"With your hands up!" the captain snapped. Malone dropped the .44 unobtrusively into his jacket pocket and complied. Then, as he came out of the car, he teleported himself back to a section of the road he'd memorized, ten feet behind the car. The four men were gaping, dumbfounded, as Malone drew his gun and shot them. Then he removed the sawhorses, got back in his car, reloaded the .44, put it back in his holster and drove on.
"Now," he said in a thoughtful tone. "Where was I?"
He imagined Luba's voice saying: You were telling us how, all this time, it's hardly surprising—
"Oh, yes," he said. "Well, then. So you solved some of the problems, you'd set. You learned how to use and control telepathy and teleportation, maybe, long before scientific boys like Dr. O'Connor became interested. But you never announced it publicly. You kept the knowledge all to yourself. 'Is this what the common folk call telepathy, Lord Bromley?' 'Yes, Lady Bromley.' 'Much too good for them, isn't it?' And maybe it is, at that; I don't know."
His thoughts, he recognized, were veering slightly. After a second he got back on the track.
"At any rate," he went on, "you—all of your out there—are responsible for what's happening to this country and all of Europe and Asia—and, for all I know, the suburbs of Hell.
"I remember one of the book facsimiles you got me, for instance," he said. "The writer tried for an 'expose' of the Society, in which he attempted to prove that Sir Lewis Carter and certain other members were trying to take over the world and run it to suit themselves, using their psionic powers to institute a rather horrible type of dictatorship over the world.
"It was a pretty convincing book in a lot of ways. The author evidently know a lot about what he was dealing with."
At this point, Malone ran into another roadblock. There had been a fight of some kind up ahead, and a lot of cars with what looked like shell-holes in them were piled on one side of the road. The State Police were working under the confused direction of an Army major to straighten things out, while a bulldozer pushed the cars off the road onto the grass bordering it. The major stopped what he was doing and came to meet Malone as the car stopped.