Trigger and Friends by James H. Schmitz

7

The point of it, Holati Tate explained, was that this had been more activity than 113-A normally displayed over a period of a week. And 113-A was easily the most active plasmoid of them all nowadays.

“It is, of course, possible,” Mantelish said, arousing from deep thought, “that it was attracted by your body odor.”

“Thank you, Mantelish!” said Trigger.

“You’re welcome, my dear.” Mantelish had pulled his chair up to the table; he hitched himself forward in it. “We shall now,” he announced, “try a little experiment. Pick it up, Trigger.”

She stared at him. “Pick it up? No, Mantelish. We shall now try some other little experiment.”

Mantelish furrowed his Jovian brows. Holati gave her a small smile across the table. “Just touch it with the tip of a finger,” he suggested. “You can do that much for the professor, can’t you?”

“Barely,” Trigger told him grimly. But she reached out and put a cautious fingertip to the less lively far end of 113-A. After a moment she said, “Hey!” She moved the finger lightly along the thing’s surface. It had a velvety, smooth, warm feeling, rather like a kitten. “You know,” she said surprised, “it feels sort of nice! It just looks disgusting—”

“Disgusting!” Mantelish boomed, offended again.

The Commissioner held up a hand. “Just a moment,” he said. He’d picked up some signal Trigger hadn’t noticed, for he went over to the wall now and touched something there. A release button apparently. The door to the room opened. Trigger’s grabber came in. The door closed behind him. He was carrying a tray with a squat brown flask and four rather small glasses on it.

The Commissioner introduced him: Heslet Quillan—Major Heslet Quillan, of the Subspace Engineers. For a Subspace Engineer, Trigger thought skeptically, he was a pretty good grabber. But there was a qualified truce in the room. There was no really good reason not to include Major Quillan in it. He gave Trigger a grin. She gave him a tentative smile in return.

“Ah, Puya!” Professor Mantelish exclaimed, advancing on the tray as Quillan set it on the table. Mantelish seemed to have forgotten about plasmoid experiments for the moment, and Trigger didn’t intend to remind him. She drew her hand back quietly from 113-A. The professor unstoppered the flask. “You’ll have some, Trigger, I’m sure? The only really good thing the benighted world of Rumli ever produced.”

“My great-grandmother,” Trigger remarked, “was a Rumlian.” She watched him fill the four glasses with a thin purple liquid. “I’ve never tried it; but yes, thanks.”

Quillan put one of the glasses in front of her.

“And we shall drink,” Mantelish suggested, with a suave flourish of his Puya, “to your great-grandmother!”

“We shall also,” suggested Major Quillan, pulling a chair up to the table for himself, “advise Trigger to take a very small sip on her first go at the stuff.”

Nobody had invited him to sit down. But nobody was objecting either. Well, that fitted, Trigger thought.

She sipped. It was tart and hot. Very hot. She set the glass back on the table, inhaled with difficulty, exhaled quiveringly. Tears gathered in her eyes.

“Very good!” she husked.

“Very good,” the Commissioner agreed. He put down his empty glass and smacked his lips lightly. “And now,” he said briskly, “let’s get on with this conference.”

Trigger glanced around the room while Quillan refilled three glasses. The small live coal she had swallowed was melting away; a warm glow began to spread through her. It did look like the dining room of a hunting lodge. The woodwork was dark, old-looking, worn with much polishing. Horned heads of various formidable Maccadon life-forms adorned the walls.

But it was open season now on a different kind of game. Three men had walked briskly past them when Quillan brought her in by the front door. They hadn’t even looked at her. There were sounds now and then from some of the other rooms, and that general feeling of a considerable number of people around—of being at an operating headquarters of some sort, which hummed with quiet activity.

Holati glanced at Quillan. “Someone at the door. We’ll hold it while you see what they want.”

The burly character who had appeared at the door said diffidently that Professor Mantelish had wanted to be present while his lab equipment was stowed aboard. If the professor didn’t mind, things were about that far along.

Mantelish excused himself and went off with the messenger. The door closed. Quillan came back to his chair.

“We’re moving the outfit later tonight,” the Commissioner explained. “Mantelish is coming along—plus around eight tons of his lab equipment. Plus his six special U-League guards.”

“Oh?” Trigger picked up the Puya glass. She looked into it. It was empty. “Moving where?” she asked.

“Manon,” said the Commissioner. “Tell you about that later.”

Every last muscle in Trigger’s body seemed to go limp simultaneously. She settled back slightly in the chair, surprised by the force of the reaction. She hadn’t realized by half how keyed up she was! She sighed a small sigh. Then she smiled at Quillan.

“Major,” she said, “how about a tiny little refill on that Puya—about half?”

Quillan took care of the tiny little refill.

Commissioner Tate said, “By the way, Quillan does have a degree in subspace engineering and gets assigned to the Engineers now and then. But his real job’s Space Scout Intelligence.”

Trigger nodded. “I’d almost guessed it!” She gave Quillan another smile. She nearly gave 113-A a smile.

“And now,” said the Commissioner, “we’ll talk more freely. We tell Mantelish just as little as we can. To tell you the truth, Trigger, the professor is a terrible handicap on an operation like this. I understand he was a great friend of your father’s.”

“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.

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