Brain Twister | Page 7

remembering his father as neither
fearless nor, exactly, alert--anyway, not the way the movies and the TV
screens liked to picture the words--he had the impression that cigars
looked out of place on FBI agents.

And it was, in any case, a small sacrifice to make. He found his lighter
and shielded it from the brisk wind. He looked out over water at the
Jefferson Memorial, and was surprised that he'd managed to walk as far
as he had. Then he stopped thinking about walking, and took a puff of
his cigarette, and forced himself to think about the job in hand.
Naturally, the Westinghouse gadget had been declared Ultra Top Secret
as soon as it had been worked out. Virtually everything was, these days.
And the whole group involved in the machine and its workings had
been transferred without delay to the United States Laboratories out in
Yucca Flats, Nevada.
Out there in the desert, there just wasn't much to do, Malone supposed,
except to play with the machine. And, of course, look at the scenery.
But when you've seen one desert, Malone thought confusedly, you've
seen them all.
So, the scientists ran experiments on the machine, and they made a
discovery of a kind they hadn't been looking for.
Somebody, they discovered, was picking the brains of the scientists
there.
Not the brains of the people working with the telepathy machine.
And not the brains of the people working on the several other Earth-
limited projects at Yucca Flats.
They'd been reading the minds of some of the scientists working on the
new and highly classified non-rocket space drive.
In other words, the Yucca Flats plant was infested with a telepathic spy.
And how do you go about finding a telepath? Malone sighed. Spies that
got information in any of the usual ways were tough enough to locate.
A telepathic spy was a lot tougher proposition.
Well, one thing about Andrew J. Burris. He had an answer for
everything. Malone thought of what his chief had said: "It takes a thief

to catch a thief. And if the Westinghouse machine won't locate a
telepathic spy, I know what will."
"What?" Malone had asked.
"It's simple," Burris had said. "Another telepath. There has to be one
around somewhere. Westinghouse did have one, after all, and the
Russians still have one. Malone, that's your job: go out and find me a
telepath."
Burris had an answer for everything, all right, Malone thought. But he
couldn't see where the answer did him very much good. After all, if it
takes a telepath to catch a telepath, how do you catch the telepath
you're going to use to catch the first telepath?
Malone ran that through his mind again, and then gave it up. It sounded
as if it should have made sense, somehow, but it just didn't, and that
was all there was to that.
He dropped his cigarette to the ground and mashed it out with the toe of
his shoe. Then he looked up.
Out there, over the water, was the Jefferson Memorial. It stood, white
in the floodlights, beautiful and untouchable in the darkness. Malone
stared at it. What would Thomas Jefferson have done in a crisis like
this?
Jefferson, he told himself without much conviction, would have been
just as confused as he was.
But he'd have had to find a telepath, Malone thought. Malone
determined that he would do likewise, If Thomas Jefferson could do it,
the least he, Malone, could do was to give it a good try.
There was only one little problem:
Where, Malone thought, do I start looking?
2

Early the next morning, Malone awoke on a plane, heading across the
continent toward Nevada. He had gone home to sleep, and he'd had to
wake up to get on the plane, and now here he was, waking up again. It
seemed, somehow, like a vicious circle.
The engines hummed gently as they pushed the big ship through the
middle stratosphere's thinly distributed molecules. Malone looked out
at the purple-dark sky and set himself to think out his problem again.
He was still mulling things over when the ship lowered its landing gear
and rolled to a stop on the big field near Yucca Flats. Malone sighed
and climbed slowly out of his seat. There was a car waiting for him at
the airfield, though, and that seemed to presage a smooth time; Malone
remembered calling Dr. O'Connor the night before, and congratulated
himself on his foresight.
Unfortunately, when he reached the main gate of the high double fence
that surrounded the more than ninety square miles of United States
Laboratories, he found out that entrance into that sanctum sanctorum of
Security wasn't as easy as he'd imagined--not even for an FBI man. His
credentials were