“Stay where I was?”
“In the Manon System.”
“Oh!” Trigger flushed a little. “Well—”
“I know. Let’s go on a moment. We had this inharmonious inclination. So we told Commissioner Tate to bring you to the Hub and keep you there, to see what would happen. And on Maccadon, in just a few weeks, you’d begun working that moderate inclination to be back in the Manon System up to a dandy first-rate compulsion.”
Trigger licked her lips. “I—”
“Sure,” said Pilch. “You had to have a good sensible reason. You gave yourself one.”
“Well!”
“Oh, you were fond of that young man, all right. But that was the first time you hadn’t been able to stand a couple of months away from him. It was also the first time you’d started worrying about competition. You now had your justification. And we,” Pilch said darkly, “had a fine, solid compulsion with no doubt very revealing ramifications to it to work on. Just one thing wrong with that, Trigger. You don’t have the compulsion any more.”
“Oh?”
“You don’t even,” said Pilch, “have the original moderate inclination. Now one might have some suspicions there! But we’ll let them ride for the moment.”
She did something on the desk. The huge wall-screen suddenly lit up. A soft, amber-glowing plane of blankness, with a suggestion of receding depths within it.
“Last night, shortly before you woke up,” Pilch said, “you had a dream. Actually you had a series of dreams during the night which seem pertinent here. But the earlier ones were rather vague preliminary structures. In one way and another, their content is included in this final symbol grouping. Let’s see what we can make of them.”
A shape appeared on the screen.
Trigger started, then laughed.
“What do you think of it?” Pilch asked.
“A little green man!” she said. “Well, it could be a sort of counterpart to the little yellow thing on the ship, couldn’t it? The good little dwarf and the very bad little dwarf.”
“Could be,” said Pilch. “How do you feel about the notion?”
“Good plasmoids and bad plasmoids?” Trigger shook her head. “No. It doesn’t feel right.”
“Right,” Pilch said. “Let’s see what you can do with this one.”
Trigger was silent for almost a minute before she said in a subdued voice, “I just get what it shows. It doesn’t seem to mean anything?”
“What does it show?”
“Laughing giants stamping on a farm. A tiny sort of farm. It looks like it might be the little green man’s farm. No, wait. It’s not his! But it belongs to other little green people.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“Well—I hate those giants!” Trigger said. “They’re cruel. And they laugh about being cruel.”
“Are you afraid of them?”
Trigger blinked at the screen for a few seconds. “No,” she said in a low, sleepy voice. “Not yet.”
Pilch was silent a moment. She said then, “One more.”
Trigger looked and frowned. Presently she said, “I have a feeling that does mean something. But all I get is that it’s the faces of two clocks. On one of them the hands are going around very fast. And on the other they go around slowly.”
“Yes,” Pilch said. She waited a little. “No other thought about those clocks? Just that they should mean something?”
Trigger shook her head. “That’s all.”
Pilch’s hand moved on the desk again. The wall-screen went blank, and the light in the little room brightened slowly. Pilch’s face was reflective.
“That will have to do for now,” she said. “Trigger, this ship is working on an urgent job somewhere else. We’ll have to go back and finish that job. But I’ll be able to return to Manon in about ten days, and then we’ll have another session. And I think that will get this little mystery cleared up.”
“All of it?”
“All of it, I’d say. The whole pattern seems to be moving into view. More details will show up in the ten-day interval; and one more cautious boost then should bring it out in full.”
Trigger nodded. “That’s good news. I’ve been getting a little fed up with being a kind of walking enigma.”
“Don’t blame you at all,” Pilch said, sounding almost exactly like Commissioner Tate. “Incidentally, you’re a busy lady at present, but if you do have half an hour to spare from time to time, you might just sit down comfortably somewhere and listen to yourself thinking. The way things are going, that should bring quite a bit of information to view.”
Trigger looked doubtful. “Listen to myself thinking?”
“You’ll find yourself getting the knack of it rather quickly,” Pilch said. She smiled. “Just head off in that general direction whenever you find the time, and don’t work too hard at it. Are there any questions now before we start back to Manon?”
Trigger studied her a moment. “There’s one thing I’d like to be sure about,” she said. “But I suppose you people have your problems with Security too.”
“Who doesn’t?” said Pilch. “You’re secure enough for me. Fire away.”
“All right,” Trigger said. “So I am involved with the plasmoid mess?”
“You’re right in the middle of it, Trigger. That’s definite. In just what way is something we should be able to determine next session.”
Pilch turned off the desk light and stood up. “I always hate to run off and leave something half finished like this,” she admitted, “but I’ll have to run anyway. The plasmoids are nowhere near the head of the Federation’s problem list at present. They’re just coming up mighty fast.”
20
When Trigger reached her office next morning, she learned that the Psychology Service ship had moved out of the Manon area within an hour after she’d been returned to the Headquarters dome the night before.
None of the members of the plasmoid team were around. The Commissioner, who had a poor opinion of sleep, had been up for the past three hours; he’d left word Trigger could reach him, if necessary, in the larger of his two ships, parked next to the dome in Precol Port. Presumably he had the ship sealed up and was sitting in the transmitter cabinet, swapping messages with the I-Fleets in the Vishni area. He was likely to be at that for hours more. Professor Mantelish hadn’t yet got back from his latest field trip, and Major Heslet Quillan just wasn’t there.
It looked, Trigger decided, not at all reluctantly, like a good day to lean into her Precol job a bit. She told the staff to pitch everything not utterly routine her way, and leaned.
A set of vitally important reports from Precol’s Giant Planet Survey Squad had been mislaid somewhere around Headquarters during yesterday’s conferences. She soothed down the GP Squad and instituted a check search. A team of Hub ecologists, who had decided for themselves that outworld booster shots weren’t required on Manon, called in nervously from a polar station to report that their hair was falling out. Trigger tapped the “Manon Fever” button on her desk, and suggested toupees.
The ecologists were displeased. A medical emergency skip-boat zoomed out of the dome to go to their rescue; and Trigger gave it its directions while dialing for the medical checker who’d allowed the visitors to avoid their shots. She had a brief chat with the young man, and left him twitching as the GP Squad came back on to inquire whether the reports had been found yet. Trigger began to get a comfortable feeling of being back in the good old groove.
Then a message from the Medical Department popped out on her desk. It was addressed to Commissioner Tate and stated that Brule Inger was now able to speak again.
Trigger frowned, sighed, bit her lip and thought a moment. She dialed for Doctor Leehaven. “Got your message,” she said. “How’s he doing?”
“All right,” the old medic said.
“Has he said anything?”
“No. He’s scared. If he could get up the courage, he’d ask for a personnel lawyer.”
“Yes, I imagine. Tell him this then—from the Commissioner; not from me—there’ll be no charges, but Precol expects his resignation, end of the month.”
“That on the level?” Doctor Leehaven demanded incredulously.
“Of course.”
The doctor snorted. “You people are getting soft-headed! But I’ll tell him.”
The morning went on. Trigger was suspiciously studying a traffic control note stating that a Devagas missionary ship had checked in and berthed at the spaceport when the GC Center’s management called in to report, with some nervousness, that the Center’s much advertised meteor-repellent roof had just flipped several dozen tons of falling Moon Belt material into the spaceport area. Most of it, unfortunately, had dropped around and upon a Devagas missionary ship.
“Not damaged, is it?” she asked.
The Center said no, but the Missionary Captain insisted on speaking to the person in charge here. To whom should they refer him?
“Refer him to me,” Trigger said expectantly. She switched on the vision screen.