bargain. Go, and sin no more."

"I'll buzz you back before I go in," I said, and hung up.

* * * * *

Playing games inside a crowded asteroid is not the same as playing
games in, say, Honolulu or Vladivostok, especially when that game is a
combination of hide-and-seek and ring-around-the-Rosie. The trouble is
lack of communication. Radio contact is strictly line-of-sight inside
a hunk of metal. Radar beams can get a little farther, but a man has
to be an expert billiards player to bank a reflecting beam around very
many corners, and even that would depend upon the corridors being
empty, which they never are. To change the game analogy again, it
would be like trying to sink a ninety-foot putt across Times Square on
New Year's Eve.

Following somebody isn't anywhere near as easy as popular fiction
might lead you to believe. Putting a tail on someone whose spouse
wants divorce evidence is relatively easy, but even the best
detectives can lose a man by pure mischance. If the tailee, for
instance, walks into a crowded elevator and the automatic computer
decides that the car is filled to the limit, the man who's tailing him
will be left facing a closed door. Something like that can happen by
accident, without any design on the part of the tailee.

[Illustration]

If you use a large squad of agents, all in radio contact with one
another, that kind of loss can be reduced to near zero by simply
having a man covering every possible escape route.

But if the tailee knows, or even suspects, that he's being followed,
wants to get away from his tail, and has the ability to reason
moderately well, it requires an impossibly large team to keep him in
sight. And if that team has no fast medium of communication, they're
licked at the onset.

In this case, we were fairly certain of Jack Ravenhurst's future
actions, and so far our prophecies had been correct ... but if she
decided to shake her shadows, fun would be had by all.

And as long as I had to depend on someone else to do my work for me, I
was going to be just the teenchiest bit concerned about whether they
were doing it properly.

I decided it was time to do my best to imitate a cosmic-ray particle,
and put on a little speed through the corridors that ran through the
subsurface of Ceres.

My vac suit was in my hotel room. One of the other agents had picked
it up from my flitterboat and packed it carefully into a small attache
case. I'd