“You won’t lose anything, though,” the officer said, helpfully. “Everything’s covered, you know.”
“It isn’t the money I’m yowling about—it’s the time. That apparatus can’t be duplicated anywhere except on Tellus, and even there it’s all special-order stuff. OH, DAMN!” and Cloud strode away toward his hotel.
During the following days TPI entertained him royally. Not insistently—Graves was an expert in such matters—but simply by giving him the keys to the planet. He could do anything he pleased. He could have all the company he wanted, male or female, to help him to do it. Thus he did—within limits—just about what Graves wanted him to do; and, in spite of the fact that he did not want to enjoy life, he liked it.
One evening, however, he refused to play a slot machine, explaining to his laughing companion that the laws of chance were pretty thoroughly shackled in such mechanisms—and the idle remark backfired. What was the mathematical probability that all the things that had happened to him could have happened by pure chance?
That night he analyzed his data. Six incidents; the probability was extremely small. Seven, if he counted his arm. If it had been his left arm—jet back! Since he wrote with his right hand, very few people knew that he was left-handed. Seven it was; and that made it virtually certain. Accident was out.
But if he was being delayed and hampered deliberately, who was doing it, and why? It didn’t make sense. Nevertheless, the idea would not down.
He was a trained observer and an analyst second to none. Therefore he soon found out that he was being shadowed wherever he went, but he could not get any really significant leads. Wherefore:
“Graves, have you got a spy-ray detector?” he asked boldly—and watchfully.
The fat man did not turn a hair. “No, nobody would want to spy on me. Why?”
“I feel jumpy. I don’t know why anybody would be spying on me, either, but—I’m neither a Lensman nor an esper, but I’d swear that somebody’s peeking over my shoulder half the time. I think I’ll go over to the Patrol station and borrow one.”