She waved her hand at him as they came up. “Hi, Holati!”
“Hi, yourself,” said the Commissioner. He asked Quillan, “How’s she doing?”
“Not bad,” Quillan said. “A bit ta-ta at the moment. Double dose of ceridim, by the smell of it. Had a little trouble here, I see.”
“A little,” the Commissioner acknowledged. “They went for their guns.”
“Very uninformed gentlemen,” said Quillan. He let Lyad’s limp form slide off his shoulder, and bent forward to lower her into the subtub’s back seat. Trigger had been waiting for a chance to get into the conversation.
“Just who,” she demanded now, frowning, “is a bit ta-ta at the moment?”
“You,” said Quillan. “You’re doped, remember? You’ll ride up front with the Commissioner. Here.” He picked her up, plasmoid purse and all, and set her down on the front seat. Holati Tate, she discovered then, was already inside. Quillan swung down into the seat behind her. The canopy snapped shut above.
The Commissioner shifted the tub’s controls. In the screens, the room outside vanished. A darkness went rushing downwards past them.
A thought suddenly popped to mind again, and Trigger burst into tears. The Commissioner glanced over at her.
“What’s the matter, Trigger girl?”
“I’m so s-sorry I killed Pilli. He s-screamed.”
Then her mind froze up with a jolt, and thinking stopped completely. Quillan reached over the back of the seat and eased her over on her side.
“Got to her finally!” he said. He sat down again. He brooded a moment. “She shouldn’t get so disturbed about that Pilli thing,” he remarked then. “It couldn’t have lived anyway.”
“Eh?” the Commissioner said absently, watching the screens. “Why not?”
“Its brains,” Quillan explained, “were too far apart.”
The Commissioner blinked. “It’s getting to you too, son!” he said.
23
Trigger came out of the ceridim trance hours before Lyad awoke from the stunner blast she’d absorbed. The Commissioner was sitting in a chair beside her bunk, napping.
She looked around a moment, feeling very comfortable and secure. This was her personal cabin on Commissioner Tate’s ship, the one he referred to as the Big Job, modeled after the long-range patrol ships of the Space Scouts. It wasn’t actually very big, but six or seven people could go traveling around in it very comfortably. At the moment it appeared to be howling through subspace at its hellish rate again, going somewhere.
Well, that could keep.
Trigger reached out and poked the Commissioner’s knee. “Hey, Holati!” she whispered. “Wake up.”
His eyes opened. He looked at her and smiled. “Back again, eh?” he said.
Trigger motioned at the door. “Close it,” she whispered. “Got something to tell you.”
“Talk away,” he said. “Quillan’s piloting, the First Lady’s out cold, and Mantelish got dive-sick and I doped him. Nobody else on board.”
Trigger lay back and looked at him. “This is going to sound pretty odd!” she warned him. Then she told him what Repulsive had done and what he was trying to do.
The Commissioner looked badly shaken.
“You sure of that, Trigger?”
“Sure, I’m sure.”
“Trying to talk to you?”
“That’s it.”
He blinked at her. “I looked in the bag,” he said, “and the thing was gone.”
“Lyad knows it was gone,” Trigger said. “So in case she gets a chance to blab to someone, we’ll say you had it.”
He nodded and stood up. “You stay here,” he said. “Prescription for the kind of treatment you’ve had is a day of bed rest.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to go talk to that Psychology ship,” he said. “And just let ’em try to stall me this time!”
He went off up the passage toward the transmitter cabinet in the forward part of the ship. Some minutes passed. Then Trigger suddenly heard Commissioner Tate’s voice raised in great wrath. She listened. It appeared the Psychology Service had got off on the wrong foot by advising him once more to stay calm.
He came back presently and sat down beside the bunk, still a little red in the face. “They’re going to follow us,” he said. “If they hadn’t, I would have turned back and gunned our way on board that lopsided disgrace of theirs.”
“Follow us? Where?”
He grunted. “A place called Luscious. We’ll be there in under a week. It’ll take them about three. But they’re starting immediately.”
Trigger blinked. “Looks like the plasmoids have made it to the head of the problem list!”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” said the Commissioner. “I was put through to that Pilch after a while. She said to remind you to listen to your thinking whenever you can get around to it. Know what she meant?”
“I’m not sure I do,” Trigger said hesitantly. “But she’s mentioned it. I’ll give it a whirl. Why are we going to Luscious?”
“Selan’s Fleet found plasmoids on it. It’s in the Vishni area.”
“What kind of plasmoids?”
He shrugged. “They don’t amount to much, from what I heard. Small stuff. But definitely plasmoid. It looks like somebody might have done some experimenting there for a while. And not long ago.”
“Did they find the big one?”
“Not yet. No trace of any people on Luscious either.” He chewed his lip thoughtfully for a moment. “About an hour after we picked you and Lyad up,” he said, “we had a Council Order transmitted to the ship. Told us to swing off course a bit and rendezvous with a fast courier boat of theirs.”
“What for?”
“The order said the courier was to take Lyad on board and head for the Hub with her. Some diplomatic business.” He scratched his chin. “It also instructed us to treat the First Lady of Tranest with the courtesy due to her station meanwhile.”
“Brother!” Trigger said, outraged.
“Just too bad I couldn’t read that message,” said Holati Tate. “Some gravitic disturbance! Rendezvous point’s hours behind us. They’ll never catch up.”
“Ho-ho!” said Trigger. “But that’s being pretty insubordinate, Holati!”
“It was till just now,” he said. “I mentioned that we had Lyad on board to that Pilch person. She said she’d speak to the Council. We’re to hang on to Lyad, and when Pilch gets to Luscious she’ll interview her.”
Trigger grinned. “Now that,” she remarked, “gives me a feeling of great satisfaction, somehow. When Pilch gets her little mitts on someone, there isn’t much left out.”
“I had that impression. Meanwhile, we’ll put the Ermetyne through a routine questioning ourselves when she gets over being groggy. Courtesy will be on the moderate side. She’ll probably spill part of what she knows, especially if you sit there and hand her the beady stare from time to time.”
“That,” Trigger assured him, “will be hardly any effort at all!”
“I can imagine. You’re pretty sure that thing will show up again?”
Trigger nodded. “Just leave the handbag with me.”
“All right.” He stood up. “I’ve got a hot lunch prepared for you. I’ll bring the bag along. Then you can tell me what happened after they grabbed you.”
“How did you find out I was gone?” Trigger asked.
“Your fac,” he said. “The girl was darn good actually. I talked to you—her—on office transmitter once and didn’t spot a sour note. Mostly she just kept out of everybody’s way. Very slick at it! We would have got her fairly fast because we were preparing for take-off to Luscious by then. But she spilled it herself.”
“How?”
“I located her finally again, on transmitter screen. There was no one on her side to impress. She took a sniff of porgee.”
Trigger laughed delightedly. “Good old porgee pouch! It beat them twice. But how did you know where I was?”
“No problem there. We knew Lyad had strings on Pluly. Quillan knew about that sealed level on Pluly’s yacht and got Pluly to invite him over to admire the harem right after the Dawn City arrived. While he was admiring, he was also recording floor patterns for a subtub jump. That gimmick’s pretty much of a spilled secret now, but on a swap for you and Lyad it was worth it. We came aboard five minutes after we’d nabbed your fac.”
“The Ermetyne figured you’d go chasing after the Aurora,” Trigger said.
“Well,” the Commissioner said tolerantly, “the Ermetyne’s pretty young. The Aurora was a bit obvious.”
“How come Quillan didn’t start wondering when I didn’t show up in Mantelish’s lab with Repulsive?”
“So that’s what he was for!” Holati said. He rubbed the side of his jaw. “I was curious about that angle! That wasn’t Quillan. That was Quillan’s fac.”
“In Mantelish’s lab?” Trigger said, startled.
“Sure. That’s how they all got in. In those specimen crates Mantelish has been lugging into the dome the past couple of days. It looks like the prof’s been hypnotized up to his ears for months.”
The last five hours of her day of recuperative rest Trigger spent asleep, her cabin door locked and the plasmoid purse open on the bunk beside her. Holati had come by just before to report that the Ermetyne was now awake but very groggy, apparently more than a little shocked, and not yet quite able to believe she was still alive. He’d dose her with this and that, and interrogations would be postponed until everybody was on their feet.