Supermind by Randall Garrett and Laurence M. Janifer (chromebook ebook reader txt) 📗

PRS offices on the West Coast, where it wasn’t closing time yet, showed that all the executive officers had suddenly felt the need of extended vacations to parts unknown.

That, if not exactly cheering news, was still welcome; Malone had more backing for his theory.

An overseas call to New Scotland Yard in London took a little more time, and several arguments with bored overseas operators who, apparently, had nothing better to do than to confuse the customers. But Malone finally managed to get Assistant Commissioner C. E. Teal, who promised to check on Malone’s inquiry at once.

It seemed like years before he called back, and Malone leaped to the phone.

“Yes?” he said.

Teal, red-faced and apparently masticating a stick of gum, said: “I got C. I. D. Commander Gideon to follow up on that matter, Mr. Malone. It is rather late here, as you must realize—”

“Yes?” Malone said. “And they’ve all gone?”

“Why, no,” Teal said, surprised. “A spot check shows that most of the executives of the London branch of the Psychical Research Society are spending quiet evenings in their homes. Our Inspector Ottermole actually spoke to Dr. Carnacki, the head of the office here.”

“Oh,” Malone said.

“They haven’t skipped,” Teal went on. “Is this in connection with anything serious, Mr. Malone?”

“Not yet,” Malone said. “But I’ll let you know at once if there are any further developments. Thanks very much, Mr. Teal.”

“A pleasure, Mr. Malone,” Teal said. “A pleasure.” And then, still masticating, he switched off.

And that, Malone told himself, was definitely that. Of course the British PRS hadn’t gone underground; why should they? The British police weren’t on to them, as Scotland Yard showed. And, no matter what opinions Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I might hold in the matter, the FBI had absolutely no jurisdiction in the British Isles.

Malone buried his face in his hands, thought about a cigar and decided that even a cigar might make him feel worse. Where were they? What were they doing now? What did they plan to do?

Where had they gone?

“Out of the everywhere,” he said in a hollow, sepulchral voice, “into the here.”

But where was the here?

He tried to make up his mind whether or not that made sense. Superficially, it sounded like plain bad English, but he wasn’t sure of anything any more. Things were getting much too confused.

There was a knock at the door.

Malone, without any hope at all, called: “Come in,” and the door opened.

The agent-in-charge came in, and dropped a dollar on Malone’s desk.

“So you checked,” Malone said.

“I checked,” the A-in-C said sadly. “The boys went through the entire damned building. Not a sign of her. Not even a trace.”

“There wouldn’t be one,” Malone said, shoving the dollar back to waiting hands. “Take the money; I knew what would happen. It was a sucker bet.”

“Well, I feel like the sucker, all right,” the A-in-C said. “I don’t know how she did it.”

“I do,” Malone said quietly. “Teleportation.”

The A-in-C whistled. “Well,” he said, “it was a great secret as long as it was FBI property. But now, friend, all hell is going to bust loose.”

“It already has,” Malone said hollowly.

“Great,” the A-in-C said. “What now?”

“Now,” Malone said, “I am going to go back to Washington. Take care of poor little old New York for me.”

He closed his eyes, and vanished.

When he opened them, he was in his Washington apartment. He went over to the big couch and sat down, feeling that if he were going to curse he might as well be comfortable while he did it. But when the air was bright blue, some minutes later, he didn’t feel any better. Cursing was not the answer.

Nothing seemed to be.

What was his next move?

Where did he go from here?

The more he thought about it, the more his mind spun. He was, he realized, at an absolute, total, dead end.

Oh, there were things he could do. Malone knew that very well. He could make a lot of noise and go through a lot of waste motion—that was what it would amount to. He could have all the homes of all the missing PRS members checked. That would result, undoubtedly, in the discovery that the PRS members involved weren’t in their homes. He could have their files impounded, which would clutter everything with a great many more pieces of paper, and none of the pieces of paper would do any good to him. In general, he could have the entire FBI chasing all over hell and gone—and finding nothing whatever.

No, it would be a waste of time, he told himself. That much was certain.

And, though he probably had enough evidence to get the FBI in motion, he had nowhere near enough to carry the case into court, much less make a try at getting the case to stand up in court. That was one thing he couldn’t do, even if he wanted to: issue warrants for arrest on any basis whatever.

But Malone was an FBI agent, and his motto was: “There’s always a way.” No normal method of tracking down the PRS members, and finding their present whereabouts, was going to work. They’d been covering themselves for such an emergency, undoubtedly, for a good many years and, due to telepathy, they certainly knew enough not to leave any clues around, of any kind.

But nobody, Malone told himself, was perfect. There were clues lying around somewhere, he was sure of that; there had to be. The problem was, simply, to figure out where to look, and what to look for.

Somewhere, the clues were sitting quietly and waiting for him to find them. The thought cheered him slightly, but not very much. Instead, he went into the kitchen and started heating water for coffee. He thought there might be a long night ahead of him, and sighed gently. But there was no help for it. The work had to be done, and done quickly.

But when eight cigars had been reduced to ash, and what seemed like several gallons of coffee had sloshed their way into Malone’s interior workings, his mind was as blank as a baby’s. The lovely, opalescent dawn began to show in the East, and Malone swore at it. Then, haggard, red-eyed, confused, violently angry, and not one inch closer to a solution, he fell into a fitful doze on his couch.

When he awoke the sun was high in the sky, and outside his window the cheerful sound of traffic floated in the air. Downstairs somebody was playing a television set too loudly, and the voice reached Malone’s semi-aware mind in a great tinny shout:

“And now, the makers of Bon-Ton B-Complex Bolsters—the blanket of health—present Mother Kohler’s Chit-Chat Hour!”

The invisible audience screamed and howled. Malone ripped out a particularly foul oath and sat up on the couch. “That,” he muttered, “is a fine thing to wake up to.” He focused his eyes, with only slight difficulty, on his watch. The time was exactly noon.

“But first,” the announcer burbled downstairs, “a word from Mother Kohler herself, about the brand new special B-Complex Irradiated Bolster you can get at your neighborhood stores....”

“Shut up,” Malone said. He had wasted a lot of time doing nothing but sleeping, he told himself. This was no time to be listening to television. He got up and found, to his vague surprise, that he felt a lot better and more clear-headed than he’d been feeling. Maybe the sleep had done him some good.

He yawned, blinked and stretched, and then he padded into the bathroom, showered and shaved and put on fresh clothes. He thought about having a morning cup of coffee, but last night’s dregs appeared to have taken up permanent residence in his digestive tract, and he decided against it at last. He swallowed some orange juice and toast and then, heaving a great sigh of resignation and brushing crumbs off his shirt, he teleported himself over to his office.

He was going to have to face Burris eventually, he knew.

And now was just as good, or as bad, a time as any.

Malone didn’t hesitate. He punched the button on his intercom for Burris’ office and then sat back, with his eyes closed, for the well-known voice.

It didn’t come.

Instead, Wolf, the director’s secretary, spoke up.

“Burris isn’t in, Malone,” he said. “He had to fly to Miami. I can get a call through to him on the plane, if it’s urgent, but he’ll be landing in about fifteen minutes. And he did say he’d call this afternoon.”

“Oh,” Malone said. “Sure. Okay. It isn’t urgent.” He was just as glad of the reprieve; it gave him one more chance to work matters through to a solution, and report success instead of failure. “But what’s going on in Miami?” he added.

“Don’t you read the papers?” Wolf asked.

Everybody, Malone reflected, seemed to be asking him that lately. “I haven’t had time,” he said.

“The governor of Mississippi was assassinated yesterday, at Miami Beach,” Wolf said.

“Ah,” Malone said. He thought about it for a second. “Frankly,” he said, “this does not strike me as an irreparable loss to the nation. Not even to Mississippi.”

“You express my views precisely,” Wolf said.

“How about the killer?” Malone said. “I gather they haven’t got him yet, or Burris wouldn’t be on his way down.”

“No,” Wolf said. “The killer would be on his way here instead. They haven’t got him, Malone. It seems Governor Flarion was walking along Collins Avenue when somebody fired at him, using a high-powered rifle with, I guess, a scope sight.”

“Professional,” Malone commented.

“It looks like it,” Wolf said. “Nobody even heard the sniper’s shot; the governor just fell over, right there in the street. And by the time his bodyguards found out what had happened, it was impossible even to be sure just which way he was facing when the shot had been fired.”

“And, as I remember Collins Avenue—” Malone started.

“Right,” Wolf said. “Out where Governor Flarion was taking his stroll, there’s an awful lot of it to search. The boys are trying to find somebody who might have seen a man acting suspicious in any of the nearby buildings, or heard a shot, or seen anybody at all lurking or loitering anywhere remotely close to the scene.”

“Lovely,” Malone said. “Sounds like a nice complicated job.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Wolf said. “There’s also the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce. According to them, Flarion died of a heart attack, and not even in Miami Beach. The bullet and the body are supposed to be written off as just coincidences, to keep the fair name of Miami Beach unsullied.”

“All I can say,” Malone offered, “is good luck. This is the saddest day in American history since the assassination of Huey P. Long.”

“Agreed,” Wolf said. “Want me to tell Burris you called?”

“Right,” Malone said. He flicked off.

Now, he asked himself, how did the assassination of Governor Nemours P. Flarion fit in with anything? Granted, good old Nemours P. had been a horrible mistake, a paranoid, self-centered, would-be dictator whose talents as a rabble-rouser and a fearmonger had somehow managed to get him elected to a governorship. Certainly nobody felt particularly unhappy about his death. But he wouldn’t fit into the pattern. Malone reminded himself that that was one more thing he had to find out when he got the chance.

The trouble lay in finding an opportunity, he thought—and then he corrected himself.

Not finding it—making it. Nobody was going to hand him anything on a silver serving salver.

He punched the intercom again and got the Records office.

“Yes, sir?” a familiar voice said.

“Potter?” Malone said. “This is Malone. I want facsimiles of everything we have on the Psychical Research Society, on Sir Lewis Carter, and on Luba Vasilovna Garbitsch. Both of those last are connected with the Society.”

“Right,” Potter said. “They’ll be up at once.”

Then he punched again, and asked for the latest copy of the Washington Post. He gave the article on Governor Flarion one quick glance, but it didn’t contain anything in the way of facts that he hadn’t already had from Wolf. After that, he left it and concentrated on the more prosaic, human-interest news, the smaller stories.