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. Not old Spit-and-Polish! He taught a few years, then he went to the one corps that might take him, chewed up as he was, and presented a plan.
"The Nine Worlds are the backbone of the slave trade. The Sargony was colonized a long time ago, and they never accepted Hegemony after they broke off as colonies. The Nine Worlds don't qualify on human rights and don't want to qualify. So we can't travel there and they can't visit our worlds.
"Colonel Baslim decided that the traffic could be rendered uneconomic if we knew how it worked in the Sargony. He reasoned that slavers had to have ships, had to have bases, had to have markets, that it was not just a vice but a business. So he decided to go there and study it.
"This was preposterous -- one man against a nine-planet empire . . . but the Exotic Corps deals in preposterous notions. Even they would probably not have made him an agent if he had not had a scheme to get his reports out. An agent couldn't travel back and forth, nor could he use the mails -- there aren't any between us and them -- and he certainly couldn't set up an n-space communicator; that would be as conspicuous as a brass band.
"But Baslim had an idea. The only people who visit both the Nine Worlds and our own are Free Traders. But they avoid politics like poison, as you know better than I, and they go to great lengths not to offend local customs. However Colonel Baslim had a personal 'in' to them
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