And then there were two items, on different pages, that seemed to contradict each other. The first was a small headline on page fourteen:
RESIGNATIONS REACH NEW HIGH IN U.S. COLLEGE FACULTIES
Teachers were apparently resigning all over the place, in virtually every department of virtually every college. That made sense. And the other item, on page three, made just as much sense:
HIGHER TAXES VOTED THROUGHOUT U.S.
FOR TEACHER INCOME RISE
State and Federal Aid Also Promised
in Drive to Raise Salaries Now
Apparently, teachers were resigning just as they were about to get more money than they’d ever seen before. But Malone could fit that into the pattern easily enough; it was perfectly obvious, once he thought about it.
Malone didn’t have time to go through much more of the paper; the facsimile records he’d been waiting for arrived, and he put the Post aside and concentrated on them instead. Maybe somewhere in the records was the clue he desperately needed.
The PRS was widely spread, all right. It had branches in almost every major city in the United States, in Europe, South Africa, South America and Australia. There was even a small branch society in Greenland. True, the Communist disapproval of such non-materialistic, un-Marxian objectives as Psychical Research showed up in the fact that there were no registered branches in the Sino-Soviet bloc. But that, Malone thought, didn’t really matter. Maybe in Russia they called themselves the Lenin Study Group, or the Better Borshcht League. He was fairly sure, from what he’d experienced, that the PRS had some kind of organization even behind the Iron Curtain.