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“Thanks. One more thing: why do you think anybody will swallow the idea that your daughter needs a private bodyguard to escort her to Braunsville?”

His smile broadened a little. “You have not met my daughter, Mr. Oak. Jaqueline takes after me in a great many respects, not the least of which is her desire to have things her own way and submit to no man’s yoke, as the saying goes. I have had a difficult time with her, sir; a difficult time. It is and has been a matter of steering a narrow course between the Scylla of breaking her spirit with too much discipline and the Charybdis of allowing her to ruin her life by letting her go hog wild. She is seventeen now, and the time has come to send her to a school where she will receive an education suitable to her potentialities and abilities, and discipline which will be suitable to her spirit.

“Your job, Mr. Oak, will be to make sure she gets there. You are not a bodyguard in the sense that you must protect her from the people around her. Quite the contrary, they may need protection from her. You are to make sure she arrives in Braunsville on schedule. She is perfectly capable of taking it in her head to go scooting off to Earth if you turn your back on her.”

Still smiling, he refilled his glass. “Do have some more Madeira, Mr. Oak. It’s really an excellent year.”

I let him refill my glass.

“That, I think, will cover your real activities well enough. My daughter will, of course, take a tour of the plant on Ceres, which will allow you to do whatever work is necessary.”

He smiled at me.

I didn’t smile back.

“Up till now, this sounded like a pretty nice assignment,” I said. “But I don’t want it now. I can’t take care of a teenage girl with a desire for the bright lights of Earth while I investigate a sabotage case.”

I knew he had an out; I was just prodding him into springing it.

He did. “Of course not. My daughter is not as scatterbrained as I have painted her. She is going to help you.”

“Help me?”

“Exactly. You are ostensibly her bodyguard. If she turns up missing, you will, of course, leave no stone unturned to find her.” He chuckled. “And Ceres is a fairly large stone.”

I thought it over. I still didn’t like it too well, but if Jaqueline wasn’t going to be too much trouble to take care of, it might work out. And if she did get to be too much trouble, I could see to it that she was unofficially detained for a while.

“All right, Mr. Ravenhurst,” I said, “you’ve got yourself a man for both jobs.”

“Both?”

“I find out who is trying to sabotage the McGuire ship, and I baby-sit for you. That’s two jobs. And you’re going to pay for both of them.”

“I expected to,” said Shalimar Ravenhurst.

Fifteen minutes later, I was walking into the room where I’d left my vac suit. There was a girl waiting for me.

She was already dressed in her vac suit, so there was no way to be sure, but she looked as if she had a nice figure underneath the suit. Her face was rather unexceptionally pretty, a sort of nice-girl-next-door face. Her hair was a reddish brown and was cut fairly close to the skull; only a woman who never intends to be in a vac suit in free fall can afford to let her hair grow.

“Miss Ravenhurst?” I asked.

She grinned and stuck out a hand. “Just call me Jack. And I’ll call you Dan. O.K.?”

I grinned and shook her hand because there wasn’t much else I could do. Now I’d met the Ravenhursts: A father called Shalimar and a daughter called Jack.

And a spaceship named McGuire.

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