Occasion ... for Disaster

"That was the fake," Malone said easily. "They knew you were after a shipment, Sand, so they suckered you in. They fed your spies with false information and sent you out after the fake shipment." "Fake shipment?" Sand said. "It's the real stuff, brother. The real stuff." "But not enough of it," Malone said. "Their big shipments are almost three times what you got. They made one while you were suckered off with the fake--and they're making another one next week. Interested?" Sand snorted. "The hell," he said. "Didn't you hear me say I got the first shipment right where I can put my finger on it?" "So?" Malone said. "So I can't get rid of it," Sand said. "What do I want with a new load? Every day I hold the stuff is dangerous. You never know when somebody's going to look for it and maybe find it." "Can't get rid of it?" Malone said. This was a new turn of events. "What's happening?" "Everything," Sand said tersely. "Look, you want to sell me some information--but you don't know the setup. Maybe when I tell you, you'll stop bothering me." He put his head in his hands, and his voice, when he spoke again, was muffled. "The contacts are gone," he said. "With the arrests and the resignations and everything else, nobody wants to take any chances; the few guys that aren't locked up are scared they will be. I can't make any kind of a deal for anything. There just isn't any action." "Things are tough, huh?" Malone said hopelessly. Apparently even Mike Sand wasn't going to pan out for him. "Things are terrible," Sand said. "The locals are having revolutions--guys there are kicking out the men from National Headquarters. Nobody knows where he stands any more--a lot of my organizers have been goofing up and getting arrested for one thing and another. Like apes in the trees, that's what." Malone nodded very slowly and took another puff of the cigarette. "Nothing's going right," he said. "Listen," Sand said. "You want to hear trouble? My account books are in duplicate--you know? Just to keep things nice and peaceful and quiet." "One for the investigators and one for the money," Malone said. "Sure," Sand said, preoccupied with trouble. "You know the setup. But both sets are missing. Both sets." He raised his head, the picture of witless agony. "I've got an idea where they are, too. I'm just waiting for the axe to fall." "O.K.," Malone said. "Where are they?" "The U. S. Attorney's Office," Sand said dismally. He stared down at his battered desk and sighed. Malone stubbed out his cigarette. "So you're not in the market for any more buttons?" he said. "All I'm in the market for," Sand said without raising his eyes, "is a nice, painless way to commit suicide." * * * * * Malone walked several blocks without noticing where he was going. He tried to think things over, and everything seemed to fall into a pattern that remained, agonizingly, just an inch or so out of his mental reach. The mental bursts, the trouble the United States was having, Palveri, Queen Elizabeth, Burris, Mike Sand, Dr. O'Connor, Sir Lewis Carter and even Luba Ardanko juggled and flowed in his mind like pieces out of a kaleidoscope. But they refused to form any pattern he could recognize. He uttered a short curse and managed to collide with a bulky woman with frazzled black hair. "Pardon me," he said politely. "The hell with it," the woman said, looking straight past him, and went jerkily on her way. Malone blinked and looked around him. There were a lot of people still on the streets, but they didn't look like normal New York City people. They were all curiously tense and wary, as if they were suspicious not only of him and each other, but even themselves. He caught sight of several illegal-looking bulges beneath men's armpits, and many heavily sagging pockets. One or two women appeared to be unduly solicitous of their large and heavy handbags. But it wasn't his job to enforce the Sullivan Law, he told himself. Especially while he was on vacation. A single foot patrolman stood a few feet ahead, guarding a liquor store with drawn revolver, his eyes scanning the passers-by warily while he waited for help. Behind him, the smashed plate glass and broken bottles and the sprawled figure just inside the door told a fairly complete story. Down the block, Malone saw several stores that carried _Closed_ or _Gone Out Of Business_ signs. The whole depressing picture gave him the feeling that all the tragedies of the 1930-1935 period had somehow been condensed into the past two weeks. Ahead there was a chain drugstore, and Malone headed for it. Two uniformed men wearing Special Police badges were standing near the door eyeing everyone with suspicion, but Malone managed to get past them and went on to a telephone booth. He tried dialling the Washington number of the FBI, but got only a continuous _beep-beep_, indicating a service delay. Finally he managed to get a special operator, who told him sorrowfully that calls to Washington were jamming all available trunk lines. Malone glanced around to make sure nobody was watching. Then he teleported himself to his apartment in Washington and, on arriving, headed for the phone there. Using that one, he dialed again, got Pelham's sad face on the screen, and asked for Thomas Boyd. Boyd didn't look any different, Malone thought, though maybe he was a little more tired. Henry VIII had obviously had a hard day trying to get his wives to stop nagging him. "Ken," he said. "I thought you were on vacation. What are you doing calling up the FBI, or do you just want to feel superior to us poor working slobs?" "I need some information," Malone said. Boyd uttered a short, mirthless laugh. "How to beat the tables, you mean?" he said. "How are things in good old Las Vegas?" Malone, realizing that with direct-dial phones Boyd had no idea where he was actually calling from, kept wisely quiet. "How about Burris?" he said after a second. "Has he come up with any new theories yet?" "New theories?" Boyd said. "What about?" "Everything," Malone said. "From all I see in the papers things haven't been quieting down any. Is it still Brubitsch, Borbitsch and Garbitsch putting psychodrugs in water-coolers, or has something new been added?" "I don't know what the chief thinks," Boyd said. "Things'll straighten out in a while. We're working on it--twenty-four hours a day, or damn near, but we're working. While you take a nice, long vacation that--" "I want you to get me something," Malone said. "Just go and get it and send it to me at Las Vegas." "Money?" Boyd said with raised eyebrows. "Dossiers," Malone said. "On Mike Sand and Primo Palveri." "Palveri I can understand," Boyd said. "You want to threaten him with exposure unless he lets you beat the roulette tables. But why Sand? Ken, are you working on something psionic?" "Me?" Malone said sweetly. "I'm on vacation." "The chief won't like--" "Can you send me the dossiers?" Malone interrupted. Boyd shook his head very slowly. "Ken, I can't do it without the chief finding out about it. If you are working on something ... hell, I'd like to help you. But I don't see how I can. You don't know what things are like here." "What are they like?" Malone said. "The full force is here," Boyd said. "As far as I know, you're the only vacation leave not canceled yet. And not only that, but we've got agents in from the Sureté and New Scotland Yard, agents from Belgium and Germany and Holland and Japan ... Ken, we've even got three MVD men here working with us." "It's happening all over?" Malone said. "All over the world," Boyd said. "Ken, I'm beginning to think we've got a case of Martian Invaders on our hands. Or something like it." He paused. "But we're licking them, Ken," he went on. "Slowly but surely, we're licking them." "How do you mean?" Malone said. "Crime is down," Boyd said, "away down. Major crime, I mean--petty theft, assault, breaking and entering and that sort of thing has gone away up, but that's to be expected. Everything's going to--" "Skip the handbasket," Malone said. "But you're working things out?" "Sooner or later," Boyd said. "Every piece of equipment and every man in the FBI is working overtime; we can't be stopped forever." "I'll wave flags," Malone said bitterly. "And I wish I could join you." "Believe me," Boyd said, "you don't know when you're well off." Malone switched off. He looked at his watch; it was ten-thirty. XII That made it eight-thirty in Las Vegas. Malone opened his eyes again in his hotel room there. He had half an hour to spare until his dinner date with Luba. That gave him plenty of time to shower, shave and dress, and he felt pleased to have managed the timing so neatly. Two minutes later, he was soaking in the luxury of a hot tub allowing the warmth to relax his body while his mind turned over the facts he had collected. There were a lot of them, but they didn't seem to mean anything special. The world, he told himself, was going to hell in a handbasket. That was all very well and good, but just what was the handbasket made of? Burris' theory, the more he thought about it, was a pure case of mental soapsuds, with perhaps a dash of old cotton-candy to make confusion even worse confounded. And there wasn't any other theory, was there? Well, Malone reflected, there was one, or at least a part of one. Her Majesty had said that everything was somehow tied up with the mental bursts--and that sounded a lot more probable. Assuming that the bursts and the rest of the mixups were _not_ connected made, as a matter of fact, very little sense; it was multiplying hypotheses without reason. When two unusual things happen, they have at least one definite connection: they're both unusual. The sensible thing to do, Malone thought, was to look for more connections. Which meant asking who was causing the bursts, and why. Her Majesty had said that she didn't know, and couldn't do it herself. Obviously, though, some telepath or a team of telepaths was doing the job. And the only trouble with that, Malone reflected sadly, was that all telepaths were in the Yucca Flats laboratory. It was at this point that he sat upright in the tub, splashing water over the floor and gripping the soap with a strange excitement. Who'd ever said that _all_ the telepaths were in Yucca Flats? All the ones so far discovered were--but that, obviously, was an entirely different matter. Her majesty didn't know about any others, true. But Malone thought of his own mind-shield. If he could make himself telepathically "invisible," why couldn't someone else? Dr. Marshall's theories seemed to point the other way--but they only went for telepaths like Her Majesty, who were psychotic. A sane telepath, Malone thought, might conceivably develop such a mind-shield. All known telepaths were nuts, he told himself. Now, he began to see why. He'd started out, two years before, _hunting_ for nuts, and for idiots. But they wouldn't even know anything about sane telepaths--the sane ones probably wouldn't even want to communicate with them. A sane telepath was pretty much of an unknown quantity. But that, Malone told himself with elation, was exactly what he was looking for. Could a sane telepath do what an insane one couldn't--and project thoughts, or at least mental bursts? He got out of the cooling tub and grabbed for a terry-cloth robe. Not even bothering about the time, he closed his eyes. When he opened them again he was in the Yucca Flats apartment of Dr. Thomas O'Connor. O'Connor wasn't sleeping, exactly. He sat in a chair in his bare-looking living room, a book open on his lap, his head nodding