“In other words, you may have spies in your own organization who are working with the Viking group. Very interesting. That means they know I’m working for you, which will effectively seal me up, too. You might as well have kept Brock on the job.”
He smiled in a smug, superior sort of way that some men might have resented. I did. Even though I’d fed him the line so that he could feel superior, knowing that a smart operator like Ravenhurst would already have covered his tracks. I couldn’t help wishing I’d told him simply to trot out his cover story instead of letting him think I believed it had never occurred to either of us before.
“As far as my staff knows, Mr. Oak, you are here to escort my daughter, Jaqueline, to Braunsville, Luna. You will, naturally, have to take her to Ceres in your flitterboat, where you will wait for a specially chartered ship to take you both to Luna. That will be a week after you arrive. Since the McGuire 7 is to be tested within three days, that should give you ample time.”
“If it doesn’t?”
“We will consider that possibility if and when it becomes probable. I have a great deal of faith in you.”
“Thanks. One more thing: why do you think anybody will swallow the idea that your daughter needs a private bodyguard to escort her to Braunsville?”
His smile broadened a little. “You have not met my daughter, Mr. Oak. Jaqueline takes after me in a great many respects, not the least of which is her desire to have things her own way and submit to no man’s yoke, as the saying goes. I have had a difficult time with her, sir; a difficult time. It is and has been a matter of steering a narrow course between the Scylla of breaking her spirit with too much discipline and the Charybdis of allowing her to ruin her life by letting her go hog wild. She is seventeen now, and the time has come to send her to a school where she will receive an education suitable to her potentialities and abilities, and discipline which will be suitable to her spirit.
“Your job, Mr. Oak, will be to make sure she gets there. You are not a bodyguard in the sense that you must protect her from the people around her. Quite the contrary, they may need protection from her. You are to make sure she arrives in Braunsville on schedule. She is perfectly capable of taking it in her head to go scooting off to Earth if you turn your back on her.”
Still smiling, he refilled his glass. “Do have some more Madeira, Mr. Oak. It’s really an excellent year.”
I let him refill my glass.
“That, I think, will cover your real activities well enough. My daughter will, of course, take a tour of the plant on Ceres, which will allow you to do whatever work is necessary.”
He smiled at me.
I didn’t smile back.
“Up till now, this sounded like a pretty nice assignment,” I said. “But I don’t want it now. I can’t take care of a teenage girl with a desire for the bright lights of Earth while I investigate a sabotage case.”
I knew he had an out; I was just prodding him into springing it.
He did. “Of course not. My daughter is not as scatterbrained as I have painted her. She is going to help you.”
“Help me?”
“Exactly. You are ostensibly her bodyguard. If she turns up missing, you will, of course, leave no stone unturned to find her.” He chuckled. “And Ceres is a fairly large stone.”
I thought it over. I still didn’t like it too well, but if Jaqueline wasn’t going to be too much trouble to take care of, it might work out. And if she did get to be too much trouble, I could see to it that she was unofficially detained for a while.
“All right, Mr. Ravenhurst,” I said, “you’ve got yourself a man for both jobs.”
“Both?”
“I find out who is trying to sabotage the McGuire ship, and I baby-sit for you. That’s two jobs. And you’re going to pay for both of them.”
“I expected to,” said Shalimar Ravenhurst.
Fifteen minutes later, I was walking into the room where I’d left my vac suit. There was a girl waiting for me.
She was already dressed in her vac suit, so there was no way to be sure, but she looked as if she had a nice figure underneath the suit. Her face was rather unexceptionally pretty, a sort of nice-girl-next-door face. Her hair was a reddish brown and was cut fairly close to the skull; only a woman who never intends to be in a vac suit in free fall can afford to let her hair grow.
“Miss Ravenhurst?” I asked.
She grinned and stuck out a hand. “Just call me Jack. And I’ll call you Dan. O.K.?”
I grinned and shook her hand because there wasn’t much else I could do. Now I’d met the Ravenhursts: A father called Shalimar and a daughter called Jack.
And a spaceship named McGuire.
* * * *
I gave the flitterboat all the push it would take to get us to Ceres as fast as possible. I don’t like riding in the things. You sit there inside a transite hull, which has two bucket seats inside it, fore and aft, astraddle the drive tube, and you guide from one beacon to the next while you keep tabs on orbital positions by radio. It’s a long jump from one rock to the next, even in the asteroid belt, and you have to live inside your vac suit until you come to a stopping place where you can spend an hour or so resting before you go on. It’s like driving cross-continent in an automobile, except that the signposts and landmarks are constantly shifting position. An inexperienced man can get lost easily in the Belt.
I was happy to find that Jack Ravenhurst knew how to handle a flitterboat and could sight navigate by the stars. That meant that I could sleep while she piloted and vice-versa. The trip back was a lot easier and faster than the trip out had been.
I was glad, in a way, that Ceres was within flitterboat range of Raven’s Rest. I don’t like the time wasted in waiting for a regular spaceship, which you have to do when your target is a quarter of the way around the Belt from you. The cross-system jumps don’t take long, but getting to a ship takes time.
The Ravenhurst girl wasn’t much of a talker while we were en route. A little general chitchat once in a while, then she’d clam up to do a little mental orbit figuring. I didn’t mind. I was in no mood to pump her just yet, and I was usually figuring orbits myself. You get in the habit after a while.
When the Ceres beacon came into view, I was snoozing. Jack reached forward and shook my shoulder. “Decelerating toward Ceres,” she said. “Want to take over from here on?” Her voice sounded tinny and tired in the earphones of my fishbowl.
“O.K.; I’ll take her in. Have you called Ceres Field yet?”
“Not yet. I figured that you’d better do that, since it’s your flitterboat.”
I said O.K. and called Ceres. They gave me a traffic orbit, and I followed it in to Ceres Field.
It was a lot bigger than the postage-stamp field on Raven’s Rest, and more brightly lit, and a lot busier, but it was basically the same idea—a broad, wide, smooth area that had been carved out of the surface of the nickel-iron with a focused sun beam. One end of it was reserved for flitterboats; three big spaceships sat on the other end, looking very noblesse oblige at the little flitterboats.
I clamped down, gave the key to one of the men behind the desk after we had gone below, and turned to Jack. “I suggest we go to the hotel first and get a shower and a little rest. We can go out to Viking tomorrow.”
She glanced at her watch. Like every other watch and clock in the Belt, it was set for Greenwich Standard Time. What’s the point in having time zones in space?
“I’m not tired,” she said brightly. “I got plenty of sleep while we were on the way. Why don’t we go out tonight? They’ve got a bounce-dance place called Bali’s that—”
I held up a hand. “No. You may not be tired, but I am. Remember, I went all the way out there by myself, and then came right back.
“I need at least six hours sleep in a nice, comfortable bed before I’ll be able to move again.”
The look she gave me made me feel every one of my thirty-five years, but I didn’t intend to let her go roaming around
at this stage of the game.
Instead, I put her aboard one of the little rail cars, and we headed for the Viking Arms, generally considered the best hotel on Ceres.
Ceres has a pretty respectable gee pull for a planetoid: Three per cent of Standard. I weigh a good, hefty five pounds on the surface. That makes it a lot easier to walk around on Ceres than on, say, Raven’s Rest. Even so, you always get the impression that one of the little rail cars that scoots along the corridors is climbing uphill all the way, because the acceleration is greater than any measly thirty centimeters per second squared.
Jack didn’t say another word until we reached the Viking, where Ravenhurst had thoughtfully made reservations for adjoining rooms. Then, after we’d registered, she said: “We could at least get something to eat.”
“That’s not a bad idea. We can get something to line our stomachs, anyway. Steak?”
She beamed up at me. “Steak. Sounds wonderful after all those mushy concentrates. Let’s go.”
* * * *
The restaurant off the lobby was just like the lobby and the corridors outside—a big room hollowed out of the metal of the asteroid. The walls had been painted to prevent rusting, but they still bore the roughness left by the sun beam that had burnt them out.
We sat down at a table, and a waiter brought over a menu. The place wouldn’t be classed higher than a third-rate cafe on Earth, but on Ceres it’s considered one of the better places. The prices certainly compare well with those of the best New York or Moscow restaurants, and the price of meat, which has to be shipped from Earth, is—you should pardon the gag—astronomical.
That didn’t bother me. Steaks for two would go right on the expense account. I mentally thanked Mr. Ravenhurst for the fine slab of beef when the waiter finally brought it.
While we were waiting, though, I lit a cigarette and said: “You’re awfully quiet, Jack.”
“Am I? Men are funny.”
“Is that meant as a conversational gambit, or an honest observation?”
“Observation. I mean, men are always complaining that girls talk too much, but if a girl keeps her mouth shut, they think there’s something wrong with her.”
“Uh-huh. And you think that’s a paradox or something?”
She looked puzzled. “Isn’t it?”
“Not at all. The noise a jackhammer makes isn’t pleasant at all, but if it doesn’t make that noise, you figure it isn’t functioning properly. So you wonder why.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I had noticed a man wearing the black-and-gold union suit of Ravenhurst’s Security Guard coming toward us from the door, using the gliding shuffle that works best under low gee. I ignored him to listen to Jack Ravenhurst.
“That has all the earmarks of a dirty crack,” she said. The tone of her voice indicated that she wasn’t sure whether to be angry or to laugh.
“Hello, Miss Ravenhurst; Hi, Oak.” Colonel Brock had reached the table. He stood there, smiling his rather flat smile, while his eyes looked us both over carefully.
He was five feet ten, an inch shorter than I am, and lean almost to the point of emaciation. His scarred, hard-bitten face looked as though it had gotten that way when he tried to kiss a crocodile.
“Hello, Brock,” I said. “What’s new?”
Jack gave him a meaningless smile and said: “Hello, colonel.” She was obviously not very impressed with either of us.
“Mind if I sit?” Brock asked.
We didn’t, so he sat.
“I’m sorry I missed you at the spaceport,” Brock said seriously, “but I had several of my boys there with their eyes open.” He was quite obviously addressing Jack, not me.
“It’s all right,” Jack said. “I’m not going anywhere this time.” She looked at me and gave me an odd grin. “I’m going to stay home and be a good girl this time around.”
Colonel Brock’s good-natured chuckle sounded about as genuine as the ring of a lead nickel. “Oh, you’re no trouble, Miss Ravenhurst.”
“Thank you, kind sir; you’re a poor liar.” She stood up and smiled sweetly. “Will you gentlemen excuse me a moment?”
We would and did. Colonel Brock and I watched her cross the room and disappear through a door. Then he turned to look at me, giving me a wry grin and shaking his head a little sadly. “So you got saddled with Jack the Ripper, eh, Oak?”
“Is she that bad?”
His chuckle was harsher this time, and had the ring of truth. “You’ll find out. Oh, I don’t mean she’s got the morals of a cat or anything like that. So far as I know, she’s still waiting for Mister Right to come along.”
“Drugs?” I asked. “Liquor?”
“A few drinks now and then—nothing else,” Brock said. “No, it’s none of the usual things. It isn’t what she does that counts; it’s what she talks other people into doing. She’s a convincer.”
“That sounds impressive,” I said. “What does it mean?”
His hard face looked wolfish, “I ought to let you find out for yourself. But, no; that wouldn’t be professional courtesy, and it wouldn’t be ethical.”
“Brock,” I said tiredly, “I have been given more runarounds in the past week than Mercury has had in the past millennium. I expect clients to be cagey, to hold back information, and to lie. But I didn’t expect it of you. Give.”
He nodded brusquely. “As I said, she’s a convincer. A talker. She can talk people into doing almost anything she wants them to.”
“For instance?”
“Like, for instance, getting all the patrons at the Bali to do a snake dance around the corridors in the altogether. The Ceres police broke it up, but she was nowhere to be found.”
He said it so innocently that I knew he’d been the one to get her out of the mess.
“And the time,” he continued, “that she almost succeeded in getting a welder named Plotkin elected Hereditary Czar of Ceres. She’d have succeeded, too, if she hadn’t made the mistake of getting Plotkin himself up to speak in front of his loyal supporters. After that, everybody felt so silly that the movement fell apart.”
He went on, reciting half a dozen more instances of the girl’s ability to influence people without winning friends. None of them were new to me; they were all on file in the Political Survey Division of the United Nations Government on Earth, plus several more which Colonel Brock either neglected to tell me or wasn’t aware of himself.
But I listened with interest; after all, I wasn’t supposed to know any of these things. I am just a plain, ordinary, “confidential expediter”. That’s what it says on the door of my office in New York, and that’s what it says on my license. All very legal and very dishonest.
The Political Survey Division is very legal and very dishonest, too. Theoretically, it is supposed to be nothing but a branch of the System Census Bureau; it is supposed to do nothing but observe and tabulate political trends. The actual fact that it is the Secret Service branch of the United Nations Government is known only to relatively few people.
I know it because I work for the Political Survey Division.
The PSD already had men investigating both Ravenhurst and Thurston, but when they found out that Ravenhurst was looking for a confidential expediter, for a special job, they’d shoved me in fast.
It isn’t easy to fool sharp operators like Colonel Brock, but, so far, I’d been lucky enough to get away with it by playing ignorant-but-not-stupid.
The steaks were brought, and I mentally saluted Ravenhurst, as I had promised myself I would. Then I rather belatedly asked the colonel if he’d eat with us.
“No,” he said, with a shake of his head. “No, thanks. I’ve got to get things ready for her visit to the Viking plant tomorrow.”
“Oh? Hiding something?” I asked blandly.
He didn’t even bother to look insulted. “No. Just have to make sure she doesn’t get hurt by any of the machinery, that’s all. Most of the stuff is automatic, and she has a habit of getting too close. I guess she thinks she can
talk a machine out of hurting her as easily as she can talk a man into standing on his head.”
Jack Ravenhurst was coming back to the table. I noticed that she’d fixed her hair nicely and put on make-up. It made her look a lot more feminine than she had while she was on the flitterboat.
“Well,” she said as she sat down, “have you two decided what to do with me?”
Colonel Brock just smiled and said: “I guess we’ll have to leave that up to you, Miss Ravenhurst.” Then he stood up. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be about my business.”
Jack nodded, gave him a quick smile, and fell to on her steak with the voraciousness of an unfed chicken in a wheat bin.
Miss Jaqueline Ravenhurst evidently had no desire to talk to me at the moment.
* * * *
On Ceres, as on most of the major planetoids, a man’s home is his castle, even if it’s only a hotel room. Raw nickel-iron, the basic building material, is so cheap that walls and doors are seldom made of anything else, so a hotel room is more like a vault than anything else on Earth. Every time I go into one of the hotels on Ceres or Eros, I get the feeling that I’m either a bundle of gold certificates or a particularly obstreperous prisoner being led to a medieval solitary confinement cell. They’re not pretty, but they’re solid.
Jack Ravenhurst went into her own room after flashing me a rather hurt smile that was supposed to indicate her disappointment in not being allowed to go nightclubbing. I gave her a big-brotherly pat on the shoulder and told her to get plenty of sleep, since we had to be up bright and early in the morning.
Once inside my own room, I checked over my luggage carefully. It had been brought there from the spaceport, where I’d checked it before going to Ravenhurst’s Raven’s Rest, on orders from Ravenhurst himself. This was one of several rooms that Ravenhurst kept permanently rented for his own uses, and I knew that Jack kept a complete wardrobe in her own rooms.
There were no bugs in my luggage—neither sound nor sight spying devices of any kind. Not that I would have worried if there had been; I just wanted to see if anyone was crude enough to try that method of smuggling a bug into the apartment.
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