now, the makers of Bon-Ton B-Complex Bolsters--the blanket of health--present Mother Kohler's Chit-Chat Hour!"
The invisible audience screamed and howled. Malone ripped out a particularly foul oath and sat up on the couch. "That," he muttered, "is a fine thing to wake up to." He focused his eyes, with only slight difficulty, on his watch. The time was exactly noon.
"But first," the announcer burbled downstairs, "a word from Mother Kohler herself, about the brand new special B-Complex Irradiated Bolster you can get at your neighborhood stores..."
"Shut up," Malone said. He had wasted a lot of time doing nothing but sleeping, he told himself. This was no time to be listening to television. He got up and found, to his vague surprise, that he felt a lot better and more clear-headed than he'd been feeling. Maybe the sleep had done him some good.
He yawned, blinked and stretched, and then he padded into the bathroom, showered and shaved and put on fresh clothes. He thought about having a morning cup of coffee, but last night's dregs appeared to have taken up permanent residence in his digestive tract, and he decided against it at last. He swallowed some orange juice and toast and then, heaving a great sigh of resignation and brushing crumbs off his shirt, he teleported himself over to his office.
He was going to have to face Burris eventually, he knew.
And now was just as good, or as bad, a time as any.
Malone didn't hesitate. He punched the button on his intercom for Burris' office and then sat back, with his eyes closed, for the well-known voice.
It didn't come.
Instead, Wolf, the director's secretary, spoke up.
"Burris isn't in, Malone," he said. "He had to fly to Miami. I can get a call through to him on the plane, if it's urgent, but he'll be landing in about fifteen minutes. And he did say he'd call this afternoon."
"Oh," Malone said. "Sure. Okay. It isn't urgent." He was just as glad of the reprieve; it gave him one more chance to work matters through to a solution, and report success instead of failure. "But what's going on in Miami?" he added.
"Don't you read the papers?" Wolf asked.
Everybody, Malone reflected, seemed to be asking him that lately. "I haven't had time," he said.
"The governor of Mississippi was assassinated yesterday, at Miami Beach," Wolf said.
"Ah," Malone said. He thought about it for a second. "Frankly," he said, "this does not strike me as an irreparable loss to the nation. Not even to Mississippi."
"You express my views precisely," Wolf said.
"How about the killer?" Malone said. "I gather they haven't got him yet, or Burris wouldn't be on his way down."
"No," Wolf said. "The killer would be on his way here instead. They haven't got him, Malone. It seems Governor Flarion was walking along Collins Avenue when somebody fired at him, using a high-powered rifle with, I guess, a scope sight."
"Professional," Malone commented.
"It looks like it," Wolf said. "Nobody even heard the sniper's shot; the governor just fell over, right there in the street. And by the time his bodyguards found out what had happened, it was impossible even to be sure just which way he was facing when the shot had been fired."
"And, as I remember Collins Avenue--" Malone started.
"Right," Wolf said. "Out where Governor Flarion was taking his stroll, there's an awful lot of it to search. The boys are trying to find somebody who might have seen a man acting suspicious in any of the nearby buildings, or heard a shot, or seen anybody at all lurking or loitering anywhere remotely close to the scene."
"Lovely," Malone said. "Sounds like a nice complicated job."
"You don't know the half of it," Wolf said. "There's also the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce. According to them, Flarion died of a heart attack, and not even in Miami Beach. The bullet and the body are supposed to be written off as just coincidences, to keep the fair name of Miami Beach unsullied."
"All I can say," Malone offered, "is good luck. This is the saddest day in American history since the assassination of Huey P. Long."
"Agreed," Wolf said. "Want me to tell Burris you called?"
"Right," Malone said. He flicked off.
Now, he asked himself, how did the assassination of Governor Nemours P. Flarion fit in with anything? Granted, good old Nemours P. had been a horrible mistake, a paranoid, self-centered, would-be dictator whose talents as a rabble-rouser and a fearmonger had somehow managed to get him elected to a governorship. Certainly nobody felt particularly unhappy about his death. But he wouldn't fit into the pattern. Malone reminded himself that that was one more thing he had to find out when he got the chance.
The trouble lay in finding an opportunity, he thought--and then he corrected himself.
Not finding it--making it. Nobody was going to hand him anything on a silver serving salver.
He punched the intercom again and got the Records office.
"Yes, sir?" a familiar voice said.
"Potter?" Malone said. "This is Malone. I want facsimiles of everything we have on the Psychical Research Society, on Sir Lewis Carter, and on Luba Vasilovna Garbitsch. Both of those last are connected with the Society."
"Right," Potter said. "They'll be up at once."
Then he punched again, and asked for the latest copy of the Washington Post. He gave the article on Governor Flarion one quick glance, but it didn't contain anything in the way of facts that he hadn't already had from Wolf. After that, he left it and concentrated on the more prosaic, human-interest news, the smaller stories.
FIFTH SPLINTER GROUP FORMS IN DCA BATTLE
That was an interesting one, he thought. The Daughters of Colonial Americans had about reached the point of diminishing returns in their battle over the claims of Rose Carswell Elder, a descendant of a Negro freedman named William Elder who had lived in Boston in 1776 and fought on the side of the Colonies during the Revolution. One more splinter group, Malone thought, and there'd be as many splinters as members. Rose Carswell Elder was pressing her claim for membership, and the ladies were replying by throwing crockery and hard words at each other.
Then there was the Legion of American War Veterans. The headline on this one read:
LAWV OUSTS 'ROWDIES': AID MEETING CONTINUES
The "rowdies," Malone discovered, were a large minority group that wanted the good old days of electric canes, paper hats, whistles and pretty girls. "The Legion has grown up," a spokesman told them. "This convention is being held to discuss the possibility of increased technological aid to India and Africa. There is no place for tomfoolery or high jinks."
The expulsion order had been carried by a record majority.
And then there were two items, on different pages, that seemed to contradict each other. The first was a small headline on page fourteen:
RESIGNATIONS REACH
