Supermind
“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 button 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 assassinated 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.”
“No,” Wolf said. “The killer would be on his way here instead. They
haven’t got him, Malone. It seems Governor Flarion was walking along
Collins Avenue when somebody fired at him, using a high-powered rifle
with, I guess, a scope sight.”
“Professional,” Malone commented.
“It looks like it,” Wolf said. “Nobody even heard the sniper’s shot;
the governor just fell over, right there in the street. And by the
time his bodyguards found out what had happened, it was impossible
even to be sure just which way he was facing when the shot had been
fired.”
“And, as I remember Collins Avenue—” Malone started.
“Right,” Wolf said. “Out where Governor Flarion was taking his stroll,
there’s an awful lot of it to search. The boys are trying to find
somebody who might have seen a man acting suspicious in any of the
nearby buildings, or heard a shot, or seen anybody at all lurking or
loitering anywhere remotely close to the scene.”
“Lovely,” Malone said. “Sounds like a nice complicated job.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Wolf said. “There’s also the Miami
Beach Chamber of Commerce. According to them, Flarion died of a heart
attack, and not even in Miami Beach. The bullet and the body are
supposed to be written off as just coincidences, to keep the fair name
of Miami Beach unsullied.”
“All I can say,” Malone offered, “is good luck. This is the saddest
day in American history since the assassination of Huey P. Long.”
“Agreed,” Wolf said. “Want me to tell Burris you called?”
“Right,” Malone said. He flicked off.
Now, he asked himself, how did the assassination of Governor Nemours
P. Flarion fit in with anything? Granted, good old Nemours P. had been
a horrible mistake, a paranoid, self-centered, would-be dictator whose
talents as a rabble-rouser and a fearmonger had somehow managed to get
him elected to a governorship. Certainly nobody felt particularly
unhappy about his death. But he wouldn’t fit into the pattern. Malone
reminded himself that that was one more thing he had to find out when
he got the chance.
The trouble lay in finding an opportunity, he thought—and then he
corrected himself.
Not _finding_ it—_making_ it. Nobody was going to hand him anything
on a silver serving salver.
He punched the intercom again and got the Records office.
“Yes, sir?” a familiar voice said.
“Potter?” Malone said. “This is Malone. I want facsimiles of
everything we have on the Psychical Research Society, on Sir Lewis
Carter, and on Luba Vasilovna Garbitsch. Both of those last are
connected with the Society.”
“Right,” Potter said. “They’ll be up at once.”
Then he punched again, and asked for the latest copy of the Washington
_Post_. He gave the article on Governor Flarion one quick glance, but
it didn’t contain anything in the way of facts that he hadn’t already
had from Wolf. After that, he left it and concentrated on the more
prosaic, human-interest news, the smaller stories.
FIFTH SPLINTER GROUP FORMS IN DCA BATTLE
That was an interesting one, he thought. The Daughters of Colonial
Americans had about reached the point of diminishing returns in their
battle over the claims of Rose Carswell Elder, a descendant of a Negro
freedman named William Elder who had lived in Boston in 1776 and
fought on the side of the Colonies during the Revolution. One more
splinter group, Malone thought, and there’d be as many splinters as
members. Rose Carswell Elder was pressing her claim for membership,
and the ladies were replying by throwing crockery and hard words at
each other.
Then there was the Legion of American War Veterans. The headline on
this one read:
LAWV OUSTS ‘ROWDIES’: AID MEETING CONTINUES
The “rowdies,” Malone discovered, were a large minority group that
wanted the good old days of electric canes, paper hats, whistles and
pretty girls. “The Legion has grown up,” a spokesman told them. “This
convention is being held to discuss the possibility of increased
technological aid to India and Africa. There is no place for
tomfoolery or high jinks.”
The expulsion order had been carried by a record majority.
And then there were two items, on different pages, that seemed to
contradict each other. The first was a small headline on page
fourteen:
RESIGNATIONS REACH NEW HIGH IN U.S. COLLEGE FACULTIES
Teachers were apparently resigning all over the place, in virtually
every department of virtually every college. That made sense. And the
other item, on page three, made just as much sense:
HIGHER TAXES VOTED THROUGHOUT U.S.
FOR TEACHER INCOME RISE
State and Federal Aid Also Promised
in Drive to Raise Salaries Now
Apparently, teachers were resigning just as they were about to get
more money than they’d ever seen before. But Malone could fit that
into the pattern easily enough; it was perfectly obvious, once he
thought about it.
Malone didn’t have time to go through much more of the paper; the
facsimile records he’d been waiting for arrived, and he put the _Post_
aside and concentrated on them instead. Maybe somewhere in the records
was the clue he desperately needed.
The PRS was widely spread, all right. It had branches in almost every
major city in the United States, in Europe, South Africa, South
America and Australia. There was even a small branch society in
Greenland. True, the Communist disapproval of such non-materialistic,
un-Marxian objectives as Psychical Research showed up in the fact that
there were no registered branches in the Sino-Soviet bloc. But that,
Malone thought, didn’t really matter. Maybe in Russia they called
themselves the Lenin Study Group, or the Better Borshcht League. He
was fairly sure, from what he’d experienced, that the PRS had some
kind of organization even behind the Iron Curtain.
Money didn’t seem to be much of a problem, either. Malone checked for
the supporters of the organization and found a microfilmed list that
ran into the hundreds of thousands of names, most of them ordinary
people who seemed to be interested in spiritualism and the like, and
who donated a few dollars apiece each year to the PRS. Besides this
mass of small donations, of course, there were a few large ones, from
independently wealthy men who gave support to the organization and
seemed actively interested in its aims.
It wasn’t an unusual picture; it was just an exceptionally big one.
Malone sighed and went on to the personal dossiers.
Sir Lewis Carter himself was a well-known astronomer and
mathematician. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal
Astronomical Society and the Royal Mathematical Society. He had been
knighted for his contributions in higher mathematics only two years
before he had come to live in the United States. Malone went over the
papers dealing with his entry into the country carefully, but they
were all in order and they contained absolutely no clues he could use.
Sir Lewis’ books on political and historical philosophy had been
well-received, and he had also written a novel, _But Some Are More
Equal_, which, for a few weeks after publication, had managed to reach
the bottom of the best-seller list.
And that was that. Malone tried to figure out whether all this
information did him any good at all, and he didn’t have to think for
very long. The answer was no. He opened the next dossier.
Luba Vasilovna Garbitsch had been born in New York. Her mother had
been a woman of Irish descent named Mary O’Keefe, and had died in ’68.
Her father, of course, had now been revealed as a Russian agent, and
was at present making his home, such as it probably was, in good old
Moscow.
Malone sighed. Somewhere in the dossiers, he was sure, there was a
clue, the basic clue that would tell him everything he needed to know.
His prescience had never been so strong; he knew perfectly well that
he was staring at the biggest, most startling and most complete
disclosure of all. And he couldn’t see it.
He stared at the folders for a long minute. What did they tell him?
What was the clue?
And then, very slowly, the soft light of a prodigal sun illuminated
his mind.
“Mr. Malone,” Malone said gently, “you are a damned fool. There are
times when it is necessary to discard the impossible after you have
seen that the obscure is the obvious.”
He wasn’t sure whether that meant anything, or even whether he knew
what he was saying. He was sure of only one thing: the final answer.
And it _was_ obvious. Obvious as all hell.
13
There was, of course, only one thing to do, and only one place to go.
Malone went downstairs without even stopping to wave farewell to the
agent-in-charge, and climbed into the big, specially-built FBI Lincoln
that waited for him.
“Want a driver?” one of the mechanics asked.
“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