"Yes," she said. "Going over for visits to Mantelish's garden with my father is one of the earliest things I remember. I can imagine he's a problem!" She shifted her gaze curiously from one to the other of the two men. "What are you people doing?"

  Holati Tate said, "We're one of a few hundred Federation groups assigned to the plasmoid project. Each group works at its specialties, and the information gets correlated." He paused. "The Federation Council—they're the ones we're working for directly—the Council's biggest concern is the very delicate political situation that's involved. They feel it could develop suddenly into a dangerous one. They may be right."

  "In what way?" Trigger asked.

  "Well, suppose that a key unit is lost and stays lost. Unit 112-113, to be precise. Suppose all the other plasmoids put together don't contain enough information to show how the Old Galactics produced the things and got them to operate."

  "Somebody would get that worked out pretty soon, wouldn't they?"

  "Not necessarily, or even probably, according to Mantelish and some other people who know what's happened. There seem to be too many basic factors missing. It might be necessary to develop a whole new class of sciences first. And that could take a few centuries."

  "Well," Trigger admitted, "I could get along without the things indefinitely."

  "Same here," the plasmoid nabob agreed ungratefully. "Weird beasties! But—let's see. At present there are twelve hundred and fifty-eight member worlds to the Federation, aren't there?"

  "More or less."

  "And the number of planetary confederacies, subplanetary governments, industrial, financial and commercial combines, assorted power groups, etc. and so on, is something I'd hate to have to calculate."

  "What are you driving at?" she asked.

  "They've all been told we're heading for a new golden age, courtesy of the plasmoid science. Practically everybody has believed it. Now there's considerable doubt."

  "Oh," she said. "Of course—practically everybody is going to get very unhappy, eh?"

  "Including," said Holati, "any one of the two hundred and fourteen restricted worlds. Their treaties of limitation wouldn't have let them get into the plasmoid pie until the others had been at it a decade or so. They would have been quite eager . . ."

  There was a little pause. Then Trigger said, "Lordy! The thing could even set off another string of wars—"

  "That's a point the Council is nervous about," he said.

  "Well, it certainly is a mess." Trigger was silent a moment. "Holati, could those things ever become as valuable as people keep saying? It's all sounded a little exaggerated to me."

  The Commissioner said he'd wondered about it too. "I'm not enough of a biologist to make an educated guess. What it seems to boil down to is that they might. Which would be enough to tempt a lot of people to gamble very high for a chance to get control of the plasmoid process. We've been working a couple of leads here. Pretty short leads so far, but you work with what you can get." He nodded at the table. "We picked up the first lead through 113-A."

  Trigger glanced down. The plasmoid lay there some inches from the side of her hand. "You know," she said uncomfortably, "old Repulsive moved again while we were talking! Towards my hand." She drew the hand away.

  "I was watching it," Major Quillan said reassuringly from the end of the table. "I would have warned you, but it stopped when it got as far as it is now. That was around five minutes ago."

  Trigger reached back and gave old Repulsive a cautious pat. "Very lively character! He does feel pleasant to touch. Kitty-cat pleasant! How did you get a lead through him?"

  "Mantelish brought it back to Maccadon with him, mainly because he couldn't even guess at what its function was. It was just lying there in a cubicle. So he did considerable experimenting with it."

  Trigger shook her head. "So what happened with 113-A?"

  "Mantelish began to get results with it," the Commissioner said. "One experiment was rather startling. He'd been trying that electrical stimulation business. Nothing happened until he had finished. Then he touched the plasmoid, and it fed the whole charge back to him. Apparently it was a fairly hefty dose."

  She laughed delightedly. "Good for Repulsive! Stood up for his rights, eh?"

  "Mantelish gained some such impression anyway. He became more cautious with it after that. And then he learned something that should be important. He was visiting another lab where they had a couple of plasmoids which actually moved now and then. He had 113-A in his coat pocket. The two lab plasmoids stopped moving while he was there. They haven't moved since. He thought about that, and then located another moving plasmoid. He dropped in to look it over, with 113-A in his pocket again, and it stopped. He did the same thing in one more place and then quit. There aren't that many moving plasmoids around. Those three labs are still wondering what hit their specimens."

  She studied 113-A curiously. "A mighty mite! What does Mantelish make of it?"

  "He thinks the stolen 112-113 unit forms a kind of self-regulating system. The big one induces plasmoid activity, the little one modifies it. This 113-A might be a spare regulator. But it seems to be more than a spare—which brings us to that first lead we got. A gang of raiders crashed Mantelish's lab one night."

  "When was that?"

  "Some months ago. Before you and I left Manon. The professor was out, and 113-A had gone along in his pocket as usual. But his two lab guards and one of the raiders were killed. The others got away. The Feds got there fast, and dead-brained the raider. They learned just two things. One, he'd been mind-blocked and couldn't have spilled any significant information even if they had got him alive. The other item they drew from his brain was a clear impression of the target of the raid—the professor's pal here."

  "Uh-huh," Trigger said, lost in thought. She poked Repulsive lightly. "Did they want to kill it or grab it?"

  The Commissioner looked at her. "Grab it, was the dead-brain report. Why?"

  "Just wondering. Would make a difference, wouldn't it? Did they try again?"

  "There've been five more attempts," he said.

  "And what's everybody concluded from that?"

  "They want 113-A in a very bad way. So they need it."

  "In connection with the key unit?" Trigger asked.

  "Probably."

  "That makes everything look very much better, doesn't it?"

  "Quite a little," he said. "The unit may not work, or may not work satisfactorily, unless 113-A is in the area. Mantelish talks of something he calls proximity influence. Whatever that is, 113-A has demonstrated it has it."

  "So," Trigger said, "whoever stole 112-113 might have two thirds of what everybody wants, and you might have one third. Right here on the table. How many of the later raiders did you catch?"

  "All of them," said the Commissioner. "Around forty. We got them dead, we got them alive. It didn't make much difference. They were hired hands. Very expensive hired hands, but still just that. Most of them didn't know a thing we could use. The ones that did know something were mind-blocked again."

  "I thought," Trigger said reflectively, "you could unblock someone like that."

  "You can, sometimes. If you're very good at it and if you have time enough. We couldn't afford to wait a year. They died before they could tell us anything."

  There was a pause. Then Trigger asked, "How did you get involved in this, personally?"

  "More or less by accident," the Commissioner said. "It was in connection with our second lead."

  "That's me, huh?" she said unhappily.

  "Yes."

  "Why would anyone want to grab me? I don't know anything."

  He shook his head. "We haven't found out yet. We're hoping we will, in a very few days."

  "Is that one of the things you can't tell me about?"

  "I can tell you most of what I know at the moment," said the Commissioner. "Remember the night we stopped off at Evalee on the way in from Manon?"

  "Yes," she said. "That big hotel!"

  8

  "About an hour after you'd decided to hit the bunk," Holati said, "I portaled back to your rooms to pick up some Precol reports we'd been setting up."

  Trigger nodded. "I remember the reports."

  "A couple of characters were working on your doors when I got there. They went for their guns, unfortunately. But I called the nearest Scout Intelligence office and had them dead-brained."

  "Why that?" she asked.

  "It could have been an accident—a couple of ordinary thugs. But their equipment looked a little too good for ordinary thugs. I didn't know just what to be suspicious of, but I got suspicious anyway."

  "That's you, all right," Trigger acknowledged. "What were they?"

  "They had an Evalee record which told us more than the brains did. They were high-priced boys. Their brains told us they'd allowed themselves to be mind-blocked on this particular job. High-priced boys won't do that unless they can set their standard price very much higher. It didn't look at all any more as if they'd come to your door by accident."

  "No," she admitted.

  "The Feds got in on it then. There'd been that business in Mantelish's lab. There were similarities in the pattern. You knew Mantelish. You'd been on Harvest Moon with him. They thought there could be a connection."

  "But what connection?" she protested. "I know I don't know anything that could do anybody any good!"

  He shrugged. "I can't figure it either, Trigger girl. But the upshot of it was that I was put in charge of this phase of the general investigation. If there is a connection, it'll come out eventually. In any case, we want to know who's been trying to have you picked up and why."

  She studied his face with troubled eyes.

  "That's quite definite, is it?" she asked. "There couldn't possibly still be a mistake?"

  "No. It's definite."

  "So that's what the grabber business in the Colonial School yesterday was about . . ."

  He nodded. "It was their first try since the Evalee matter."

  "Why do you think they waited so long?"

  "Because they suspected you were being guarded. It's difficult to keep an adequate number of men around without arousing doubts in interested observers."

  Trigger glanced at the plasmoid. "That sounds," she remarked, "as if you'd let other interested observers feel you'd left them a good opening to get at Repulsive."

  He didn't quite smile. "I might have done that. Don't tell the Council."

  Trigger pursed her lips. "I won't. So the grabbers who were after me figured I was booby-trapped. But then they came in anyway. That doesn't seem very bright. Or did you do something again to make them think the road was clear?"

  "No," he said. "They were trying to clear the road for themselves. We thought they would finally. The deal was set up as a one-two."

  "As a what?"

  "One-two. You slug into what could be a trap like that with one gang. If it was a trap, they were sacrifices. You hope the opposition will now relax its precautions. Sometimes it does—and a day or so later you're back for the real raid. That works occasionally. Anyway it was the plan in this case."

  "How do you know?"

  "They'd started closing in for the grab in Ceyce when Quillan's group located you. So Quillan grabbed you first."

  She flushed. "I wasn't as smart as I thought, was I?"

  The Commissioner grunted. "Smart enough to give us a king-sized headache! But they didn't have any trouble finding you. We discovered tonight that some kind of tracer material had been worked into all your clothes. Even the flimsiest. Somebody may have been planted in the school laundry, but that's not important now." He looked at her for a moment. "What made you decide to take off so suddenly?" he asked.

  Trigger shrugged. "I was getting pretty angry with you," she admitted. "More or less with everybody. Then I applied for a transfer, and the application bounced—from Evalee! I figured I'd had enough and that I'd just quietly clear out. So I did—or thought I did."

  "Can't blame you," said Holati.

  Trigger said, "I still think it would have been smarter to keep me informed right from the start of what was going on."

  He shook his head. "I wouldn't be telling you a thing even now," he said, "if it hadn't been definitely established that you're already involved in the matter. This could develop into a pretty messy operation. I wouldn't have wanted you in on it, if it could have been avoided. And if you weren't going to be in on it, I couldn't go spilling Federation secrets to you."

  "I'm in on it, definitely, eh?"

  He nodded. "For the duration."

  "But you're still not telling me everything?"

  "There're a few things I can't tell you," he said. "I'm following orders in that."

  Trigger smiled faintly "That's a switch! I didn't know you knew how."

  "I've followed plenty of orders in my time," the Commissioner said, "especially when I thought they made sense. And I think these do."

  Trigger was silent a moment. "You said a while ago that most of the heat was to go off me tonight. Can you talk about that?"

  "I'll have to tell you something else again first—why we're going to Manon."

  She settled back in her chair. "Go ahead."

  "By what is, at all events, an interesting coincidence," the Commissioner went on, "we've had word that an outfit called Vishni's Fleet hasn't been heard from for some months. Their Independent Fleet area is a long way out beyond Manon, but Vishni's had his pick of a few hundred uncharted habitable planets and a few thousand very expert outworlders. And Vishni's boys are exactly the kind of people who would get involved in a deal like this."

  "You think they stole 112-113?" Trigger asked.

  Holati shook his head. "Doesn't look as simple as that, because there were obviously some insiders involved. But I don't want to get into that here." He and Quillan exchanged a quick glance. The Commissioner hurried on.

  "Now, what's been done is to hire a few of the other I-Fleets around there and set them and as many Space Scout squadrons as could be kicked loose from duty elsewhere to surveying the Vishni territory. Our outfit is in charge of that operation. And Manon, of course, is a lot better point from which to conduct it than the Hub. If something is discovered that looks interesting enough to investigate in detail, we'll only be a week's run away.

  "So we've been ready to move for the past two weeks now, which was when the first reports started coming in from the Vishni area—negative reports so far, by the way. I've kept stalling from day to day, because there were also indications that your grabber friends might be getting set to swing at you finally. It seemed tidier to get that matter cleared up first. Now they've swung, and we'll go."

  He rubbed his chin. "The nice thing about it all," he remarked, "is that we're going there with the two items the opposition has revealed it wants. We're letting them know those items will be available in the Manon System henceforward. They might get discouraged and just drop the whole project. If they do, that's fine. We'll go ahead with cleaning up the Vishni phase of the operation.

  "But," he continued, "the indications are they can't drop their project any more than we can drop looking for that key unit. So we'll expect them to show up in Manon. When they do, they'll be working in unfamiliar territory and in a system where they have only something like fifty thousand people to hide out in, instead of a planetary civilization. I think they'll find things getting very hot for them very fast in Manon."

  "Very good," said Trigger. "That I like! But what makes you think the opposition is just one group? There might be a bunch of them by now. Maybe even fighting among themselves."

  "I'd bet on at least two groups myself," he said. "And if they're fighting, they've got our blessing. They're still all opposition as far as we're concerned."

  She nodded. "How are you letting them know about the move?"

  "The mountains around here are lousy with observers. Very cute tricks some of them use—one boy has been sitting in a hollow tree for weeks. We let them see what we want to. This evening they saw you coming in. Later tonight they'll see you climbing into the ship with the rest of the party and taking off. They've already picked up messages to tell them just where the ship's going." He paused. "But you've got a job to finish up here first, Trigger. That'll take about four days. So it won't really be you they see climbing into the ship."

  "What!" She straightened up.

  "We've got a facsimile for you," he explained. "Girl agent. She goes along to draw the heat to Manon."

  Trigger felt herself tightening up slowly all over.

  "What's this job you're talking about?" she asked evenly.

  "Can't tell you in too much detail. But around four days from now somebody is coming in to Maccadon to interview you."

  "Interview me? What about?"

  He hesitated a moment. "There's a theory," he said, "that you might have information you don't know you have. And that the people who sent grabbers after you want that information. If it's true, the interview will bring it out."

  Her mouth went dry suddenly. And she'd almost spilled everything, she was thinking. The paid-up reservation. Every last thing.

  "I'd like to get this straight," she said. "What you're talking about sounds like it's a mind-search job, Holati."

  "It's in that class," he said. "But it won't be an ordinary mind-search. The people who are coming here are top experts at that kind of work."

  She nodded. "I don't know much about it . . . Do they think somebody's got to me with a hypno-spray or something? That I've been conditioned? Something like that?"

  "I don't know, Trigger," he said. "It may be something in that line. But whatever it is, they'll be able to handle it."

  Trigger moistened her lips. "I was thinking, you know," she said. "Supposing I'm mind-blocked."

  He shook his head. "I can tell you that, anyway," he said. "We already know you're not."

  Trigger was silent a moment. Then she said, "After that interview's over, I'm to ship out to Manon—is that it?"

  "That's right."

  "But it would depend on the outcome of that interview too, wouldn't it?" Trigger pointed out. "I mean you can't really be sure what those people might decide, can you?"

 

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