Brain Twister Read online

him.He thought of several responses and chose one. "I see," he said.

  "But the important thing here," Dr. O'Connor said, "is the timing. Yousee, Charlie was incapable of continued concentration. He could notkeep his mind focused on another mind for very long, before he hoppedto still another. The actual amount of time concentrated on any givenmind at any single given period varied from a minimum of one pointthree seconds to a maximum of two point six. The timing samples, whenplotted graphically over a period of several months, formed a skewedbell curve with a mode at two point oh seconds."

  "Ah," Malone said, wondering if a skewed ball curve was the same thingas a belled skew curve, and if not, why not?

  "It was, in fact," Dr. O'Connor continued relentlessly, "a suddenvariation in those timings which convinced us that there was anothertelepath somewhere in the vicinity. We were conducting a second set ofreading experiments, in precisely the same manner as the first set,and, for the first part of the experiment, our figures weresubstantially the same. But--" He stopped.

  "Yes?" Malone said, shifting his feet and trying to take some weightoff his left foot by standing on his right leg. Then he stood on hisleft leg. It didn't seem to do any good.

  "I should explain," Dr. O'Connor said, "that we were conducting thisseries with a new set of test subjects: some of the scientists here atYucca Flats. We wanted to see if the intelligence quotients of thesubjects affected the time of contact which Charlie was able tomaintain. Naturally, we picked the men here with the highest IQ's, thetwo men we have who are in the top echelon of the creative geniusclass." He cleared his throat. "I did not include myself, of course,since I wished to remain an impartial observer, as much as possible."

  "Of course," Malone said without surprise.

  "The other two geniuses," Dr. O'Connor said, "the other two geniusesboth happen to be connected with the project known as Project Isle--anoperation whose function I neither know, nor care to know, anything atall about."

  Malone nodded. Project Isle was the non-rocket spaceship. Classified.Top Secret. Ultra Secret. And, he thought, just about anything elseyou could think of.

  "At first," Dr. O'Connor was saying, "our detector recorded the timeperiods of--ah--mental invasion as being the same as before. Then, oneday, anomalies began to appear. The detector showed that the minds ofour subjects were being held for as long as two or three minutes. Butthe phrases repeated by Charlie during these periods showed that hisown contact time remained the same; that is, they fell within the sameskewed bell curve as before, and the mode remained constant if nothingbut the phrase length were recorded."

  "Hmm," Malone said, feeling that he ought to be saying something.

  Dr. O'Connor didn't notice him. "At first we thought of errors in thedetector machine," he went on. "That worried us not somewhat, sinceour understanding of the detector is definitely limited at this time.We do feel that it would be possible to replace some of the electroniccomponents with appropriate symbolization like that already used inthe purely psionic sections, but we have, as yet, been unable todetermine exactly which electronic components must be replaced by whatsymbolic components."

  Malone nodded, silently this time. He had the sudden feeling that Dr.O'Connor's flow of words had broken itself up into a vast sea ofalphabet soup, and that he, Malone, was occupied in drowning in it.

  "However," Dr. O'Connor said, breaking what was left of Malone's trainof thought, "young Charlie died soon thereafter, and we decided to goon checking the machine. It was during this period that we foundsomeone else reading the minds of our test subjects--sometimes for afew seconds, sometimes for several minutes."

  "Aha," Malone said. Things were beginning to make sense again._Someone else._ That, of course, was the spy.

  "I found," Dr. O'Connor said, "on interrogating the subjects moreclosely, that they were, in effect, thinking on two levels. They werereading the book mechanically, noting the words and sense, but simplyshuttling the material directly into their memories without actuallythinking about it. The actual thinking portions of their minds wereconcentrating on aspects of Project Isle."

  There was a little silence.

  "In other words," Malone said, "someone was spying on them forinformation about Project Isle?"

  "Precisely," Dr. O'Connor said with a frosty, teacher-to-studentsmile. "And whoever it was had a much higher concentration time thanCharlie had ever attained. He seems to be able to retain contact aslong as he can find useful information flowing in the mind beingread."

  "Wait a minute," Malone said. "Wait a minute. If this spy is soclever, how come he didn't read _your_ mind?"

  "It is very likely that he has," O'Connor said. "What does that haveto do with it?"

  "Well," Malone said, "if he knows you and your group are working ontelepathy and can detect what he's doing, why didn't he just hold offon the minds of those geniuses when they were being tested in yourmachine?"

  Dr. O'Connor frowned. "I'm afraid that I can't be sure," he said, andit was clear from his tone that, if Dr. Thomas O'Connor wasn't sure,no one in the entire world was, had been, or ever would be. "I do havea theory, however," he said, brightening up a trifle.

  Malone waited patiently.

  "He must know our limitations," Dr. O'Connor said at last. "He must beperfectly well aware that there's not a single thing we can _do_ abouthim. He must know that we can neither find nor stop him. Why should heworry? He can afford to ignore us--or even bait us. We're helpless,and he knows it."

  That, Malone thought, was about the most cheerless thought he hadheard in sometime.

  "You mentioned that you had an insulated room," the FBI agent saidafter a while. "Couldn't you let your men think in there?"

  Dr. O'Connor sighed. "The room is shielded against magnetic fields andelectro-magnetic radiation. It is perfectly transparent to psionicphenomena, just as it is to gravitational fields."

  "Oh," Malone said. He realized rapidly that his question had been alittle silly to begin with, since the insulated room had been theplace where all the tests had been conducted in the first place. "Idon't want to take up too much of your time, Doctor," he said after apause, "but there are a couple of other questions."

  "Go right ahead," Dr. O'Connor said. "I'm sure I'll be able to helpyou."

  Malone thought of mentioning how little help the Doctor had been todate, but decided against it. Why antagonize a perfectly goodscientist without any reason? Instead, he selected his first question,and asked it. "Have you got any idea how we might lay our hands onanother telepath? Preferably one that's not an imbecile, of course."

  Dr. O'Connor's expression changed from patient wisdom to irritation."I wish we could, Mr. Malone. I wish we could. We certainly need onehere to help us here with our work--and I'm sure that your work isimportant, too. But I'm afraid we have no ideas at all about findinganother telepath. Finding little Charlie was purely fortuitous--purely, Mr. Malone, fortuitous."

  "Ah," Malone said. "Sure. Of course." He thought rapidly anddiscovered that he couldn't come up with one more question. As amatter of fact, he'd asked a couple of questions already, and he couldbarely remember the answers. "Well," he said, "I guess that's aboutit, then, Doctor. If you come across anything else, be sure and let meknow."

  He leaned across the desk, extending a hand. "And thanks for yourtime," he added.

  Dr. O'Connor stood up and shook his hand. "No trouble, I assure you,"he said. "And I'll certainly give you all the information I can."

  Malone turned and walked out. Surprisingly, he discovered that hisfeet and legs still worked. He had thought they'd turned to stone inthe office long before.

  * * * * *

  It was on the plane back to Washington that Malone got his firstinkling of an idea.

  The only telepath that the Westinghouse boys had been able to turn upwas Charles O'Neill, the youthful imbecile.

  All right, then. Suppose there were another like him. Imbecilesweren't very difficult to locate. Most of them would be ininstituti
ons, and the others would certainly be on record. It might bepossible to find someone, anyway, who could be handled and used as atool to find a telepathic spy.

  And--happy thought!--maybe one of them would turn out to be a high-grade imbecile, or even a moron.

  Even if they only turned up another imbecile, he thought wearily, atleast Dr. O'Connor would have something to work with.

  He reported back to Burris when he