“Parabolic mike detector?” he said after a pause.
“Yes. And it’s okay. No one is eavesdropping right now.” Clarke folded the gadget and put it away. “Sorry, but I had to make absolutely certain, because of what I want to ask you. Turpin, how well do you know these service crews of EG?”
“I know some of them in fair detail,” Turpin said, wondering if he was about to receive a gift from the gods. It certainly sounded as though he was. “As to this one, thirtythree-well, rather less than some.”
“I noticed you call the crew-boss by his first name,” Clarke probed.
“Oh, that’s company policy,” Turpin said with an easy smile. “Executives call crew-bosses by their first names, their juniors by their surnames. It goes for both sexes.”
.. “I see. But it’s rather an unusual name, isn’t it-Gunnar?”
AM
Smoothly, never saying anything outright that might be interpreted as an accusation, Turpin laid down parameters for Clarke’s thinking: someone who felt handicapped by a foreign name. possibly suspecting that he’d been passed over for promotion because of it, might so easily have listened to blandishments from another company, hoping to augment the income he regarded as less than his just due, . . . He managed to refer to EG’s excellent record on industrial espionage, then to the intense competition against which the firm had secured the automatic defences contract, then to the clean bill that every House committee had given them after an investigation, and all the time Clarke listened intently, now and then making a further check with his detector.
At last be- gave a thoughtful nod. He said, “I guess you must have studied Sandstrom’s file.”
“Seen it, certainly,” Turpin said, blinking. “Can’t swear to having memorised it, naturally.”
“I seem to recall, though”-with a frown-“he gave one special reason for-moving into high-grade electronics, didn’t he?”
“Ah . . .” Simultaneous, a search of memory and preparation of an adequate excuse for not remembering. Memmory dealt him a trump just in time. “Why, yesl I do know what you meanl Didn’t it have something to do with a childhood fascination with the space programme?”
“So he deposed,” Clarke agreed, slipping his detector back in his pocket for the fourth or fifth time. And then, just as Turpin was preparing to congratulate him on being able to pick that single entry out of heaven knew how many security files-which, indeed, was a rather sobering feat and indicated just why Clarke was as high as he was in the hierarchy of his force-he did something that took Turpin absolutely by surprise. He bent to the ground, caught up a small rock, and hurled it as far as he could.
“Did you see that go into orbit?” he demanded savagely. And added, before Turpin could frame words to reply with: “Come on-better get back and see if my men have turned up anything else.”
A )kV111 A
“I guess that’s the place,” Lora said doubtfully, slowing the car alongside a vacant parking-bay and pointing across the street to an ugly old building with a hoverhalt on its roof.
“Yell” she added, craning to read a sign pointing to it. “I remember the name. Right first time-not bad, lm?”
She backed into the bay and jumped out. Copying her, Sheklov stared at the building. It was shabby, with great cracks in its walls that were only prevented from spreading by the reinforced concrete beams doing double duty as supports for the steel stairs up to the hoverhalt. They had arrived at the same moment as a hovercar, and he could see the walls trembling under the extra load.
He shook his head. He hoped he wasn’t going to have to spend long in this paradoxical country: so rich, yet with so many people in it prepared to suffer intolerable indignities)
Having stuffed five bucks into the nearby meter-the regular fee for two hours’ parking on a Sunday-Lora caught his arm and hurried him across the street. On the steep stairs of the hoverhalt he lost sight of her as the hovercar discharged a crowd of people numbering only about twenty but blocking the width of the steps as efficiently as a small army, then caught up with her again on the landing outside the topmost apartment, where she was already ringing the bell.