"No, thanks," Malone said. "This one"s a solo job."
That was for sure. He drove out onto the streets and into the heavy late afternoon traffic of Washington, D. C. The Lincoln handled smoothly, but Malone didn"t press his luck among the rushing cars. He wasn"t in any hurry. He had all the time in the world, and he knew it.
They--and, for once, Malone knew just who "they" were--would still be waiting for him when he got there.
_If_ he got there, he thought suddenly, dodging a combination roadblock consisting of a green Plymouth making an illegal turn, a fourteen-year-old boy on a bicycle and a sweet young girl pushing a baby carriage. He managed to get past and wiped his forehead with one hand. He continued driving, even more carefully, until he was out of the city.
It took quite a lot of time. Washington traffic was getting worse and worse with every pa.s.sing month, and the pedestrians were as nonchalant as ever. As Malone turned a corner, a familiar face popped into view, practically in front of his car. He swerved and got by without committing homicide, and a cheerful voice said: "Thanks, sorry."
"It"s okay, Chester," Malone said. The big man skipped back to the sidewalk and watched the car go by. Malone knew him slightly, a private eye who did some work on the fringes of Washington crime; basically a nice guy, but a little too active for Malone"s taste.
For a second he thought of asking the man to accompany him, but the last thing Malone needed was muscle. What he wanted was brains, and he even thought he might be developing some of those.
He was nearly sure of it by the time he finally did leave the city and get out onto the highway that went south into the depths of Virginia.
And, while he drove, he began to use that brain, letting his reflexes take over most of the driving problems now that the Washington traffic tangle was behind him.
He took all his thoughts from behind the shield that had sheltered them and arrayed them neatly before him. Everything was perfectly clear; all he had to do now was explain it.
Malone had wondered, over the years, about the detectives in books.
They always managed to wrap everything up in the last chapter--and that was all right. But they always had a whole crowd of suspects listening to them, too. And Malone knew perfectly well that he could never manage a set-up like that. People would be interrupting him.
Things would happen. Dogs would rush in and start a fight on the floor. There would be earthquakes, or else somebody would suddenly faint and interrupt him.
But now, at long last, he realized, he had his chance.
n.o.body, he thought happily, could interrupt him. And he could explain to his heart"s content.
Because the members of the PRS were telepathic. And Malone, he thought cheerfully, was not.
Somebody, he was sure, would be tuned in on him as he drove toward their Virginia hiding place. And he hoped that that somebody would alert everybody else, so they could all tune in and hear his grand final explanation of everything.
_And a hearty good afternoon to everybody,_ he thought. _A very hearty and happy and sunny good afternoon to all--and most especially to Miss Luba Garbitsch. I hope she"s the one who"s tuned in--or that somebody has alerted her by now, because I"d rather talk to her than to anyone else I can think of out there._
_Nothing personal, you understand. It"s just that I"d like to show off a little. I don"t need to hide anything from you--as a matter of plain, simple fact, I can"t. Not with my shield down._
He paused then, and, in his imagination, he could almost hear Lou"s voice.
"I"m listening, Kenneth," the voice said. "Go on."
_Well, then,_ he thought. He fished around in his mind for a second, wondering exactly where to start. Then he decided, in the best traditions of the detective story, not to mention _Alice in Wonderland,_ to start at the beginning.
_The dear old Psychical Research Society,_ he thought, _had been going along for a good many years now--since the 1880"s, as a matter of fact, or somewhere near there. That"s a long time and a lot of research. A lot of famous and intelligent men and women have belonged to the Society. And in all that time, they"ve worked hard, and worked sincerely, in testing every kind of psychic phenomenon. They"ve worked impartially and scientifically to find out whether a given unusual incident was explicable in terms of known natural laws, or was the result of some unknown force._
_And it"s hardly surprising that, after about a hundred years of work, something finally came of it._
"Not surprising at all," he imagined Lou"s voice saying. "You"re making things very clear, Kenneth."
Or had that been "Sir Kenneth"? Malone wasn"t sure, but it didn"t really matter. He spun the car around a curve in the highway, smiled gently to himself, and went on.
_Naturally, to the average man in the street, the Society was just a bunch of crackpots, and the more respected and famous the people who belonged to it, the happier he was; it just proved his superiority to them. He didn"t deal with crackpot notions, did he?_
_No, the Society did. And n.o.body except the members paid much attention to what was going on._
_I remember one of the book facsimiles you gave me, for instance. Some man, whose name I can"t recall, wrote a great "expose" of the Society, in which he tried to prove that Sir Lewis Carter and certain other members were trying to take over the world and run it to suit themselves, making a sort of horrible dictatorship out of their power and position. At that, he wasn"t really far from the truth, though he had it turned around a little. But the book shows that he has no knowledge whatever of what psionics is, or how it works. He seems to me to be just a little afraid of it, which probably adds to his ignorance. And, as a result, he got a twisted idea of what the PRS is actually doing._
He could almost hear Lou"s voice again. "Yes," she was saying. "I remember the book. It was put in our reference library for its humorous aspects."
_That"s right,_ Malone thought. _It would be only funny to you. But it would be frightening and terrible to an awful lot of people simply because they wouldn"t understand what the Society was all about._
"All right," Lou"s voice said helpfully. "And what _is_ it all about?"
Malone settled back in the driver"s seat as the car continued to spin along the road. _It seems to me,_ he thought carefully, _that any telepath has to go one of two ways. Either, like Her Majesty or the others we found when we discovered her two years ago, the telepath ends up insane--or perhaps commits suicide, which is simply one step further in retreat--or else he learns to understand and control his own powers, and to understand other human beings so well that, if he actually did control the world, everyone would benefit in the long run._
_The difference between the two kinds is the difference between Her Majesty and the PRS._
"That"s good thinking," he could hear Lou say.
_No, it isn"t,_ he thought; _it"s no more than guessing, and it could be just as wild as you please. But there is one thing I do know: the way to get a better world, or anyhow the first step, is to clear the road ahead. And that means getting rid of the fools, idiots, maniacs, blockheads, morons, psychopaths, paranoids, timidity-ridden, fear-worshipers, fanatics, thieves, criminals and a whole lot more._
"Get rid of them?" Lou"s voice said.
_Well,_ Malone thought, _I don"t mean they"ve got to be killed or driven out of the civilized world. You"ve just got to get them out of any place where their influence is heavily felt on society as a whole._
"All right," Lou"s voice said pleasantly. "And how could we go about that? Do we write nasty letters to the editor?"
_There"s a much more effective way,_ Malone thought. _There"s no trouble in getting rid of a man if you can make him expose himself.
And you"ve managed that pretty well. You"ve thwarted their idiotic plans, made them stumble over their own fumble-mindedness, played on their neuroses, concocted errors for them to fight and, in general, rigged things in any possible way so that they"d quit, or get fired, or lose elections, or get arrested, or just generally get put out of circulation somehow._
_It"s extremely effective--and it works very well._
_Sometimes, you"ve only had to put the blocks to individuals.
Sometimes whole nations have had to go. And sometimes it"s been in-between, and you"ve managed to foul up whole organizations with misplaced papers missent messages, error, and changed minds and everything else you can think of._
_As a matter of fact, it sounds like fun._
"Well," he imagined Lou saying, "it is fun, in away. But it"s a deadly serious business, too."
_Sure it is,_ Malone thought. _I think the first time that came home to me was when I saw what was happening in Russia, and compared it to what had been going on over here. Tom Boyd saw that, too, when I pointed it out to him--as you probably know if you were spying on my mind at the time._
_Not that I mind that in the least._
_Come more often, by all means._
_But Tom, in case you weren"t listening, said: "Over here there are a lot of confused jerks and idiots... And in Russia there"s a lot of confusion."_
_Now, that"s perfectly true, and it spells out the difference. Over here, you"ve been confusing the jerks and the idiots, getting rid of them so the system can work properly. Over in Russia, on the other hand, you"ve left the jerks and the idiots all alone to do their dirty work, and you"ve just added to the confusion where necessary, so that the system will break down of its own weight._
"But, after all," Lou said, "things look pretty bad over here, too.
Look at the papers."
_Everybody,_ Malone thought, _has been telling me to go and look at the newspapers. And when I do look at them I find all sorts of evidence of confusion. Teachers resigning, senators and representatives goofing up bills on Congress, gang wars cluttering up the streets with cadavers and making things tough for the Sanitation Department, factional fights in various organizations. Now, all of that looks pretty horrible in the papers, but do you know something?