Science fiction; Spy stories; Telepathy -- Fiction; United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation -- Fiction
Malone went over the whole case in his mind--for about the thousandth
time, he told himself bitterly.
Who could the telepathic spy be? It was like looking for a needle in a
rolling stone, he thought. Or something. He did remember clearly that a
stitch in time saved nine, but he didn't know nine what, and suspected
it had nothing to do with his present problem.
How about Dr. Harry Gamble, Malone thought. It seemed a little unlikely
that the head of Project Isle would be spying on his own
men--particularly since he already had all the information. But, on the
other hand, he was just as probable a spy as anybody else.
Malone moved onward. Dr. Thomas O'Connor, the Westinghouse psionics man,
was the next nominee. Before Malone had actually found Her Majesty, he
had had a suspicion that O'Connor had cooked the whole thing up to throw
the FBI off the trail and confuse everybody, and that he'd intended
merely to have the FBI chase ghosts while the real spy did his work
undetected.
But what if O'Connor were the spy himself--a telepath? What if he were
so confident of his ability to throw the Queen off the track that he had
allowed the FBI to find all the other telepaths? There was another
argument for that: he'd had to report the findings of his machine no
matter what it cost him; there were too many other men on his staff who
knew about it.
O'Connor was a perfectly plausible spy, too. But he didn't seem very
likely. The head of a Government project is likely to be a
much-investigated man. Could any tie-up with Russia--even a psionic
one--stand against that kind of investigation? Malone doubted it.
Malone thought of the psychiatrists. There wasn't any evidence, that was
the trouble. There wasn't any evidence either way.
Then he wondered if Boyd had been thinking of him, Malone, as the
possible spy. Certainly it worked in reverse. Boyd--
No. That was silly.
Malone told himself that he might as well consider Andrew J. Burris.
Ridiculous. Absolutely ridic--
Well, Queen Elizabeth had seemed pretty certain when she'd pointed him
out in Dr. Dowson's office. And even though she'd changed her mind, how
much faith could be placed in Her Majesty? After all, if she'd made a
mistake about Burris, she could just as easily have made a mistake about
the spy's being at Yucca Flats. In that case, Malone thought sadly, they
were right back where they'd started from.
Behind their own goal line.
One way or another, though, Her Majesty had made a mistake. She'd
pointed Burris out as the spy, and then she'd said she'd been wrong.
Either Burris was a spy or he wasn't. You couldn't have it both ways.
Why couldn't you? Malone thought suddenly. And then something Burris
himself had said came back to him, something that--
_I'll be damned_, he thought.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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