"It only pays off for the lucky few, eh, Max?" MacIntosh asked slyly. Hawkes grinned. "Some of us make out all right. You have to have the knack, though. You can get awful hungry otherwise. Come on, kid--let's go up a little higher, now. Up to the televector files. Thanks for the help, Hinesy. You're a pal." "Just doin' my job," MacIntosh said. "See you tonight as usual?" "I doubt it," Hawkes replied. "I'm going to take the night off. I have it coming to me." "That leaves the coast clear for us amateurs, doesn't it? Maybe I'll come out ahead tonight." Hawkes smiled coldly. "Maybe you will. Let's go, kid." They took the lift tube outside and rode it as high as it went. It opened out into the biggest room Alan had ever seen, bigger even than the main registry downstairs--a vast affair perhaps a hundred feet high and four hundred feet on the side. And every inch of those feet was lined with computer elements. "This is the nerve-center of the world," Hawkes said as they went in. "By asking the right questions you can find out where anybody in the world happens to be at this very moment." "How can they do that?" Hawkes nudged a tiny sliver of metal embedded in a ring on his finger. "Here's my televector transmitter. Everyone who has a work card or Free Status carries one, either on a ring or in a locket round his neck or somewhere else. Some people have them surgically embedded in their bodies. They give off resonance waves, each one absolutely unique; there's about one chance in a quadrillion of a duplicate pattern. The instruments here can pick up a given pattern and tell you exactly where the person you're looking for is." "So we can find Steve without much trouble!" "Probably." Hawkes' face darkened. "I've known it to happen that the televector pattern picks up a man who's been at the bottom of the sea for five years. But don't let me scare you; Steve's probably in good shape." He took out the slip of paper on which he had jotted down Steve's televector code number and transferred the information to an application blank. "This system," Alan said. "It means no one can possibly hide anywhere on Earth unless he removes his televector transmitter." "You can't do that, though. Strictly illegal. An alarm goes out whenever someone gets more than six inches from his transmitter, and he's picked up on suspicion. It's an automatic cancellation of your work card if you try to fool with your transmitter--or if you're Free Status a fine of ten thousand credits." "And if you can't pay the fine?" "Then you work it off in Government indenture, at a thousand credits a year--chopping up rocks in the Antarctica Penitentiary. The system's flawless. It _has_ to be. With Earth as overpopulated as it is, you need some system of tracking down people--otherwise crime would be ten times as prevalent as it is now." "There still is crime?"