Psychic ability -- Fiction; Science fiction; United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation -- Fiction
Malone turned slowly, trying to look calm and in control of the
situation. "Yes?" he said.
Lynch looked at him with puzzled, pleading eyes. "Malone, _how_ did you
release him? We were right here. He didn't come through the door. There
isn't any other exit. So how did you get him out?"
There was only one answer to that, and Malone gave it with a quiet,
assured air. "I'm terribly sorry, lieutenant," he said, "but that's
classified information, too." He gave the cops a little wave and walked
slowly down the corridor. When he reached the stairs he began to speed
up, and he was out of the precinct station and into a taxicab before any
of the cops could have realized what had happened.
He took a deep breath, feeling as if it were the first he'd had in
several days. "Breathe air," he told himself. "It's _good_ for you." Not
that New York had any real air in it. It was mostly carbon fumes and the
like. But it was the nearest thing to air that Malone could find at the
moment, and he determined to go right on breathing it until something
better and cleaner showed up.
But that wasn't important now. As the cab tooled along down Broadway
toward Sixty-ninth Street, Malone closed his eyes and began going over
the whole thing in his mind.
Mike Fueyo had vanished.
Of that, Malone told himself, there was no shadow of doubt. No probable,
possible shadow of doubt.
No possible doubt--as a matter of fact--whatever.
Dismissing the Grand Inquisitor with a negligent wave of his hand, he
concentrated on the main question. It was a good question. Malone could
have sat and looked at it admiringly for a long time.
As a matter of fact, that was all he could think of to do, as the cab
turned up Seventieth Street and headed east. He certainly didn't have
any answers for it.
But it was a lovely question:
_Where does that leave Kenneth J. Malone?_
And, possibly even more important:
_Where was Miguel Fueyo?_
It was obvious that he'd vanished on purpose. And it hadn't just been
something he'd recently discovered. He had known all along that he could
pull the trick; if he hadn't known that, he wouldn't have done what he
had done beforehand. No seventeen-year-old boy, no matter what he was,
would give the FBI the raspberry unless he were pretty sure he could get
away with it.
Malone remembered the raspberry and winced slightly. The cab driver
called back: "Anything wrong, buddy?"
"Everything," Malone said. "But don't worry about it."
The cab driver shrugged and turned back to the wheel. Malone went back
to Mike Fueyo.
The kid could make himself vanish at will.
Invisibility?
Malone thought about that for a while. The fact that it was impossible
didn't decide him against it. Everything was impossible; that much was
clear. But he didn't think Mike Fueyo had just become invisible. No.
There had been the sense of a presence actually leaving the room. If
Mike had become invisible and stayed, Malone was sure he wouldn't have
felt the boy leave.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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