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 d.a.m.ned 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 h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l 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 n.o.body, 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 b.u.t.ton 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 a.s.sa.s.sinated 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."