“What’s wrong?” Trigger asked.
“Transmitters went out,” he said. “Don’t know why yet. Grab some tools and help me check.”
She slipped on her work gloves, grabbed some tools and joined him. Lyad and Mantelish watched them silently.
They found the first spots of the fungus a few minutes later.
“Fungus!” Mantelish said, startled. He began to fumble in his pockets. “My microscope—”
“I have it.” Lyad handed it to him. She looked at him with concern. “You don’t think—”
“It seems possible. We did come in here last night, remember? And we came straight from the lab.”
“But we had decontaminated,” Lyad said puzzledly.
“Don’t try to walk in here, Professor!” Trigger warned as he lumbered forward. “We might have to de-electrocute you. The Commissioner will scrape off a sample and hand it out. This stuff—if it’s what you think it might be—is it poisonous?”
“Quite harmless to life, my dear,” said the professor, bending over the patch of greenish-gray scum the Commissioner had reached out to him. “But ruinous in delicate instruments! That’s why we’re so careful.”
Holati Tate glanced at Trigger. “Better look in the black box, Trig,” he said.
She nodded and wormed herself farther into the innards of the transmitters. A minute later she announced, “Full of it! And that’s the one part we can’t repair or replace, of course. Is it your beast, Professor?”
“It seems to be,” Mantelish said unhappily. “But we have, at least, a solvent which will remove it from the equipment.”
Trigger came sliding out from under the transmitters, the detached black box under one arm. “Better use it then before the stuff gets to the rest of the ship. It won’t help the black box.” She shook it. It tinkled. “Shot!” she said. “There went another quarter million of your credits, Commissioner.”
Mantelish and Lyad headed for the lock to get the solvent. Trigger slipped off her work gloves and turned to follow them. “Might be a while before I’m back,” she said.
The Commissioner started to say something, then nodded and climbed back into the transmitters. After a few minutes, Mantelish came puffing in with sprayers and cans of solvent. “It’s at least fortunate you tried to put out a call just now,” he said. “It might have done incalculable damage.”
“Doubt it,” said Holati. “A few more instruments might have gone. Like the communicators. The main equipment is fungus-proof. How do you attach this thing?”
Mantelish showed him.
The Commissioner thanked him. He directed a fine spray of the solvent into the black box and watched the fungus melt. “Happen to notice where Trigger and Lyad went?” he asked.
“Eh?” said Mantelish. He reflected. “I saw them walking down toward camp talking together as I came in,” he recalled. “Should I go get them?”
“Don’t bother,” Holati said. “They’ll be back.”
They came walking back into the ship around half an hour later. Both faces looked rather white and strained.
“Lyad has something she wants to tell you, Holati,” Trigger said. “Where’s Mantelish?”
“In his lab. Taking a nap, I believe.”
“That’s good. We don’t want him here for this. Go ahead, Lyad. Just the important stuff. You can give us the details after we’ve left.”
* * *
Three hours later, the ship was well away from Luscious, traveling subspace, traveling fast. Trigger walked up into the control section.
“Mantelish is still asleep,” she said. They’d fed the professor a doped drink to get him aboard without detailed explanation and argument about how much of the lab should be loaded on the ship first. “Shall I get Lyad out of her cabin for the rest of the story or wait till he wakes up?”
“Better wait,” said the Commissioner. “He’ll come out of it in about an hour, and he might as well hear it with us. Looks like navigating’s going to be a little rough for a spell anyway.”
Trigger nodded and sat down in the control seat next to his. After a while he glanced over at her.
“How did you get her to talk?” he asked.
“We went back into the woods a bit. I tied her over a stump and broke two sticks across the first seat of Tranest. Got the idea from Mihul, sort of,” Trigger added vaguely. “When I picked up a third stick, Lyad got awfully anxious to keep things at just a fast conversational level. We kept it there.”
“Hm,” said the Commissioner. “You don’t feel she did any lying this time?”
“I doubt it. I tapped her one now and then, just to make sure she didn’t slow down enough to do much thinking. Besides I’d got the whole business down on a pocket recorder, and Lyad knew it. If she makes one more goof till this deal is over, the recording gets released to the Hub’s news viewer outfits, yowls and all. She’d sooner lose Tranest than risk having that happen. She’ll be good.”
“Yeah, probably,” he said thoughtfully. “About that substation—would you feel more comfortable if we went after the bunch around the Devagas dome first and got us an escort for the trip?”
“Sure,” Trigger said. “But that would just about kill any chances of doing anything personally, wouldn’t it?”
“I’m afraid so. Scout Intelligence will go along pretty far with me. But they couldn’t go that far. We might be able to contact Quillan individually though. He’s a topnotch man in a fighter.”
“It doesn’t seem to me,” Trigger said, “that we ought to run any risk of being spotted till we know exactly what this thing is like.”
“Well,” said the Commissioner, “I’m with you there. We shouldn’t.”
“What about Mantelish and Lyad? You can’t let them know either.”
The Commissioner motioned with his head. “The rest cubicle back of the cabins. If we see a chance to do anything, we’ll pop them both into Rest. I can dream up something to make that look plausible afterwards, I think.”
Trigger was silent a moment. Lyad had told them she’d dispatched the Aurora to stand guard over a subspace station where the missing king plasmoid presently was housed, until both she and the combat squadron from Tranest could arrive there. The exact location of that station had been the most valuable of the bits of information she had extracted so painstakingly from Balmordan. The coordinates were centered on the Commissioner’s course screen at the moment.
“How about that Tranest squadron?” Trigger asked. “Think Lyad might have risked a lie, and they could get out here in time to interfere?”
“No,” said the Commissioner. “She had to have some idea of where to send them before starting them out of the Hub. They’ll be doing fine if they make it to the substation in another two weeks. Now the Aurora—if they started for Luscious right after Lyad called them last night, at best they can’t get there any sooner than we can get to the substation. I figure that at four days. If they turn right around then, and start back—”
Trigger laughed. “You can bet on that!” she said. The Commissioner had used his ship’s guns to brand the substation’s coordinates in twenty-mile figures into a mountain plateau above Plasmoid Creek. They’d left much more detailed information in camp, but there was a chance it would be overlooked in too hurried a search.
“Then they’ll show up at the substation again four or five days behind us,” the Commissioner said. “So they’re no problem. But our own outfit’s fastest ships can cut across from the Devagas dome in less than three days after their search party messages from Luscious to tell them why we’ve stopped transmitting and where we’ve gone. Or the Psychology ship might get to Luscious before the search party does and start transmitting about the coordinates.”
“In any case,” said Trigger, “it’s our own boys who are likely to be the problem.”
“Yes. I’d say we should have two days, give or take a few hours, after we get to the station to see if we can do anything useful and get it done. Of course, somebody might come wandering into Luscious right now and start wondering about those coordinate figures, or drop in at our camp and discover we’re gone. But that’s not very likely, after all.”
“Couldn’t be helped anyway,” Trigger said.
“No. If we knock ourselves out on this job, somebody besides Lyad’s Tranest squadron and the Devagas has to know just where the station is.” He shook his head. “That Lyad! I figured she’d know how to run the transmitters, so I gave her the chance. But I never imagined she’d be a good enough engineer to get inside them and mess them up without killing herself.”
“Lyad has her points,” Trigger said. “Too bad she grew up a rat. You had a playback attachment stuck in there then?”
“Naturally.”
“Full of the fungus, I suppose?”
“Full of it,” said the Commissioner. “Well, Lyad still lost on that maneuver. Much less comfortably then she might have, too.”