aggy protective clothing of a maintenance man.

By that time, Jack Ravenhurst had been gone more than forty minutes.
She could be almost anywhere on Ceres.

Colonel Brock was furious and so was I. I sneered openly at his
assurance that the girl couldn't leave and then got sneered back at
for letting other people do what was supposed to be my job. That
phase only lasted for about a minute, though.

Then Colonel Brock muttered: "She must have had a plexiskin mask and a
wig and the maintenance clothing in her purse. As I recall, it was a
fairly good-sized one." He didn't say a word about how careless I had
been to let her put such stuff in her purse. "All right," he went on,
"we'll find her."

"I'm going to look around, too," I said. "I'll keep in touch with your
office." I got out of there.

* * * * *

I got to a public phone as fast as I could, punched BANning 6226, and
said: "Marty? Any word?"

"Not yet."

"I'll call back."

I hung up and scooted out of there.

I spent the next several hours pushing my weight around all over
Ceres. As the personal representative of Shalimar Ravenhurst, who was
manager of Viking Spacecraft, which was, in turn, the owner of Ceres,
I had a lot of weight to push around. I had every executive on the
planetoid jumping before I was through.

Colonel Brock, of course, was broiling in his own juices. He managed
to get hold of me by phone once, by calling a Dr. Perelson whom I was
interviewing at the time.

The phone chimed, Perelson said, "Excuse me," and went to answer. I
could hear his voice from the other room.

"Mr. Daniel Oak? Yes; he's here. Well, yes. Oh, all sorts of
questions, colonel." Perelson's voice was both irritated and worried.
"He says Miss Ravenhurst is missing; is that so? Oh? Well, does this
man have any right to question me this way? Asking me? About
everything!... How well I know the girl, the last time I saw
her--things like that. Good heavens, we've hardly met!" He was getting
exasperated now. "But does he have the authority to ask these
questions? Oh. Yes. Well, of course, I'll be glad to co-operate in any
manner I can ... Yes ... Yes. All right, I'll call him."

I got up from the half-reclining angle I'd been making with the wall,
and shuffled across the room as Dr. Perelson stuck his head around the
corner and said, "It's for you." He looked as though someone had put
aluminum hydrogen sulfate in his mouthwash.

I pick