“I’ve got to finger someone but only the right one or my head’s handed to me.”

“In thin slices. You’re beginning to understand me, Max.”

In a long lifetime of looking ugly, Rog Crinton had never looked uglier. The only comfort I got out of staring at him was the realization that he was married, too, and that he lived with his wife at Marsport all year round. And does he deserve that. Maybe I’m hard on him, but he deserves it.

I put in a quick call to Flora, as soon as Rog was out of sight.

She said, “Well?”

I said, “Baby, honey, it’s something I can’t talk about, but I’ve got to do it, see? Now you hang on, I’ll get it over with if I have to swim the Grand Canal to the icecap in my underwear, see? If I have to claw Phobos out of the sky. If I have to cut myself in pieces and mail myself parcel post.”

“Gee,” she said, “if I thought I was going to have to wait—”

I winced. She just wasn’t the type to respond to poetry.

Actually, she was a simple creature of action—But after all, if I was going to be drifting through low-gravity in a sea of jasmine perfume with Flora, poetry-response is not the type of qualification I would consider most indispensable.

I said urgently, “Just hold on, Flora. I won’t be any time at all. I’ll make it up to you.”

I was annoyed, sure, but I wasn’t worried as yet. Rog hadn’t more than left me when I figured out exactly how I was going to tell the guilty man from the others.

It was easy. I should have called Rog back and told him, but there’s no law against wanting egg in your beer and oxygen in your air. It would take me five minutes and then off I would go to Flora; a little late, maybe, but with a promotion, a raise, and a slobbering kiss from the Service on each cheek.

You see, it’s like this. Big industrialists don’t go space-hopping much; they use trans-video reception. When they do go to some ultra-high interstellar conference, as these three were probably going, they take Spaceoline. For one thing, they don’t have enough hops under their belt to risk doing without. For another, Spaceoline is the expensive way of doing it and industrialists do things the expensive way. I know their psychology.