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me,’ I said, ‘but what’s the big flap all about? These Anacaona are free agents, aren’t they? There’s nothing to stop them leaving New Alexandria, is there?’
    My suspicious mind began to awake at last.
    â€˜This is kidnap,’ put in Denton. ‘The woman wasn’t the girl’s mother. She had no right to take her away. And wherever they are they’ve gone in secret.’
    â€˜Even so,’ I said, ‘are we just concerned about the inconvenience, or what? Why is there such a panic on?’
    â€˜I’ve got years of work tied up in that girl,’ said Charlot. ‘It’ll set the project back half a lifetime.’ He was talking half to himself, half to me.
    â€˜Oh great,’ I said. ‘She was just a little girl, was she? Tyler and Lanning only wanted to take her home before it got late, huh? You bastard. What in hell are you doing out at that colony?’
    â€˜Don’t be a fool,’ he said. ‘The girl is important because I’ve been conducting a careful and unobtrusive study of her development since the day she was born. A lot of the effort of the colony is going into making the study as complete and as unobtrusive as possible. You know full well that to achieve the kind of synthesis I’m trying to form I need more than knowledge. I need empathy. The Anacaona are very difficult people to understand. We encounter difficulties in translation. The programming of the whole project is threatened if we can’t find the core of an understanding. I was looking to that girl to provide me with that core. We haven’t interfered with her in any way at all. The whole point of the study would have been defeated if we had. We need that girl.’
    It didn’t sound too convincing to me. I had the feeling that I wasn’t getting the whole truth.
    â€˜It’s still kidnap,’ said Denton, trying to help out—feeling, no doubt, that we’d been sidetracked into irrelevancy.
    â€˜The Laws of New Rome allow anybody to leave any world for any reason they choose,’ I said.
    â€˜Not with somebody else’s child they don’t,’ he said.
    â€˜You want to go after her,’ I said, suddenly realising why I’d been roped into the heart of the operation. ‘You’re just hanging about until you find out which ship she left on and where she’s bound.’
    â€˜We have a good idea already where she’s bound,’ said Charlot, ‘but it would be best to stop her before she gets there, if possible.’
    â€˜Why?’ I asked. ‘Wherever she lands, she’ll still be a criminal, if you can prove kidnap.’
    â€˜Not on Chao Phrya,’ said Charlot. ‘The authorities there are uncooperative.’
    â€˜Not again,’ I complained, despairingly. ‘Not another LWA world?’
    â€˜Not quite,’ he said. ‘Not from our point of view. From theirs. The situation on Chao Phrya is difficult and complicated. It won’t be easy dealing with them.’
    â€˜And you want me to help.’
    â€˜I may need more than help,’ he said. ‘If the woman and Alyne—that’s the child—reach Chao Phrya, you might have to go down and fetch her on your own. I don’t think they’ll let me land.’
    â€˜Why?’ I asked, fascinated. ‘What did you do?’
    â€˜A diplomatic failure,’ he said obliquely. ‘That’s not important at all. What is...?’
    He was interrupted by the bleeping of his desk phone. He paused to answer it. He listened intently for several moments—the call-circuit was tight-beamed so I couldn’t hear what was coming out of the speaker. I watched Charlot’s face turn grim, and I could imagine his teeth grinding. Something was upsetting him, and I could see that someone was going to suffer for it. I got the crazy notion that the bogeys might have found something in my room, but I quashed