jesty Queen Elizabeth I--had been housed
in a converted dormitory in the Westinghouse area, together with four
highly nervous and even more highly trained and investigated
psychiatrists from St. Elizabeths in Washington. The Convention of
Nuts, as Malone called it privately, was in full swing.

And it was every bit as strange as he'd thought it was going to be.
Unfortunately, five of the six (Her Majesty being the only exception)
were completely out of contact with the world. The psychiatrists
referred to them in worried tones as "unavailable for therapy," and
spent most of their time brooding over possible ways of bringing them
back into the real world for a while, at least far enough so that they
could be spoken with.

Malone stayed away from the five who were completely psychotic. The
weird babblings of fifty-year-old Barry Miles disconcerted him. They
sounded like little Charlie O'Neill's strange semi-connected jabber,
but Westinghouse's Dr. O'Connor said that it seemed to represent
another phenomenon entirely. William Logan's blank face was a memory
of horror, but the constant tinkling giggles of Ardith Parker, the
studied and concentrated way that Gordon Macklin wove meaningless
patterns in the air with his waving fingers, and the rhythmless,
melodyless humming that seemed to be all there was to the personality
of Robert Cassiday were simply too much for Malone. Taken singly, each
was frightening and remote; all together, they wove a picture of
insanity that chilled him more than he wanted to admit.

When the seventh telepath was flown in from Honolulu, Malone didn't
even bother to see her. He let the psychiatrists take over directly,
and simply avoided their sessions.

Queen Elizabeth I, on the other hand, he found genuinely likeable.

According to the psych boys, she had been (as both Malone and Her
Majesty had theorized) heavily frustrated by being the possessor of a
talent which no one else recognized. Beyond that, the impact of other
minds was disturbing; there was a slight loss of identity which seemed
to be a major factor in every case of telepathic insanity. But the
Queen had compensated for her frustrations in the easiest possible
way; she had simply traded her identity for another one, and had
rationalized a single, overruling delusion: that she was Queen
Elizabeth I of England, still alive and wrongfully deprived of her
throne.

"It's a beautiful rationalization," one of the psychiatrists said wi