He cut me off with: "Mr. Oak, I have come all the way from Earth to speak to you. I assure you that this is most important. I would like very much to discuss it with you."
"Well, all right. Go ahead."
"Not over the phone. There is a possibility of its being tapped. I would like to meet you personally."
I took a couple of seconds out for thought. There are a lot of places on Earth where a phone line can be tapped with fairly cheap equipment simply because, for economic reasons, the phone company hasn't installed new equipment. But on Ceres, everything goes through a synchronized random scrambler circuit, just as it does in the more modern cities on Earth. Nobody's been able to crack it yet without a good-sized computer and a lot of luck. Still—
"Very well, Mr. Venuccio; if you could be here in half an hour—"
"No, no," he said quickly. "Your apartment might be bugged."
He had a point there. He couldn't know that I'd already made sure that my apartment was bug-proof. A self-contained broadcaster isn't much use inside Ceres; the metal walls stop almost any radiation before it can get very far. If my place was bugged, conductors of some kind would have to be used, and I'd gone over the place thoroughly to make sure there was no such thing.
In addition, I'd used one of my favorite gadgets: a non-random noise generator. Because a conversation is patterned, it is possible to pick it out of a "white," purely random background noise, even if the background is louder than the conversation. But my little sweetheart was a multiple recording of ten thousand different conversations, all meaningless, plus a lot of "white" noise. After the gadget is connected up, the walls vibrate with jabber that can't be analyzed even by the best of differential analyzers. Only in the hush area away from the walls is it quiet.
Trouble with a hunch something's wrong is ... it doesn't tell what's wrong!