ime is down," Boyd said, "away down. Major crime, I mean--petty
theft, assault, breaking and entering and that sort of thing has gone
away up, but that's to be expected. Everything's going to--"

"Skip the handbasket," Malone said. "But you're working things out?"

"Sooner or later," Boyd said. "Every piece of equipment and every man
in the FBI is working overtime; we can't be stopped forever."

"I'll wave flags," Malone said bitterly. "And I wish I could join
you."

"Believe me," Boyd said, "you don't know when you're well off."

Malone switched off. He looked at his watch; it was ten-thirty.

XII

That made it eight-thirty in Las Vegas. Malone opened his eyes again
in his hotel room there. He had half an hour to spare until his dinner
date with Luba. That gave him plenty of time to shower, shave and
dress, and he felt pleased to have managed the timing so neatly.

Two minutes later, he was soaking in the luxury of a hot tub allowing
the warmth to relax his body while his mind turned over the facts he
had collected. There were a lot of them, but they didn't seem to mean
anything special.

The world, he told himself, was going to hell in a handbasket. That
was all very well and good, but just what was the handbasket made of?
Burris' theory, the more he thought about it, was a pure case of
mental soapsuds, with perhaps a dash of old cotton-candy to make
confusion even worse confounded.

And there wasn't any other theory, was there?

Well, Malone reflected, there was one, or at least a part of one. Her
Majesty had said that everything was somehow tied up with the mental
bursts--and that sounded a lot more probable. Assuming that the bursts
and the rest of the mixups were _not_ connected made, as a matter of
fact, very little sense; it was multiplying hypotheses without reason.
When two unusual things happen, they have at least one definite
connection: they're both unusual. The sensible thing to do, Malone
thought, was to look for more connections.

Which meant asking who was causing the bursts, and why. Her Majesty
had said that she didn't know, and couldn't do it herself. Obviously,
though, some telepath or a team of telepaths was doing the job. And
the only trouble with that, Malone reflected sadly, was that all
telepaths were in the Yucca Flats laboratory.

It was at this point that he sat upright in the tub, splashing water
over the floor and gripping the soap with a strange excitement. Who'd
ever sa