Supermind
“And two thieves are better than one,” Malone said.
“Anyhow,” Boyd said with a small, gusty sigh, “it’s company.”
“Sure,” Malone said.
Boyd looked for an ashtray, failed again to find one, and walked over
to flip a second cigarette out onto Washington. He came back to his
chair, sat down, and said, “What’s our next step, Ken?”
Malone considered carefully. “First,” he said finally, “we’ll start
assuming something. We’ll start assuming that there is some kind of
organization behind all this, behind all the senators’ resignations
and everything like that.”
“It sounds like a big assumption,” Boyd said.
Malone shook his head. “It isn’t really,” he said. “After all, we
can’t figure it’s the work of one person: it’s too widespread for
that. And it’s silly to assume that everything’s accidental.”
“All right,” Boyd said equably. “It’s an organization.”
“Trying to subvert the United States,” Malone went on. “Reducing
everything to chaos. And that brings in everything else, Tom. That
brings in the unions and the gang wars and everything.”
Boyd blinked. “How?” he said.
“Obvious,” Malone said. “Strife brought on by internal confusion,
that’s what’s going on all over. It’s the same pattern. And if we
assume an organization trying to jam up the United States, it even
makes sense.” He leaned back and beamed.
“Sure it makes sense,” Boyd said. “But who’s the organization?”
Malone shrugged.
“If I were doing the picking,” Boyd said, “I’d pick the Russians. Or
the Chinese. Or both. Probably both.”
“It’s a possibility,” Malone said. “Anyhow, if it’s sabotage, who else
would be interested in sabotaging the United States? There’s some
Russian or Chinese organization fouling up Congress, and the unions,
and the gangs. Come to think of it, why the gangs? It seems to me that
if you left the professional gangsters strong, it would do even more
to foul things up.”
“Who knows?” Boyd said. “Maybe they’re trying to get rid of American
gangsters so they can import some of their own.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Malone said, “but I’ll think about it.
In the meantime, we have one more interesting question.”
“We do?” Boyd said.
“Sure we do,” Malone said. “The question is: how?”
Boyd said: “Mmm.” Then there was silence for a little while.
“How are the saboteurs doing all this?” Malone said. “It just doesn’t
seem very probable that _all_ the technicians in the Senate Office
Building, for instance, are spies. It makes even less sense that the
labor unions are composed mostly of spies. Or, for that matter, the
Mafia and the organizations like it. What would spies be doing in the
Mafia?”
“Learning Italian,” Boyd said instantly.
“Don’t be silly,” Malone said. “If there were that many spies in this
country, the Russians wouldn’t have to fight at all. They could _vote_
the Communists into power, and by a nice big landslide, too.”
“Wait a minute,” Boyd said. “If there aren’t so many spies, then how
is all this getting done?”
Malone beamed. “That’s the question,” he said. “And I think I have an
answer.”
“You do?” Boyd said. After a second he said: “Oh, no.”
“Suppose you tell me,” Malone said.
Boyd opened his mouth. Nothing emerged. He shut it. A second passed
and he opened it again. “Magic?” he said weakly.
“Not exactly,” Malone said cheerfully. “But you’re getting warm.”
Boyd shut his eyes. “I’m not going to stand for it,” he announced.
“I’m not going to take any more.”
“Any more what?” Malone said. “Tell me what you have in mind.”
“I won’t even consider it,” Boyd said. “It haunts me. It gets into my
dreams. Now, look, Ken, I can’t even see a pitchfork any more without
thinking of Greek letters.”
Malone took a breath. “Which Greek letter?” he said.
“You know very well,” Boyd said. “What a pitchfork looks like. _Psi._
And I’m not even going to think about it.”
“Well,” Malone said equably, “you won’t have to. If you’d rather start
with the Russian-spy end of things, you can do that.”
“What I’d rather do,” Boyd said, “is resign.”
“Next year,” Malone said instantly. “For now, you can wait around
until the dossiers come up—they’re for the Senate Office Building
technicians, and they’re on the way. You can go over them, and start
checking on any known Russian agents in the country for contacts. You
can also start checking on the dossiers, and in general for any
hanky-panky.”
Boyd blinked. “Hanky-panky?” he said.
“It’s a perfectly good word,” Malone said, offended. “Or two words.
Anyhow, you can start on that end, and not worry about anything else.”
“It’s going to haunt me,” Boyd said.
“Well,” Malone said, “eat lots of ectoplasm and get enough sleep, and
everything will be fine. After all, I’m going to have to do the real
end of the work, the psionics end. I may be wrong, but—”
He was interrupted by the phone. He flicked the switch and Andrew J.
Burris’ face appeared on the screen.
“Malone,” Burris said instantly, “I just got a complaint from the
State Department that ties in with your work. Their translator has
been acting up.”
Malone couldn’t say anything for a minute.
“Malone,” Burris went on. “I said—”
“I heard you,” Malone said. “And it doesn’t have one.”
“It doesn’t have one what?” Burris said.
“A pig-Latin circuit,” Malone said. “What else?”
Burris’ voice was very calm. “Malone,” he said, “what does pig-Latin
have to do with anything?”
“You said—”
“I said one of the State Department translators was acting up,” Burris
said. “If you want details—”
“I don’t think I can stand them,” Malone said.
“Some of the Russian and Chinese releases have come through with the
meaning slightly altered,” Burris went on doggedly. “And I want you to
check on it right away. I—”
“Thank God,” Malone said.
Burris blinked. “What?”
“Never mind,” Malone said. “Never mind. I’m glad you told me, Chief.
I’ll get to work on it right away, and—”
“You do that, Malone,” Burris said. “And for God’s sake stop calling
me Chief! Do I look like an Indian? Do I have feathers in my hair?”
“Anything,” Malone said grandly, “is possible.” He broke the
connection in a hurry.
3
The summer sun beat down on the white city of Washington, D. C, as if
it had mistaken its instructions slightly and was convinced that the
city had been put down somewhere in the Sahara. The sun seemed
confused, Malone thought. If this were the Sahara, obviously there was
no reason whatever for the Potomac to be running through it. The sun
was doing its best to correct this small error, however, by exerting
even more heat in a valiant attempt to dry up the river.
Its attempt was succeeding, at least partially. The Potomac was still
there, but quite a lot of it was not in the river bed any more.
Instead, it had gone into the air, which was so humid by now that
Malone was willing to swear that it was splashing into his lungs at
every inhalation. Resisting an impulse to try the breaststroke, he
stood in the full glare of the straining sun, just outside the Senate
Office Building. He looked across at the Capitol, just opposite,
squinting his eyes manfully against the glare of its dome in the
brightness.
The Capitol was, at any rate, some relief from the sight of Thomas
Boyd and a group of agents busily grilling two technicians. That was
going on in the Senate Office Building, and Malone had come over to
watch the proceedings. Everything had been set up in what Malone
considered the most complicated fashion possible. A big room had been
turned into a projection chamber, and films were being run off over
and over. The films, taken by hidden cameras watching the
computer-secretaries, had caught two technicians red-handed punching
errors into the machines. Boyd had leaped on this evidence, and he and
his crew were showing the movies to the technicians and questioning
them under bright lights in an effort to break down their resistance.
But it didn’t look as though they were going to have any more success
than the sun was having, turning Washington into the Sahara. After
all, Malone told himself, wiping his streaming brow, there were no
Pyramids in Washington. He tried to discover whether that made any
sense, but it was too much work. He went back to thinking about Boyd.
The technicians were sticking to their original stories that the
mistakes had been honest ones. It sounded like a sensible idea to
Malone; after all, people did make mistakes. And the FBI didn’t have a
single shred of evidence to prove that the technicians were engaged in
deliberate sabotage. But Boyd wasn’t giving up. Over and over he got
the technicians to repeat their stories, looking for discrepancies or
slips. Over and over he ran off the films of their mistakes, looking
for some clue, some shred of evidence.
Even the sight of the Capitol, Malone told himself sadly, was better
than any more of Boyd’s massive investigation techniques.
He had come out to do some thinking. He believed, in spite of a good
deal of evidence to the contrary, that his best ideas came to him
while walking. At any rate, it was a way of getting away from four
walls and from the prying eyes and anxious looks of superiors. He
sighed gently, crammed his hat onto his head and started out.
Only a maniac, he reflected, would wear a hat on a day like the one he
was swimming through. But the people who passed him as he trudged
onward to no particular destination didn’t seem to notice; they gave
him a fairly wide berth, and seemed very polite, but that wasn’t
because they thought he was nuts, Malone knew. It was because they
knew he was an FBI man.
That was the result of an FBI regulation. All agents had to wear hats.
Malone wasn’t sure why, and his thinking on the matter had only
dredged up the idea that you had to have a hat in case somebody asked
you to keep something under it. But the FBI was firm about its
rulings. No matter what the weather, an agent wore a hat. Malone
thought bitterly that he might just as well wear a red, white and blue
luminous sign that said _FBI_ in great winking letters, and maybe a
hooting siren too. Still, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was not
supposed to be a secret organization, no matter what occasional
critics might say. And the hats, at least as long as the weather
remained broiling, were enough proof of that for anybody.
Malone could feel water collecting under his hat and soaking his head.
He removed the hat quickly, wiped his head with a handkerchief and
replaced the hat, feeling as if he had become incognito for a few
seconds. The hat was back on now, feeling official but terrible, and
about the same was true of the fully-loaded Smith & Wesson .44
Magnum revolver which hung in his shoulder holster. The harness chafed
at his shoulder and chest and the weight of the gun itself was an
added and unwelcome burden.
But even without the gun and the hat, Malone did not feel exactly
chipper. His shirt and undershirt were no longer two garments, but
one, welded together by seamless sweat and plastered heavily and not
too skillfully to his skin. His trouser legs clung damply to calves
and thighs, rubbing as he walked, and at the knees each trouser leg
attached and detached itself with the unpleasant regularity of a wet
bastinado. Inside Malone’s shoes, his socks were completely awash, and
he seemed to squish as he walked. It was hard to tell, but there
seemed to be a small fish in his left shoe. It might, he told himself,
be no more than a pebble or a wrinkle in his sock. But he was willing
to swear that it was swimming upstream.
And the forecast, he told himself bitterly, was for continued warm.
He forced himself to take his mind off his own troubles and get back
to the troubles of the FBI in general, such as the problem at hand. It