a trick."

"Shut up," Mike told him.

"It's no trick," Malone said. "I've been waiting for you for quite a
while, boys." He paused. "And you can't move, can you? I've taken care
of that."

"Some kind of gas," Mike said instantly.

"Gas?" Malone said. "Nope." He shook his head.

"Electricity," Mike said. It sounded desperate. "Some gimmick you've got
set up back there behind the curtain, to--"

"No gimmick," Malone said. "It's just that I know a couple of tricks,
too--and I'm a little better at them than you are." The next minute was
going to be difficult, he knew, but it had to be done. He "froze" the
picture of the room in his mind and, at the same time, pictured himself
at the other side of the room. He made the effort, and at first nothing
happened. Then--

"You can do the Vanish," Mike said, very slowly and softly.

"Oh, I can do more than that," Malone said cheerfully from the other
side of the room. "I can do the Vanish, and I can also keep you from
doing it. Right?"

It hung in the balance for a second, but Malone was barely worried about
the final outcome. He'd beaten the boys, not with scientific gadgetry or
trickery, but at their own game. He'd done it simply, easily and
completely. And for boys who were sure they were something very special,
boys who'd never been beaten on their own grounds before, the shock was
considerable.

Malone knew, even before Mike said: "I guess so," in a defeated voice,
that he had won.

"Now," he said briskly, "you boys are going to come down to the FBI
offices with me. And you're not going to try any tricks--because you
can't get away with a thing, and you know you can't. I've just proven
that to you."

"I guess you have," Mike said.

Malone beckoned the three other men out of the back room and then, under
his watchful guidance, the procession started for the street.

XVI

"The only thing we had to worry about," Malone said, pouring some more
champagne into the hollow-stemmed glasses, "was whether the theory would
actually prove out in practice. From all we knew, it seemed logical that
I could concentrate on the room with the boys in it, and by that
concentration prevent them from teleporting out--but there's a lot we
don't know, too. And it didn't damage the kids any."

Dorothea relaxed in her chair and looked around at the hotel room walls
with contentment. "Mike seemed pretty normal--except that he had that
awful _trapped_ feeling."

Malone hande