The Greatest Works of Randall Garrett. Randall Garrett

Mike began, and stopped.

      "You don't have to be afraid of me, Mike," Malone said. "Just tell me whatever's on your mind."

      "Sure," Mike said. "It's this."

      He took a deep breath. Malone clenched his fists. Now it was coming. Now he would hear the all-important fact. He waited.

      Mike stuck out his tongue and blew the longest, loudest, brassiest and juiciest Bronx cheer that Malone had ever heard.

      Then, almost instantly, the room was empty except for Malone himself.

      Mike was gone.

      There wasn't any place to hide, and there hadn't been any time to hide in. Malone looked around wildly, but he had no doubts at all.

      Mike Fueyo had vanished, utterly and instantaneously. He'd gone out like a light.

      VII

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      Thirty seconds passed. During that time, Malone did nothing at all. He just sat there, while a confused montage of pictures tumbled through his head. Sometimes he saw double exposures, and sometimes a couple of pictures overlapped, but it didn't seem to make any difference, because none of the pictures meant anything anyhow.

      The reason for that was obvious. He was no longer sane. He had cracked up. At a crucial moment, his brain had failed him, and now people would have to come in and cart him away and put him in a straitjacket. It was perfectly obvious to Malone that he was no longer capable of dealing with everyday life. The blow on the head had probably taken final effect, and it had been more serious than the doctor had imagined.

      He had always distrusted doctors anyhow.

      And now he was suffering from a delayed reaction. He wasn't living in the real world any more. He had gone off to dreamland, where people disappeared when you looked at them. There was no hope for him.

      It was a nice theory, and it was even comforting, in a way. There was only one thing wrong with it.

      The room around him didn't look dreamlike at all. It was perfectly solid and real, and it looked just the way it had looked before Mike Fueyo had ... well, Malone amended, before whatever had happened had happened. It was a perfectly complete little room, and it had four chairs in it. Malone was sitting in one of the chairs and all the others were empty.

      There was absolutely nothing else in the room.

      With some regret, Malone abandoned the theory that he had gone mad. This left him with no ideas at all. Because if he hadn't become insane, then what had happened?

      After another second or two, some ideas began to filter through the daze. Perhaps he'd just blacked out for a minute and the kid had gone out the door. That was possible, wasn't it?

      Sure it was. And maybe he had just not seen the kid go. His eyes had failed for a second or two. That could certainly happen, after a blow on the head. Malone tried to remember where the sight centers of the brain were. Maybe whoever had hit him had disturbed them, and he'd had a sudden blackout.

      Come to think of it, that made pretty good sense. If he had blacked out, then Mike would have seen it as he went groggy, and Mike had just walked out the door. It had to be the door, of course—the windows were out of the question, since there weren't any windows. And six-inch-wide air-conditioner ducts do not provide reasonable space for an exit, not if you happen to be a human being.

      That, Malone told himself, was settled—and a good thing, too. He had begun to worry about it. But now he knew just what had happened, and he felt relieved. He got up from his chair, walked over to the door and opened it.

      Lieutenant Lynch nearly fell into the room. He'd obviously had his ear pressed tightly to the door and hadn't expected it to open. The other two cops stood behind him, just about filling the hallway with their broad shoulders.

      "Well, well," Malone said.

      Lynch recovered his balance and glared at the FBI agent. He said nothing.

      "Where is he?" Malone said.

      "Where is he?" Lynch repeated, and blinked. "Where's who?"

      Malone shook his head impatiently. "Fueyo," he said.

      Lynch's expression was the same as that on the faces of the other two cops: complete and utter bafflement. Malone stopped and stared. It was suddenly very obvious that the lovely theory he had worked out for Mike's disappearance wasn't true in the least. If Mike Fueyo had come out the door, then these cops would know about it. But they obviously knew nothing at all about it.

      Therefore, he hadn't come out through the door.

      Malone took a deep breath.

      "What are you talking about?" Lynch said. "Isn't the kid in there with you? What's happened?"

      There was only one thing to do and, straight-faced, Malone went ahead and did it. "Of course not," he snapped, trying to sound impatient and official. "I released him."

      "You what?"

      "Released him," Malone said. He stepped out into the hall and closed the door of the interrogation room firmly behind him. "I got all the information I needed, so I let him go."

      "Thanks," Lynch said bitterly. "After all, I was the one who—"

      "You called him in for questioning, didn't you, lieutenant?" Malone said.

      "Yes, I did, and I—"

      "Well," Malone said, "I questioned him."

      There was a little silence. Then Lynch asked, in a strangled voice: "What did he say?"

      "Sorry," Malone said at once. "That's classified information." He pushed his way into the corridor, trying to look as if he had fifteen other jobs to accomplish within the next hour. Being an FBI agent was going to help a little, but he still had to look good in order to really carry it off.

      "But—"

      "Thanks for your co-operation, lieutenant," Malone said. "You've all been very helpful." He smiled at them in what he hoped was a superior manner. "So long," he said, and started walking.

      "Wait!" Lynch said. He flung open the door of the interrogation room. There was no doubt that it was empty. "Wait! Malone!"

      Malone turned slowly, trying to look calm and in control of the situation. "Yes?" he said.

      Lynch looked at him with puzzled, pleading eyes. "Malone, how did you release him? We were right here. He didn't come through the door. There isn't any other exit. So how did you get him out?"

      There was only one answer to that, and Malone gave it with a quiet, assured air. "I'm terribly sorry, lieutenant," he said, "but that's classified information, too." He gave the cops a little wave and walked slowly down the corridor. When he reached the stairs he began to speed up, and he was out of the precinct station and into a taxicab before any of the cops could have realized what had happened.

      He took a deep breath, feeling as if it were the first he'd had in several days. "Breathe air," he told himself. "It's good for you." Not that New York had any real air in it. It was mostly carbon fumes and the like. But it was the nearest thing to air that Malone could find at the moment, and he determined to go right on breathing it until something better and cleaner showed up.

      But that wasn't important now. As the cab tooled along down Broadway toward Sixty-ninth Street, Malone closed his eyes and began going over the whole thing in his mind.

      Mike Fueyo had vanished.

      Of that, Malone told himself, there was no shadow of doubt. No probable, possible shadow of doubt.

      No possible doubt—as a matter of fact—whatever.

      Dismissing the Grand Inquisitor with a negligent wave of his hand, he concentrated