Then she saw the man sitting by the ComWeb cabinet. Her breath sucked in. She crouched a little, ready to wheel and bolt.
“Take it easy, Trigger!” Major Quillan said. He was in civilian clothes, of rather dudish cut.
Trigger swallowed. There was, too obviously, no place to bolt to. “How did you find me?”
He shrugged. “Longish story. You’re not under arrest.”
“I’m not?”
“No,” said Quillan. “When we get to Manon, the Commissioner will have a suggestion to make to you.”
“Suggestion?” Trigger said warily.
“I believe you’re to take back your old Precol job in Manon, but as cover for your participation in our little project. If you agree to it.”
“What if I don’t?”
He shrugged again. “It seems you’ll be writing your own ticket from here on out.”
Trigger stared at him, wondering. “Why?”
Quillan grinned. “New instructions have been handed down,” he said. “If you’re still curious, ask Whatzzit.”
“Oh,” Trigger said. “Then why are you here?”
“I,” said Quillan, “am to make damn sure you get to Manon. I brought a few people with me.”
“Mihul, too?” Trigger asked, a shade diffidently.
“No. She’s on Maccadon.”
“Is she—how’s she doing?”
“Doing all right,” Quillan said. “She sends her regards and says a little less heft on the next solar plexus you torpedo should be good enough.”
Trigger flushed. “She isn’t sore, is she?”
“Not the way you mean.” He considered. “Not many people have jumped Mihul successfully. In her cockeyed way, she seemed pretty proud of her student.”
Trigger felt the flush deepen. “I got her off guard,” she said.
“Obviously,” said Quillan. “In any ordinary argument she could pull your legs off and tie you up with them. Still, that wasn’t bad. Have you talked to anybody since you came on board?”
“Just the room stewardess. And a couple of old ladies in the next cabin.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Couple of old ladies. What did you talk about?”
Trigger recounted the conversation. He reflected, nodded and stood up.
“I put a couple of suitcases in that closet over there,” he said. “Your personal stuff is in them, de-tracered. Another thing—somebody checked over your finances and came to the conclusion you’re broke.”
“Not exactly broke,” said Trigger.
Quillan reached into a pocket, pulled out an envelope and laid it on the cabinet. “Here’s a little extra spending money then,” he said. “The balance of your Precol pay to date. I had it picked up on Evalee this morning. Seven hundred twenty-eight FC.”
“Thanks,” Trigger said. “I can use some of that.”
They stood looking at each other.
“Any questions?” he asked.
“Sure,” Trigger said. “But you wouldn’t answer them.”
“Try me, doll,” said Quillan. “But let’s shift operations to the fanciest cocktail lounge on this thing before you start. I feel like relaxing a little. For just one girl, you’ve given us a fairly rough time these last forty-eight hours!”
“I’m sorry,” Trigger said.
“I’ll bet,” said Quillan.
Trigger glanced at the closet. If he’d brought everything along, there was a dress in one of those suitcases that would have been a little too daring for Maccadon. It should, therefore, be just about right for a cocktail lounge on the Dawn City; and she hadn’t had a chance to wear it yet. “Give me ten minutes to change.”
“Fine.” Quillan started toward the door. “By the way, I’m your neighbor now.”
“The cabin at the end of the hall?” she asked startled.
“That’s right.” He smiled at her. “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
Well, that was going to be cozy! Trigger found the dress, shook it out and slipped into it, enormously puzzled but also enormously relieved. That Whatzzit!
Freshening up her make-up, she wondered how he had induced the Elfkund ladies to leave. Perhaps he’d managed to have a better cabin offered to them. It must be convenient to have that kind of a pull.
12
“Well, we didn’t just leave it up to them,” Quillan said. “Ship’s Engineering spotted a radiation leak in their cabin. Slight but definite. They got bundled out in a squawking hurry.” He added, “They did get a better cabin though.”
“Might have been less trouble to get me to move,” Trigger remarked.
“Might have been. I didn’t know what mood you’d be in.”
Trigger decided to let that ride. This cocktail lounge was a very curious place. By the looks of it, there were thirty or forty people in their immediate vicinity; but if one looked again in a couple of minutes, there might be an entirely different thirty or forty people around. Sitting in easy chairs or at tables, standing about in small groups, talking, drinking, laughing, they drifted past slowly; overhead, below, sometimes tilted at odd angles—fading from sight and presently returning.
In actual fact she and Quillan were in a little room by themselves, and with more than ordinary privacy via an audio block and a reconstruct scrambler which Quillan had switched on at their entry. “I’ll leave us out of the viewer circuit,” he remarked, “until you’ve finished your questions.”
“Viewer circuit?” she repeated.
Quillan waved a hand around. “That,” he said. “There are more commercial and industrial spies, political agents, top-class confidence men and whatnot on board this ship than you’d probably believe. A good percentage of them are pretty fair lip readers, and the things you want to talk about are connected with the Federation’s hottest current secret. So while it’s a downright crime not to put you on immediate display in a place like this, we won’t take the chance.”
Trigger let that ride too. A group had materialized at an oblong table eight feet away while Quillan was speaking. Everybody at the table seemed fairly high, and two of the couples were embarrassingly amorous; but she couldn’t quite picture any of them as somebody’s spies or agents. She listened to the muted chatter. Some Hub dialect she didn’t know.
“None of those people can see or hear us then?” she asked.
“Not until we want them to. Viewer gives you as much privacy as you like. Most of the crowd here just doesn’t see much point to privacy. Like those two.”
Trigger followed his glance. At a tilted angle above them, a matched pair of black-haired, black-gowned young sirens sat at a small table, sipping their drinks, looking languidly around.
“Twins,” Trigger said.
“No,” said Quillan. “That’s Blent and Company.”
“Oh?”
“Blent’s a lady of leisure and somewhat excessively narcissistic tendencies,” he explained. He gave the matched pair another brief study. “Perhaps one can’t really blame her. One of them’s her facsimile. Blent—whichever it is—is never without her fac.”
“Oh,” Trigger said. She’d been studying the gowns. “That,” she said, a trifle enviously, “is why I’m not at all eager to go on display here.”
“Eh?” said Quillan.
Trigger turned to regard herself in the wall mirror on the right, which, she had noticed, remained carefully unobscured by drifting viewers and viewees. A thoughtful touch on the lounge management’s part.
“Until we walked in here,” she explained, “I thought this was a pretty sharp little outfit I’m wearing.”
“Hmm,” Quillan said judiciously. He made a detailed appraisal of the mirror image of the slim, green, backless, half-thigh-length sheath which had looked so breath-taking and seductive in a Ceyce display window. Trigger’s eyes narrowed a little. The major had appraised the dress in detail before.
“It’s about as sharp a little outfit as you could get for around a hundred and fifty credits,” he remarked. “Most of the items the girls are sporting here are personality conceptions. That starts at around ten to twenty times as high. I wasn’t talking about displaying the dress. Now what were those questions?”
Trigger took a small sip of her drink, considering. She hadn’t made up her mind about Major Quillan, but until she could evaluate him more definitely, it might be best to go by appearances. The appearances so far indicated small sips in his company.
“How did you people find me so quickly?” she asked.
“Next time you want to sneak off a civilized planet,” Quillan advised her, “pick something like a small freighter. Or hire a small-boat to get you out of the system and flag down a freighter for you. Plenty of tramp captains will make a space stop to pick up a paying passenger. Liners we can check.”
“Sorry,” Trigger said meekly. “I’m still new at this business.”
“And thank God for that!” said Quillan. “If you have the time and the money, it’s also a good idea, of course, to zig a few times before you zag towards where you’re really heading. Actually, I suppose, the credit for picking you up so fast should go to those collating computers.”
“Oh?”
“Yes.” Major Quillan looked broodingly at his drink for a moment. “There they sit,” he remarked suddenly, “with their stupid plastic faces hanging out! Rows of them. You feed them something you don’t understand. They don’t understand it either. Nobody can tell me they can. But they kick it around and giggle a bit, and out comes some ungodly suggestion.”