d some
reports and listen to some interview tapes, and then he could go home.

The reports and the interview tapes didn't exactly sound like fun,
Malone thought, but at the same time they seemed fairly innocent. He
would work his way through them grimly, and maybe he would even
indulge his most secret vice and smoke a cigar or two to make the work
pass more pleasantly. Soon enough, he told himself, they would be
finished.

Sometimes, though, he regretted the reputation he'd gotten. It had
been bad enough in the old days, the pre-1971 days when Malone had
thought he was just lucky. Burris had called him a Boy Wonder then,
when he'd cracked three difficult cases in a row. Being just lucky had
made it a little tough to live with the Boy Wonder label. After all,
Malone thought, it wasn't actually as if he'd done anything.

But since 1971 and the case of the Telepathic Spy, things had gotten
worse. Much worse. Now Malone wasn't just lucky any more. Instead, he
could teleport and he could even foretell the future a little, in a
dim sort of way. He'd caught the Telepathic Spy that way, and when the
case of the Teleporting Juvenile Delinquents had come up he'd been
assigned to that one too, and he'd cracked it. Now Burris seemed to
think of him as a kind of God, and gave him all the tough dirty jobs.

And if he wasn't just lucky any more, Malone couldn't think of himself
as a fearless, heroic FBI agent, either. He just wasn't the type. He
was ... well, talented. That was the word, he told himself: talented.
He had all these talents and they made him look like something
spectacular to Burris and the other FBI men. But he wasn't, really. He
hadn't done anything really tough to get his talents; they'd just
happened to him.

Nobody, though, seemed to believe that. He heaved a little sigh and
stepped into the waiting elevator.

There were, after all, he thought, compensations. He'd had some good
times, and the talents did come in handy. And he did have his pick of
the vacation schedule lately. And he'd met some lovely girls...

And besides, he told himself savagely as the elevator shot upward, he
wasn't going to do anything except return to his office and read some
reports and listen to some tapes. And then he was going to go home and
sleep all night, peacefully. And in the morning Mitchell was going to
call him up and tell him that the computer-secretaries needed nothing
more than a little repair. He'd say they were getting