Mark Phillips Supermind 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16...

In 1914, it was enemy aliens. In 1930, it was Wobblies. In 1957, it was fellow travelers. In 1971, it was insane telepaths. And, in 1973: “We don’t know what the hell it is,” said Andrew J. Burris, Director of the FBI. He threw his hands in the air and looked baffled and confused. Kenneth J. Malone tried to appear sympathetic. “What what is?” he asked. Burris frowned and drummed his fingers on his big desk. “Malone,” he said, “make sense. And don’t stutter.” “Stutter?” Malone said. “You said you

The telephone, Malone realized belatedly, had had a particularly nasty-sounding ring. He might have known it would be bad news. As a matter of fact, he told himself sadly, he had known. “Nothing at all wrong?” he said into the mouthpiece. “Not with any of the computers?” He blinked. “Not even one of them?” “Not a thing,” Mitchell said. “I’ll be sending a report up to you in a little while. You read it; we put them through every test, and it’s all detailed there.” “I’m sure you were very thorough

The summer sun beat down on the white city of Washington, D. C, as if it had mistaken its instructions slightly and was convinced that the city had been put down somewhere in the Sahara. The sun seemed confused, Malone thought. If this were the Sahara, obviously there was no reason whatever for the Potomac to be running through it. The sun was doing its best to correct this small error, however, by exerting even more heat in a valiant attempt to dry up the river. Its attempt was succeeding, at l

He walked over to the wall control and shut off the air-conditioning in a hurry. He threw open a window and breathed great gulps of the hot, humid air from the streets. In a small corner at the back of his mind, he wondered why he was grateful for the air he had suffered under only a few minutes before. But that, he reflected, was life. And a very silly kind of life, too, he told himself without rancor. In a few minutes he left the window, somewhat restored, and headed for the shower. When it wa

Malone stared. He tried to say something but he couldn’t find any words. The telephone rang again and he pushed the switch with a sense of relief. The beard-fringed face of Thomas Boyd appeared on the screen. “You’re getting hard to find,” Boyd said. “I think you’re letting fame and fortune go to your head.” “I left word at the office that I was coming here,” Malone said aggrievedly. “Sure you did,” Boyd said. “How do you think I found you? Am I telepathic? Do I have strange powers?” “Wouldn’t s

Midnight. Kenneth J. Malone sat at his desk, in his Washington office, surrounded by piles of papers covering the desk, spilling off onto the floor and decorating his lap. He was staring at the papers as if he expected them to leap up, dance round him and shout the solution to all his problems at him in trained choral voices. They did nothing at all. Seated cross-legged on the rug in the center of the room, and looking like an impossible combination of the last Henry Tudor and Gautama Buddha, Th

Red Square was, somehow, disappointing. It was crowded with men and women, all looking very Russian in an undefined sort of way, and the big glass windows sparkled from every side. “I know it’s silly,” Luba said in a baffled voice, “but, somehow, I always expected Red Square to be red.” “And why should that be?” the MVD man next to her said. He was a burly man with a sour expression, as if he had eaten too many onions the day before. “Well,” Malone said, “it is Red Square, after all.” “But red i

The door rattled against Malone’s back as a hand twisted the knob and shook it. He braced himself for the next assault, and it came: the shudder of a heavy body slamming up against it. Miraculously, the door held, at least for the moment. But the roars outside were growing louder and louder as the second team came up. Where was the Mongol? he wondered. But there was no time for idle contemplation. The scene inside the room demanded his immediate attention. He was in the anteroom, a gilded and de

Lou didn’t wake up until the plane was dropping toward the Washington airfield, and when she did awaken it was as if she had merely come out of an especially deep sleep. Malone was standing over her, which was far from a coincidence; he had been waiting and watching virtually every minute since takeoff. During his brief periods of rest, Her Majesty had taken over, and she was now peacefully asleep at the back of the plane, looking a little more careworn, but just as regal as ever. She looked to

On the way to FBI Headquarters on 69th Street, he read the Post a little more carefully. The judge and his union suit weren’t the only things that were fouled up, he saw. Things were getting pretty bad all over. One story dealt with the recent factional fights inside the American Association for the Advancement of Medicine. A new group, the United States Medical-Professional Society, appeared to be forming as a competitor to the AAAM, and Malone wasn’t quite so sure, when he thought about it, th

“Boyd?” the agent-in-charge said. “He went out to talk to Mike Sand down at the ITU a while ago, and he hasn’t come back yet.” “Fine,” Malone said. “I’ll be in my office if he wants me.” The agent-in-charge picked up a small package. “A messenger brought this,” he said. “It’s from the Psychical Research Society, and if it’s ghosts, they’re much smaller than last time.” “Dehydrated,” Malone said. “Just add ectoplasm and out they come, shouting boo at everybody and dancing all over the world.” “So

After the great mass of teeth, vaguely surrounded by a face, had faded from Malone’s screen, he just sat there, looking at the dead, grey screen of the visiphone and feeling about twice as dead and at least three times as grey. Things, he told himself, were terrible. But even that sentence, which was a good deal more cheerful than what he actually felt, didn’t do anything to improve his mood. All of the evidence, after all, had been practically living on the tip of his nose for nearly twenty-fou

There was, of course, only one thing to do, and only one place to go. Malone went downstairs without even stopping to wave farewell to the agent-in-charge, and climbed into the big, specially-built FBI Lincoln that waited for him. “Want a driver?” one of the mechanics asked. “No, thanks,” Malone said. “This one’s a solo job.” That was for sure. He drove out onto the streets and into the heavy late afternoon traffic of Washington, D. C. The Lincoln handled smoothly, but Malone didn’t press his lu

At this point Malone suddenly became aware of a sound that was not coming from his own mind. It was coming from somewhere behind his car, and it was a very loud sound. It was, he discovered when he looked back, the siren of a highway patrolman on a motorcycle, coming toward him at imminent risk of life and limb and waving frantically with an unbelievably free hand. Malone glanced down at the speedometer. With a sigh, he realized that his reflexes had allowed him a little leeway, and that he was

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

Two hours passed, somehow. Bourbon and soda helped them pass, Malone discovered; he drank two highballs slowly, trying not to think about anything, and kept staring around at the walls of his apartment without really seeing anything. He felt terrible. He made himself a third bourbon and soda and started in on it. Maybe this one would make him feel better. Maybe, he thought, he ought to break out the cigars and celebrate. But there didn’t seem to be very much to celebrate, somehow. He felt like a