He was five years ahead of us
when we found out that he'd gone from Baldur to Odin. Six years ago,
nine years after we'd started hunting for him, we decided, from the
best information we could get, that he had left Odin on one of the
local-stop ships for Terra, and dropped off along the way. There are
six planets at which those Terra-Odin ships stop. We sent a man to
each of them. I drew this prize out of the hat.
"When I landed here, I contacted Mr. Fieschi, and we found that a man
answering to Gerrit's description had come in on the _Peenemuende_ from
Odin seven years before, about the time Gerrit had left Odin. The man
who called himself Steve Ravick. Of course, he didn't look anything
like the pictures of Gerrit, but facial surgery was something we'd
taken for granted he'd have done. I finally managed to get his
fingerprints."
Special Agent Ware took out a cigar, inspected it with the drunken
oversolemnity he'd been drilling himself into for five years, and lit
it. Then he saw what he was using and rose, holding it out, and I went
to the desk and took back my lighter-weapon.
"Thank you, Walt. I wouldn't have been able to do this if I hadn't had
that. Where was I? Oh, yes. I got Gerrit-alias-Ravick's fingerprints,
which did not match the ones we had on file for Gerrit, and sent them
in. It was eighteen months later that I got a reply on them. According
to his fingerprints, Steve Ravick was really a woman named Ernestine
Coyon, who had died of acute alcoholism in the free public ward of a
hospital at Paris-on-Baldur fourteen years ago.
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