Trigger and Friends by James H. Schmitz

Pilch’s voice said, “Hold still!” behind Duffold, and something like a pliable ring slipped down around his skull. Soft clamps fastened it here and there, and then he was aware of her settling down in the chair beside him. Her whisper reached him again, “If you don’t like what you’re getting, say so! They don’t really need you for this.”

Duffold made a grunting sound, indicating complete contentment with his situation and a desire not to be disturbed, but not entirely turning down the suggestion. There were crawling feelings along his spine.

He felt good. He felt drowsy but purposeful, because now there were only a few more steps to go, and then the great pink maw would open before him, and he could relax right into it. Relax and—

He jerked upright in his chair, horror prickling through his nerves. Pilch was tapping his arm.

“Outside!” she whispered. “Keep the damper on.” They moved through the dim room; a door clicked ahead of Duffold, then clicked again behind him, and light flooded around them.

He pulled the tel-damper off his head like some small, unclean, clinging animal. “Whew!” he breathed. “Should have taken your advice, I think!”

“Well, you didn’t know. We should have thought of it. There are ways of letting stuff like that come at you, and you—”

“Don’t say it,” he warned. “I’m learning my limitations.” He was silent a moment. “Was that how it felt to them?” He described his sensations.

“They felt something like that,” she said. “You gave the impulses your individual interpretations, of course, because you’d seen the restructure and knew what the keff was like. Cabon will be out in a moment, by the way. They got the Integrators’ report back on this. I gather there’s nothing definite enough in it to change our plans.”

“I see,” Duffold said absently. Mentally, he was reliving that section of the restructure in which the two investigators had come walking and wading right up to the keff, looking about as if searching for something, and apparently not even aware of each other’s presence. Then they had stood still, while the huge head came slowly up out of the water before them—and the wet, pink maw opened wide and slapped shut twice.

Cabon stepped out of the room behind them. He grinned faintly. “Raw stuff,” he remarked. “You’ve got a fine restructure team, Excellency.”

“Any delays indicated?” Pilch inquired.

“No. You’d better go ahead on schedule. It’s almost certain we’ll still need our average Palayatan—and the one we’ve got spotted isn’t going to hold still for us forever.”

3

Yunnan, the average Palayatan, had finished the satisfactory third day of his solitary camping hike with a satisfactory meal composed largely of a broiled platterful of hard-shelled and hard-to-catch little water creatures, famed for their delicacy. The notion of refreshing his memory of that delicacy had been in his mind for some weeks and had finally led him up to this high mountain plateau and its hundreds of quick, cold streams where they were to be found at their best.

Having sucked out the last of the shells and pitched it into his camp fire, he sat on for a while under the darkening sky, watching the stars come out and occasionally glancing across the plateau at the dark, somber mass of the next mountain ridge. Two other campfires had become very distantly visible there, indicating the presence of other soqua spearers. He would stay here two more days, Yunnan thought, and then turn back, towards the valleys and the plain, and return to his semi-permanent house in his semi-permanent settlement, to devote himself again for a while to his semi-permanent occupation of helping local unbannut-growers select the best seeds for next season’s crop.

It was all a very pleasant prospect. Life, Yunnan told himself, with a sense of having summed it up, was a pretty good thing! It was a conclusion he had come to before under similar circumstances.

Presently he rebuilt the fire, stretched out on some blankets close to it, and pulled a few more blankets on top of him. He blinked up at the stars a few more times and fell sound asleep.

Far overhead, a meteor that was not a meteor hit the atmosphere, glowed yellow, and vanished. A survey heli of the Hub Station’s Planetary Geographers outfit, which had been moving high and unobtrusively above the plateau all day, came in closer to a point almost directly above Yunnan’s camp, remained there a few minutes, and moved off again across the plateau and on beyond the mountain ridges to the east.

A dark spherical body, the size of a small house, sank swiftly and silently toward the plateau and came to a halt finally a hundred yards above Yunnan’s camp and a little more than that to one side of it. Presently a breeze moved from that direction across the camp, carrying traces of a chemical not normally found in such concentration in Palayata’s air. Yunnan inhaled it obligingly. A few minutes later, the breeze grew suddenly into a smooth, sustained rush of air, like the first moan of an approaching storm. Sparks flew from the fire, and leaves danced out of the trees. Then the wind subsided completely, and three people came walking into the camp. They bent above Yunnan.

“Perfect reaction!” Pilch’s voice said. She straightened and glanced up. The spherical object had come gliding along at treetop level behind them and was now stationed directly overhead. Various and sundry clicking, buzzing, and purring sounds came out of its open lock. “Take them two or three more minutes to get a complete reproduction,” she remarked. “Nothing to do but wait.”

Duffold grunted. He was feeling uncomfortable again, and not entirely because of the presence of a Palayatan. Pilch had explained what had happened to Yunnan; the patterns of external sensory impressions that had been sifting into his brain at the moment the trace-chemical reached it through his blood stream were fixed there now, and no new impressions were coming through. He would remain like that, his last moment of sleep-sensed external reality extending itself unchangingly through the hours and days until the blocking agent was removed. What worried Duffold was that the action was a deliberate preliminary prod at the mysterious X factor, and if X felt prodded, there was no telling at all just how it might respond.

He looked down at their captive. Yunnan certainly looked quietly asleep, but the mild smile on his humanoid features might have expressed either childlike innocence or a rather sinister enjoyment of the situation, depending on how you felt about Palayatans.

And assuming Yunnan was harmless, at least for the moment, was somebody—or something—else, far off or perhaps quite close in the thickening night around them, aware by now that untoward and puzzling things were going on in a Palayatan mind?

Duffold knew they were trying to check on that, too. A voice began murmuring presently from one of the talkie gadgets Pilch wore as earrings. When it stopped, she said briefly, “All right.” And then, to Duffold, “Not a pulse coming through the tele-screens that wouldn’t be normal here! Just animals—” She sounded disappointed about it.

“Too bad!” Duffold said blandly. His nerves unknotted a trifle.

“Well, it’s negative evidence anyway!” Pilch consoled him. The voice murmured from the same earring again, and she said, “All right. Put down the carrier then!” and to her two companions, “They’re all done in the shuttle. Let’s go.”

A grav-carrier came floating down through the dark air toward them, and the crewman who had accompanied them into the camp began to extinguish the fire. He was conscientious and thorough about it. Pilch stepped up on the carrier. Duffold looked at her, at the busy crewman, and at Yunnan. Then he set his teeth, wrapped the Palayatan up in his blankets, picked him up, and laid him down on the carrier.

“Hm-m-m!” said Pilch. “Not bad, Excellency!”

Duffold thought a bad word and hoped she wasn’t being telepathic.

“Of course not!” said Pilch, reaching up for the earring that hadn’t come into noticeable use so far. She began to unscrew it. “Besides, I’m shutting off the pick-up right now, Excellency—”

Almost two hours later, Yunnan awakened briefly. He blinked up at the familiar star-patterns overhead, gazed out across the plateau, and noted that one of the campfires there had gone out. Thus reminded, he yawned and scratched himself, stood up, and replenished his own fire. Then he lay down again, listened for a half-minute or so to the trilling night-cries of two small tree creatures not far away, and drifted back to sleep.

* * *

“He’s completely out of the sensory stasis now, of course,” Wintan explained to Duffold as the view of Yunnan’s camp faded out before them. “How did you like the staging job?”

Duffold admitted it was realistic. He was wondering, however, he added, what would have happened if the Palayatan had decided to go for a stroll and walked off the stage?

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