* * * * *
I had time for one drag off my cigarette and one swallow of beer
before the phone chimed. I put my beer down and pushed the switch for
the audio only.
"Yes?" I said.
The face that came on the screen was one I'd never seen before. A man
about my age, I thought, or maybe a few years older. His skin was
tanned--whether by heredity or sunlight was hard to tell; his features
were not distinctive enough to be sure. His hair was medium brown and
cut rather longer than the crew cut which is common in the Belt.
"I'm calling for Mr. Daniel Oak," he said in a low tenor voice.
I touched the "vision" button and let the pick-up transmit my image to
him. No point in playing cagy just at that time. "Speaking," I said.
"You're Mr. Daniel Oak, of New York?" he asked.
"That's right."
"The confidential expediter?" He seemed to want to make very certain of
his quarry.
"That's right," I repeated.
His smile was a little stiff. "My name is Venuccio, Mr. Oak; André
Venuccio. I'd like to speak to you about a matter of employment."
"You mean you want a job?" This is a conversational gimmick known as
The Deliberate Misunderstanding, or The Innocent Needle.
He twitched his head a little, which might have been a negative shake.
"No, no. _I_ wish to employ _you_, Mr. Oak."
"Well, I'm pretty busy right now, and I--"
He cut me off with: "Mr. Oak, I have come all the way from Earth to
speak to you. I assure you that this is most important. I would like
very much to discuss it with you."
"Well, all right. Go ahead."
"Not over the phone. There is a possibility of its being tapped. I
would like to meet you personally."
I took a couple of seconds out for thought. There are a lot of
places on Earth where a phone line can be tapped with fairly cheap
equipment simply because, for economic reasons, the phone company
hasn't installed new equipment. But on Ceres, everything goes through
a synchronized random scrambler circuit, just as it does in the more
modern cities on Earth. Nobody's been able to crack it yet without a
good-sized computer and a lot of luck. Still--
"Very well, Mr. Venuccio; if you could be here in half an hour--"
"No, no," he said quickly. "Your apartment might be bugged."
He had a point there. He couldn't know that I'd already made sure that
my apartment was bug-proof. A self-contained broadcaster isn't much use
inside Ceres; the metal walls stop almost any radiation before it can
get very far. If my place was bugged, conductors of some kind would
have to be used, and I'd gone over the place thoroughly to make sure
there was no such thing.
In addition, I'd used one of my favorite gadgets: a non-random noise
generator. Because a conversation is patterned, it is possible to
pick it out of a "white," purely random background noise, even if the
background is louder than the conversation. But my little sweetheart
was a multiple recording of ten thousand different conversations,
all meaningless, _plus_ a lot of "white" noise. After the gadget is
connected up, the walls vibrate with jabber that can't be analyzed even
by the best of differential analyzers. Only in the hush area away from
the walls is it quiet.
[Illustration: _Trouble with a hunch something's wrong is ... it
doesn't tell what's wrong!_]
But my caller couldn't be expected to know that, and I didn't feel like
telling him.