“Yes,” she said. “Going over for visits to Mantelish’s garden with my father is one of the earliest things I remember. I can imagine he’s a problem!” She shifted her gaze curiously from one to the other of the two men. “What are you people doing? Looking for Gess Fayle and the key unit?”
Holati Tate said, “That’s about it. We’re one of a few thousandhundred Federation groups assigned to the same general job.plasmoid project. Each group works at its specialties, and the information gets correlated.” He paused. “The Federation Council — they’re the ones we’re working for directly — the Council’s biggest concern is the very delicate political situation that’s involved. They feel it could develop suddenly into a dangerous one. They may be right.”
“In what way?” Trigger asked.
“Well, suppose that a key unit is lost and stays lost. Unit 112-113, to be precise. Suppose all the other plasmoids put together don’t contain enough information to show how the Old Galactics produced the things and got them to operate.”
“Somebody would get that worked out pretty soon, wouldn’t they?”
“Not necessarily, or even probably, according to Mantelish and some other people who know what’s happened. There seem to be too many basic factors missing. It might be necessary to develop a whole new class of sciences first. And that could take a few centuries.”
“Well,” Trigger admitted, “I could get along without the things indefinitely.”
“Same here,” the plasmoid nabob agreed ungratefully. “Weird beasties! But — let’s see. At present there are twelve hundred and fifty-eight member worlds to the Federation, aren’t there?”
“More or less.”
“And the number of planetary confederacies, subplanetary governments, industrial, financial and commercial combines, assorted power groups, etc. and so on, is something I’d hate to have to calculate.”
“What are you driving at?” she asked.
“They’ve all been told we’re heading for a new golden age, courtesy of the plasmoid science. Practically everybody has believed it. Now there’s considerable doubt.”
“Oh,” she said. “Of course — practically everybody is going to get very unhappy, eh?”
“That,” said Commissioner Tate, “is only a little of it.”
“Yes, the thing isn’t just lost. Somebody’s got it.”
“Very likely.”
Trigger nodded. “Fayle’s ship might have got wrecked accidentally, of course. But the way he took off shows he planned to disappear — a crack-up on top of that would be too much of a coincidence. So any one of umpteen thousands of organizations in the Hub might be the one that has that plasmoid now!”
“Including,” said Holati, “any one of the two hundred and fourteen restricted worlds. Their treaties of limitation wouldn’t have let them get into the plasmoid pie until the others had been at it a decade or so. They would have been quite eager…”
There was a little pause. Then Trigger said, “Lordy! The thing could even set off another string of wars–”
“That’s a point the Council is nervous about,” he said.
“Well, it certainly is amess. You would have thought the Federation might have had a Security Chief in on that first operation. Right there on Harvest Moon!”
“They did,” he said. “It was Fayle.”
“Oh! Pretty embarrassing.”mess.” Trigger was silent a moment. “Holati, could those things ever become as valuable as people keep saying? It’s all sounded a little exaggerated to me.”
The Commissioner said he’d wondered about it too. “I’m not enough of a biologist to make an educated guess. What it seems to boil down to is that they might. Which would be enough to tempt a lot of people to gamble very high for a chance to get control of the plasmoidprocess — and we know definitely that some people are gambling for it.”
“How do you know?”
“We’veprocess. We’ve been working a couple of leads here. Pretty short leads so far, but you work with what you can get.” He nodded at the table. “We picked up the first lead through 113-A.”
Trigger glanced down. The plasmoid lay there some inches from the side of her hand. “You know,” she said uncomfortably, “old Repulsive moved again while we were talking! Towards my hand.” She drew the hand away.
“I was watching it,” Major Quillan said reassuringly from the end of the table. “I would have warned you, but it stopped when it got as far as it is now. That was around five minutes ago.”
Trigger reached back and gave old Repulsive a cautious pat. “Very lively character! He does feel pleasant to touch. Kitty-cat pleasant! How did you get a lead through him?”
“Mantelish brought it back to Maccadon with him, mainly becauseof its similarity to 113. He was curious because he couldn’t even guess at what its function was. It was just lying there in a cubicle. So he did considerable experimenting with it while he waited for Gess Fayle to show up — and League Headquarters fidgeted around, hoping to get the kind of report from Mantelish and Fayle that Mantelish it.”
thought they’d already received. They were wondering where Fayle was, too. But they knew Fayle was Security, so they didn’t like to get too nosy.”
Trigger shook her head. “Wonderful! So what happened with 113-A?”
“Mantelish began to get results with it,” the Commissioner said. “One experiment was rather startling. He’d been trying that electrical stimulation business. Nothing happened until he had finished. Then he touched the plasmoid, and it fed the whole charge back to him. Apparently it was a fairly hefty dose.”
She laughed delightedly. “Good for Repulsive! Stood up for his rights, eh?”
“Mantelish gained some such impression anyway. He became more cautious with it after that. And then he learned something that should be important. He was visiting another lab where they had a couple of plasmoids which actually moved now and then. He had 113-A in his coat pocket. The two lab plasmoids stopped moving while he was there. They haven’t movedsince.”
“Like the Harvest Moon plasmoids when they stimulated 113?”
“Right.since. He thought about that, and then located another moving plasmoid. He dropped in to look it over, with 113-A in his pocket again, and it stopped. He did the same thing in one more place and then quit. There aren’t that many moving plasmoids around. Those three labs are still wondering what hit their specimens.”
She studied 113-A curiously. “A mighty mite! What does Mantelish make of it?”
“He thinks the stolen 112-113 unit forms a kind of self-regulating system. The big one induces plasmoid activity, the little one modifies it. This 113-A might be a spare regulator. But it seems to be more than a spare — which brings us to that first lead we got. A gang of raiders crashed Mantelish’s lab one night.”
“When was that?”
“Some months ago. Before you and I left Manon. The professor was out, and 113-A had gone along in his pocket as usual. But his two lab guards and one of the raiders were killed. The others got away.Gess Fayle’s defection was a certainty by then, and everybody was very nervous. The Feds got there fast, and dead-brained the raider. They learned just two things. One, he’d been mind-blocked and couldn’t have spilled any significant information even if they had got him alive. The other item they drew from his brain was a clear impression of the target of the raid — the professor’s pal here.”
“Uh-huh,” Trigger said, lost in thought. She poked Repulsive lightly. “That would be Fayle and his associates then. Or somebody who knew about them. Did they want to kill it or grab it?”
The Commissioner looked at her. “Grab it, was the dead-brain report. Why?”
“Just wondering. Would make a difference, wouldn’t it? Did they try again?”
“There’ve been five more attempts,” he said.
“And what’s everybody concluded from that?”
“They want 113-A in a very bad way. So they need it.”
“In connection with the key unit?” Trigger asked.
“Probably.”
“That makes everything look very much better, doesn’t it?”
“Quite a little,” he said. “The unit may not work, or may not work satisfactorily, unless 113-A is in the area. Mantelish talks of something he calls proximity influence. Whatever that is, 113-A has demonstrated it has it.”
“So,” Trigger said, “they”whoever stole 112-113 might have two thirds of what everybody wants, and you might have one third. Right here on the table. How many of the later raiders did you catch?”
“All of them,” said the Commissioner. “Around forty. We got them dead, we got them alive. It didn’t make much difference. They were hired hands. Very expensive hired hands, but still just that. Most of them didn’t know a thing we could use. The ones that did know something were mind-blocked again.”
“I thought,” Trigger said reflectively, “you could unblock someone like that.”
“You can, sometimes, Ififsometimes. If you’re very good at it and if you have time enough. We couldn’t afford to wait a year. They died before they could tell us anything.”
There was a pause. Then Trigger asked, “How did you get involved in this, personally?”