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.
The door chime pinged solemnly.
I took a peek through the door camera and saw a man in a bellboy's
uniform, holding a large traveling case. I recognized the face, so I
let him in.
"The rest of your luggage, sir," he said with a straight face.
"Thank you very much," I told him. I handed him a tip, and he popped
off.
This stuff was special equipment that I hadn't wanted Ravenhurst or
anybody else to get his paws into.
I opened it carefully with the special key, slid a hand under the
clothing that lay on top for camouflage, and palmed the little
detector I needed. Then I went around the room, whistling gently to
myself.
The nice thing about an all-metal room is that it's impossible to hide
a self-contained bug in it that will be of any use. A small, concealed
broadcaster can't broadcast any farther than the walls, so any bug has
to have wires leading out of the room.
I didn't find a thing. Either Ravenhurst kept the room clean or
somebody was using more sophisticated bugs than any I knew about. I
opened the traveling case again and took out one of my favorite
gadgets. It's a simple thing, really: a noise generator. But the noise
it generates is non-random noise. Against a background of "white,"
purely random noise, it is possible to pick out a conversation, even
if the conversation is below the noise level, simply because
conversation is patterned. But this little generator of mine was
non-random. It was the multiple recording of ten thousand different
conversations, all meaningless, against a background of "white" noise.
Try that one on your differential analyzers.
By the time I got through, nobody could tap a dialogue in that room,
barring, as I said, bugs more sophisticated than any the United
Nations knew about.
* * * * *
Then I went over and tapped on the communicating door between my room
and Jack Ravenhurst's. There was no answer.