"Wait!" Lynch said. He flung open the door of the interrogation room.
There was no doubt that it was empty. "Wait! Malone!"
Malone turned slowly, trying to look calm and in control of the situation. "Yes?" he said.
Lynch looked at him with puzzled, pleading eyes. "Malone, _how_ did you release him? We were right here. He didn"t come through the door. There isn"t any other exit. So how did you get him out?"
There was only one answer to that, and Malone gave it with a quiet, a.s.sured air. "I"m terribly sorry, lieutenant," he said, "but that"s cla.s.sified information, too." He gave the cops a little wave and walked slowly down the corridor. When he reached the stairs he began to speed up, and he was out of the precinct station and into a taxicab before any of the cops could have realized what had happened.
He took a deep breath, feeling as if it were the first he"d had in several days. "Breathe air," he told himself. "It"s _good_ for you." Not that New York had any real air in it. It was mostly carbon fumes and the like. But it was the nearest thing to air that Malone could find at the moment, and he determined to go right on breathing it until something better and cleaner showed up.
But that wasn"t important now. As the cab tooled along down Broadway toward Sixty-ninth Street, Malone closed his eyes and began going over the whole thing in his mind.
Mike Fueyo had vanished.
Of that, Malone told himself, there was no shadow of doubt. No probable, possible shadow of doubt.
No possible doubt--as a matter of fact--whatever.
Dismissing the Grand Inquisitor with a negligent wave of his hand, he concentrated on the main question. It was a good question. Malone could have sat and looked at it admiringly for a long time.
As a matter of fact, that was all he could think of to do, as the cab turned up Seventieth Street and headed east. He certainly didn"t have any answers for it.
But it was a lovely question:
_Where does that leave Kenneth J. Malone?_
And, possibly even more important:
_Where was Miguel Fueyo?_
It was obvious that he"d vanished on purpose. And it hadn"t just been something he"d recently discovered. He had known all along that he could pull the trick; if he hadn"t known that, he wouldn"t have done what he had done beforehand. No seventeen-year-old boy, no matter what he was, would give the FBI the raspberry unless he were pretty sure he could get away with it.
Malone remembered the raspberry and winced slightly. The cab driver called back: "Anything wrong, buddy?"
"Everything," Malone said. "But don"t worry about it."
The cab driver shrugged and turned back to the wheel. Malone went back to Mike Fueyo.
The kid could make himself vanish at will.
Invisibility?
Malone thought about that for a while. The fact that it was impossible didn"t decide him against it. Everything was impossible; that much was clear. But he didn"t think Mike Fueyo had just become invisible. No.
There had been the sense of a presence actually leaving the room. If Mike had become invisible and stayed, Malone was sure he wouldn"t have felt the boy leave.
Mike had not just become invisible. (And what do I mean, "just"? Malone asked himself unhappily.) He had gone--elsewhere.
This brought him back full circle to his original question: where was the boy now? But he ignored it for a minute or two as another, even more difficult query presented itself.
Never mind where, Malone told himself. _How?_
Something was bothering him. Malone realized that it had been bothering him for a long time. At last he managed to locate it and hold it up to the light for inspection.
Dr. O"Connor, the psionics expert at Westinghouse, had mentioned something during Malone"s last conversation with him. Dr. O"Connor, who"d invented a telepathy detector, had been discussing further reaches in his field.
"After all," he"d said, "if thoughts can bridge any distance whatever, regardless of other barriers, there is no reason why matter could not do likewise."
"How do you know?" Malone had asked him, "it doesn"t. Or, anyhow, it hasn"t so far."
"There"s no way to be sure of that." Dr. O"Connor had said sternly.
"After all, we have no reports of it--but that means little. Our search has only begun."
"Oh," Malone said. "Sure."
"Matter, controlled by thought, might bridge distances instantaneously,"
Dr. O"Connor had said.
And he"d referred to something, some word....
_Teleportation._
That was it. Malone sat back. All you had to do, he reflected, was to think yourself somewhere else, and--_bing!_--you were there. If Malone had been able to do it, it would not only save him a lot of time and trouble, but also such things as cab fare and train fare and ... oh, a lot of different things.
But he couldn"t. And Dr. O"Connor hadn"t found anyone else who could, either. As far as Malone knew, n.o.body could teleport.
Except Mike Fueyo.
The cab stopped in front of FBI Headquarters. "You some kind of secret agent?" the cabbie said.
"Of course not," Malone said pleasantly. "I"m a foreign spy."
"Oh," the cabbie said. "Sure." He took his money with a somewhat puzzled air, while Malone crossed the sidewalk and went into the building.
Everyone was active. Malone pushed his way through arguing knots of men until he reached the small office which he and Boyd had been a.s.signed.
He had already decided not to tell Boyd about the disappearing boy. That would only confuse him--and matters were confused enough as they stood.
Malone had no proof; he had only his word and the word of a few baffled policemen, all of whom were probably thoroughly confused by now.
Boyd had a job to do, and Malone had decided to let him go on doing it.
That, as a matter of fact, was what he was doing when Malone entered the room.
He was sitting at his desk, talking on the telephone. Malone couldn"t see the face on the screen, but Boyd was scowling at it fiercely.
"Sure," he said. "So some guy makes a fuss. That"s what you"re for."
"But he wants to sue the city," a voice said tinnily. "Or somebody."
"Let him sue," Boyd said. "We"ve got authority. Just get that car."