a and Australia. There was even a
small branch society in Greenland. True, the Communist disapproval of
such nonmaterialistic, un-Marxian objectives as Psychical Research
showed up in the fact that there were no registered branches in the
Sino-Soviet bloc. But that, Malone thought, hardly mattered. Maybe in
Russia they called themselves the Lenin Study Group, or the Better
Borschch League. He was fairly sure, from all the evidence, that the
PRS had some kind of organization even behind the Iron Curtain.

Money backing didn't seem to be much of a problem, either. Malone
checked for the supporters of the organization and found a microfilmed
list that ran into the hundreds of thousands of names, most of them
ordinary people who seemed to be interested in spiritualism and the
like, and who donated a few dollars apiece to the PRS. Besides this
mass of small donations, of course, there were a few large ones, from
independently wealthy men who gave support to the organization and
seemed actively interested in its aims.

It wasn't an unusual picture; just an exceptionally big one.

Malone sighed and went on to the personal dossiers.

Sir Lewis Carter himself was a well-known astronomer and
mathematician. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal
Astronomical Society and the Royal Mathematical Society. He had been
knighted for his contributions in higher mathematics only two years
before he had come to live in the United States. Malone went over the
papers dealing with his entry into the country carefully, but they
were all in order and they contained absolutely nothing in the way of
usable clues.

Sir Lewis' books on political and historical philosophy had been
well-received, and he had also written a novel, "But Some Are More
Equal," which, for a few weeks after publication, had managed to claw
its way to the bottom of the best-seller list.

And that was that. Malone tried to figure out whether all this
information did him any good, and the answer came very quickly. The
answer was no. He opened the second dossier.

Luba Ardanko had been born in New York. Her mother had been a woman of
Irish descent named Mary Foley, and had died in '69. Her father had
been a Hungarian named Chris Yorgen Ardanko, and had died in the same
year.

Malone sighed. Somewhere in the dossiers, he was sure, there was a
clue, the basic clue that would tell him everything he needed to know.
His prescience had never been so strong; he knew