"I shall return anon."

He went out the door and closed it carefully behind him. When he had
gone a few steps he allowed himself the luxury of a deep sigh.

Then he went outside and across the dusty street to the barracks where
Her Majesty and the other telepaths were housed. No one paid any
attention to him, and he rather missed the stares he'd become used to
drawing. But by now, everybody was used to seeing Elizabethan
clothing. Her Majesty had arrived at a new plateau.

She would now allow no one to have audience with her unless he was
properly dressed. Even the psychiatrists--whom she had, with a careful
sense of meiosis, appointed Physicians to the Royal House--had to wear
the stuff.

Malone went over the whole case in his mind--for about the thousandth
time, he told himself bitterly.

Who could the telepathic spy be? It was like looking for a needle in a
rolling stone, he thought. Or something. He did remember clearly that
a stitch in time saved nine, but he didn't know nine what, and
suspected it had nothing to do with his present problem.

How about Dr. Harry Gamble, Malone thought. It seemed a little
unlikely that the head of Project Isle would be spying on his own
men--particularly since he already had all the information. But, on
the other hand, he was just as probable a spy as anybody else.

Malone moved onward. Dr. Thomas O'Connor, the Westinghouse psionics
man, was the next nominee. Before Malone had actually found Her
Majesty, he had had a suspicion that O'Connor had cooked the whole
thing up to throw the FBI off the trail and confuse everybody, and
that he'd intended merely to have the FBI chase ghosts while the real
spy did his work undetected.

But what if O'Connor were the spy himself--a telepath? What if he were
so confident of his ability to throw the Queen off the track that he
had allowed the FBI to find all the other telepaths? There was another
argument for that: he'd had to report the findings of his machine no
matter what it cost him; there were too many other men on his staff
who knew about it.

O'Connor was a perfectly plausible spy, too. But he didn't seem very
likely. The head of a government project is likely to be a much-
investigated man. Could any tie-up with Russia--even a psionic one--
stand up against that kind of investigation? It was possible.
Anything, after all, was possible. You eliminated the impossible, and
then whatever remained, however improbable....

Malone t