Walt shook his head. "He'd assume that someone would be rambling up here off and on to look at the works. He'd automatically choose another place if he thought we had this one under observation."
Walt stopped at the thermostat and with a screwdriver he removed the face of the instrument. He reached down into his tool-pocket and took out a long, slender pair of tweezers. He probed in the depths of the thermostat and come out with a tiny square of paper.
He held it up for Christine to see.
"Stickum on one side held it until the contacts closed," he said. "Then it made a darned good insulator. Betcha this slip of paper came from Terran Electric!"
"Now what?" asked Christine.
"I'm going to call Don," said Walt. "Iffen and providen we can find a live jack." He took a handset from his kit of tools and plugged it into the jack below the thermostat. He jiggled a tiny switch and pressed a little red button, and after a full three minutes, he said "Damn," under his breath and dropped the handset back into his tool kit.
"Nobody's paying much attention to the telephone from this section of Venus Equilateral any more," he said. "There's a live one in the cold room, though. Let's take a look around first."
"Which way?"
Walt thought for a moment. "We set the cold room about one-third of the way from the North End because it was as far from the rest of the station's operating and living section as possible while commensurable with being reasonably close to the labs," he said. "We're not very far—perhaps a hundred yards from the axis. We're about a mile from the North End.
"Now, if I were Kingman, I'd set up shop in some place as far from the operating section as possible commensurable with an out of the way place—and definitely far from the laboratories. Then I'd select a place as far from me as I could get without too much danger of having the effect detected."