One of Mick's old friends asks the RIS to provide some security for a business transaction.

In his office, Mick has been tinkering with his superheterodyne radio. He has messed it up so that it is generating a high pitched wail when he gets near it. He has a chess problem set up on his board

A scientist, Amster Reeves, ScD, a friend of Mick, is meeting with potential buyers for an invention at The Aerodyne Club. He is worried that people have been trying to steal his invention, which Mick thinks is possible, if not terribly likely.

The invention is the equivalent of the Williams Tube, a computer memory. It has a box with tube and electronics, and a panel with switches and buttons, and some neon lights.

It would be explained, if asked, in terms of a "cathode-ray oscillograph."

They need to escort Dr. Reeves from his home near the campus of Dandulena Royal University to the Aerodyne club. Party should go home to change and meet him there at 1800.

Reeves is an absentminded professor type. His house is full of vintage electronics experiments. He is from overseas, from one of victorious the Southern Alliance Nations, Meridional Calidoria, which broke off from the Greater Calidorian State just prior to the war. GCS fought on the side of the Combine. Reeves lost his family except for his son, who is away at boarding school now.

The Combine was fighting the Alliance over mercantilism in the colonies. "Five brothers died to fight for free trade and self determination, supposedly."

Reeves has mild socialist sympathies. He is a gerbil, about forty years old.

The Aerodyne club has vertical lucite columns providing light; the incandescent lights are shining down through them. It overlooks an airfield.

Ignatia Camberline, the famous aircraft designer whose family owns the building RIS rents space in, formerly their headquarters, is also at the club. She is a mongoose. She is there with her test pilot, Yino Tera, a flying fox, to celebrate the breaking of a speed record earlier in the day. The media are there to cover it. "Iggy" is also part of Garnet's "Book Club." She is wearing a black satin evening dress with triangular silver decorations that match her earrings.

The people who are maybe buying the invention, Mr. (John Henry) Finkley (capitalist), Dr. (Increase) Feckman (entrepenuerial mathemetician), and Dr. (Shimon) Gluck (physicist/ engineer), engineers - businessmice investors and the principle shareholders of the Opal Electronic Tabulator Company.

Spying for the Transmontane Alliance, disguised as a waiter, a dwarf hamster Cordelia Boole.