"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.
[Illustration]
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.