“Nothing in particular.” Alice answered. “How’d you guess?”

“It showed.”

Alice thought a while, put the book back down and asked:

“Dad, do you have any gold nuggets hanging around?”

“Just how much gold do you need?”

“About a kilogram and a half.”

“Nope.”

“Do you have less than that?”

“Do be honest, I don’t have any less than that at all. None whatsoever. What’s it good for?”

“I don’t know.” Alice said. “I just need it.”

I came out of my study, sat down on the divan beside Alice, and said:

“I think you’d better tell me just what it is you’ve gotten into.”

“Nothing special. I just need the gold.”

“And if you were to be totally honest with me….”

Alice took a long and painful sigh, looked out the window, and finally came clean:

“Dad, I’m a criminal.”

“A criminal?”

“I committed a robbery, and now they are going to kick me out of school for sure.”

“Too bad.” I said. “But continue. It might be that everything isn’t quite so terrible as it was when you looked at the problem first glance.”

“Okay. Well, in general, Alesha Naumov and I decided to catch the giant pike. It lives in the Ikshinsky reservoir and devours the fry. One of the fishermen there told us about it. You don’t know him.”

“And for this you need gold ore?”

“For a fish lure.

“My whole class talked it all over and decided we would need a lure to catch the pike. Ordinary pike you catch with simple lure, but a giant pike would need as really special lure to catch it. And we have a big piece of gold in the school museum. Or we had. It weighed a kilogram and a half. One of our graduates gave it to the school; he found it in the asteroid belt.”

“And you stole gold ore weighing a kilogram and a half?”

“It really wasn’t like that, Dad. We were just taking in on loan. Leva Zvansky said that his father was a geologist and could get us a new one. And so we decided to make lures out of gold. The giant pike wold be sure to fall for a lure like that.”