The Greatest Works of Randall Garrett. Randall Garrett

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      And if Burris really were the spy, Malone thought, then why had he started the investigation in the first place? You came back to the same question with Burris, he realized, that you had with Dr. O'Connor: it didn't make sense for a man to play one hand against the other. Maybe the right hand sometimes didn't know what the left hand was doing, but this was ridiculous.

      So Burris wasn't the spy. And Her Majesty had made a mistake when she'd said....

      "Wait a minute," Malone told himself suddenly.

      Had she?

      Maybe, after all, you could have it both ways. The thought occurred to him with a startling suddenness and he stood silent upon a peak in Yucca Flats, contemplating it. A second went by.

      And then something Burris himself had said came back to him, something that--

      "I'll be damned," he muttered.

      He came to a dead stop in the middle of the street. In one sudden flash of insight, all the pieces of the case he'd been looking at for so long fell together and formed one consistent picture. The pattern was complete.

      Malone blinked.

      In that second, he knew exactly who the spy was.

      A jeep honked raucously and swerved around him. The driver leaned out to curse and Malone waved at him, dimly recognizing a private eye he had once known, a middle-aged man named Archer. Wondering vaguely what Archer was doing this far East, and in a jeep at that, Malone watched the vehicle disappear down the street. There were more cars coming, but what difference did that make? Malone didn't care about cars. After all, he had the answer, the whole answer....

      "I'll be damned," he said again, abruptly, and wheeled around to head back to the offices.

      On the way, he stopped in at another small office, this one inhabited by the two FBI men from Las Vegas. He gave a series of quick orders, and got the satisfaction, as he left, of seeing one of the FBI men grabbing for a phone in a hurry.

      It was good to be doing things again, important things.

      Burris, Boyd and Dr. Gamble were still talking as Malone entered.

      "That," Burris said, "was one hell of a quick lunch. What's Her Majesty doing now--running a diner?"

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