s showed that his
own contact time remained the same; that is, they fell within the same
skewed bell curve as before, and the mode remained constant if nothing
but the phrase length were recorded."

"Hmm," Malone said, feeling that he ought to be saying something.

Dr. O'Connor didn't notice him. "At first we thought of errors in the
detector machine," he went on. "That worried us not somewhat, since
our understanding of the detector is definitely limited at this 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."

There was a little silence.

"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 ar