I spent the next several hours pushing my weight around all over
Ceres. As the personal representative of Shalimar Ravenhurst, who was
manager of Viking Spacecraft, which was, in turn, the owner of Ceres,
I had a lot of weight to push around. I had every executive on the
planetoid jumping before I was through.
Colonel Brock, of course, was broiling in his own juices. He managed
to get hold of me by phone once, by calling a Dr. Perelson whom I was
interviewing at the time.
The phone chimed, Perelson said, "Excuse me," and went to answer. I
could hear his voice from the other room.
"Mr. Daniel Oak? Yes; he's here. Well, yes. Oh, all sorts of
questions, colonel." Perelson's voice was both irritated and worried.
"He says Miss Ravenhurst is missing; is that so? Oh? Well, does this
man have any right to question me this way? Asking me? About
everything!... How well I know the girl, the last time I saw
her--things like that. Good heavens, we've hardly met!" He was getting
exasperated now. "But does he have the authority to ask these
questions? Oh. Yes. Well, of course, I'll be glad to co-operate in any
manner I can ... Yes ... Yes. All right, I'll call him."
I got up from the half-reclining angle I'd been making with the wall,
and shuffled across the room as Dr. Perelson stuck his head around the
corner and said, "It's for you." He looked as though someone had put
aluminum hydrogen sulfate in his mouthwash.
I picked up the receiver and looked at Brock's face in the screen. He
didn't even give me a chance to talk. "What are you trying to do?" he
shouted explosively.
"Trying to find Jaqueline Ravenhurst," I said, as calmly as I could.
"Oak, you're a maniac! Why, by this time, it's all over Ceres that the
boss' daughter is missing! Shalimar Ravenhurst will have your hide for
this!"
"He will?" I gave him Number 2--the wide-eyed innocent stare. "Why?"
"Why, you idiot, I thought you had sense enough to know that this
should be kept quiet! She's pulled this stunt before, and we always
managed to quiet things down before anything happened! We've managed
to keep everything under cover and out of the public eye ever since
she was fifteen, and now you blow it all up out of proportion and
create a furore that won't ever be forgotten!"
He gave his speech as though it had been written for him in full caps,
with three exclamation points after every sentence, and added gestures
and grimaces after every word.
"Just doing what I thought was best," I said. "I want to find her as
soon as possible."
"Well, stop it! Now! Let us handle it from here on in!"
Then I lowered the boom. "Now _you_ listen, Brock. I am in charge of
Jack Ravenhurst, not you. I've lost her, and I'll find her. I'll
welcome your co-operation, and I'd hate to have to fight you, but if
you don't like the way I'm handling it, you can just tell your boys to
go back to their regular work and let me handle it alone, without
interference. Now, which'll it be?"
He opened his mouth, closed it, and blew out his breath from between
his lips. Then he said: "All right. The damage has been done, anyhow.
But don't think I won't report all this to Ravenhurst as soon as I can
get a beam to Raven's Rest."
"That's your job and your worry, not mine. Now, have you got any
leads?"
"None," he admitted.
"Then I'll go out and dig up some. I'll let you know if I need you."
And I cut off.
Dr. Perelson was sitting on his couch, with an expression that
indicated that the pH of his saliva was hovering around one point
five.
I said, "That will be all, Dr. Perelson. Thank you for your
co-operation." And I walked out into the corridor, leaving him with a
baffled look.
* * * * *
At the next public phone, I dialed the BANning number again.
"Any news?"
"Not from her; she hasn't reported in at all."
"I didn't figure she would. What else?"
"Just as you said," he told me. "With some cute frills around the
edges. Ten minutes ago, a crowd of kids--sixteen to twenty-two age
range--about forty of 'em--started a songfest and football game in the
corridor outside Colonel Brock's place. The boys he had on duty there
recognized the Jack Ravenhurst touch, and tried to find her in the
crowd. Nothing doing. Not a sign of her."
"That girl's not only got power," I said, "but she's bright as a solar
flare."
"Agreed. She's headed up toward Dr. Midguard's place now. I don't know
what she has in mind, but it ought to be fun to watch."
"Where's Midguard now?" I asked.
"Hovering around Brock, as we figured. He's worried and feels
responsible because she disappeared from his apartment, as predicted."
"Well, I've stirred up enough fuss in this free-falling anthill to
give them all the worries they need. Tell me what's the overall
effect?"
"Close to perfect. It's slightly scandalous and very mysterious, so
everybody's keeping an eye peeled. If anyone sees Jaqueline
Ravenhurst, they'll run to a phone, and naturally she's been spotted
by a dozen different people in a dozen different places already.
"You've got both Brock's Company guards and the civil police tied up
for a while."
"Fine. But be sure you keep the boys who are on her tail shifting
around often enough so that she doesn't spot them."
"Don't worry your thick little head about that, Dan," he said. "They
know their business. Are you afraid they'll lose her?"
"No, I'm not, and you know it. I just don't want her to know she's
being followed. If she can't ditch her shadow, she's likely to try to
talk to him and pull out all the stops convincing him that he should
go away."
"You think she could? With _my_ boys?"
"No, but if she tries it, it'll mean she knows she's being followed.
That'll make it tougher to keep a man on her trail. Besides, I don't
want her to try to convince him and fail."
"_Ich graben Sie._ On the off chance that she does spot one and gives
him a good talking to, I'll pass along the word that the victim is to
walk away meekly and get lost."
"Good," I said, "but I'd rather she didn't know."
"She won't. You're getting touchy, Dan; 'pears to me you'd rather be
doing that job yourself, and think nobody can handle it but you."
I gave him my best grin. "You are closer than you know. O.K., I'll lay
off. You handle your end of it and I'll handle mine."
"A fair exchange is no bargain. Go, and sin no more."
"I'll buzz you back before I go in," I said, and hung up.
* * * * *
Playing games inside a crowded asteroid is not the same as playing
games in, say, Honolulu or Vladivostok, especially when that game is a
combination of hide-and-seek and ring-around-the-Rosie. The trouble is
lack of communication. Radio contact is strictly line-of-sight inside
a hunk of metal. Radar beams can get a little farther, but a man has
to be an expert billiards player to bank a reflecting beam around very
many corners, and even that would depend upon the corridors being
empty, which they never are. To change the game analogy again, it
would be like trying to sink a ninety-foot putt across Times Square on
New Year's Eve.
Following somebody isn't anywhere near as easy as popular fiction
might lead you to believe. Putting a tail on someone whose spouse
wants divorce evidence is relatively easy, but even the best
detectives can lose a man by pure mischance. If the tailee, for
instance, walks into a crowded elevator and the automatic computer
decides that the car is filled to the limit, the man who's tailing him
will be left facing a closed door. Something like that can happen by
accident, without any design on the part of the tailee.
[Illustration]
If you use a large squad of agents, all in radio contact with one
another, that kind of loss can be reduced to near zero by simply
having a man covering every possible escape route.
But if the tailee knows, or even suspects, that he's being followed,
wants to get away from his tail, and has the ability to reason
moderately well, it requires an impossibly large team to keep him in
sight. And if that team has no fast medium of communication, they're
licked at the onset.
In this case, we were fairly certain of Jack Ravenhurst's future
actions, and so far our prophecies had been correct ... but if she
decided to shake her shadows, fun would be had by all.
And as long as I had to depend on someone else to do my work for me, I
was going to be just the teenchiest bit concerned about whether they
were doing it properly.
I decided it was time to do my best to imitate a cosmic-ray particle,
and put on a little speed through the corridors that ran through the
subsurface of Ceres.
My vac suit was in my hotel room. One of the other agents had picked
it up from my flitterboat and packed it carefully into a small attaché
case. I'd planned my circuit so that I'd be near the hotel when things
came to the proper boil, so I did a lot of diving, breaking all kinds
of traffic regulations in the process.
I went to my room, grabbed the attaché case, checked it over
quickly--never trust another man to check your vac suit for
you--and headed for the surface.
Nobody paid any attention to me when I walked out of the air lock onto
the spacefield. There were plenty of people moving in and out, going
to and from their ships and boats. It wasn't until I reached the edge
of the field that I realized that I had over-played my hand with
Colonel Brock. It was only by the narrowest hair, but that had been
enough to foul up my plans. There were guards surrounding the
perimeter with radar search beams.
As I approached, one of the guards walked toward me and made a series
of gestures with his left hand--two fingers up, fist, two fingers up,
fist, three fingers up. I set my suit phone for 223; the guy's right
hand was on the butt of his stun gun.
"Sorry, sir," came his voice. "We can't allow anyone to cross the
field perimeter. Emergency."
"My name's Oak," I said tiredly. "Daniel Oak. What is going on here?"
He came closer and peered at me. Then: "Oh, yes, sir; I recognize you.
We're ... uh--" He waved an arm around. "Uh ... looking for Miss
Ravenhurst." His voice lowered conspiratorially. I could tell that he
was used to handling the Ravenhurst girl with silence and suede
gloves.
"Up _there_?" I asked.
"Well, Colonel Brock is a little worried. He says that Miss Ravenhurst
is being sent to a school on Luna and doesn't want to go. He got to
thinking about it, and he's afraid that she might try to leave
Ceres--sneak off you know."