I don't know how, but you've managed somehow to smother telepathic communication almost completely." "But not quite?" Malone said. Apparently, he was thinking, but very weakly. Like a small child, he told himself dismally. Like a small Elizabethan child. Her Majesty's face took on a look of faraway concentration. "It's like looking at a very dim light," she said, "a light just at the threshold of perception. You might say that you've got to look at such a light sideways. If you look directly at it, you can't see it. And, of course, you can't see it at all if you're a long way off." She blinked. "It's not exactly like that, you understand," she finished. "But in some ways--" "I get the idea," Malone said. "Or I think I do. But what's causing it? Sunspots? Little green men?" "Not so little," Her Majesty said with some return of her old humor, "and not green, either. As a matter of fact, _you_ are, Sir Kenneth." Malone opened his mouth, shut it again and finally managed to say: "Me?" in a batlike squeal of surprise. "I don't know how, Sir Kenneth," Her Majesty went on, "but you are. It's ... rather frightening to me, as a matter of fact; I've never seen such a thing before. I've never even considered it before." "You?" Malone said. "How about me?" It was like suddenly discovering that you'd been lifting two-hundred-pound barbells and not knowing it. "How could I be doing anything like that without knowing anything about it?" Her Majesty shook her head. "I haven't the faintest idea," she said. But Malone, very suddenly, did. He remembered deciding to keep a close check on his mental processes to make sure those bursts of energy didn't do anything to him. Subconsciously, he knew, he was still keeping that watch. And maybe the watch itself caused the complete blanking of his telepathic faculties. It was worth a test, at least, he decided. And it was an easy test to make. "Listen," he said. He told himself that he would now allow communication between himself and Her Majesty--and only between those two. Maybe it wasn't possible to let down the barrier in a selective way, but he gave it all he had. A long second passed.