"True enough—but where and when?"
"Couldn't we alert all the nearby planets?"
"You know better than that. He could be halfway across the galaxy before an ethero-gram reached the nearest planet."
"Suppose we sent scout ships to the nearer planets and asked them to inform their neighbors in the same way. We'd soon have an expanding circle that he couldn't slip through."
The Director smiled wryly. "Maybe. But who's going to pay for all this. By the time the circle was a thousand light-years in diameter there would be ten thousand ships and a million clerks working on recapturing one escaped prisoner. Another thing; I don't know offhand what he's been sentenced for, but I'll wager there are ten thousand planets on which his crime would not be a crime. Do you think we could ever extradite him from such a planet? And even if by some incredible stroke of fortune one of our agents happened to land on the right planet, in which city would he begin his search. Or suppose our quarry lands only on uninhabited planets? We can't very well alert the whole galaxy in the search for just one man."
"I know, but—"
"But what?" interrupted the Director. "Any other suggestions?"
"N ... no—"
"All right, he asked for it. You have the pattern, I presume. Feed it to Fido!"