ll--and most especially to Miss
Luba Garbitsch. I hope she's the one who's tuned in--or that somebody
has alerted her by now, because I'd rather talk to her than to anyone
else I can think of out there._

_Nothing personal, you understand. It's just that I'd like to show off
a little. I don't need to hide anything from you--as a matter of
plain, simple fact, I can't. Not with my shield down._

He paused then, and, in his imagination, he could almost hear Lou's
voice.

"I'm listening, Kenneth," the voice said. "Go on."

_Well, then,_ he thought. He fished around in his mind for a second,
wondering exactly where to start. Then he decided, in the best
traditions of the detective story, not to mention _Alice in
Wonderland,_ to start at the beginning.

_The dear old Psychical Research Society,_ he thought, _had been going
along for a good many years now--since the 1880's, as a matter of
fact, or somewhere near there. That's a long time and a lot of
research. A lot of famous and intelligent men and women have belonged
to the Society. And in all that time, they've worked hard, and worked
sincerely, in testing every kind of psychic phenomenon. They've worked
impartially and scientifically to find out whether a given unusual
incident was explicable in terms of known natural laws, or was the
result of some unknown force._

_And it's hardly surprising that, after about a hundred years of work,
something finally came of it._

"Not surprising at all," he imagined Lou's voice saying. "You're
making things very clear, Kenneth."

Or had that been "Sir Kenneth"? Malone wasn't sure, but it didn't
really matter. He spun the car around a curve in the highway, smiled
gently to himself, and went on.

_Naturally, to the average man in the street, the Society was just a
bunch of crackpots, and the more respected and famous the people who
belonged to it, the happier he was; it just proved his superiority to
them. He didn't deal with crackpot notions, did he?_

_No, the Society did. And nobody except the members paid much
attention to what was going on._

_I remember one of the book facsimiles you gave me, for instance. Some
man, whose name I can't recall, wrote a great "expose" of the Society,
in which he tried to prove that Sir Lewis Carter and certain other
members were trying to take over the world and run it to suit
themselves, making a sort of horrible dictatorship out of their power
and position. At that, he wasn't really f