Flam took a small knife and neatly slit the back of the Precol uniform open along the line of her spine. She folded the cloth away. Then Trigger felt the thin icy touches of some vanilla-smelling spray walk up her, ending at the base of her skull.
It wasn’t so very painful; Lyad had told the truth about that. But presently it became extremely undignified. Then her thoughts were speeding up and slowing down and swirling around in an odd, confusing fashion. And at last her voice began to say things she didn’t want it to say.
After this, there might have been a pause. She seemed to be floating up out of a small pool of sleep when Lyad’s voice said somewhere, with cold fury in it: “There’s nothing inside?”
A whole little series of memory-pictures popped up suddenly then, like a chain of firecrackers somebody had set off. They formed themselves into a pattern; and there the pattern was in Trigger’s mind. She looked at it. Her eyes flew open in surprise. She began to laugh weakly.
Light footsteps came quickly over to her. “Where is that plasmoid, Trigger?”
The Ermetyne was in a fine, towering rage. She’d better say something.
“Ask the Commissioner,” she said, mumbling it a little.
“It’s wearing off, First Lady,” said Flam. “Shall I?”
Trigger’s thoughts went eddying away for a moment, and she didn’t hear Lyad’s reply. But then the vanilla smell was there again, and the thin icy touches. This time, they stopped abruptly, halfway.
And then there was a very odd stillness all around Trigger. As if everybody and everything had stopped moving together.
A deep, savage voice said, “I hope there’ll be no trouble, folks. I just want her a lot worse than you do.”
Trigger frowned in puzzlement. Next came an angry roar, some thumping sounds, a sudden sharp crack.
“Oops!” the deep voice said happily. “A little too hard, I’m afraid!”
Why, of course, Trigger thought. She opened her eyes and twisted her head around.
“Still awake, Trigger?” Quillan asked from the door of the room. He looked pleasantly surprised. There was a very large bell-mouthed gun in his hand.
That was an odd-looking little group in the doorway, Trigger felt. On his knees before Quillan was a fat, elderly man, blinking dazedly at her. He wore a brilliantly purple bath towel knotted about his loins and nothing else. It was a moment before she recognized Belchik Pluly. Old Belchy! And on the floor before Belchy, motionless as if in devout prostration, Virod lay on his face. Dead, no doubt. He shouldn’t have got gay with Quillan.
“Yes,” Trigger said then, remembering Quillan’s question. “I’ve got a very fast snap-back—but they fed me a fresh load of dope just a moment ago.”
“So I saw,” said Quillan. His glance shifted beyond Trigger.
“Lyad,” he said, almost gently.
“Yes, Quillan?” Lyad’s voice came from the other side of Trigger. Trigger turned her head toward it. Lyad and Flam both stood at the far side of the room. Their expressions were unhappy.
“I don’t like at all,” Quillan said, “what’s been going on here. Not one bit! Which is why Big Boy got the neck broken finally. Can the rest of us take a hint?”
“Certainly,” the Ermetyne said.
“So the Flam girl quits ogling those guns on the shelf and stays put, or they’ll amputate a leg. First Lady, you come up to the table and get Trigger unclamped.”
Trigger realized her eyes had fallen shut again. She left them that way for the moment. There was motion near her, and the wrist clamps came off in turn. Lyad moved down to her feet.
“The fancy-looking little gun is Trigger’s?” Quillan inquired.
“Yes,” said Lyad.
“Is that what happened to Pilli and the other gent out there?”
“Yes.”
“Imagine!” said Quillan thoughtfully. “Uh—got something to seal up the clothes?”
“Yes,” Lyad said. “Bring it here, Flam.”
“Toss it, Flam!” cautioned Quillan. “Remember the leg.”
Lyad’s hands did things to the clothes at her back. Then they went away.
“You can sit up now, Trigger!” Quillan’s voice informed her loudly. “Sort of slide down easy off the table and see if you can stand.”
Trigger opened her eyes, twisted about, slid her legs over the edge of the table, came down on her feet, stood.
“I want my gun and the handbag,” she announced. She saw them again then, on the shelf, walked over and picked up the plasmoid container. She looked inside, snapped it shut and slung the strap over her shoulder. She picked up the Denton, looked at its setting, spun it and turned.
“First Lady—” she said.
Lyad went white around the lips. Quillan made some kind of startled sound. Trigger shot.
Flam ran at her then, screaming, arms waving, eyes wild and green like an animal’s. Trigger half turned and shot again.
She looked at Quillan. “Just stunned,” she explained. She waited.
Quillan let his breath out slowly. “Glad to hear it!” He glanced down at Pluly. “Purse was open,” be remarked significantly.
“Uh-huh,” Trigger agreed.
“How’s doohinkus?”
She laughed. “Safe and sound! Believe me.”
“Good,” he said. He still looked somewhat puzzled. “Put the eye on Belchy for a few seconds then. We’re taking Lyad along. I’ll have to carry her now.”
“Right,” Trigger said. She felt rather jaunty at the moment. She put the eye on Belchik. Belchik moaned.
They started out of the little room, Pluly in the van, clutching his towel. The Ermetyne, dangling loosely over Quillan’s left shoulder, looked fairly gruesomely dead. “You walk this side of me, Trigger,” Quillan said. “Still all right?”
She nodded. “Yes.” Actually she wasn’t, quite. It was mainly a problem with her thoughts, which showed a tendency now to move along in odd little leaps and bounds, with short stops in between, as if something were trying to freeze them up. But if it was going to be like the first time, she should last till they got to wherever they were going.
Halfway across the big room, she saw the golden thing like a huge furry sack on the carpet and shivered. “Poor Pilli!” she said.
“Alas!” Quillan said politely. “I gather you didn’t just stun Pilli?”
She shook her head. “Couldn’t,” she said. “Too big. Too fast.”
“How about the other one?”
“Oh, him. Stunned. He’s an investigator. They thought he was dead, though. That’s what scared Lyad and Flam.”
“Yeah,” Quillan said thoughtfully. “It would.”
Another section of wall hanging had folded aside, and a wide door stood open behind it. They went through the door and turned into a mirrored passageway, Pluly still tottering rapidly ahead. “Might keep that gun ready, Trigger,” Quillan warned. “We just could get jumped here. Don’t think so, though. They’d have to get past the Commissioner.”
“Oh, he’s here, too?”
She didn’t hear what Quillan answered, because things faded out around then. When they faded in again, the passageway with the mirrors had disappeared, and they were coming to the top of a short flight of low, wide stairs and into a very beautiful room. This room was high and long, not very wide. In the center was a small square swimming pool, and against the walls on either side was a long row of tall square crystal pillars through which strange lights undulated slowly. Trigger glanced curiously at the nearest pillar. She stopped short.
“Galaxy!” she said, startled.
Quillan reached back and grabbed her arm with his gun hand. “Keep moving, girl! That’s just how Belchik keeps his harem grouped around him when he’s working. Not too bad an idea—it does cut down the chatter. This is his office.”
“Office!” Then she saw the large business desk with prosaic standard equipment which stood on the carpet on the other side of the pool. They moved rapidly past the pool, Quillan still hauling at her arm. Trigger kept staring at the pillars they passed. Long-limbed, supple and languid, they floated there in their crystal cages, in tinted, shifting lights, eyes closed, hair drifting about their faces.
“Awesome, isn’t it?” Quillan’s voice said.
“Yes,” said Trigger. “Awesome. One in each—he is a pig! They look drowned.”
“He is and they aren’t,” said Quillan. “Very lively girls when he lets them out. Now around this turn and . . . oops!”
Pluly had reached the turn at the end of the row of pillars, moaned again and fallen forwards.
“Fainted!” Quillan said. “Well, we don’t need him any more. Watch your step, Trigger—dead one just behind Pluly.”
Trigger stretched her stride and cleared the dead one behind Pluly neatly. There were three more dead ones lying inside the entrance to the next big room. She went past them, feeling rather dreamy. The sight of a squat, black subtub parked squarely on the thick purple carpeting ahead of her, with its canopy up, didn’t strike her as unusual. Then she saw that the man leaning against the canopy, a gun in one hand, was Commissioner Tate. She smiled.