Malone went over the whole case in his mind—for about the thousandth time, he told himself bitterly.
Who could the telepathic spy be? It was like looking for a needle in a rolling stone, he thought. Or something. He did remember clearly that a stitch in time saved nine, but he didn't know nine what, and suspected it had nothing to do with his present problem.
How about Dr. Harry Gamble, Malone thought. It seemed a little unlikely that the head of Project Isle would be spying on his own men—particularly since he already had all the information. But, on the other hand, he was just as probable a spy as anybody else.
Malone moved onward. Dr. Thomas O'Connor, the Westinghouse psionics man, was the next nominee. Before Malone had actually found Her Majesty, he had had a suspicion that O'Connor had cooked the whole thing up to throw the FBI off the trail and confuse everybody, and that he'd intended merely to have the FBI chase ghosts while the real spy did his work undetected.
But what if O'Connor were the spy himself—a telepath? What if he were so confident of his ability to throw the Queen off the track that he had allowed the FBI to find all the other telepaths? There was another argument for that: he'd had to report the findings of his machine no matter what it cost him; there were too many other men on his staff who knew about it.
O'Connor was a perfectly plausible spy, too. But he didn't seem very likely. The head of a Government project is likely to be a much-investigated man. Could any tie-up with Russia—even a psionic one—stand against that kind of investigation? Malone doubted it.
Malone thought of the psychiatrists. There wasn't any evidence, that was the trouble. There wasn't any evidence either way.
Then he wondered if Boyd had been thinking of him, Malone, as the possible spy. Certainly it worked in reverse. Boyd—
No. That was silly.
Malone told himself that he might as well consider Andrew J. Burris.