Part 3

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.

But my caller couldn't be expected to know that, and I didn't feel like telling him.

I decided to see how far he'd go.

"Mr. Venuccio," I said in an apologetic tone, "I'm sorry, but my present work will require several more weeks, and--"

"I understand that," he said quickly. He seemed to be a great one for interruptions. "But I assure you that I can make it worth your while. What would you charge for an hour of your time?"

"It would depend on what I'd have to do."

"All you will have to do is listen to me explain my problem and my proposition to you. An hour, at the very most. I could meet you at the _Seven Sisters_ in half an hour. This is very urgent, Mr. Oak."

Not to me, it wasn't. But my intuition told me that there was something here I ought to know about. "All right, Mr. Venuccio; I'll be there. It'll cost you a hundred in cash for the consultation fee. Have it with you." In case he didn't know what I charged, that ought to give him some idea.

He didn't flinch. "Very good, Mr. Oak. I'll see you in half an hour, then. Good-by." And his image vanished.

_Interesting_, I thought. There was something definitely phony about Mr. André Venuccio. His manner of speaking didn't sound natural; it was as though he were attempting to pretend to be something he wasn't.

I made a few phone calls and came up with more information. The last ship directly from Earth had landed four days ago. Mr. Venuccio could have come in by flitterboat, but it didn't seem likely, if he had, as he claimed, come all the way from Earth to see me. Aside from the fact that my staff in my New York office wouldn't have told him where I was, there was also the fact that no André Venuccio had come in on the last ship.

I made two more calls--one to Marty and one to Colonel Brock--and then began to get ready for my appointment with the enigmatic Mr. Venuccio.

* * * * *

The _Seven Sisters_ is one of the most elaborate dining clubs on Ceres. It caters strictly to the moneyed class, and is positively drenched in snob appeal. The food is good, the liquor is good, and the entertainment is adequate. Since all three have to be imported from Earth, the first two are expensive and the last one is the best they can get, because most of the top-flight entertainers of Earth don't feel that it's worth their while to go asteroid-hopping.

It is one of the few public places in the Belt where you will be expected to "dress" for dinner. That means a jacket and Bermuda shorts over your union suit.

As far as decoration goes, the _Seven Sisters_ is the lushest place in the Belt. The walls of the main dining room, which is about sixty by sixty feet in floor area, are paneled with white oak up to a height of eight feet. Wood is expensive in the Belt; forests on the asteroids share the null class with snowflakes on the sunward side of Mercury.

Above the paneling, the ceiling is domed and black, and a pattern of bright pinlights representing the Pleiades--greatly enlarged--glitters against the blackness.

The floor is decorative traction tile, white and pale blue, with rust-red geometric designs on it. In the middle of the floor, there is a hollow, transparent column, brightly illuminated from below. Four feet in diameter, it rises a dozen feet above the floor to a flat, truncated top that is opaque to prevent the light from hitting the dome overhead and ruining the pseudo-sky effect, and mirrored on the underside to reflect the light back down the column. Inside, thousands of tiny, faceted, plastic gems are kept constantly in motion by forced air currents, swirling up and down the inside of the transparent column--easy enough to do under Cerean gravity. Each spinning gem, scarcely larger than a pinhead, catches the light and scatters it around the room. It's a sort of macroscopic Tyndall effect that is quite impressive.

I told the headwaiter that I wanted Mr. Venuccio's table, and was escorted straight to it. Venuccio was waiting for me.

He stood up as I approached and gave me his stiff smile. He was short--not more than five foot six--and rather lean. I got the impression that his jacket was padded to make his shoulders appear wider than they were.

"Sit down, Mr. Oak," he said in that oddly forced voice of his. "Would you care for something to eat? Or a drink, perhaps?" He already had a drink, still three-quarters full.

"Not just yet. Later, maybe."

I had watched him as he stood up, and I went right on watching him while we sat down. For a man who was just in from Earth, he handled himself remarkably well under low gee. "We may order later," he said to the waiter.

As soon as the waiter was out of earshot, Venuccio leaned toward me, and suddenly he was all business.

One hand slid a banknote across the table. "Here is the hundred we agreed upon, Mr. Oak. I can state my proposition very quickly; you have only to listen."

I palmed the hundred and slipped it out of sight. "You have rented yourself a pair of ears, Mr. Venuccio."

"Very good." He kept his voice low and even. "Do you know anything of the Cronos Water Corporation?"

"Sure. Cronos is one of the companies that mines the rings of Saturn. A lot of the water here in the Belt comes from the ice they ship in. Why?"

"Not exactly," he said, ignoring my question. "They now have full control of their only rival, Titan Enterprises. I am a stockholder in Titan, and I am convinced that there was chicanery involved in the transfer of managership. The Cronos Corporation intends to raise the price of water in the Belt and make a lot of fast money."

"Does the Government know about this?"

"No. Even I can't prove it on paper. That's why I want you to go out there and get the information. It will have to be done quickly, before Cronos can file notice of new prices."

"What do you mean, 'quickly'?"

"You'll have to take the _Warbow_, which is leaving for Luna this evening, in order to catch the _Plunger_, which is leaving Luna for Saturn. There won't be another chance for three weeks, and that will be too late."

It was all very pretty. Saturn was on the other side of the System at the time, and it would be a nice, long trip.

I shook my head. "Sorry, Mr. Venuccio, but, as I told you, I'm already engaged. You'll have to get someone else."

He looked suddenly desperate. "I will pay you well. I'll buy out your present contract, and I'll pay you double for the work."

* * * * *

We spent the rest of his bought-and-paid-for hour haggling. Or, rather, _he_ haggled. I asked a lot of questions, and he tried to answer them in order to convince me that I should go, and I just asked more questions.

Exactly one hour from the time I'd been handed the hundred, I stood up. Venuccio was in the middle of a sentence, but I said: "Your hour's up, Mr. Venuccio. The answer is still no. Thank you for your business."

"But--" He started to rise, started to grasp my sleeve.

"Sit down." I didn't say it harshly or angrily, just firmly. He sat. "I don't want to be bothered by any more of this kind of thing. Ever again. Is that understood, Mr. Venuccio?"

He nodded wordlessly, and I left him sitting there.

As I moved toward the door, the headwaiter came towards me. Before he could say anything, I said: "Mr. Venuccio is taking care of the check."

"I know that, Oak," he said in a low voice. "We'll have him tailed when he leaves here." I never would have recognized him; it was Colonel Harrington Brock, wearing a plexiskin mask. "Got any idea of what he wants or who he's working for?"

"He wants me to leave Ceres, which would hold up the testing of McGuire. Offered me plenty for it, too. I'm pretty sure he's wearing a plexiskin mask, too; and I'm almost certain I've heard that voice before, but I can't quite place it."

"We'll find out," Brock said grimly.

Then he gave me a headwaiter's smile and went on his way. I went on out through the ornate doors of the _Seven Sisters_.

* * * * *

When I got back to my apartment, I looked it over carefully. It didn't look as though anyone had made an unauthorized search. I called Marty, and he assured me that the men watching the place had seen no one go in. But I was already fairly certain that the purpose of Mr. Venuccio's appointment had not been to lure me away from my apartment. He wanted me to go a lot farther than that.

I drank a couple more beers and smoked four or five cigarettes while I thought things through, then I got ready for bed, cut the lights, and went to sleep.

* * * * *

The next morning, I showed up at Viking's Testing Area Four with a hot breakfast inside me and my vac suit outside, ready to go sky-climbing with McGuire. McGuire's tall blue spire shone brightly in the sunlight, and looked, as he always did, as though ready to take the leap at any time.

There would be only five of us aboard. Besides myself, there was the short, chubby Ellsworth Felder, head of the robotics staff; the boyish Irwin Brentwood; the tough, taciturn Theodore Videnski; and the lovely Vivian Devereaux.

We made the last-minute checks to make sure everything was ready for the hop to Phobos, and then I took command.

"Plot a one-gee orbit to Phobos, McGuire. Take-off in five minutes."

"Yes, sir," said McGuire. He thought for a minute, then said: "Course plotted, sir."

"Good." I glanced at Brentwood, who had set up his instruments in a semipermanent installation for the trip. "Did you get that, Brentwood?" He nodded.

"All right, McGuire; we're going to be doing a few tests out in space, so, for right now, just follow the curve of the first half--up to five minutes before turnover. I'll let you know what to do then. Warn me at five minutes before turnover; otherwise, just keep going until I give you further orders."

"Yes, sir."

"How much longer until take-off time?"

"Three and a half minutes, sir."

"Begin a countdown at minus thirty seconds. One count every five seconds until minus five seconds, one count per second from there to zero. Lift at zero."

"Yes, sir."

We got everything settled, made sure there were no loose tools lying around, and sat down in the lounge chairs to wait for the lift. Pretty soon, McGuire said: "Minus thirty seconds." Finally, he said "Five ... four ... three ... two ... one ... zero."

And we all sank down in the chairs, under the pull of a full Standard Gee of acceleration--one thousand centimeters per second squared.

Ceres fell away from beneath us and slowly receded in the vast blackness of space.

I got up and stretched my muscles, and the others began doing the same. It takes time to get used to a full gee again after spending time in the Belt. Even in a flitterboat, you're in a bucket seat, lying on your back; you can't do any walking around in a flitterboat.

The change in Ellsworth Felder was remarkable. All that chubbiness that had ballooned out under the low gravity of Ceres and made him look like the Cheerful Cherub was pulled into sagging folds under the pull of the ship's acceleration. It made him look fifteen years older. None of the others seemed to be bothered much.

Felder kept his good humor, though. He didn't seem to know that there'd been any change in his appearance. He rubbed his hands together and said: "I, for one, always get hungry when the gravity goes up. May I suggest an early lunch?"

Nobody disagreed with him.

* * * * *

We settled into a routine pretty quickly. There wasn't much to do, since McGuire was taking care of the jobs that require a crew on an ordinary ship. To avoid boredom, we'd brought books and a few decks of cards and various other time-wasters. Several times, McGuire had to change course slightly because of rocks in his path, and Brentwood would always glance at his instruments when that happened, watching the squiggles that indicated McGuire's replotting.

Those occasional rocks were our reason for waiting before we tried any fancy tricks with McGuire. We wanted to get out into the relatively clear space between Mars and the Belt.

I beat Videnski out of a ten-spot at gin rummy, which, oddly enough, seemed to raise his respect for me. Vivian Deveraux talked with Brentwood for a while, then settled down to reading a book entitled "Some Applications of Discontinuity in Pattern Theory." Felder munched apples and read a magazine.

We ate another meal amid pleasant chatter, and I went into one of the two bedrooms for a nap. Miss Devereaux had one of the bedrooms all to herself. We men had drawn straws, and Felder and I had ended up with the bedroom while Videnski and Brentwood got the couches in the lounge.

I dozed off, but it was only a light doze. If there were an emergency, I would be the only one who could order McGuire around, and I wanted to be ready to wake up at a moment's notice.

I'd been snoozing for half an hour or so when I heard the noise that woke me up. I'd been lying with my face to the wall, and, for a moment, I couldn't figure out what had awakened me.

Then I heard it again. Just the faintest sound of a footstep near the bunk. I moved just in time. I sat up and turned to see Irwin Brentwood standing near me, holding a hypospray gun in one hand. I jumped him, knocking the gun aside, but his hand didn't lose his grip on it as we went down in a tangle.

He was a lot tougher than he looked. That boyish figure was all wiry muscle, and I was still dopey from sleep--not much, but just enough to impair my efficiency. I got a grip on his gun hand and began slowly twisting it while we rolled over and over on the floor. Then, somehow, he managed to get his other arm loose, and he drove an elbow into my throat.

There was an instant of blinding pain, and I heard the hypogun go _chuff!_ as my muscles tightened with the searing fire in my throat.

The next thing I knew, somebody was wiping my face with a cold, wet towel. I opened my eyes. It was Vivian Deveraux. I tried to say something, but nothing came out. There was only a terrible aching in my throat.

Videnski was standing near a chair where Brentwood was seated. Brentwood looked a little dazed; Videnski looked furious.

So did Felder, who was looking at the hypospray gun he was holding in his hand. "Who hired you, Brentwood?" he asked sharply. There was nothing Santa Clausy about him now.

"A man named Borodin," Brentwood said, in an uninterested voice.

I managed to force air past my bruised larynx. All that came out was a whisper. "What happened?"

"He tried to use pythantin on you," Felding said. "But he got the dose himself. That's why he's co-operative."

I nodded and stopped when a pain went through my throat. Pythantin would have made me receptive to any suggestions Brentwood wanted to make.

"What were you supposed to do after you dosed Daniel Oak?" Felder asked the electronicist.

"Tell him to order McGuire to change course, to go to Asteroid MJ3-1990."

I sat up. It was nice just to lie there and have Vivian bathe my brow, but I had more pressing things to do. I didn't feel in the pink of condition, and my throat hurt like hell, but I wasn't in too bad a shape.

"This Borodin," I whispered, "who was he working for?"

"I don't know," Brentwood said. "He didn't say."

* * * * *

We questioned him for another half hour, but it soon became apparent that he didn't know very much. He'd been offered a tremendous amount of money to do the job, and he didn't have the stamina to refuse it. It's guys like Brentwood who gave rise to the saying that every man has his price.

"What'll we do now?" Felding asked at last. "Go on to Phobos, or go back to Ceres?"

"Back to Ceres," I whispered. "Colonel Brock will know what to do with him."

I'd been uneasy ever since my calls to Brock and Marty that morning had disclosed that Venuccio had lost the men who were supposed to be tailing him. It's fairly easy to do on Ceres, if you know how.

"It won't mean much of a delay," I went on. "Ravenhurst can still have his big splash on Earth."

We herded Brentwood into the lounge and bound him to a chair. Then I said: "McGuire?"

"Yes, sir?"

"We're changing course. Return to Ceres."

And McGuire said: "I'm sorry, sir; I cannot obey any orders except those of Mr. Daniel Oak."

I just stood there for a long minute. "I am Daniel Oak," I whispered. But I was fairly certain that the declaration would do me no good whatever.

I was right. "No, sir. You are not Mr. Oak." McGuire is always polite to anyone who speaks to him, even if he doesn't regard that person as human.

"McGuire," I said patiently, "can you see Mr. Oak? Is he on board?"

"Yes, sir. I perceive him seated on the starboard couch in the main lounge."

"Fine. Then your directional audio pick-ups should be able to tell you where this voice is coming from."

"Yes, sir. It is coming from the approximate volume of space now occupied by Mr. Oak's head. But it is definitely not Mr. Oak's voice."

Felder put a hand over his eyes and moaned.

Videnski, who had carefully lighted a cigarette, blew out a cloud of smoke and looked at me. "I got to admit he's right. That is not Daniel Oak's voice."

"Which came first the chicken or the egg?" Vivian said abstractedly.

"What's that got to do with it?" Videnski asked with a scowl.

"A matter of definition," Vivian said. "Somewhere along the line of chicken evolution, it would have been possible to point at a specific bird and say, 'This is a chicken, but its parents were not chickens.' Now, do you define a chicken egg as an egg laid by a chicken or an egg that hatches out a chicken?"

"That's right," Felder said. "Do you define Oak's voice as any voice coming from Oak or as any voice that sounds like Oak's?"

"Well, you people ought to be able to answer that," I said. "Which is it?"

"Both," said Felder in a dull voice. "When you activated him by giving him his first order, he identified you and the voice as parts of the same unit. If you'd gone hoarse slowly, step-by-step, as it were, McGuire could have made logical adjustments to the change. But this sudden change is too big a jump for his logic to follow; he hasn't got the intermediate steps he needs to put it into syllogistic form."

There was another question I wanted to ask of McGuire. "McGuire, you are not supposed to allow Mr. Oak to come to any harm. Yet you did so. Why?" I was wondering how he'd managed to let Brentwood get away with his attack on me, without at least warning me.

"Mr. Oak was in no danger, sir. He has come to no harm."

"What about Brentwood's attack?"

"Mr. Brentwood did not attack Mr. Oak, sir; Mr. Oak attacked Mr. Brentwood."

The other three looked at me. "In a way, he's right," I said quickly. "When I saw Brentwood standing there with the hypospray, I jumped him."

"That's another one of our problems," said Felder. "How do you define 'harm'? If you broke your arm and a doctor tried to set it without an anesthetic, what would McGuire think when you yelled? Could you and I engage in a friendly boxing match? And since McGuire is supposed to _prevent_ harm, he has to be able to define it in advance. Oh, we've had a lot of fun with that one, I'll tell you." There was a thin edge of bitterness in his voice.

"You see what this means, don't you?" Videnski asked, eying me through a cloud of blue cigarette smoke.

"Sure," I whispered. "It means that McGuire will go right on accelerating until I tell him to stop, and I can't tell him that until my larynx heals--if it ever does."

"If it takes a week or two, which is likely," Vivian said, "we'll be saying good-by to the Solar System."

"By the time this heals," I said, "we'll be so far out we won't be able to come back. At that distance, the amount of sunlight McGuire will be able to pick up will be negligible, and the atomic fuel will be gone."

Nobody bothered to suggest that we call for help. McGuire had the communications system under control, too.

"One of us," I said, "had better think of something."

* * * * *

In the next several hours, every one of us thought of something, one way or another. Not that it did much good, because none of the ideas were worth much, directly. Indirectly, they told us plenty about what _not_ to try.

When Brentwood finally came out from under the effects of the pythantin, even he started thinking furiously about some way out of our predicament. We kept him locked in the bedroom for obvious reasons, but he had just as much stake in getting us back in control of McGuire as we did. After all, there's no law against industrial espionage, and we couldn't prove any charge of sabotage. Even a charge of attempted kidnapping or attempted larceny would be almost impossible to make stand up in court. With a good lawyer, he could get out from under an assault and battery charge. He'd lose his job with Viking, of course, but that was better than losing his life.