and legs still worked. He had thought they'd turned to stone in the
office long before.

* * * * *

It was on the plane back to Washington that Malone got his first inkling
of an idea.

The only telepath that the Westinghouse boys had been able to turn up
was Charles O'Neill, the youthful imbecile.

All right, then. Suppose there were another one like him. Imbeciles
weren't very difficult to locate. Most of them would be in institutions,
and the others would certainly be on record. It might be possible to
find someone, anyway, who could be handled and used as a tool to find a
telepathic spy.

And--happy thought!--maybe one of them would turn out to be a
high-grade imbecile, or even a moron.

[Illustration]

Even if they only turned up another imbecile, he thought wearily, at
least Dr. O'Connor would have something to work with.

He reported back to Burris when he arrived in Washington, told him about
the interview with Dr. O'Connor, and explained what had come to seem a
rather feeble brainstorm.

"It doesn't seem too productive," Burris said, with a shade of
disappointment in his voice, "but we'll try it."

At that, it was a better verdict than Malone had hoped for. He had
nothing to do but wait, while orders went out to field agents all over
the United States, and quietly, but efficiently, the FBI went to work.
Agents probed and pried and poked their noses into the files and data
sheets of every mental institution in the fifty states--as far, at any
rate, as they were able.

It was not an easy job. The inalienable right of a physician to refuse
to disclose confidences respecting a patient applied even to idiots,
imbeciles, and morons. Not even the FBI could open the private files of
a licensed and registered psychiatrist.

But the field agents did the best they could and, considering the
circumstances, their best was pretty good.

Malone, meanwhile, put in two weeks sitting glumly at his Washington
desk and checking reports as they arrived. They were uniformly
depressing. The United States of America contained more subnormal minds
than Malone cared to think about. There seemed to be enough of them to
explain the results of any election you were unhappy over.
Unfortunately, subnormal was all you could call them. Not one of them
appeared to possess any abnormal psionic abilities whatever.

There were a couple who were reputed to be poltergeists--but in neither
case was t