According to her—and Malone didn’t doubt it for an instant—most people simply didn’t think their superiors were all they claimed to be. But they acted as if they did, at least while in the presence of those superiors. It was a common fiction, a sort of handy oil on the wheels of social intercourse.
And all Her Majesty had ever insisted on was the same sort of treatment.
“Bless you,” she’d said, “I can’t help the way you think, but, as Queen, I do have some control over the way you act.”
The funny thing, as far as Malone was concerned, was that the two parts of his personality were becoming more and more alike. He didn’t actually believe that Her Majesty was Queen Elizabeth I, and he hoped fervently that he never would. But he did have a great deal of respect for her, and more affection than he had believed possible at first. She was the grandmother Malone had never known; she was good, and kind, and he wanted to keep her happy and contented. There had been nothing at all phony in the solemn toast he had proposed, nor in the righteous indignation he had felt against anyone who was giving Her Majesty even a minute’s worth of discomfort.
And Boyd, surprisingly enough, seemed to feel the same way. Malone felt good about that; Her Majesty needed all the loyal supporters she could get.
But all of this was later. At the time, Malone was doing nothing except what came naturally. Nor, apparently, was Boyd. After the glasses had been thrown, with a terrifying crash, into the metal wastebasket, and the reverberations of that second had stopped ringing in their ears, a moment of silence had followed.
Then Boyd turned, briskly rubbing his hands. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get back to work.”
Malone looked at the proud, happy look on Her Majesty’s face; he saw the glimmer of a tear in the corner of each eye. But he gave no indication that he had noticed anything at all out of the ordinary.
“Fine,” he said. “Now, getting on back to the facts, we’ve established something, anyhow. Some agency is causing flashes of telepathic static all over the place. And those flashes are somehow connected with the confusion that’s going on all around us. Somehow, these flashes have an effect on the minds of people.”
“And we know at least one manifestation of that effect,” Boyd said. “It makes spies blab all their secrets when they’re exposed to it.”