At this point, to the infinite relief of the Los Angeles office, prime responsibility for the case shifted to Washington, D.C.
A tight lid of security was clamped over the whole affair. FBI analysts went to work on the facts and figures. Mathematically, they proved that the percentage of missing psi test cases was fantastically above the probability of coincidence.
One by one, the people had dropped from sight, lost in the swirling undercurrents of a vast, shifting population. A school teacher in Little Rock, a side-show freak in Chattanooga, a TV salesman in Milwaukee, an artist in Philadelphia—all had disappeared, obscurely but definitely.
And the disappearances were continuing.
Only two days before an inquiring FBI agent called on a pharmacist in Dubuque, the man had closed up the drugstore, started for home and had never been seen again. He was listed as an amnesia victim at the local police department. In his psi test, four years earlier, he had consistently averaged seventeen out of twenty-five calls. Remorselessly, the accrual of new facts added to the Bureau's bewilderment.
One of the FBI statisticians pointed out that almost an identical number of men and women were missing: 1,596 men; 1,627 women.
Another perceptive young researcher ran cards on the missing positives through an IBM machine, and came up with this statistic: The women were between the ages of 17 and 35; the men between 19 and 45. Eighty percent of both sexes were in their late twenties.
When all possible data had been assembled, the FBI gingerly submitted its report to a super-secret meeting of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The reaction was not flattering.
Navy's slightly profane comment was that someone in the Bureau had flipped his wig.