“Quillan,” a tiny voice said from the viewer.
He turned, took two steps, and sat down fast before the viewer. “Go ahead!”
“Fast motion in B section. Going your way.”
Fast motion. A thought flicked up. “Quillan—” Trigger began.
He raised a shushing hand. “Get a silhouette?” he asked. His hands went to a set of control switches and stayed there.
“No. Pickup shows a haze like in the reconstruct.” An instant’s pause. “Leaving B section.”
“Motion in C section,” said another voice.
Quillan said, “All right. It’s coming. No more verbal reports unless it changes direction. If you want to stay alive, don’t move unless you’re in armor.”
There was silence. Quillan sat unmoving, eyes fixed on the screen. Trigger stood just behind him. Her legs had begun to tremble. She’d better tell him.
“Quillan—”
For an instant, in the screen, there was something like heat shimmer at the far end of the passage. Then she saw her cabin door pop open.
The interior of the cabin showed in a brief flare of blue light. In it was a shape. It vanished instantly again.
She heard Quillan make a shocked, incredulous sound. His left hand slashed at a switch on the panel.
Twenty feet from them, just behind the closed door to the passage, was a splatting noise like a tremendous slap. Then another noise, strangely like a brief cloudburst. Then silence again.
She realized Quillan was on his feet beside her, the oversized gun in his hand. It was pointed at the door. His eyes switched suddenly from the door to the screen and back again. She felt him relaxing slowly. Then she discovered she was clutching a handful of his shirt along with a considerable chunk of tough skin. She went on clutching it.
“Fly swatter got it!” he said. “Whew!” He looked down and patted the clutching hand. “That was no catassin! The trap in the cabin wasn’t fast enough. Had a gravity mine outside our door, just in case. That was barely fast enough!” For once, Quillan looked almost awed.
“L-l-l-like—” Trigger began. She tried again. “Like a little yellow man—”
“You saw it? In the cabin? Yes. Never saw anything just like it before!”
Trigger pressed her lips together to make them stay steady.
“I have,” she said. “That’s what I was trying to tell you.”
Quillan stared at her for an instant. “You’ll tell me about it in a couple of minutes. I’ve got some quick work to do first.” He checked himself. A wide grin spread suddenly over his face. “Know something, doll?”
“What?”
“The damn computers!” Major Quillan said happily. “They goofed!”
* * *
The gravity mine would have reduced almost any life-form which moved into its field to a rather thin smear, but there wasn’t even that left of the yellow demon-shape. Something, presumably something it was carrying, had turned it into a small blaze of incandescent energy as the mine flattened it out. Which explained the sound like a cloudburst. That had been the passage’s automatic fire extinguishers going into brief but correspondingly violent action.
Quillan’s group stayed out of sight for the time being. He’d barely got the mine put away, along with a handful of warped metal slugs, which was what the mine had left of their attacker’s mechanical equipment, and Trigger’s cabin door locked again, when three visitors came zooming down the storerooms hall in a small car. A ship’s engineer and two assistants had arrived to check on what had started the extinguishers.
“They may,” Quillan said hopefully, “just go away again.” He and Trigger were watching the engineers through the viewer which had been extended to cover their end of the passage.
They didn’t just go away again. They checked the extinguishers, looked at the floor, still wet but rapidly absorbing the last drops of the brief deluge. They exchanged puzzled comment. They checked everything once more. Finally the leader made use of the door announcer and asked if he might intrude.
Quillan switched off the viewer. “Come in,” he said resignedly.
The door opened. The three glanced at Quillan, and then at Trigger-plus-Beldon. Their eyes widened only slightly. Duty on the Dawn City produced hardened men.
Neither Quillan nor Trigger could offer the slightest explanation as to what had started the extinguishers. The engineers apologized and withdrew. The door closed again.
Quillan switched on the viewer. Their voices came back into the cabin as they climbed into their car.
“So that’s how it happened,” one of the assistants was saying reflectively.
“Right,” said the ship’s engineer. “Like to burst into flames myself.”
“Ha-ha-ha!” They drove off.
Trigger flushed. She looked at Quillan.
“Perhaps I ought to get into something else,” she said. “Now that the party’s over.”
“Perhaps,” Quillan admitted. “I’ll have Gaya bring something down. We want to stay out of your cabin for an hour or so till everything’s been checked. There’ll be a few conferences to go through now.”
Gaya arrived next, with clothes. Trigger retired to the cabin’s bathroom with them and came out a few minutes later, dressed again. Meanwhile the Dawn City’s First Security Officer also had arrived and was setting up a portable restructure stage in the center of the cabin. He looked rather grim, but he also looked like a very much relieved man.
“I suggest we run your sequence off first, Major,” he said. “Then we can put them on together, and compare them.”
Trigger sat down on a couch beside Gaya to watch. She’d been told that the momentary view of the little demon-shape in the cabin had been deleted from Security’s copy of their own sequence and wasn’t to be mentioned.
Otherwise there really was not too much to see. What the attacking creature had used to blur the restructure wasn’t clear, except that it wasn’t a standard scrambler. Amplified to the limits of clarity and stepped down in time to the limit of immobility, all that emerged was a shifting haze of energy, which very faintly hinted at a dwarfish human shape in outline. A rather unusually small and heavy catassin, the Security chief pointed out, would present such an outline. That something quite material was finally undergoing devastating structural disorganization on the gravity mine was unpleasantly obvious, but it produced no further information. The sequence ended with the short blaze of heat which had set off the extinguishers.
Then they ran the restructure of the preceding double killing. Trigger watched, gulping a little, till it came to the point where the haze shape actually was about to touch its victims. Then she studied the carpet carefully until Gaya nudged her to indicate the business was over. Catassins almost invariably used their natural equipment in the kill; it was a swift process, of course, but shockingly brutal, and Trigger didn’t care to remember what the results looked like in a human being. Both men had been killed in that manner; and the purpose obviously was to conceal the fact that the killer was not a catassin, but something even more efficient along those lines.
It didn’t occur to the Security chief to question Trigger. A temporal restructure of a recent event was a far more reliable witness than any set of human senses and memory mechanisms. He left presently, reassured that the catassin incident was concluded. It startled Trigger to realize that Security did not seem to be considering seriously the possibility of discovering the human agent behind the murders.
Quillan shrugged. “Whoever did it is covered three ways in every direction. The chief knows it. He can’t psych four thousand people on general suspicions, and he’d hit mind-blocks in every twentieth passenger presently on board if he did. Anyway he knows we’re on it, and that we have a great deal better chance of nailing the responsible characters eventually.”
“More information for the computers, eh?” Trigger said.
“Uh-huh.”
“You got this little chunk the hard way, I feel,” she observed.
“True,” Quillan admitted. “But we have to get it any way we can till we get enough to move on. Then we move.” He looked at her, with an air of regarding a new idea. “You know,” he said, “you don’t do badly for an amateur!”
“She doesn’t do badly,” Gaya’s voice said behind Trigger, “for anybody. How do you people feel about a drink? I thought I could use one myself after looking at the chief’s restructure.”
Trigger felt herself coloring. Praise from the cloak and dagger experts! For some reason it pleased her immensely. She turned her head to smile at Gaya, standing there with three glasses on a tray.
“Thanks!” she said. She took one of the glasses. Gaya held the tray out to Quillan and took the third glass herself.
It was some five minutes later when Trigger remarked, “You know, I’m getting sleepy.”
Quillan looked around from the viewer equipment he and Gaya were dismantling. “Why not hit the couch over there and take a nap?” he suggested. “It’ll be about an hour before the boys can get down here for the real conference.”