She grimaced. "I'm not real keen on it," she confessed, "but I think we'd better do something about that interview with Whatzzit I ducked out of. If they still want to talk to me—"
"They do. Very much so."
"What's that business about their saying it was okay now for me to go on to Manon?"
Commissioner Tate tugged gently at his left ear lobe. "Frankly," he said, "that's something that shook me a little."
"Shook you? Why?"
"It's that matter of experts coming in grades. The upper ranks in the Psychology Service are extremely busy people, I understand. After your first interview we were shifted upward promptly. A couple of middling high-bracket investigators took over for a while. But after the fourth interview I was told I'd have to bring you to the Hub to let somebody really competent handle the next stage of whatever they've been doing. They said they couldn't spare anybody of that caliber for a trip to Manon."
"Was that the real reason we went to Maccadon?" Trigger asked, startled.
"Sure. But we still hadn't got anywhere near the Service's top level then. As I get it, their topnotchers don't spend much time on individual cases. They keep busy with things on the scale of our more bothersome planetary cultures—and there are supposed to be only a hundred or so of them in that category. So I was more than a little surprised when the Service informed me finally one of those people was coming to Maccadon to conduct your ninth interview."
"One of the real eggheads!" Trigger smiled nervously. "And then I just took off! They can't have too good an opinion of me at the moment, you know."
"Apparently that didn't upset them in the least," the Commissioner said. "They told me to stay calm and make sure you got to Manon all right. Then they said they had a ship operating in this area, and they'd route it over to Manon after you arrived here."