"And those three young women? Were they going to be sacrifices?"

Macouri shrugged. "Possibly. Probably not. They have other potential."

"What was in their bellies, Macouri? If not babies, then what?"

The little man gave him almost a smirk in return. "You wouldn't believe me if I told you, nor would it matter very much. But it wasn't any natural breeding project like I suspect you all believed at the start. No, no. Nothing as crass as that. We would hardly need the girls to do that now, would we?"

Maslovic decided that he'd had about enough for now. "Let's take a break, Georgi old pal. We'll see if the others had anything more to say."

Macouri yawned and stretched. "Captial idea, old boy. But you'll get nothing out of them. The girls don't really know much, and the others would never give it voluntarily and we've all had our little heads wired so that you can't dig it out. And you won't be able to cajole them, either. You see, they are much more frightened of what happens if they tell than of anything, even death, that you might threaten them with. And we've already demonstrated, I believe, that we're hardly helpless even in this monster ship of yours."

"We'll see. But nobody's going to get close to those crystal devices, not this time," the intelligence man warned him. "And thanks to that demonstration, your money's worthless here. It's not a game any more, 'old boy.' The very best you can hope for here is to live the most unremittingly boring and lonely life imaginable. Lonely, but never alone."

Macouri laughed. "Rather melodramatic of you, I think. Would it surprise you to be told that all of us, at least all but the young guests, can get out of here any time we choose? And it's beyond your power to stop us?"

"I know you could trigger that little bomb in your brain. It so happens I have a somewhat similar device in mine, just in case," Maslovic responded. "But I won't unless there is absolutely no hope, nor will you."

"My dear boy! If I triggered it now, it would join me to the greatest power in the universe!"

"You're no martyr. Deep down, at the very bottom core of your being, is a highly educated man who can not rid himself of that one last shred of doubt. And if I'm wrong about that, well, then, if you're going to tell me nothing, then you are nothing but a burden and a waste. Killing yourself would be just fine with me, and would simplify the paperwork. You see, you've finally done it, Georgi my lad. You've put yourself in a place and situation by your actions where you can't possibly win. You're either here, like this, forever, or you cease to exist. I'll see you in a bit. Have a bland lunch."

And, with that, the sergeant got up and walked out of the room, making sure that the brig's first security door closed with as much sound and finality as it could muster.

Within a few minutes his intelligence team, along with Murphy, were in fact eating a bland lunch together. Murphy wasn't complaining about it simply because Maslovic had insured that he could still get that very, very good stout.

"Okay," the sergeant said between bites of a large sandwich, "did anybody get anything?"

"Pretty much the same stuff, only not as good speechmaking as you report your boy had," Chung told him. She had taken Magda. "The old girl was a lot more belligerent, a lot more threatening of dire consequences from her employer and maybe supernatural or alien sources unstated but implied, and she could drop names like mad. It is true that a lot of our own security stuff came from the firm where she's a senior vice president. We should keep an extra close watch on her for that reason alone."

"Done. And the two employees?"

"The cook's nothing more than a thug with a ton of loyalty and no other morals whatsoever," Broz reported. "I'd swear to that."

"There's more to this Joshua than that, but I can't give you anything concrete," Darch told Maslovic. "We've run him through all sorts of databases and tried remote colonial files using tight beam and nothing really comes up. I think he's a good man in a fight, and had some sort of military training or background even if not in our sort of culture."

"Colonial defense, maybe? Many of them went freelance or pirate over the years. Still do. And they shouldn't be underestimated," Maslovic noted.

"Could be. If so, he's not under any of the usual colonial records. Doesn't mean much."

"Any luck on figuring out the girls' role in this?" the sergeant asked them.

One by one they shook their heads. Nobody had given the slightest clue, although all but the cook who, if she knew, probably hadn't paid attention and didn't give a damn now, seemed to be amused by the constant questioning about that.

Finally, there was near silence as each of them thought over the reports of the others and reflected on how little it had profited them.

Finally, Captain Murphy took a last drain of stout, put down the makeshift mug, and said, "Wheelbarrows."

All the other heads suddenly turned in his direction. "Wheelbarrows?" Maslovic repeated.

"Sure. You know what a wheelbarrow is?"

"Not exactly."

"It's a device for manual labor haulin' and such. One wheel in the front, two stands and two handles in the back so one man can get behind it, lift it up on the wheel, and rush it and its contents to wherever it's needed. There's an ancient joke, origins unknown, about a fellow who was known to be a smuggler on some world and there was this security perimeter or somesuch which you had to pass and who was lookin' for blokes what might try to sneak things over. And every day this laborer who worked on one side would come up to the guards with a wheelbarrow full of dirt. Now, they knew the fellow was sneakin' somethin' by 'em, but they didn't know what.

"They did him a full scan, analyzed every bit of dirt, did a full inside-and-out analysis of the wheelbarrow, you name it. Never found nothin', so they had to let him through. Did this for months, he did. Finally he quit, and was ready to make his exit with some money that was a lot more than he'd made as a laborer. Guard sees him, knows he's leavin', and begs the fellow to tell him what he was smugglin'. Promises no penalty. So, finally, the smuggler, he smiles and says, 'I was smugglin' wheelbarrows, of course.' "

They all looked at him blankly. Finally, Darch asked, "But why would he need to pass wheelbarrows through security?"

Murphy raised his eyes towards heaven and sighed. "It ain't worth explainin' a joke. The point is, you can do it with container modules on a space freighter. Fellow keeps bringin' in empty ones, and it's only later that they figure out he was smugglin' in the containers themselves to folks that needed 'em but couldn't buy 'em cheap where they was. You see? The point is, what was bein' smuggled was in plain sight. The container was the booty!"

Maslovic thought it over. "But under that logic, the girls themselves would be the object of the exercise. But there are lots of young women down there on Barnum's World and, in fact, the one thing we don't have any shortages of are people. So why smuggle them in? What possible value could they have?"

"I been thinkin' about that, and I come up with a theory. Maybe them girls got a talent. They sure ain't got a lot of education, and I ain't sure how much brains they're hidin' or if they're hidin' any a-tall, but you don't need to be a mental wizard if you got a useful talent. Somethin' you're just better at, or somethin' you're born with. I been tryin' to figure out what the hell Tara Hibernius had that would be worth this kind of trouble to smuggle someplace in that little an amount and I can't come up with nothin'. But pregnant girls-hell, they're the most helpless, least threatenin' folks you'll ever find. Nobody's gonna be scared of 'em but they're gonna be a lot safer travelin' out in the real world. It may even be just some kind of tricky gizmo or substance that made even them believe it, which would give 'em real reasons like I told you that first time to make 'em want to run like hell and get on an old tub with an old reprobate like me."