. I know I am. Maybe
it's not me. Your telepathy might be fading out temporarily, or
something like that. It's possible, isn't it?" He was reasonably sure
it wasn't, but it was a last try at making sense. Her Majesty shook
her head.

"I can still receive Sir Thomas, for instance, quite clearly," she
said. She seemed a little miffed, but the irritation was overpowered
by her worry. "I think, Sir Kenneth, that you just don't know your own
power, that's all. I don't know how, but you've managed somehow to
smother telepathic communication almost completely."

"But not quite?" Malone said. Apparently, he was thinking, but very
weakly. Like a small child, he told himself dismally. Like a small
Elizabethan child.

Her Majesty's face took on a look of faraway concentration. "It's like
looking at a very dim light," she said, "a light just at the threshold
of perception. You might say that you've got to look at such a light
sideways. If you look directly at it, you can't see it. And, of
course, you can't see it at all if you're a long way off." She
blinked. "It's not exactly like that, you understand," she finished.
"But in some ways--"

"I get the idea," Malone said. "Or I think I do. But what's causing
it? Sunspots? Little green men?"

"Not so little," Her Majesty said with some return of her old humor,
"and not green, either. As a matter of fact, _you_ are, Sir Kenneth."

Malone opened his mouth, shut it again and finally managed to say:
"Me?" in a batlike squeal of surprise.

"I don't know how, Sir Kenneth," Her Majesty went on, "but you are.
It's ... rather frightening to me, as a matter of fact; I've never
seen such a thing before. I've never even considered it before."

"You?" Malone said. "How about me?" It was like suddenly discovering
that you'd been lifting two-hundred-pound barbells and not knowing it.
"How could I be doing anything like that without knowing anything
about it?"

Her Majesty shook her head. "I haven't the faintest idea," she said.

But Malone, very suddenly, did. He remembered deciding to keep a close
check on his mental processes to make sure those bursts of energy
didn't do anything to him. Subconsciously, he knew, he was still
keeping that watch.

And maybe the watch itself caused the complete blanking of his
telepathic faculties. It was worth a test, at least, he decided. And
it was an easy test to make.

"Listen," he said. He told himself that he would now allow
communication betw