He was five feet ten, an inch shorter than I am, and lean almost to the point of emaciation. His scarred, hard-bitten face looked as though it had gotten that way when he tried to kiss a crocodile. "Hello, Brock," I said. "What's new?" Jack gave him a meaningless smile and said: "Hello, colonel." She was obviously not very impressed with either of us. "Mind if I sit?" Brock asked. We didn't, so he sat. "I'm sorry I missed you at the spaceport," Brock said seriously, "but I had several of my boys there with their eyes open." He was quite obviously addressing Jack, not me. "It's all right," Jack said. "I'm not going anywhere this time." She looked at me and gave me an odd grin. "I'm going to stay home and be a good girl this time around." Colonel Brock's good-natured chuckle sounded about as genuine as the ring of a lead nickel. "Oh, you're no trouble, Miss Ravenhurst." "Thank you, kind sir; you're a poor liar." She stood up and smiled sweetly. "Will you gentlemen excuse me a moment?" We would and did. Colonel Brock and I watched her cross the room and disappear through a door. Then he turned to look at me, giving me a wry grin and shaking his head a little sadly. "So you got saddled with Jack the Ripper, eh, Oak?" "Is she that bad?" His chuckle was harsher this time, and had the ring of truth. "You'll find out. Oh, I don't mean she's got the morals of a cat or anything like that. So far as I know, she's still waiting for Mister Right to come along." "Drugs?" I asked. "Liquor?" "A few drinks now and then--nothing else," Brock said. "No, it's none of the usual things. It isn't what _she_ does that counts; it's what she talks other people into doing. She's a convincer." "That sounds impressive," I said. "What does it mean?" His hard face looked wolfish, "I ought to let you find out for yourself. But, no; that wouldn't be professional courtesy, and it wouldn't be ethical." "Brock," I said tiredly, "I have been given more runarounds in the past week than Mercury has had in the past millennium. I expect clients to be cagey, to hold back information, and to lie. But I didn't expect it of you. Give." He nodded brusquely. "As I said, she's a convincer. A talker. She can talk people into doing almost anything she wants them to." "For instance?" "Like, for instance, getting all the patrons at the _Bali_ to do a snake dance around the corridors in the altogether. The Ceres police broke it up, but she was nowhere to be found." He said it so innocently that I knew he'd been the one to get her out of the mess. "And the time," he continued, "that she almost succeeded in getting a welder named Plotkin elected Hereditary Czar of Ceres. She'd have succeeded, too, if she hadn't made the mistake of getting Plotkin himself up to speak in front of his loyal supporters. After that, everybody felt so silly that the movement fell apart."