"Stay where I was?"
"In the Manon System."
"Oh!" Trigger flushed a little. "Well—"
"I know. Let's go on a moment. We had this inharmonious inclination. So we told Commissioner Tate to bring you to the Hub and keep you there, to see what would happen. And on Maccadon, in just a few weeks, you'd begun working that moderate inclination to be back in the Manon System up to a dandy first-rate compulsion."
Trigger licked her lips. "I—"
"Sure," said Pilch. "You had to have a good sensible reason. You gave yourself one."
"Well!"
"Oh, you were fond of that young man, all right. Who wouldn't be? Wonderful-looking lug. I'd go for him myself—till I got him on that couch, that is. But that was the first time you hadn't been able to stand a couple of months away from him. It was also the first time you'd started worrying about competition. You now had your justification. And we," Pilch said darkly, "had a fine, solid compulsion with no doubt very revealing ramifications to it to work on. Just one thing went wrong with that, Trigger. You don't have the compulsion any more."
"Oh?"
"You don't even," said Pilch, "have the original moderate inclination. Now one might have some suspicions there! But we'll let them ride for the moment."