A Spaceship Named: 45 Sci-Fi Novels & Stories in One Volume. Randall Garrett

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      "Certainly."

      "Try it again," Malone said.

      The operator did so. She returned with the same answer.

      Malone frowned and hung up. It didn't sound right. Even a dream was supposed to make more sense than this was making. There was something wrong.

      He had to get back to the hotel room.

      There was only one trouble. He didn't have a picture of the room in his notebook.

      Dorothea had said that it was almost impossible to go to a place one hadn't been to before. Mike Fueyo had been able to pick up any red Cadillac in the city because he'd concentrated solely on the symbol of a red Cadillac. But he never knew which Cadillac he'd end up at.

      Malone closed his eyes and tried to remember the hotel room. He half-wished he had a photograph of it, but Dorothea had told him that photos wouldn't work. They were too complete; they required no effort of the mind. Only a symbol would do.

      Of course, the job could be done without a symbol by somebody who'd had plenty of practice. But Malone had made exactly one jump. Could he do it the second time with nothing to work with except his own recollection and visualization of the room?

      He didn't know, but he was certainly going to try. He had to.

      Something was wrong; something had happened to Dorothea.

      He tried to imagine what it could be, and then realized that such thoughts were only delaying him by distracting his mind from its main job.

      He kept his eyes tightly closed and tried to form the picture in his mind. The couch—there. The dresser—over there. The easy-chair, the rug, the walls, the table—wait a minute: he was losing the couch. There. Now. The table, the desk—all there. In color. And in detail.

      Slowly they came, and he held them in place, visualizing his hotel room just as he had visualized his office minutes before. He concentrated. Harder. Harder. Harder. HAR—

      "Sir Kenneth!" a voice said. "Will you please stop standing there with your eyes closed and help me with this poor child? She's fainted."

      Malone's eyes popped open, but for a minute he wasn't entirely sure he'd opened them. His visualization blended almost perfectly with the reality of the room around him. There was only one jarring difference.

      He had certainly never visualized the richly-dressed figure of Queen Elizabeth I standing in the center of the room.

      "Now, now," she said. "Thinking like that can only lead to confusion. Come over here and help me."

      Dorothea was on the couch. Between them, they managed to wake her gently, and she sat up and stared around at them and the room. "I'm sorry," she said dazedly. "It's just that I didn't expect you to turn into a little old lady in Elizabethan costume. Just a bit disconcerting." She blinked. "By the way, who is she?"

      "This," Malone said with a sense of some foreboding, "is Queen Elizabeth I."

      "She's dead," Dorothea said decisively.

      "Not really, my dear," the Queen said. "Actually, you see ... well, it's too long to explain now." She gave everybody a bland smile.

      "She's nuts, then," Dorothea said. "She is nuts, isn't she? Because if she isn't, I am."

      "You're not crazy," Malone told her diplomatically. "But she—" He stopped. How could he explain everything, in front of the Queen herself?

      "Don't worry about it," Her Majesty said. "Dorothea is a little confused—but it hardly matters. Perhaps there are other things to do."

      "Sure," Malone said uncertainly. "By the way, how did you get here?"

      "Now, why do you ask that?" the Queen said. "You've already figured it all out, Sir Kenneth."

      "I don't get it," Dorothea put in.

      "Simple," Malone said. "She's telepathic. She's been listening in on our sessions for the past four days—she must have been. So now she can teleport, too."

      Dorothea looked at the little old lady in awe. "But how could you come to a place you'd never been to before?"

      "I got all the information I needed, my dear, out of Sir Kenneth's mind."

      "Sir Kenneth?" Dorothea said. "Sir ... Ken? His mind?"

      "Never mind it," Malone said. "What do I do now?"

      Her Majesty said: "Don't worry about anything. And use your own psionic talents. You can catch those dear boys now, you know. You're better than they are."

      "Me?" Malone said. "But they've had—"

      "Practice, of course," the Queen said. "But you have a talent they don't."

      "I do?"

      "Well," the Queen said, "you've been calling it 'luck' for years. You're much too modest, Sir Kenneth. If you'll think back, you'll remember that every time you had a bit of your so-called luck, it was because you were at the right place at the right time. There's no other way to explain the fact that you wandered at random through Greenwich Village—of all places!—and just happened to end up at the very same red Cadillac that young Mike was going to come to—before he got there!"

      Malone felt the back of his head. "That," he said, "was luck?"

      "You got the notebook, didn't you?" the Queen said. "But of course it wasn't luck. It's prescience—the ability to predict the future. You've had it all along, but you haven't been consciously using it. The only way you'll ever catch those boys is to know where they're going to be before they get there."

      Malone sat down heavily on the couch next to Dorothea. His mind was whirling with a fine, dizzy rapidity. In a few seconds he was going to try and grab the brass ring.

      "Oh, I'll help you," the Queen added. "Don't worry about that. I think I can pick up Mike's mind, now that I'm closer to him. And if we can figure out what their plans are, and where they're going to be, we can nab them all, Sir Kenneth. Won't that be nice?"

      "Ducky," Malone said. "Simply ducky. All I have to do is predict the future while you read minds and we both teleport. And Dorothea can sit around sticking pins in dolls, I guess. Or—"

      "Well, now," the Queen said, "I don't know. Perhaps she just doesn't have that talent. Besides, why would we want to do anything like that? It seems to me—"

      "Never mind," Malone said hopelessly. "If we're going to do anything, let's get started."

      Twelve hours later, Kenneth J. Malone was sitting quietly in a small room at the rear of a sporting-goods store on upper Madison Avenue, trying to remain calm and hoping that the finest, most beautiful and complete hunch—only now it wasn't a "hunch" any more, he reminded himself; now it was prescience—was going to pay off. With him were Boyd and two agents from the Sixty-ninth Street office. They were sitting quietly, too, but there was a sense of enormous excitement in the air. Malone wanted to get up and walk around, but he didn't dare. He clamped his hands in his lap and sat tight.

      They waited in silence, not daring to СКАЧАТЬ