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“If I take the assignment, Mr. Ravenhurst,” I told him, “I’ll be working for you. I can be bought, but once I’m bought I stay bought.

“Now, what seems to be your trouble?”

He frowned. “Well, now, let’s get one thing settled: Are you working for me, or not?”

“I won’t know that until I find out what the job is.”

His frown deepened. “Now, see here; this is very confidential work. What happens if I tell you and you decide not to work for me?”

I sighed. “Ravenhurst, right now, you’re paying me to listen to you. Even if I don’t take your job, I’m going to bill you for expenses and time to come all the way out here. So, as far as listening is concerned, I’m working for you now. If I don’t like the job, I’ll still forget everything I’m told. All right?”

He didn’t like it, but he had no choice. “All right,” he said. He polished off his glass of Madeira and refilled it. My own glass was still nearly full.

“Mr. Oak,” he began, “I have two problems. One is minor, the other major. But I have attempted to blow the minor problem up out of proportion, so that all the people here at Raven’s Rest think that it is the only problem. They think that I brought you out here for that reason alone.

“But all that is merely cover-up for the real problem.”

“Which is?” I prompted.

He leaned forward again. Apparently, it was the only exercise he ever got. “You’re aware that Viking Spacecraft is one of the corporations under the management of Ravenhurst Holdings?”

I nodded. Viking Spacecraft built some of the biggest and best spacecraft in the System. It held most of Ceres–all of it, in fact, except the Government Reservation. It had moved out to the asteroids a long time back, after the big mining concerns began cutting up the smaller asteroids for metal. The raw materials are easier to come by out here than they are on Earth, and it’s a devil of a lot easier to build spacecraft under low-gee conditions than it is under the pull of Earth or Luna or Mars.

“Do you know anything about the experimental robotic ships being built on Eros?” Ravenhurst asked.

“Not much,” I admitted. “I’ve heard about them, but I don’t know any of the details.” That wasn’t quite true, but I’ve found it doesn’t pay to tell everybody everything you know.

“The engineering details aren’t necessary,” Ravenhurst said. “Besides, I don’t know them, myself. The point is that Viking is trying to build a ship that will be as easy to operate as a flitterboat–a one-man cargo vessel. Perhaps even a completely automatic job for cargo, and just use a one-man crew for the passenger vessels. Imagine how that would cut the cost of transportation in the Solar System! Imagine how it would open up high-speed cargo transfer if an automatic vessel could accelerate at twenty or twenty-five gees to turnover!”

I’ll give Ravenhurst this: He had a light in his eyes that showed a real excitement about the prospect he was discussing, and it wasn’t due entirely to the money he might make.

“Sounds fine,” I said. “What seems to be the trouble?”

His face darkened half a shade. “The company police suspect sabotage, Mr. Oak.”

“How? What kind?”

“They don’t know. Viking has built six ships of that type–the McGuire class, the engineers call it. Each one has been slightly different than the one before, of course, as they ironed out the bugs in their operation. But each one has been a failure. Not one of them would pass the test for space-worthiness.”

“Not a failure of the drive or the ordinary mechanisms of the ship, I take it?”

Ravenhurst sniffed. “Of course not. The brain. The ships became, as you might say, non compos mentis. As a matter of fact, when the last one simply tried to burrow into the surface of Eros by reversing its drive, one of the roboticists said that a coroner’s jury would have returned a verdict of ‘suicide while of unsound mind’ if there were inquests held for spaceships.”