“Oh, there you are, pretty boy. Business is too slack tonight. Some of the girls say you have something beautifully new.” She looked at him seductively, stroking his arm. “Please, pretty please, can I come in with you and we…”

My screen flashed out. The interference roared.

But I had a lot of other things to puzzle over. He was interested in his usual hobby, speed. He was interested in an executive retreat in the wilderness. I felt I should be able to piece it together.

But even though I labored into the Turkish dawn, I could not figure out how you would run a racing car in a tree-infested wilderness. Or why.

It was three in the afternoon in Turkey when I arose. Not really thinking, still numb with sleep, I walked into my secret office and, like a fool, looked into the view-screen.

I nearly fainted!

I was staring twenty stories straight down!

I felt like I was going to fall!

The people were small spots in the street below; the cars were toys!

The strain I had been under was telling. The shock was too much. I pulled my eyes away and shuddered into a chair. After a few minutes, I got control of my stomach and dared take another look.

What in Hells was he up to?

He was on a cupola that crowned the Gracious Palms. Fifteen feet below him, firmly on the asphalt roof, a whore in a green jump suit was steadying a line up to him.

He was rigging a TV antenna kit! That’s what it read on the top of the box he was steadying on his knees:

He had inset the feet into the concrete top of the cupola. He was now adjusting the booster. He glanced around and it was visible that several nearby buildings had them. He must have had it sent out for the day before.

Oho! So he was having signal trouble, too! But wait, this must mean that the TV wasn’t working when my equipment wasn’t working, so those girls in his room weren’t there to watch TV!

He completed the upper installation and then, box under his arm, he started down a line.

I had him. Code break! It was a spacer safety line! He was carrying Voltarian gear in his suitcases!

He was working with a stapler, fastening the TV cable to the stone as he descended.

He got to the bottom and turned toward the woman. There she was, a New York whore, holding a spacer safety line manufactured in Industrial City, Voltar! I watched like a hawk. Did she realize it? Everything depended on that! I could simply order him off the mission and court-martialed!

“Here’s your clothesline, honey,” she said. “Now, what do I do?”

He took it, gave it the snap that causes it to come loose at the top and caught it in coils around his wrist as it fell — a typical show-off spacer gesture: I don’t know how they do it.

“You just uncoil this reel, Martha. Just walk along and I’ll fasten it down as we go.”

“Okay, dearie,” she said. And along they went. She had a stick through the reel and Heller was snubbing it under the parapet with the stapler.

Then, I realized something else. Heller must know where the interference was coming from. The roof he was laying the cable on was about three hundred and fifty feet long, perhaps double the building width. The antenna was outside the interference zone. I tried to plot from this where and what the interference might be, for I was not only very curious about what he did in that suite, I also had to know where he could have hidden the platen. I got all tangled up.

The girl had come to the far end of the roof. “Now what do I do, pretty boy?”

“You go down to my room and open the double doors and stand on the balcony and steady the safety line again.”

She ran off. Heller tied the reel to the safety line and then paid it out so that it landed on his balcony below. The girl came out on the balcony and got the reel.

He pegged the upper end of the safety line into the stone parapet, stepped over the edge…

I turned my face away. This guy was driving me mad! He had no sense. He didn’t give a (bleep) about height or his neck. I heard the staples going into the vertical wall but I wouldn’t look. I knew I would see the tiny people and cars far too far below!

The sound of a disintegrator drill. I dared look. He had snapped the spacer safety line loose and was putting a cable hole in the wall. With a Voltarian disintegrator drill!

I watched intently to see if I got a reaction from the whore. There she was watching a tiny palm-sized gadget, with nothing spinning, bite the exact sized hole through the wall. No chips or sparks. A miracle on this planet. All she had to say was “Hey, man, look at that gimmick eat up stone!” and I had him!

She said, “I’ll go call room service to send you some breakfast, dearie.” And she went inside the living room. It depressed me.

Heller went inside, put the base plate together and shortly had it all connected with the TV. He turned the set on. He fiddled with the radio antenna rotator. The difference in reception showed it was turning.

“Hey, great picture,” said the whore. “We done it! They’ll send breakfast up right away.”

Heller neated up his kit. Aha, now I would see where he stowed his gear. He certainly would hide a safety line and disintegrator drill! And I had no interference!

He was fastening the tool kit up. OH! Right on the face of the kit, big as life, it said:

It said it in Voltarian script but it said it, just like that!

He tossed the kit on the sofa. It landed face up!

He went into the bathroom and kicked off his tennis shoes and the baseball exercise suit. He stepped into the massage shower.

The massage drops were hammering at him but I could hear somebody banging cabinets in the bathroom. All that woman, Martha, had to do was notice that kit and come in and say “Hey, what’s this writing? It looks like something not of this planet,” and he would be open to being shot!

The shower door opened. Her hand was in view. She didn’t have her jump suit on. She was holding a cake of soap. She said, “Honey, let me wash your back before we…”

The interference came on!

I railed around. The screen simply flashed in jagged lines and the sound roared. It was actively preventing me from getting enough data on that suite and where he stowed his gear and thus blocking me from embarking on my raid for the platen and the end of Heller. The minutes stretched agonizingly into half an hour.

Then, it was off!

Heller was sitting on the couch drinking coffee. He was all alone in the suite.

There was a knock on the door and Heller said, in that penetrating Fleet voice, “Come in, it isn’t locked.”

In came a mob of tailors!

They started displaying bolts of fine fabrics, summer silk and mohair, tweeds, gabardine, shirt silk, passing each one under Heller’s nose.

The lead tailor, with Heller’s permission, sat down on the couch with a book of styles. He found he was sitting on something, reached under him and picked up the tool kit. All he had to do was inspect the inscription and some of those odd tools and he would know he was talking to an extraterrestrial!

“Now, we’ve brought a throwaway suit you can wear today, young sir. But we must choose both a society wardrobe and a college wardrobe. Now, it so happens that the styles this autumn will be ever so slightly gauche. Neat but gauche. In this Ives St. Giles book, we can see that the collar…”