Malone felt a pang of nostalgia. Conquering it after a brief struggle, he went on to the next paper. From Los Angeles, its front page showed that Hollywood, at least, was continuing to hold its own: LAVISH FUNERAL PLANNED FOR WONDER DOG TOMORROW But the Washington _Times-Herald_ brought things back to the mess Malone had expected. All sorts of things were going on: PRESIDENT ACCEPTS RESIGNATION OF THREE CABINET MEMBERS New Appointees Not Yet Named PENTAGON TO INVESTIGATE QUARTER-MASTER CORPS GRAFT Revelations Hinted In Closed Hearing Thursday RIOT ON SENATE FLOOR QUELLED BY GUARDS Sen. Briggs Hospitalized GENERAL BREGER, MISSILE BASE HEAD, DIES IN TESTING ACCIDENT Faulty Equipment Blamed Malone put the papers down with a deep sigh. There was some kind of a pattern there, he was sure; there had to be. More was happening in the good old United States inside of twenty-four hours than ordinarily happened in a couple of months. The big trouble was that some of it was, doubtless, completely unconnected with the work of Malone's psychological individual. It was equally certain that some of it wasn't; no normal workings of chance could account for the spate of resignations, deaths, arrests of high officials, freak accidents and everything else he'd just seen. But there was no way of telling which was which. The only one he was reasonably sure he could leave out of his calculations was Hollywood's good old Wonder Dog. And when he looked at the rest all he could see was that confusion was rampant. Which was exactly what he'd known before. He remembered once, when he was a boy, his mother had taken him to an astronomical observatory, and he had looked at Mars through the big telescope, hoping to see the canals he'd heard so much about. Sure, enough, there had been a blurred pattern of some kind. It might have represented canals--but he'd been completely unable to trace any given line. It was like looking at a spiderweb through a sheet of frosted glass. He needed a clearer view, and there wasn't any way to get it without finding some more information. Sooner or later, he told himself, everything would fall into one simple pattern, and he would give a cry of "Eureka!" There was, at any rate, no need to go to the scene of the crime. He was right in the middle of it--and would have been, apparently, no matter where he'd been. The big question was: where were all the facts he needed?