Then to put the top on the bottle, James Holden had crossed state lines in his flight from home. This meant that the case was not the simple proposition of appearing before a local magistrate and filing an emotional appeal. It was interstate. It smacked of extradition, and James Holden had committed no crime in either state. To Paul Brennan's qualifications for his henchmen, he now added the need for flouting the law if the law could not be warped to fit his need. Finding a man with ambition, with a casual disregard for ethics, is not hard in political circles. Paul Brennan found his man in Frank Manison, a rising figure in the office of the District Attorney. Manison had gubernatorial ambitions, and he was politically sharp. He personally conducted only those cases that would give him ironclad publicity; he preferred to lower the boom on a lighter charge than chance an acquittal. Manison also had a fine feeling for anticipating public trends, a sense of the drama, and an understanding of public opinion. He granted Brennan a conference of ten minutes, and knowing from long experience that incoming information flows faster when it is not interrupted, he listened attentively, oiling and urging the flow by facial expressions of interest and by leaning forward attentively whenever a serious point was about to come forth. Brennan explained about James Holden, his superior education, and what it had enabled the lad to do. He explained the education not as a machine but as a "system of study" devised by James Holden's parents, feeling that it was better to leave a few stones lying flat and unturned for his own protection. Manison nodded at the end of the ten-minute time-limit, used his desk interphone to inform his secretary that he was not to be disturbed until further notice (which also told Paul Brennan that he was indeed interested) and then said: "You know you haven't a legal leg to stand on, Brennan." "So I find out. It seems incredible that there isn't any law set up to control the activity of a child." "Incredible? No, Brennan, not so. To now it hasn't been necessary. People just do not see the necessity of laws passed to prevent something that isn't being done anyway. The number of outmoded laws, ridiculous laws, and laws passed in the heat of public emotion are always a subject for public ridicule. If the state legislature were to pass a law stating that any child under fourteen may not leave home without the consent of his parents, every opposition newspaper in the state would howl about the waste of time and money spent on ridiculous legislation passed to govern activities that are already under excellent control. They would poll the state and point out that for so many million children under age fourteen, precisely zero of them have left home to set up their own housekeeping. One might just as well waste the taxpayer's money by passing a law that confirms the Universal Law of Gravity.