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“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.

I know it because I work for the Political Survey Division.

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.”