"It's not the money I'm yapping about—it's time. Those instruments and generators can't be duplicated anywhere except on Tellus, and even there it's all special-order stuff—oh, damn!"
CHAPTER THREE
"Clear Ether!"
During the following days Tellurian Pharmaceuticals entertained Cloud. Not insistently—Graves was an expert in such matters—but simply by letting him know that the planet was his. He could do anything he pleased; he could have any number of companions to help him do it. And as a result he did—within limits—exactly what Graves wanted him to do. 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 and found that the probability was an infinitesimal. And there were too many other incidents—all contributory. Six of them—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, and anyway, it didn't make any difference. Everybody knew that it took both hands and both feet to do what he did. Seven it was; and that made it virtually certain that accident was out.
But, if he was being delayed and hampered deliberately, who was doing it, and why? It didn't make any kind of 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, but he could not get any truly significant leads.
"Graves, have you got a spy-ray detector?" he asked boldly—and watchfully.