Limits on charm production in hadronic interactions near threshold.

We present the results of an experiment to search for associated charm production near threshold in 13-GeV/c ..pi../sup -/p interactions. A large aperture PWC spectrometer was sensitive to the decay fragments of the forward-produced D/sup asterisk-/'s expected from the two-body reactions ..pi../sup -/+p..-->..D/sup asterisk-/+..lambda../sub c//sup +/,..sigma../sub c/ /sup +/,. . . . The missing baryon mass was determined from the vector momenta of the incident pion and the candidate D/sup asterisk-/. No evidence for these reactions was found, which resulted in a 7-nb upper limit (95% confidence level) for each of the cross sections sigma(..pi../sup -/p..-->..D/sup asterisk-/..lambda../sub c//sup +/) and sigma(..pi../sup -/p..-->..D/sup asterisk-/..sigma../sub c//sup +/).