LAWV OUSTS ‘ROWDIES’: AID MEETING CONTINUES The “rowdies,” Malone discovered, were a large minority group that wanted the good old days of electric canes, paper hats, whistles and pretty girls. “The Legion has grown up,” a spokesman told them. “This convention is being held to discuss the possibility of increased technological aid to India and Africa. There is no place for tomfoolery or high jinks.” The expulsion order had been carried by a record majority. And then there were two items, on different pages, that seemed to contradict each other. The first was a small headline on page fourteen: RESIGNATIONS REACH NEW HIGH IN U.S. COLLEGE FACULTIES Teachers were apparently resigning all over the place, in virtually every department of virtually every college. That made sense. And the other item, on page three, made just as much sense: HIGHER TAXES VOTED THROUGHOUT U.S. FOR TEACHER INCOME RISE State and Federal Aid Also Promised in Drive to Raise Salaries Now Apparently, teachers were resigning just as they were about to get more money than they’d ever seen before. But Malone could fit that into the pattern easily enough; it was perfectly obvious, once he thought about it. Malone didn’t have time to go through much more of the paper; the facsimile records he’d been waiting for arrived, and he put the _Post_ aside and concentrated on them instead. Maybe somewhere in the records was the clue he desperately needed. The PRS was widely spread, all right. It had branches in almost every major city in the United States, in Europe, South Africa, South America and Australia. There was even a small branch society in Greenland. True, the Communist disapproval of such non-materialistic, un-Marxian objectives as Psychical Research showed up in the fact that there were no registered branches in the Sino-Soviet bloc. But that, Malone thought, didn’t really matter. Maybe in Russia they called themselves the Lenin Study Group, or the Better Borshcht League. He was fairly sure, from what he’d experienced, that the PRS had some kind of organization even behind the Iron Curtain. Money didn’t seem to be much of a problem, either. Malone checked for the supporters of the organization and found a microfilmed list that ran into the hundreds of thousands of names, most of them ordinary people who seemed to be interested in spiritualism and the like, and who donated a few dollars apiece each year to the PRS. Besides this mass of small donations, of course, there were a few large ones, from independently wealthy men who gave support to the organization and seemed actively interested in its aims. It wasn’t an unusual picture; it was just an exceptionally big one. Malone sighed and went on to the personal dossiers.