By that time, Jack Ravenhurst had been gone more than forty minutes. She could be almost anywhere on Ceres.
Colonel Brock was furious and so was I. I sneered openly at his assurance that the girl couldn't leave and then got sneered back at for letting other people do what was supposed to be my job. That phase only lasted for about a minute, though.
Then Colonel Brock muttered: "She must have had a plexiskin mask and a wig and the maintenance clothing in her purse. As I recall, it was a fairly good-sized one." He didn't say a word about how careless I had been to let her put such stuff in her purse. "All right," he went on, "we'll find her."
"I'm going to look around, too," I said. "I'll keep in touch with your office." I got out of there.
I got to a public phone as fast as I could, punched BANning 6226, and said: "Marty? Any word?"
"Not yet."
"I'll call back."
I hung up and scooted out of there.
I spent the next several hours pushing my weight around all over Ceres. As the personal representative of Shalimar Ravenhurst, who was manager of Viking Spacecraft, which was, in turn, the owner of Ceres, I had a lot of weight to push around. I had every executive on the planetoid jumping before I was through.