“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.