his time. We do
feel that it would be possible to replace some of the electronic
components with appropriate symbolization like that already used in the
purely psionic sections, but we have, as yet, been unable to determine
exactly which electronic components must be replaced by what symbolic
components."

Malone nodded, silently this time. He had the sudden feeling that Dr.
O'Connor's flow of words had broken itself up into a vast sea of
alphabet soup, and that he, Malone, was occupied in drowning in it.

"However," Dr. O'Connor said, breaking what was left of Malone's train
of thought, "young Charlie died soon thereafter, and we decided to go on
checking the machine. It was during this period that we found someone
else reading the minds of our test subjects--sometimes for a few
seconds, sometimes for several minutes."

"Aha," Malone said. Things were beginning to make sense again. _Someone
else._ That, of course, was the spy.

"I found," Dr. O'Connor said, "on interrogating the subjects more
closely, that they were, in effect, thinking on two levels. They were
reading the book mechanically, noting the words and sense, but simply
shuttling the material directly into their memories without actually
thinking about it. The actual thinking portions of their minds were
concentrating on aspects of Project Isle."

* * * * *

"In other words," Malone said, "someone was spying on them for
information about Project Isle?"

"Precisely," Dr. O'Connor said with a frosty, teacher-to-student smile.
"And whoever it was had a much higher concentration time than Charlie
had ever attained. He seems to be able to retain contact as long as he
can find useful information flowing in the mind being read."

"Wait a minute," Malone said. "Wait a minute. If this spy is so clever,
how come he didn't read _your_ mind?"

"It is very likely that he has," O'Connor said. "What does that have to
do with it?"

"Well," Malone said, "if he knows you and your group are working on
telepathy and can detect what he's doing, why didn't he just hold off on
the minds of those geniuses when they were being tested in your
machine?"

Dr. O'Connor frowned. "I'm afraid that I can't be sure," he said, and it
was clear from his tone that, if Dr. Thomas O'Connor wasn't sure, no one
in the entire world was, had been, or ever would be. "I do have a
theory, however," he said, brightening up a trifle.

Malone waited patiently.