nowhere, and the same discovery that no one had ever heard of the place and, in fact, doubted very strongly whether it even existed.
But he found it at last, rounding a curve in a narrow black-top road and spotting the house beyond a grove of trees. He recognized it instantly.
He had seen it so often that he felt as if he knew it intimately.
It was a big, rambling, Colonial-type mansion, painted a blinding and beautiful white, with a broad, pillared porch and a great carved front door. The front windows were curtained in rich purples, and before the house was a great front garden, and tall old trees. Malone half-expected Scarlett O'Hara to come tripping out of the house at any moment.
Inside it, however, if Malone were right, was not the magnetic Scarlett. Inside the house were some of the most important members of the Psychical Research Society.
But it was impossible to tell from the outside. Nothing moved on the well-kept grounds, and the windows didn't show so much as the flutter of a purple curtain. There was no sound. No cars were parked around the house, nor, Malone thought as he remembered Gone With the Wind, were there any horses or carriages.
The place looked deserted.
Malone thought he knew better, but it took a few minutes for him to get up enough courage to go up the long driveway. He stared at the house. It was an old one, he knew, built long before the Civil War and originally commanding a huge plantation. Now, all that remained of that vast parcel of land was the few acres that surrounded the house.
But the original family still inhabited it, proud of the house and of their part in its past. Over the years, Malone knew, they had kept it up scrupulously, and the place had been both restored and modernized on the inside without harming the classic outlines of the hundred-and-fifty-year-old structure.
A fence surrounded the estate, but the front gate was swinging open. Malone saw it and took a deep breath. Now, he told himself, or never. He drove the Lincoln through the opening slowly, alert for almost anything.
There was no disturbance. Thirty yards from the front door he pulled the car to a cautious stop and got out. He started to walk toward the building. Each step seemed to take whole minutes, and everything he had thought raced through his mind again.
Nothing seemed to move anywhere, except Malone himself.
Was he right? Were the PRS people really here? Or had he been led astray by them? Had he been manipulated as easily as they had manipulated so many others?
That was possible. But it wasn't the only possibility.
Suppose, he thought, that he was perfectly right, and that the PRS members were waiting inside. And suppose, too, that he'd misunderstood their motives.
Suppose they were just waiting for him to get a little closer.
Malone kept walking.
In just a few steps, he would be close enough so that a bullet aimed at him from the house hadn't a real chance of missing him.
And it didn't have to be bullets, either. They might have set a trap, he thought, and were waiting for him to walk right into it. Then they would hold him prisoner while they devised ways to...
To what? He didn't know. And that was even worse; it called up horrible terrors from the darkest depths of Malone's mind. He continued to walk forward, feeling about as exposed as a restaurant lamb chop caught with its panty down.
He reached the steps that led up to the porch, and took them one at a time.
He stood on the porch. A long second passed.
He took a step toward the high, wide and handsome oaken door. Then he took another step, and another.
What was waiting for him inside?
He took a deep breath, and pressed the doorbell button.
The door swung open immediately, and Malone involuntarily stepped back.
The owner of the house smiled at him from the doorway. Malone let out his breath in one long sigh of relief.
"I was hoping it would be you," he said weakly. "May I come in?"
"Why, certainly, Malone. Come on in. We've been expecting you, you know," said Andrew J. Burris, director of the FBI.
Chapter 15
Malone sat, quietly relaxed and almost completely at ease, in the depths of a huge, comfortable, old-fashioned Morris chair. Three similar chairs were clustered with his, around a squat, massive coffee table made of a single slab of dark wood set on short, curved legs. Malone looked around at the other three with a relaxed feeling of recognition: Andrew J. Burris, Sir Lewis Carter, and Luba Vasilovna Garbitsch.
"That mind shield of yours," Burris was saying, "is functioning very well. We weren't entirely sure you had actually located us until you pulled into that driveway."
"I wasn't entirely sure what I was locating," Malone said.
"And so it's over," Burris said with a satisfied air. "Everything's over."
"And just beginning," Sir Lewis put in. He drew a pipe from an inside pocket and began to fill it.
"And, of course," Burris said, "just beginning. Things do that; they go round and round in circles. It's what makes everything so confusing."
"And so much fun," Lou said, leaning back in her chair. She didn't look hostile now, Malone thought; she looked like a cat, wary but content. He decided that he liked this Lou even better than the old one. Lou, at home among her psionic colleagues, was even more than he'd ever thought she could be.
"More what?" she said suddenly. Burris jerked upright a trifle.
"What's more what?" he said. "Damn it, let's stick to one thing or the other. As soon as this thing starts mixing talk and thought it confuses me."
"Never mind," Lou said. She smiled across the table at Malone.
Malone jerked a finger under his collar.
"What made you decide to come here?" Sir Lewis said. He had the pipe lit now, and blew a cloud of fragrant smoke over the table.
Malone wondered where to start. "One of the clues," he said at last, "was the efficiency of the FBI. It hit me the same way the efficiency of the PRS had hit me, while I was looking at the batch of reports that had been run off so rapidly."
"Ah," Sir Lewis said. "The dossiers."
"Dossiers?" Burris said.
Sir Lewis puffed at his pipe. "Sorry," he said. "I thought you had been tuned in for that."
"I was busy," Burris said. "I can't tune into everything. After all, I've only got one mind."
"And two hands," Malone said at random.
"At least," Lou said. Their eyes met in a glance of perfect understanding.
"What the hell do hands have to do with it?" Burris said.
Sir Lewis shrugged. "Tune in and see," he said. "It's an old joke; but you'll never really adjust to telepathy unless you practice."
"Damn it," Burris said, "I practice. I'm always practicing. This and that and the other thing--after all, I am the director of the FBI. There's a lot to be done."
Sir Lewis puffed at his pipe again. "At any rate," he said smoothly, "Mr. Malone had requested some dossiers on us. On the PRS, myself, and Luba. They arrived very quickly. The efficiency of that arrival, and the efficiency he'd been noting about the FBI ever since he began work on this case, finally struck home to him."
"Ah," Burris said. "You see? The FBI's a full-time job. It's got to be efficient."
"Of course," Sir Lewis said soothingly.
"Anyhow,"