ed to look at me, giving me a
wry grin and shaking his head a little sadly. "So you got saddled with
Jack the Ripper, eh, Oak?"

"Is she that bad?"

His chuckle was harsher this time, and had the ring of truth. "You'll
find out. Oh, I don't mean she's got the morals of a cat or anything
like that. So far as I know, she's still waiting for Mister Right to
come along."

"Drugs?" I asked. "Liquor?"

"A few drinks now and then--nothing else," Brock said. "No, it's none
of the usual things. It isn't what _she_ does that counts; it's what
she talks other people into doing. She's a convincer."

"That sounds impressive," I said. "What does it mean?"

His hard face looked wolfish, "I ought to let you find out for
yourself. But, no; that wouldn't be professional courtesy, and it
wouldn't be ethical."

"Brock," I said tiredly, "I have been given more runarounds in the
past week than Mercury has had in the past millennium. I expect
clients to be cagey, to hold back information, and to lie. But I
didn't expect it of you. Give."

He nodded brusquely. "As I said, she's a convincer. A talker. She can
talk people into doing almost anything she wants them to."

"For instance?"

"Like, for instance, getting all the patrons at the _Bali_ to do a
snake dance around the corridors in the altogether. The Ceres police
broke it up, but she was nowhere to be found."

He said it so innocently that I knew he'd been the one to get her out
of the mess.

"And the time," he continued, "that she almost succeeded in getting a
welder named Plotkin elected Hereditary Czar of Ceres. She'd have
succeeded, too, if she hadn't made the mistake of getting Plotkin
himself up to speak in front of his loyal supporters. After that,
everybody felt so silly that the movement fell apart."

He went on, reciting half a dozen more instances of the girl's ability
to influence people without winning friends. None of them were new to
me; they were all on file in the Political Survey Division of the
United Nations Government on Earth, plus several more which Colonel
Brock either neglected to tell me or wasn't aware of himself.

But I listened with interest; after all, I wasn't supposed to know any
of these things. I am just a plain, ordinary, "confidential
expediter". That's what it says on the door of my office in New York,
and that's what it says on my license. All very legal and very
dishonest.

The Political Survey Division is very legal and very dish