FullReads

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.