Occasion for Disaster Part 25

Burris folded his hands on the desk and looked at them for a second, frowning slightly like a psychiatrist. "Malone," he said at last, "I want you to listen to me. Calmly. Coolly. Collectedly."

Malone shrugged. "All right," he said. "I'm calm and cool."

"And collected," Burris added.

"That, too," Malone said vaguely.

"Malone," Burris began, "you've got to get rid of this idea that everything the FBI investigates these days is somehow linked with psionics. I know you've done a lot of work in that connection--"

"Now, wait a minute," Malone said. "There are those errors. How did the technicians feed the wrong data into the machines?"

"Errors do happen," Burris said. "If I slip on a banana peel, do I blame psionics? Do I even blame the United Fruit Growers? I do not, Malone. Instead, I tell myself that errors do happen. All the time."

"Now," Malone said, "you've contradicted yourself."

"I have?" Burris said with a look of complete surprise.

"Sure," Malone said. He leaned forward across the desk. "If the errors were just ordinary accidental errors, then how were the spies responsible? And why did they stop after the spies were arrested? When you slip on a banana peel, does it matter whether or not the United Fruit Growers are out on strike?"

"Oh," Burris said.

"You see?" Malone said. "You've gone and contradicted yourself." He felt victorious, but somewhere in the back of his mind was the horrible sensation that someone was about to come up behind him and hit him on the head with a wet sock full of old sand.

A long second pa.s.sed. Then Burris said: "Oh. Malone, I forgot to give you the a.n.a.lysis report."

That, Malone realized dimly, was supposed to be the wet sock. Fate, he told himself, was against him. Anyhow, something was against him. It was a few seconds before he came to the conclusion that what he had heard didn't really make any sense. "a.n.a.lysis report?" he said.

"On the water cooler," Burris explained cheerfully.

"There is an a.n.a.lysis report on a water cooler," Malone said.

"Everything now becomes as clear as crystal." He heard his voice begin to rise. "You a.n.a.lyzed a water cooler and discovered that it was a Siberian spy in disguise," he said, trying to make himself sound less hysterical.

"No, no," Burris said, pushing at Malone with his palms. "The water in it, Malone. The water in it."

"No Siberian spy," Malone said with decision, "could disguise himself as the water in a water cooler."

"I didn't say that," Burris went on. "But what do you think was in that water cooler, Malone?"

"Water," Malone said. "_Cool_ water."

"Congratulations," Burris said, in the hearty tones usually reserved for announcers on programs where housewives win trips to Nome. "You are just a shade less than ninety-nine point nine nine per cent correct."

"The rest of the water," Malone hazarded, "was warm?"

"The rest of the water," Burris said, "wasn't water. Aside from the usual minerals, there was also a trace of one of the psychodrugs."

The word seemed to hang in mid-air, like somebody's sword. Malone knew perfectly well what the psychodrugs were. Over the past twenty years, a great number of them had been developed by confused and anxious researchers. Some were solids, some liquids and a few gaseous at normal temperatures. Some were weak and some were highly potent. Some were relatively innocuous, and quite a few were as deadly as any of the more common poisons. They could be administered by mouth, by injection, by spray, as drops, grains, whiffs or in any other way conceivable to medical science. But they all had one thing in common.

They affected the mental functioning--what seemed to be the personality itself--of the person dosed with them.

The effect of the drugs was, in most cases, highly specific. One might make a normally brave man a craven coward; laboratory tests on that one had presented the interesting spectacle of terrified cats running from surprised, but by no means displeased, experimental mice. Another drug reversed this picture, and made the experimental mice mad with power. They attacked cats in battalions or singly, cheering and almost waving large flags as they went over the top, completely foolhardy in the presence of any danger whatever. Others made man abnormally suspicious and still others disa.s.sociated judgment to the point where all decisions were made completely at random.

The FBI had a large file on psychodrugs, Malone knew. But he didn't need the file to see what was coming. He asked the question anyhow, just for the record: "What particular psychodrug was this one?"

"One of the judgment-warpers," Burris said. "Haenlingen's Mixture; it's more or less a new development, but the Russians probably know as much about it as we do. In large doses, the drug affects even the automatic nervous system and throws the involuntary functions out of whack; but it isn't usually used in killing amounts."

"And in the water cooler?" Malone asked.

"There wasn't much of it," Burris said, "but there was enough. The technicians could be depended on to make a great many more mistakes than usual--just how many we can't determine, but the order of magnitude seems about right. It would depend on how much water each one of them drank, of course, and we haven't a chance of getting anything like a precise determination of that now."

"Oh," Malone said. "But it comes out about right, doesn't it?" He felt hopeless.

"Just about," Burris said cheerfully. "And since it was Brubitsch's job to change the cooler jug--"

"Wait a minute," Malone said. "I think I see a hole in that."

"Really?" Burris said. He frowned slightly.

Malone nodded. "Sure," he said. "If any of the spies drank the water--their judgment would be warped, too, wouldn't it?"

"So they didn't drink the water," Burris said easily.

"How can we be sure?" Malone asked.

Burris shrugged. "Why do we have to be?" he said. "Malone, you've got to stop pressing so hard on this."

"But a man who didn't drink water all day would be a little conspicuous," Malone said. "After a while, anyhow."

Burris sighed. "The man is a janitor, Kenneth," he said. "Do you know what a janitor is?"

"Don't baby me," Malone snapped.

Burris shrugged. "A janitor doesn't work in the office with the men,"

he said. "He can drink out of a faucet in the broom closet--or wherever the faucets might be. n.o.body would notice. n.o.body would think it odd."

Malone said: "But--" and stopped and thought it over. "All right," he went on at last. "But I still insist--"

"Now, Kenneth," Burris said in a voice that dripped oil. "I'll admit that psionics is new and wonderful and you've done a lot of fine work with it. A lot of very fine work indeed. But you can't go around blaming everything on psionics no matter what it is or how much sense it makes."

"I don't," Malone said, injured. "But--"

"But you do," Burris said. "Lately, you've been acting as though magic were loose in the world. As though nothing were dependable any more."

"It's not magic," Malone said.

"But it is," Burris told him, "when you use it as an explanation for anything and everything." He paused, "Kenneth," he said in a more kindly tone, "don't think I blame you. I know how hard you've been working. I know how much time and effort you've put into the gallant fight against this country's enemies."

Malone closed his eyes and turned slightly green. "It was nothing," he said at last. He opened his eyes but nothing had changed. Burris'