etter idea."

"Better?" O'Connor said.

"Well, I--" Malone took a deep breath and shut his eyes.

He heard Dr. O'Connor say: "Well, Mr. Malone--good-by. And good luck."

Then the office in Yucca Flats was gone, and Malone was standing in
the bedroom of his own apartment, on the fringes of Washington, D. C.

IV

He walked over to the wall control and shut off the air-conditioning
in a hurry. He threw open a window and breathed great gulps of the
hot, humid air from the streets. In a small corner at the back of his
mind, he wondered why he was grateful for the air he had suffered
under only a few minutes before. But that, he reflected, was life. And
a very silly kind of life, too, he told himself without rancor.

In a few minutes he left the window, somewhat restored, and headed for
the shower. When it was running nicely and he was under it, he started
to sing. But his voice didn't sound as much like the voice of Lauritz
Melchior as it usually did, not even when he made a brave, if
foolhardy stab at the Melchior accent. Slowly, he began to realize
that he was bothered.

He climbed out of the shower and started drying himself. Up to now, he
thought, he had depended on Dr. Thomas O'Connor for edifying,
trustworthy and reasonably complete information about psionics and
_psi_ phenomena in general. He had looked on O'Connor as a sort of
living version of an extremely good edition of the _Britannica_,
always available for reference.

And now O'Connor had failed him. That, Malone thought, was hardly
fair. O'Connor had no business failing him--particularly when there
was no place else to go.

The scientist had been right, of course, Malone knew. There was no
other scientist who knew as much about psionics as O'Connor, and if
O'Connor said there were no books, then that was that: there were no
books.

He reached for a drawer in his dresser, opened it and pulled out some
underclothes, humming tunelessly under his breath as he dressed. If
there was no one to ask, he thought, and if there were no books--

He stopped with a sock in his hand, and stared at it in wonder.
O'Connor hadn't said there were no books. As a matter of fact, Malone
realized, he'd said exactly the opposite.

There were books. But they were "crackpot" books. O'Connor had never
read them. He had, he said, probably never even heard of many of them.

"Crackpot" was a fighting word to O'Connor. But to Malone it had all
the sweetness of flattery. Af