Boyd shrugged “We hushed it up,” he said. “But Farnsworth’s got delusions of persecution. He apparently thinks somebody’s out to get him. As a matter of fact, he thinks everybody’s out to get him.”
“Now that,” Malone said, “sounds familiar.”
Boyd leaned back a little more in his chair. “Here’s the funny thing, though,” he said. “The others all act as if they’re suspicious of everybody who talks to them. Not anything obvious, you understand. Just worried, apprehensive. Always looking at you out of the corners of their eyes. That kind of thing.”
Malone thought of Senator Lefferts, who was also suffering from delusions of persecution, delusions that had real evidence to back them up. “It does sound funny,” he said cautiously.
“Well, I reported everything to Burris,” Boyd went on. “And he said you were working on something similar, and we might as well pool our resources.”
“Here we go again,” Malone said. He took a deep breath, filling his nostrils with what remained of the cigar odor in the room, and felt more peaceful. Quickly, he told Boyd about what had been happening in Congress. “It seems pretty obvious,” he finished, “that there is some kind of a tie-up between the two cases.”
“Maybe it’s obvious,” Boyd said, “but it is just a little bit odd. Fun and games. You know, Ken, Burris was right.”
“How?” Malone said.
“He said everything was all mixed up,” Boyd went on. “He told me the country was going to Rome in a handbasket, or something like that.”
Wondering vaguely if Burris had really been predicting mass religious conversions, Malone nodded silently.