Chapter 8-1
2014 Words
Chapter 8
Four days later, he was more than tired. He was exhausted. The
six psychopaths—including Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I—had been
housed in a converted dormitory in the Westinghouse area, together
with four highly nervous and even more highly trained and
investigated psychiatrists from St. Elizabeths in Washington. The
Convention of Nuts, as Malone called it privately, was in full
swing.
And it was every bit as strange as he'd thought it was going to
be. Unfortunately, five of the six (Her Majesty being the only
exception) were completely out of contact with the world. The
psychiatrists referred to them in worried tones as "unavailable for
therapy," and spent most of their time brooding over possible ways
of bringing them back into the real world for a while, at least far
enough so that they could be spoken with.
Malone stayed away from the five who were completely psychotic.
The weird babblings of fifty-year-old Barry Miles disconcerted him.
They sounded like little Charlie O'Neill's strange semi-connected
jabber, but Westinghouse's Dr. O'Connor said that it seemed to
represent another phenomenon entirely. William Logan's blank face
was a memory of horror, but the constant tinkling giggles of Ardith
Parker, the studied and concentrated way that Gordon Macklin wove
meaningless patterns in the air with his waving fingers, and the
rhythmless, melodyless humming that seemed to be all there was to
the personality of Robert Cassiday were simply too much for Malone.
Taken singly, each was frightening and remote; all together, they
wove a picture of insanity that chilled him more than he wanted to
admit.
When the seventh telepath was flown in from Honolulu, Malone
didn't even bother to see her. He let the psychiatrists take over
directly, and simply avoided their sessions.
Queen Elizabeth I, on the other hand, he found genuinely
likeable.
According to the psych boys, she had been (as both Malone and
Her Majesty had theorized) heavily frustrated by being the
possessor of a talent which no one else recognized. Beyond that,
the impact of other minds was disturbing; there was a slight loss
of identity which seemed to be a major factor in every case of
telepathic insanity. But the Queen had compensated for her
frustrations in the easiest possible way; she had simply traded her
identity for another one, and had rationalized a single, overruling
delusion: that she was Queen Elizabeth I of England, still alive
and wrongfully deprived of her throne.
"It's a beautiful rationalization," one of the psychiatrists
said with more than a trace of admiration in his voice. "Complete
and thoroughly consistent. She's just traded identities—and
everything else she does—everything else—stems logically
out of her delusional premise. Beautiful."
She may have been crazy, Malone realized. But she was a long way
from stupid.
The project was in full swing. The only trouble was that they
were no nearer finding the telepath than they had been three weeks
before. With five completely blank human beings to work with, and
the sixth Queen Elizabeth (Malone heard privately that the last
telepath, the girl from Honolulu, was no better than the first
five; she had apparently regressed into what one of the
psychiatrists called a "non- identity childhood syndrome." Malone
didn't know what it meant, but it sounded terrible.)—with that
crew, Malone could see why progress was their most difficult
commodity.
Dr. Harry Gamble, the head of Project Isle, was losing poundage
by the hour with worry. And, Malone reflected, he could ill afford
it.
Burris, Malone and Boyd had set themselves up in a temporary
office within the Westinghouse area. The Director had left his
assistant in charge in Washington. Nothing, he said over and over
again, was as important as the spy in Project Isle.
Apparently Boyd had come to believe that, too. At any rate,
though he was still truculent, there were no more outbursts of
rebellion.
But, on the fourth day:
"What do we do now?" Burris asked.
"Shoot ourselves," Boyd said promptly.
"Now, look here—" Malone began, but he was overruled.
"Boyd," Burris said levelly, "if I hear any more of that sort of
pessimism, you're going to be an exception to the beard rule. One
more c***k out of you, and you can go out and buy yourself a
razor."
Boyd put his hand over his chin protectively, and said nothing
at all.
"Wait a minute," Malone said. "Aren't there any sane
telepaths in the world?"
"We can't find any," Burris said. "We—"
There was a knock at the office door. "Who's there?" Burris
called. "Dr. Gamble," said the man's surprisingly baritone
voice.
Burris called: "Come in, Doctor," and the door opened. Dr.
Gamble's lean face looked almost haggard.
"Mr. Burris," he said, extending his arms a trifle, "can't
anything be done?" Malone had seen Gamble speaking before, and had
wondered if it would be possible for the man to talk with his hands
tied behind his back. Apparently it wouldn't be. "We feel that we
are approaching a critical stage in Project Isle," the scientist
said, enclosing one fist within the other hand. "If anything more
gets out to the Soviets, we might as well publish our findings—" a
wide, outflung gesture of both arms—"in the newspapers."
Burris stepped back. "We're doing the best we can, Dr. Gamble,"
he said. All things considered, his obvious try at radiating
confidence was nearly successful. "After all," he went on, "we know
a great deal more than we did four days ago. Miss Thompson has
assured us that the spy is right here, within the compound of Yucca
Flats Labs. We've bottled everything up in this compound, and I'm
confident that no information is at present getting through to the
Soviet Government. Miss Thompson agrees with me."
"Miss Thompson?" Gamble said, one hand at his bearded chin.
"The Queen," Burris said.
Gamble nodded and two fingers touched his forehead. "Ah," he
said. "Of course." He rubbed at the back of his neck. "But we can't
keep everybody who's here now locked up forever. Sooner or later
we'll have to let them—" His left hand described the gesture of a
man tossing away a wad of paper—"go." His hands fell to his sides.
"We're lost, unless we can find that spy."
"We'll find him," Burris said with a show of great
confidence.
"But—"
"Give her time," Burris said. "Give her time. Remember her
mental condition."
Boyd looked up. "Rome," he said in an absent fashion, "wasn't
built in a daze."
Burris glared at him, but said nothing. Malone filled the
conversational hole with what he thought would be nice, and
hopeful, and untrue.
"We know he's someone on the reservation, so we'll catch him
eventually," he said. "And as long as his information isn't getting
into Soviet hands, we're safe." He glanced at his wristwatch.
Dr. Gamble said: "But—"
"My, my," Malone said. "Almost lunchtime. I have to go over and
have lunch with Her Majesty. Maybe she's dug up something
more."
"I hope so," Dr. Gamble said, apparently successfully deflected.
"I do hope so."
"Well," Malone said, "pardon me." He shucked off his coat and
trousers. Then he proceeded to put on the doublet and hose that
hung in the little office closet. He shrugged into the fur-trimmed,
slash- sleeved coat, adjusted the plumed hat to his satisfaction
with great care, and gave Burris and the others a small bow. "I go
to an audience with Her Majesty, gentlemen," he said in a grave,
well-modulated voice. "I shall return anon."
He went out the door and closed it carefully behind him. When he
had gone a few steps he allowed himself the luxury of a deep
sigh.
Then he went outside and across the dusty street to the barracks
where Her Majesty and the other telepaths were housed. No one paid
any attention to him, and he rather missed the stares he'd become
used to drawing. But by now, everybody was used to seeing
Elizabethan clothing. Her Majesty had arrived at a new plateau.
She would now allow no one to have audience with her unless he
was properly dressed. Even the psychiatrists—whom she had, with a
careful sense of meiosis, appointed Physicians to the Royal
House—had to wear the stuff.
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 up against that kind of investigation? It was possible.
Anything, after all, was possible. You eliminated the impossible,
and then whatever remained, however improbable… .
Malone told himself morosely to shut up and think.
O'Connor, he told himself, might be the spy. It would be a
pleasure, he realized, to go to the office of that superior
scientist and arrest him. "I know your true name," he muttered. "It
isn't O'Connor, it's Moriarty." He wondered if the Westinghouse man
had ever done any work on the dynamics of an asteroid. Then he
wondered what the dynamics of an asteroid were.
But if O'Connor were the spy, nothing made sense. Why would he
have disclosed the fact that people were having their minds read in
the first place?
Sadly, Malone gave up the idea. But, then, there were other
ideas. The other psychiatrists, for instance… .
The only trouble with them, Malone realized, was that there
seemed to be neither motive nor anything else to connect them to
the case. There was no evidence, none in any direction.
Why, there was just as much evidence that the spy was really
Kenneth J. Malone, he told himself.
And then he stopped.
Maybe Tom Boyd had been thinking that way about him. Maybe Boyd
suspected that he, Malone, was really the spy.
Certainly it worked in reverse. Boyd…
No, Malone told himself firmly. That was silly.
If he were going to consider Boyd, he realized, he might as well
go whole hog and think about Andrew J. Burris.
And that really was ridiculous. Absolutely ridic… .
Well, Queen Elizabeth had seemed pretty certain when she'd
pointed him out in Dr. Dowson's office. And the fact that she'd
apparently changed her mind didn't have to mean very much. After
all, how much faith could you place in Her Majesty at the best of
times? If she'd made a mistake about Burris in the first place, she
could just as well have made a mistake in the second place. Or
about the spy's being at Yucca Flats at all.
In which 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 else he wasn't. You couldn't
have it both ways.
- Writer
