Then he went outside and across the dusty street to the barracks where Her Majesty and the other telepaths were housed. No one paid any attention to him, and he rather missed the stares he'd become used to drawing. But by now, everybody was used to seeing Elizabethan clothing. Her Majesty had arrived at a new plateau.
She would now allow no one to have audience with her unless he was properly dressed. Even the psychiatrists—whom she had, with a careful sense of meiosis, appointed Physicians to the Royal House—had to wear the stuff.
Malone went over the whole case in his mind—for about the thousandth time, he told himself bitterly.
Who could the telepathic spy be? It was like looking for a needle in a rolling stone, he thought. Or something. He did remember clearly that a stitch in time saved nine, but he didn't know nine what, and suspected it had nothing to do with his present problem.
How about Dr. Harry Gamble, Malone thought. It seemed a little unlikely that the head of Project Isle would be spying on his own men—particularly since he already had all the information. But, on the other hand, he was just as probable a spy as anybody else.
Malone moved onward. Dr. Thomas O'Connor, the Westinghouse psionics man, was the next nominee. Before Malone had actually found Her Majesty, he had had a suspicion that O'Connor had cooked the whole thing up to throw the FBI off the trail and confuse everybody, and that he'd intended merely to have the FBI chase ghosts while the real spy did his work undetected.
But what if O'Connor were the spy himself—a telepath? What if he were so confident of his ability to throw the Queen off the track that he had allowed the FBI to find all the other telepaths? There was another argument for that: he'd had to report the findings of his machine no matter what it cost him; there were too many other men on his staff who knew about it.
O'Connor was a perfectly plausible spy, too. But he didn't seem very likely. The head of a government project is likely to be a much- investigated man. Could any tie-up with Russia—even a psionic one— stand up against that kind of investigation? It was possible. Anything, after all, was possible. You eliminated the impossible, and then whatever remained, however improbable….
Malone told himself morosely to shut up and think.
O'Connor, he told himself, might be the spy. It would be a pleasure, he realized, to go to the office of that superior scientist and arrest him. "I know your true name," he muttered. "It isn't O'Connor, it's Moriarty." He wondered if the Westinghouse man had ever done any work on the dynamics of an asteroid. Then he wondered what the dynamics of an asteroid were.