course, have been called Cactus Flats, but the cacti
were neither as big nor as impressive as the yuccas.

[Illustration: "I knight thee Sir Andrew...."]

Or was that yucci?

Possibly, Malone mused, it was simply yucks.

And whatever it was, there were millions of it. Malone felt he couldn't
stand the sight of another yucca. He was grateful for only one thing.

It wasn't summer. If the Elizabethans had been forced to drive in closed
cars through the Nevada desert in the summertime, they might have
started a cult of nudity, Malone felt. It was bad enough now, in what
was supposed to be winter.

The sun was certainly bright enough, for one thing. It glared through
the cloudless sky and glanced with blinding force off the road. Sir
Thomas Boyd squinted at it through the rather incongruous sunglasses he
was wearing, while Malone wondered idly if it was the sunglasses, or the
rest of the world, that was an anachronism. But Sir Thomas kept his eyes
grimly on the road as he gunned the powerful Lincoln toward the Yucca
Flats Labs at eighty miles an hour.

Malone twisted himself around and faced the women in the back seat. Past
them, through the rear window of the Lincoln, he could see the second
car. It followed them gamely, carrying the newest addition to Sir
Kenneth Malone's Collection of Bats.

"Bats?" Her Majesty said suddenly, but gently. "Shame on you, Sir
Kenneth. These are poor, sick people. We must do our best to help
them--not to think up silly names for them. For shame!"

"I suppose so," Malone said wearily. He sighed and, for the fifth time
that day, he asked: "Does Your Majesty have any idea where our spy is
now?"

"Well, really, Sir Kenneth," the Queen said with the slightest of
hesitations, "it isn't easy, you know. Telepathy has certain laws, just
like everything else. After all, even a game has laws. Being telepathic
did not help me to play poker--I still had to learn the rules. And
telepathy has rules, too. A telepath can easily confuse another telepath
by using some of those rules."

"Oh, fine," Malone said. "Well, have you got into contact with his mind
yet?"

"Oh, yes," Her Majesty said happily. "And my goodness, he's certainly
digging up a lot of information, isn't he?"

Malone moaned softly. "But who _is_ he?" he asked after a second.

The Queen stared at the roof of the car in what looked like
concentration. "He hasn't thought of his name yet," she said. "I mean,
at least if he has, he