ed again, and blanked
out. Malone switched off and took a deep, superheated breath of phone
booth air. For a second he considered starting his trip from outside
the phone booth, but that was dangerous--if not to Malone, then to
innocent spectators. Psionics was by no means a household word, and
the sight of Malone leaving for Nevada might send several citizens
straight to the wagon. Which was not a place, he thought judiciously,
for anybody to be on such a hot day.

He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second. In that time he
reconstructed from memory a detailed, three-dimensional, full-color
image of Dr. O'Connor's office in his mind. It was perfect in detail;
he checked it over mentally and then, by a special effort of will, he
gave himself the psychic push that made the transition possible.

When he opened his eyes, he was in O'Connor's office, standing in
front of the scientist's wide desk. He hoped nobody had been looking
into the phone booth at the instant he had disappeared, but he was
reasonably sure he'd been unobserved. People didn't go around peering
into phone booths, after all, and he had seen no one.

O'Connor looked up without surprise. "Ah," he said. "Sit down, Mr.
Malone." Malone looked around for the chair, which was an
uncomfortably straight-backed affair, and sat down in it gingerly.
Remembering past visits to O'Connor, he was grateful for even the
small amount of relaxation the hard wood afforded him. O'Connor had
only recently unbent to the point of supplying a spare chair in his
office for visitors, and, apparently, especially for Malone. Perhaps,
Malone thought, it was more gratitude for the lovely specimens.

Malone still felt uncomfortable, but tried bravely not to show it. He
felt slightly guilty, too, as he always did when he popped into
O'Connor's office without bothering to stay space-bound. By law, after
all, he knew he should check in and out at the main gate of the huge,
ultra-top-secret Government reservation whenever he visited Yucca
Flats. But that meant wasting a lot of time and going through a lot of
trouble. Malone had rationalized it out for himself that way, and had
gotten just far enough to do things the quick and easy way and not
quite far enough to feel undisturbed about it. After all, he told
himself grimly, anything that saved time and trouble increased the
efficiency of the FBI, so it was all to the good.

He swallowed hard. "Dr. O'Connor--" he began.

O'Connor loo