"How about it, Pete? I've been trying to figure how she got here. If it was you, you needn't worry about the regulations. There was some sort of litigation going on, and all kinds of relatives came boiling up here to get her. All the hullabaloo is over by now."
Dudley took a deep breath, and told his side of the story. Fisher listened quietly, nodding occasionally with the satisfaction of one who had guessed the answer.
"So you see how it was, Jack. I didn't really believe the kid's story. And she was so wild about it!"
Fisher put out his cigar with loving care.
"Got to save the rest of this for dinner," he said. "Yes, she was wild, in a way. You should hear—well, that's in the files. Before we were sure who she was, Snowdon put her on as a secretary in his section."
"She didn't look to me like a typist," objected Dudley.
"Oh, she wasn't," said Fisher, without elaborating. "I suppose if she was a little nuts, she was just a victim of the times. If it hadn't been for the sudden plunge into space, old Forgeron wouldn't have made such a pile of quick money. Then his granddaughter might have grown up in a normal home, instead of feeling she was just a target. If she'd been born a generation earlier or later, she might have been okay."
Dudley thought of the girl's pleading, her frenzy to escape her environment.
"So I suppose they dragged her back," he said. "Which loving relative won custody of the money?"
"That's still going on," Fisher told him. "It's tougher than ever, I hear, because she didn't go down with them. She talked somebody into letting her have a space-suit and walked out to the other side of the ringwall. All the way to the foothills on the other side."