Defense and the President had
come into the room. He didn't even realize that Colonel Spaulding was
feeding him fresh sheets of paper.

Lenny didn't seem to notice the time passing, nor the pain in his hand as
the muscles tired. He kept writing. The President left with the Defense
Secretary and came back again after a while, but Lenny ignored them.

And when it was over, he pushed pencil and paper aside and, massaging his
right hand with his left, sat there with his eyes closed. Then, slowly, a
smile spread over his face.

"Well, I'll be damned," he said slowly and softly.

"Mr. Poe," said the President, "is there any danger that your brother will
be captured within the next hour?"

Lenny looked up with a startled grin. "Oh. Hi. I didn't notice you, Mr.
President. What'd you say?"

The President repeated his question.

"Oh. No. There's nothing to worry about. The little men in white coats
came after Dr. Malekrinova. She started screaming that telepathic spies
were stealing her secret. She smashed all her apparatus and burned all her
papers on top of the wreckage before they could stop her. She keeps
shouting about a pink-and-purple orgy and singing a song about glass
diamonds and Egyptian kings. I wouldn't say she was actually insane, but
she is _very_ disturbed."

"Then your brother is safe?"

"As safe as he ever was, Mr. President."

"Thank Heaven for that," said the President. "If they'd ever captured him
and made him talk--" He stopped. "I forgot," he said lamely after a
moment.

Lenny grinned. "That's all right, Mr. President. I sometimes forget it
myself. But it was his handicap, I guess, that made him concentrate on
telepathy, so that he doesn't need his ears to hear what people are
saying. Maybe I could read minds the way he does if I'd been born that
way.

"Come to think of it, I doubt if the Russians would have believed he was a
spy if they'd caught him, unless they really did believe he was
telepathic. A physical examination would show immediately that he was born
without eardrums and that the inner ear bones are fused. They wouldn't try
to make a man talk if an examination showed that he really was a
deaf-mute."

The buzzer on the colonel's intercom sounded. "Yes?" said Spaulding.

"Dr. Davenport is here," said Sergeant Nugget. "He wants to talk to you."

"Send him in," said Colonel Spaulding gleefully. "I have a nice scientific
theory I want to shove down his throat."

* *