The school principal, a gray battleship named Miss Evita Dexter, was irate. The idea that pornographic materials were being sold in her schoolyard was absurd. It was ridiculous. It was unheard-of.
Stevenson assured her that, adjectives notwithstanding, it was happening. And they were going to have a shakedown of the student body whether Miss Dexter liked it or not. Detective-Sergeant Stevenson and his associates, Marshall and Lang, were going to go through the student body with a fine tooth comb.
Neither Marshall nor Lang had mentioned the fact that they were from the FBI.
The search began at nine forty-five in the morning, and ended at ten past twelve.
On the persons of three eighth-grade boys, they found pornographic photos.
On the person of Eddie Clayhorn, they found absolutely nothing....
Abner Streitman Long was a government expert. He was more or less a government expert in the ready reserve, since he had never once been called upon to use his expertise for the government.
Not until now.
Abner Streitman Long was Resident Professor of Psychology at Mandar University. He was also one of the world's foremost and best-known experimenters in the area of parapsychology, also called Extra-Sensory Perception, also called psionics.
The government, as a matter of principle, didn't believe in psionics. But the government, also as a matter of principle, kept a psionics expert handy, just in case.