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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.

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 attache 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 attache 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.