"Certainly," BeeBee said with aplomb. "There's a call for you in the upstairs booth. A long-distance call, personal."
"Oh," Malone said. "Who'd know I was—" He stopped, thinking hard. There was no way in the world for anyone to know he was in Topp's. Therefore, nobody could be calling him. "They've got the wrong name," he said decisively.
"Oh, no," BeeBee said. "I heard them quite distinctly. You are Sir Kenneth Malone, aren't you?"
Malone gaped for one long second, and then his mind caught up with the facts. "Oh," he said. "Sure." He raced upstairs to the phone booth, said: "This is Sir Kenneth Malone," into the blank screen, and waited patiently.
After a while an operator said: "Person to person call, Sir Kenneth, from Yucca Flats. Will you take this call?"
"I'll take it," Malone said. A face appeared on the screen, and Malone knew he was right. He knew exactly how he'd been located, and by whom.
Looking at the face in the screen alone, it might have been thought that the woman who appeared there was somebody's grandmother, kindly, red-cheeked and twinkle-eyed. Perhaps that wasn't the only stereotype; she could have been an old-maid schoolteacher, one of the kindly schoolteachers who taught, once upon a time that never was, in the little old red schoolhouses of the dim past. The face positively radiated kindliness, and friendship, and peace.
But if the face was the face of a sentimental dream, the garb was the garb of royalty. Somebody's grandmother was on her way to a costume party. She wore the full court costume of the days of Queen Elizabeth I, complete with brocaded velvet gown, wide ruff collar and bejeweled skullcap.
She was, Malone knew, completely insane.