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“Up there?” I asked.

“Well, Colonel Brock is a little worried. He says that Miss Ravenhurst is being sent to a school on Luna and doesn’t want to go. He got to thinking about it, and he’s afraid that she might try to leave Ceres–sneak off you know.”

I knew.

“We’ve got a guard posted at the airlocks leading to the field, but Colonel Brock is afraid she might come up somewhere else and jump overland.”

“I see,” I said. I hadn’t realized that Brock was that close to panic. What was eating him?

There must be something, but I couldn’t figure it. Even the Intelligence Corps of the Political Survey Division can’t get complete information every time.

After all, if he didn’t want the girl to steal a flitterboat and go scooting off into the diamond-studded velvet, all he’d have to do would be to guard the flitterboats. I turned slowly and looked around. It seemed as though he’d done that, too.

And then my estimation of Brock suddenly leaped up–way up. Just a guard at each flitterboat wouldn’t do. She could talk her way into the boat and convince the guard that he really shouldn’t tell anyone that she had gone. By the time he realized he’d been conned, she’d be thousands of miles away.

And since a boat guard would have to assume that any approaching person might be the boat’s legitimate owner, he’d have to talk to whomever it was that approached. Kaput.

But a perimeter guard would be able to call out an alarm if anyone came from the outside without having to talk to them.

And the guards watching the air locks undoubtedly had instructions to watch for any female that even vaguely matched Jack’s description. A vac suit fits too tightly to let anyone wear more than a facial disguise, and Brock probably–no, definitely–had his tried-and-true men on duty there. The men who had already shown that they were fairly resistant to Jack Ravenhurst’s peculiar charm. There probably weren’t many with such resistance, and the number would become less as she grew older.

That still left me with my own problem. I had already lost too much time, and I had to go a long way. Ceres is irregular in shape, but it’s roughly four hundred and eighty miles in diameter and a little over fifteen hundred miles in circumference.

Viking Test Field Four, where McGuire 7 was pointing his nose at the sky, was about twenty-five miles away, as the crow flies. But of course I couldn’t go by crow.

By using a low, fairly flat, jackrabbit jump, a man in good condition can make a twelve hundred foot leap on the surface of Ceres, and each jump takes him about thirty seconds. At that rate, you can cover twenty-five miles in less than an hour. That’s what I’d intended on doing, but I couldn’t do it with all this radar around the field. I wouldn’t be stopped, of course, but I’d sure tip my hand to Colonel Brock–the last thing I wanted to do.

But there was no help for it. I’d have to go back down and use the corridors, which meant that I’d arrive late–after Jack Ravenhurst got there, instead of before.

There was no time to waste, so I got below as fast as possible, repacked my vac suit, and began firing myself through the corridors as fast as possible. It was illegal, of course; a collision at twenty-five miles an hour can kill quickly if the other guy is coming at you at the same velocity. There were times when I didn’t dare break the law, because some guard was around, and, even if he didn’t catch me, he might report in and arouse Brock’s interest in a way I wouldn’t like.

I finally got to a tubeway, but it stopped at every station, and it took me nearly an hour and a half to get to Viking Test Area Four.

At the main door, I considered–for all of five seconds–the idea of simply telling the guard I had to go in. But I knew that, by now, Jack was there ahead of me. No. I couldn’t just bull my way in. Too crude. Too many clues.