"Well, it's up to Ava Longacre."
"Hope she's successful."
Hanson remembered the girl's new attitude. "She'll get him," he said.
Doctor Hanson would not have been able to locate Maculay at all. But he had equipped Ava with the same set of ideas, plus the desire to catch up with the physicist wherever he might have gone; because she was thus equipped, Ava went where Maculay would—and had—gone.
Melaxis, Venus, was a mad mixture of culture and frontier. It boiled with the same sort of teeming millions as New York City; it was a modern city, with white granite buildings, subways, and broad streets filled with racing traffic. But along these broad streets went the rough-shod colonists. They were, for the most part, cut of the same cloth as the colonists of Early America. Men who went to Venus to escape whatever particular hell they felt on earth. Men who objected to taxes, laws, responsibilities, oppressions, regimentations, legalities, religions, and the rest. They were a hardy lot, a bit quick on the trigger and quite inclined to stand upon their own personal integrity. They were just, but their justice was hard-boiled. A man was innocent—or he was guilty enough to get the works.
And it was among this churning metropolis that Ava Longacre landed to seek out Maculay.
Her progress from the spaceport to Maculay was not too arduous, since she knew about where to find him. Ava found a lavish hotel, dragged the bar, picked up a likely-looking character who wanted to visit a gambling hell. Enjoying a chance to show off before this interesting female, the character took her to a mid-town casino where, he told her, "Mac" was likely to be this night.
"Mac?" she asked.
"Mac is a gambler from way back," he told her. "Luckier than hell."