He towered over me, that sour face of his hard as rock, and only the cold blue eyes showing that he was two jumps ahead of me; that he understood all about the thing in my hand, and that I wasn't as innocent about it as I was trying to make him think.
"Mark it Exhibit 1," he rattled, "and add the name of the man to whom it belongs."
I straightened up. I tossed the good luck piece to my desk; it was like any ordinary good luck charm—a century-old 1900 50-cent piece—and under the satellite's one-third G it just floated down to the desk top like a leaf falling off a tree.
"How do I know whose it is?" I bluffed. "I'm boss of sixty men here, Kolomar. Besides the twenty that come up every week on the supply shuttle. And they're a different twenty each time at that—"
He stared me straight down.
"How long have you been here, Colonel Kenton? Ten years, isn't it?"
I didn't answer him. He knew. He'd been a shuttle-lieutenant when I'd first arrived on the satellite. He had a brother who was floor leader of the Senate. It was ten years later, and now he was Director-General of the Federal Bureau of Space Investigation. I was still a colonel. My brother was a schoolteacher.
"The crews here still have to sign contracts for five-year tricks. You've known two full crews, and whoever did this—" he turned his close-cropped head and nodded at the gaping Top Secret file in the blown safe "—is obviously a member of the crew you've got now. You know it; I know it. You've got a reputation, Kenton, for getting to know your men. They say you know 'em as if they were your own brothers in six months' time."
He didn't bother making it a verbal accusation.
"I could only—I couldn't even make a bad guess as to whose it is, sir."