Brain Twister p-1 Read online

  O’Connor nodded. “Certainly. Certainly.”

  Burris said: “Well, then,” and paused. After a second he started again: “Now, Dr. O’Connor, would you please give us a sort of verbal run-down on this for our records?”

  “Of course,” Dr. O’Connor said. He smiled into the video cameras and cleared his throat. “I take it you don’t want an explanation of how this machine works. I mean: you don’t want a technical exposition, do you?”

  “No,” Burris said, and added: “Not by any means. Just tell us what it does.”

  Dr. O’Connor suddenly reminded Malone of a professor he’d had in college for one of the law courses. He had, Malone thought, the same smiling gravity of demeanor, the same condescending attitude of absolute authority. It was clear that Dr. O’Connor lived in a world of his own, a world that was not even touched by the common run of men.

  “Well,” he began, “to put it very simply, the device indicates whether or not a man’s mental — ah — processes are being influenced by outside — by outside influences.” He gave the cameras another little smile. “If you will allow me, I will demonstrate on the machine itself.”

  He took two steps that carried him out of camera range, and returned wheeling a large heavy-looking box. Dangling from the metal covering were a number of wires and attachments. A long cord led from the box to the floor, and snaked out of sight to the left.

  “Now,” Dr. O’Connor said. He selected a single lead, apparently, Malone thought, at random. “This electrode—”

  “Just a moment, Doctor,” Burris said. He was eyeing the machine with a combination of suspicion and awe. “A while back you mentioned something about ‘outside influences.’ Just what, specifically, does that mean?”

  With some regret, Dr. O’Connor dropped the lead. “Telepathy,” he said. “By outside influences, I meant influences on the mind, such as telepathy or mind-reading of some nature.”

  “I see,” Burris said. “You can detect a telepath with this machine.”

  “I’m afraid—”

  “Well, some kind of a mind-reader anyhow,” Burris said. “We won’t quarrel about terms.”

  “Certainly not,” Dr. O’Connor said. The smile he turned on Burris was as cold and empty as the inside of Orbital Station One. “What I meant was — if you will permit me to continue — that we cannot detect any sort of telepathy or mind-reader with this device. To be frank, I very much wish that we could; it would make everything a great deal simpler. However, the laws of psionics don’t seem to operate that way.”

  “Well, then,” Burris said, “what does the thing do?” His face wore a mask of confusion. Momentarily, Malone felt sorry for his chief. He could remember how he’d felt, himself, when that law professor had come up with a particularly baffling question in class.

  “This machine,” Dr. O’Connor said with authority, “detects the slight variations in mental activity that occur when a person’s mind is being read.”

  “You mean, if my mind were being read right now—”

  “Not right now,” Dr. O’Connor said. “You see, the bulk of this machine is in Nevada; the structure is both too heavy and too delicate for transport. And there are other qualifications—”

  “I meant theoretically,” Burris said.

  “Theoretically—” Dr. O’Connor began, and smiled again — “Theoretically, if your mind were being read, this machine would detect it, supposing that the machine were in operating condition and all of the other qualifications had been met. You see, Mr. Burris, no matter how poor a telepath a man may be, he has some slight ability — even if only very slight — to detect the fact that his mind is being read.”

  “You mean, if somebody was reading my mind, I’d know it?” Burris said. His face showed, Malone realized, that he plainly disbelieved this statement.

  “You would know it,” Dr. O’Connor said, “but you would never know you knew it. To elucidate: in a normal person — like you, for instance, or even like myself — the state of having one’s mind read merely results in a vague, almost sub-conscious feeling of irritation, something that could easily be attributed to minor worries, or fluctuations in one’s hormonal balance. The hormonal balance, Mr. Burris, is—”

  “Thank you,” Burris said with a trace of irritation. “I know what hormones are.”

  “Ah. Good,” Dr. O’Connor said equably. “In any case, to continue: this machine interprets those specific feelings as indications that the mind is being — ah — ‘eavesdropped’ upon.”

  You could almost see the quotation marks around what Dr. O’Connor considered slang dropping into place, Malone thought.

  “I see,” Burris said with a disappointed air. “But what do you mean, it won’t detect a telepath? Have you ever actually worked with a telepath?”

  “Certainly we have,” Dr. O’Connor said. “If we hadn’t, how would we be able to tell that the machine was, in fact, indicating the presence of telepathy? The theoretical state of the art is not, at present, sufficiently developed to enable us to—”

  “I see,” Burris said hurriedly. “Only wait a minute.”

  “Yes?”

  “You mean you actually got a real mind-reader? You’ve found one? One that works?”

  Dr. O’Connor shook his head sadly. “I’m afraid I should have said, Mr. Burris, that we did once have one,” he admitted. “He was, unfortunately, an imbecile, with a mental age between five and six, as nearly as we were ever able to judge.”

  “An imbecile?” Burris said. “But how were you able to—”

  “He could repeat a person’s thoughts word for word,” Dr. O’Connor said. “Of course, he was utterly incapable of understanding the meaning behind them. That didn’t matter; he simply repeated whatever you were thinking. Rather disconcerting.”

  “I’m sure,” Burris said. “But he was really an imbecile? There wasn’t any chance of—”

  “Of curing him?” Dr. O’Connor said. “None, I’m afraid. We did at one time feel that there had been a mental breakdown early in the boy’s life, and, indeed, it’s perfectly possible that he was normal for the first year or so. The records we did manage to get on that period, however, were very much confused, and there was never any way of telling anything at all, for certain. It’s easy to see what caused the confusion, of course: telepathy in an imbecile is rather an oddity — and any normal adult would probably be rather hesitant about admitting that he was capable of it. That’s why we have not found another subject; we must merely sit back and wait for lightning to strike.”

  Burris sighed. “I see your problem,” he said. “But what happened to this imbecile boy of yours?”

  “Very sad,” Dr. O’Connor said. “Six months ago, at the age of fifteen, the boy simply died. He simply — gave up, and died.”

  “Gave up?”

  “That was as good an explanation as our medical department was able to provide, Mr. Burris. There was some malfunction — but — we like to say that he simply gave up. Living became too difficult for him.”

  “All right,” Burris said after a pause. “This telepath of yours is dead, and there aren’t any more where he came from. Or if there are, you don’t know how to look for them. All right. But to get back to this machine of yours: it couldn’t detect the boy’s ability?”

  Dr. O’Connor shook his head. “No, I’m afraid not. We’ve worked hard on that problem at Westinghouse, Mr. Burris, but we haven’t yet been able to find a method of actually detecting telepaths.”

  “But you can detect—”

  “That’s right,” Dr. O’Connor said. “We can detect the fact that a man’s mind is being read.” He stopped, and his face became suddenly morose. When he spoke again, he sounded guilty, as if he were making an admission that pained him. “Of course, Mr. Burris, there’s nothing we can do about a man’s mind being read. Nothing whatever.” He essayed a grin that didn’t look very healthy. “But at least,” he said, “you know you’re being spied on.”

  Burris gri
maced. There was a little silence while Dr. O’Connor stroked the metal box meditatively, as if it were the head of his beloved.

  At last, Burris said: “Dr. O’Connor, how sure can you be of all this?”

  The look he received made all the previous conversation seem as warm and friendly as a Christmas party by comparison. It was a look that froze the air of the room into a solid chunk, Malone thought, a chunk you could have chipped pieces from, for souvenirs, later, when Dr. O’Connor had gone and you could get into the room without any danger of being quick-frozen by the man’s unfriendly eye.

  “Mr. Burris,” Dr. O’Connor said in a voice that matched the temperature of his gaze, “please. Remember our slogan.”

  Malone sighed. He fished in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes, found one, and extracted a single cigarette. He stuck it in his mouth and started fishing in various pockets for his lighter.

  He sighed again. Perfectly honestly, he preferred cigars, a habit he’d acquired from the days when he’d filched them from his father’s cigar-case. But his mental picture of a fearless and alert young FBI agent didn’t include a cigar. Somehow, remembering his father as neither fearless nor, exactly, alert — anyway, not the way the movies and the TV screens liked to picture the words — he had the impression that cigars looked out of place on FBI agents.

  And it was, in any case, a small sacrifice to make. He found his lighter and shielded it from the brisk wind. He looked out over water at the Jefferson Memorial, and was surprised that he’d managed to walk as far as he had. Then he stopped thinking about walking, and took a puff of his cigarette, and forced himself to think about the job in hand.

  Naturally, the Westinghouse gadget had been declared Ultra Top Secret as soon as it had been worked out. Virtually everything was, these days. And the whole group involved in the machine and its workings had been transferred without delay to the United States Laboratories out in Yucca Flats, Nevada.

  Out there in the desert, there just wasn’t much to do, Malone supposed, except to play with the machine. And, of course, look at the scenery. But when you’ve seen one desert, Malone thought confusedly, you’ve seen them all.

  So, the scientists ran experiments on the. machine, and they made a discovery of a kind they hadn’t been looking for.

  Somebody, they discovered, was picking the brains of the scientists there.

  Not the brains of the people working with the telepathy machine.

  And not the brains of the people working on the several other Earth-limited projects at Yucca Flats.

  They’d been reading the minds of some of the scientists working on the new and highly classified non-rocket space drive.

  In other words, the Yucca Flats plant was infested with a telepathic spy. And how do you go about finding a telepath? Malone sighed. Spies that got information in any of the usual ways were tough enough to locate. A telepathic spy was a lot tougher proposition.

  Well, one thing about Andrew J. Burris. He had an answer for everything. Malone thought of what his chief had said: “It takes a thief to catch a thief. And if the Westinghouse machine won’t locate a telepathic spy, I know what will.”

  “What?” Malone had asked.

  “It’s simple,” Burris had said. “Another telepath. There has to be one around somewhere. Westinghouse did have one, after all, and the Russians still have one. Malone, that’s your job: go out and find me a telepath.”

  Burris had an answer for everything, all right, Malone thought. But he couldn’t see where the answer did him very much good. After all, if it takes a telepath to catch a telepath, how do you catch the telepath you’re going to use to catch the first telepath?

  Malone ran that through his mind again, and then gave it up. It sounded as if it should have made sense, somehow, but it just didn’t, and that was all there was to that.

  He dropped his cigarette to the ground and mashed it out with the toe of his shoe. Then he looked up.

  Out there, over the water, was the Jefferson Memorial. It stood, white in the floodlights, beautiful and untouchable in the darkness. Malone stared at it. What would Thomas Jefferson have done in a crisis like this?

  Jefferson, he told himself without much conviction, would have been just as confused as he was.

  But he’d have had to find a telepath, Malone thought. Malone determined that he would do likewise. If Thomas Jefferson could do it, the least he, Malone, could do was to give it a good try.

  There was only one little problem:

  Where, Malone thought, do I start looking?

  Chapter 2

  Early the next morning, Malone awoke on a plane, heading across the continent toward Nevada. He had gone home to sleep, and he’d had to wake up to get on the plane, and now here he was, waking up again. It seemed, somehow, like a vicious circle.

  The engines hummed gently as they pushed the big ship through the middle stratosphere’s thinly distributed molecules. Malone looked out at the purple-dark sky and set himself to think out his problem again.

  He was still mulling things over when the ship lowered its landing gear and rolled to a stop on the big field near Yucca Flats. Malone sighed and climbed slowly out of his seat. There was a car waiting for him at the airfield, though, and that scemed to presage a smooth time; Malone remembered calling Dr. O’Connor the night before, and congratulated himself on his foresight.

  Unfortunately, when he reached the main gate of the high double fence that surrounded the more than ninety square miles of United States Laboratories, he found out that entrance into that sanctum sanctorum of Security wasn’t as easy as he’d imagined — not even for an FBI man. His credentials were checked with the kind of minute care Malone had always thought people reserved for disputed art masterpieces, and it was with a great show of reluctance that the Special Security guards passed him inside as far as the office of the Chief Security Officer.

  There, the Chief Security Officer himself, a man who could have doubled for Torquemada, eyed MaIone with ill-concealed suspicion while he called Burris at FBI headquarters back in Washington.

  Burris identified Malone on the video screen and the Chief Security Officer, looking faintly disappointed, stamped the agent’s pass and thanked the FBI chief. Malone had the run of the place.

  Then he had to find a courier jeep. The Westinghouse division, it seemed, was a good two miles away.

  As Malone knew perfectly well, the main portion of the entire Yucca Flats area was devoted solely to research on the new space drive which was expected to make the rocket as obsolete as the blunderbuss — at least as far as space travel was concerned. Not, Malone thought uneasily, that the blunderbuss had ever been used for space travel, but—

  He got off the subject hurriedly. The jeep whizzed by buildings, most of them devoted to aspects of the non-rocket drive. The other projects based at Yucca Flats had to share what space was left — and that included, of course, the Westinghouse research project.

  It turned out to be a single, rather small white building with a fence around it. The fence bothered Malone a little, but there was no need to worry; this time he was introduced at once into Dr. O’Connor’s office. It was panelled in wallpaper manufactured to look like pine. and the telepathy expert sat behind a large black desk bigger than any Malone had ever seen in the FBI offices. There wasn’t a scrap of paper on the desk; its surface was smooth and shiny, and behind it the nearly transparent Dr. Thomas O’Connor was close to invisible.

  He looked, in person, just about the same as he’d looked on the FBI tapes. Malone closed the door of the office behind him, looked for a chair and didn’t find one. In Dr. O’Connor’s office, it was perfectly obvious, Dr. O’Connor sat down. You stood, and were uncomfortable.

  Malone took off his hat. He reached across the desk to shake hands with the telepathy expert, and Dr. O’Connor gave him a limp fragile paw. “Thanks for giving me a little time,” Malone said. “I really appreciate it.” He smiled across the desk. His feet were already beginning to hurt.
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  “Not at all,” Dr. O’Connor said, returning the smile with one of his own special quick-frozen brand. “I realize how important FBI work is to all of us, Mr. Malone. What can I do to help you?”

  Malone shifted his feet. “I’m afraid I wasn’t very specific on the phone last night,” he said. “It wasn’t anything I wanted to discuss over a line that might have been tapped. You see, I’m on the telepathy case.”

  Dr. O’Connor’s eyes widened the merest trifle. “I see,” he said. “Well, I’ll certainly do everything I can to help you.”

  “Fine,” Malone said. “Let’s get right down to business, then. The first thing I want to ask you about is this detector of yours. I understand it’s too big to carry around — but how about making a smaller model?”

  “Smaller?” Dr. O’Connor permitted himself a ghostly chuckle. “I’m afraid that isn’t possible, Mr. Malone. I would be happy to let you have a small model of the machine if we had one available — more than happy. I would like to see such a machine myself, as a matter of fact. Unfortunately, Mr. Malone—”

  “There just isn’t one, right?” Malone said.

  “Correct,” Dr. O’Connor said. “And there are a few other factors. In the first place, the person being analyzed has to be in a specially shielded room, such as is used in encephalographic analysis. Otherwise, the mental activity of the other persons around him would interfere with the analysis.” He frowned a little. “I could wish that we knew a bit more about psionic machines. The trouble with the present device, frankly, is that it is partly psionic and partly electronic, and we can’t be entirely sure where one part leaves off and the other begins. Very trying. Very trying indeed.”

  “I’ll bet it is,” Malone said sympathetically, wishing he understood what Dr. O’Connor was talking about.

  The telepathy expert sighed. “However,” he said, “we keep working at it.” Then he looked at Malone expectantly.

  Malone shrugged. “Well, if I can’t carry the thing around, I guess that’s that,” he said. “But here’s the next question: do you happen to know the maximum range of a telepath? I mean: how far away can he get from another person and still read his mind?”