“And then,” Malone said, “there were the men who wanted to arrest me. And the ones who wanted to take Lou to jail. And the mad Mongol who just wanted to fight, I guess.”
“There were so many different things, all going on at once,” the Queen said.
Malone nodded. “There seems to be quite a lot of confusion in the Soviet Union, too,” he said. “That does not sound to me like an efficient operation.”
“It wasn’t, very,” the Queen said. “You see, they have Garbitsch now, but they can’t do anything to him because they can’t get to Lou. And it doesn’t do them any good to do anything to her father, unless she knows about it first.”
“It sounds,” Malone said, “as if the USSR is going along the same confused road as the good old United States.”
The Queen nodded agreement. “It’s terrible,” she said. “I get those same flashes of telepathic static, too.”
“You do?” Malone said, leaning forward.
“Just the same,” the Queen said. “Whatever is operating in the United States is operating over here, too.”
Malone sat down in a seat on the aisle. “Everything,” he announced, “is now perfectly lovely. The United States is being confused and mixed up by somebody, and the Somebody looked like a Russian spy. But now Russia is being confused, too.”
“Do you think there are some American spies working here?” the Queen said.