I found him standing with the ship's captain, inside the airlock, when I boarded the big, spherical space-liner. A tubby little man, with shoulders and arms he had never developed doing secretarial work, and a good-natured, not particularly intelligent face.
See the happy moron, he doesn't give a damn, I thought.
Then I took a second look at him. He might be happy, but he wasn't a moron. He just looked like one. Natalenko's people often did, as one of their professional assets.
I also noticed that he had a bulge under his left armpit the size of an eleven-mm army automatic.
He was, I'd been told, a native of New Texas. I gathered, after talking with him for a while, that he had been away from his home planet for over five years, was glad to be going back, and especially glad that he was going back under the protection of Solar League diplomatic immunity.
In fact, I rather got the impression that, without such protection, he wouldn't have been going back at all.
I made another discovery. My personal secretary, it seemed, couldn't read stenotype. I found that out when I gave him the tape I'd dictated aboard the cutter, to transcribe for me.
"Gosh, boss. I can't make anything out of this stuff," he confessed, looking at the combination shorthand-Braille that my voice had put onto the tape.
"Well, then, put it in a player and transcribe it by ear," I told him.
He didn't seem to realize that that could be done.