ould be changed by a burst of wild
mental power--and why not? Malone reflected--then he could be
unconvinced as often as necessary. He could be spun round and round
like a top and never end up facing the way Malone needed him to face.

That left the burden of solving the problem squatting like a
hunchback's hunch squarely on Malone's shoulders. He thought he could
bear the weight for a while, if he could only think of some way of
dislodging it. But the idea of its continuing to squat there forever
was horribly unnerving. "Quasimodo Malone," he muttered, and uttered a
brief prayer of thanks that his father had been spared a classical
education. "Ken" wasn't so bad. "Quasi" would have been awful.

He couldn't think of any way to get a fingerhold on the thing that
weighed him down. Slowly, he went over it in his mind.

Situation: an unidentifiable something is attacking the United States
with an untraceable something else from a completely unknown source.

Problem: how do you go about latching on to anything as downright
nonexistent as all that?

Even the best detective, Malone told himself irritably, needed clues
of some kind. And this thing, whatever it was, was not playing fair.
It didn't go around leaving bloody fingerprints or lipsticked
cigarette butts or packets of paper matches with _Ciro's, Hollywood_,
written on them. It didn't even have an alibi for anything that could
be cracked, or leave tire marks or footprints behind that could be
photographed. Hell, Malone thought disgustedly, it wasn't that the
trail was cold. It just _wasn't_.

Of course, there were ways to get clues, he reflected. He thought of
his father. His father would have gone to the scene of the crime, or
questioned some of the witnesses. But the scene of the crime was
anywhere and everywhere, and most of the witnesses didn't know they
were witnessing anything. Except for Her Majesty, of course--but he'd
already questioned her, and there hadn't been any clues he could
recall in that conversation.

Malone stubbed out his cigar, lit another one absent-mindedly, and
rescued his tie, which was working its slow way around to the side of
his collar. There were, he remembered, three classic divisions of any
crime: method, motive and opportunity. Maybe thinking about those
would lead somewhere.

As an afterthought, he got up, found a pencil and paper with the
hotel's name stamped on them in gold and came back to the chair.
Clearing the ashtray a