know right
away. Phone me. Don't waste an instant."

[Illustration]

"I'll ... I'll start right away," Fred said heavily. He looked sadly
at the mechanism he had been working on, and put his screwdriver down
next to it. It looked to Malone as if he were putting flowers on the
grave of a dear departed. "I'll get a team together," Fred added. He
gave the mechanism and screwdriver one last fond parting look.

Malone looked after him for a second, thinking of nothing in
particular, and then turned in the opposite direction and headed back
toward the elevator. As he walked, he began to feel more and more
pleased with himself. After all, he'd gotten the investigation
started, hadn't he?

And now all he had to do was go back to his office and read some
reports and listen to some interview tapes, and then he could go home.

The reports and the interview tapes didn't exactly sound like fun,
Malone thought, but at the same time they seemed fairly innocent. He
would work his way through them grimly, and maybe he would even
indulge his most secret vice and smoke a cigar or two to make the work
pass more pleasantly. Soon enough, he told himself, they would be
finished with.

Sometimes, though, he regretted the reputation he'd gotten. It had
been bad enough in the old days--the pre-1971 days when Malone had
thought he was just lucky. Burris had called him a Boy Wonder then,
when he'd cracked three difficult cases in a row. Being just lucky had
made it a little tough to live with the Boy Wonder label--after all,
Malone thought, it wasn't actually as if he'd done anything.

But since 1971 and the case of the Telepathic Spy, things had gotten
worse. Much worse. Now Malone wasn't just lucky any more. Instead, he
could teleport and he could even foretell the future a little, in a
dim sort of way. He'd caught the Telepathic Spy that way, and when the
case of the Teleporting Juvenile Delinquents had come up he'd been
assigned to that one too, and he'd cracked it. Now Burris seemed to
think of him as a kind of god, and gave him all the tough dirty jobs.

And if he wasn't just lucky any more, Malone couldn't think of himself
as a Fearless, Heroic FBI Agent, either. He just wasn't the type. He
was--well, talented. That was the word, he told himself: talented. He
had all these talents and they made him look like something
spectacular to Burris and the other FBI men. But he wasn't, really. He
hadn't done anything really tough to get hi