e working on
telepathy and can detect what he's doing, why didn't he just hold off
on the minds of those geniuses when they were being tested in your
machine?"

Dr. O'Connor frowned. "I'm afraid that I can't be sure," he said, and
it was clear from his tone that, if Dr. Thomas O'Connor wasn't sure,
no one in the entire world was, had been, or ever would be. "I do have
a theory, however," he said, brightening up a trifle.

Malone waited patiently.

"He must know our limitations," Dr. O'Connor said at last. "He must be
perfectly well aware that there's not a single thing we can _do_ about
him. He must know that we can neither find nor stop him. Why should he
worry? He can afford to ignore us--or even bait us. We're helpless,
and he knows it."

That, Malone thought, was about the most cheerless thought he had
heard in sometime.

"You mentioned that you had an insulated room," the FBI agent said
after a while. "Couldn't you let your men think in there?"

Dr. O'Connor sighed. "The room is shielded against magnetic fields and
electro-magnetic radiation. It is perfectly transparent to psionic
phenomena, just as it is to gravitational fields."

"Oh," Malone said. He realized rapidly that his question had been a
little silly to begin with, since the insulated room had been the
place where all the tests had been conducted in the first place. "I
don't want to take up too much of your time, Doctor," he said after a
pause, "but there are a couple of other questions."

"Go right ahead," Dr. O'Connor said. "I'm sure I'll be able to help
you."

Malone thought of mentioning how little help the Doctor had been to
date, but decided against it. Why antagonize a perfectly good
scientist without any reason? Instead, he selected his first question,
and asked it. "Have you got any idea how we might lay our hands on
another telepath? Preferably one that's not an imbecile, of course."

Dr. O'Connor's expression changed from patient wisdom to irritation.
"I wish we could, Mr. Malone. I wish we could. We certainly need one
here to help us here with our work--and I'm sure that your work is
important, too. But I'm afraid we have no ideas at all about finding
another telepath. Finding little Charlie was purely fortuitous--
purely, Mr. Malone, fortuitous."

"Ah," Malone said. "Sure. Of course." He thought rapidly and
discovered that he couldn't come up with one more question. As a
matter of fact, he'd asked a couple of questions already