7
The burly character who had appeared at the door said diffidently thatProfessor Mantelish had wanted to be present while his lab equipment wasstowed aboard. If the professor didn't mind, things were about that faralong.
Mantelish excused himself and went off with the messenger. The doorclosed. Quillan came back to his chair.
"We're moving the outfit later tonight," the Commissioner explained."Mantelish is coming along--plus around eight tons of his lab equipment.Plus his special U-League guards."
"Oh?" Trigger picked up the Puya glass. She looked into it. It wasempty. "Moving where?" she asked.
"Manon," said the Commissioner. "Tell you about that later."
Every last muscle in Trigger's body seemed to go limp simultaneously.She settled back slightly in the chair, surprised by the force of thereaction. She hadn't realized by now how keyed up she was! She sighed asmall sigh. Then she smiled at Quillan.
"Major," she said, "how about a tiny little refill on that Puya--abouthalf?"
Quillan took care of the tiny little refill.
Commissioner Tate said, "By the way, Quillan does have a degree insubspace engineering and gets assigned to the Engineers now and then.But his real job's Space Scout Intelligence."
Trigger nodded. "I'd almost guessed it!" She gave Quillan another smile.She nearly gave 113-A a smile.
"And now," said the Commissioner, "we'll talk more freely. We tellMantelish just as little as we can. To tell you the truth, Trigger, theprofessor is a terrible handicap on an operation like this. I understandhe was a great friend of your father's."
"Yes," she said. "Going over for visits to Mantelish's garden with myfather is one of the earliest things I remember. I can imagine he's aproblem!" She shifted her gaze curiously from one to the other of thetwo men. "What are you people doing? Looking for Gess Fayle and the keyunit?"
Holati Tate said, "That's about it. We're one of a few thousandFederation groups assigned to the same general job. Each group works atits specialties, and the information gets correlated." He paused. "TheFederation Council--they're the ones we're working for directly--theCouncil's biggest concern is the very delicate political situationthat's involved. They feel it could develop suddenly into a dangerousone. They may be right."
"In what way?" Trigger asked.
"Well, suppose that key unit is lost and stays lost. Suppose all theother plasmoids put together don't contain enough information to showhow 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 someother people who know what's happened. There seem to be too many basicfactors missing. It might be necessary to develop a whole new class ofsciences first. And that could take a few centuries."
"Well," Trigger admitted, "I could get along without the thingsindefinitely."
"Same here," the plasmoid nabob agreed ungratefully. "Weird beasties!But--let's see. At present there are twelve hundred and fifty-eightmember 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 ofthe plasmoid science. Practically everybody has believed it. Now there'sconsiderable doubt."
"Oh," she said. "Of course--practically everybody is going to get veryunhappy, 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, ofcourse. But the way he took off shows he planned to disappear--acrack-up on top of that would be too much of a coincidence. So any oneof umpteen thousands of organizations in the Hub might be the one thathas that plasmoid now!"
"Including," said Holati, "any one of the two hundred and fourteenrestricted worlds. Their treaties of limitation wouldn't have let themget into the plasmoid pie until the others had been at it a decade orso. They would have been quite eager...."
There was a little pause. Then Trigger said, "Lordy! The thing couldeven set off another string of wars--"
"That's a point the Council is nervous about," he said.
"Well, it certainly is a mess. You would have thought the Federationmight have had a Security Chief in on that first operation. Right thereon Harvest Moon!"
"They did," he said. "It was Fayle."
"Oh! Pretty embarrassing." Trigger was silent a moment. "Holati, couldthose things ever become as valuable as people keep saying? It's allsounded a little exaggerated to me."
The Commissioner said he'd wondered about it too. "I'm not enough of abiologist to make an educated guess. What it seems to boil down to isthat they might. Which would be enough to tempt a lot of people togamble 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'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 pickedup the first lead through 113-A."
Trigger glanced down. The plasmoid lay there some inches from the sideof her hand. "You know," she said uncomfortably, "old Repulsive movedagain while we were talking! Towards my hand." She drew the hand away.
"I was watching it," Major Quillan said reassuringly from the end of thetable. "I would have warned you, but it stopped when it got as far as itis now. That was around five minutes ago."
Trigger reached back and gave old Repulsive a cautious pat. "Very livelycharacter! He does feel pleasant to touch. Kitty-cat pleasant! How didyou get a lead through him?"
"Mantelish brought it back to Maccadon with him, mainly because of itssimilarity to 113. He was curious because he couldn't even guess at whatits function was. It was just lying there in a cubicle. So he didconsiderable experimenting with it while he waited for Gess Fayle toshow up--and League Headquarters fidgeted around, hoping to get thekind of report from Mantelish and Fayle that Mantelish thought they'dalready received. They were wondering where Fayle was, too. But theyknew 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. "Oneexperiment was rather startling. He'd been trying that electricalstimulation business. Nothing happened until he had finished. Then hetouched 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 cautiouswith it after that. And then he learned something that should beimportant. He was visiting another lab where they had a couple ofplasmoids which actually moved now and then. He had 113-A in his coatpocket. The two lab plasmoids stopped moving while he was there. Theyhaven't moved since."
"Like the Harvest Moon plasmoids when they stimulated 113?"
"Right. 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 itstopped. He did the same thing in one more place and then quit. Therearen't that many moving plasmoids around. Those three labs are stillwondering what hit their specimens."
She studied 113-A curiously. "A mighty mite! What does Mantelish make ofit?"
"He thinks the 112-113 unit forms a kind of self-regulating system. Thebig one induces plasmoid activity, the little one modifies it. This113-A might be a spare regulator. But it seems to be more than aspare--which brings us to that first lead we got. A gang of raiderscrashed 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 guardsand one of the raiders were killed. The others got away. Gess Fayle'sdefection was a certainty by then, and everybody was very nervous. TheFeds got there, fast, and dead-brained the raider. They learned just twothings. One, he'd been mind-blocked and couldn't have spilled anysignificant information even if they had got him alive. The other itemthey drew from his brain was a clear impression of the target of theraid--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 aboutthem. 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 tryagain?"
"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 worksatisfactorily, unless 113-A is in the area. Mantelish talks ofsomething he calls proximity influence. Whatever that is, 113-A hasdemonstrated it has it."
"So," Trigger said, "they might have two thirds of what everybody wants,and you might have one third. Right here on the table. How many of thelater 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 hiredhands. Very expensive hired hands, but still just that. Most of themdidn't know a thing we could use. The ones that did know something weremind-blocked again."
"I thought," Trigger said reflectively, "you could _un_block someonelike that."
"You can, sometimes. If you're very good at it and if you have timeenough. We couldn't afford to wait a year. They died before they couldtell us anything."
There was a pause. Then Trigger asked, "How did you get involved inthis, personally?"
"More or less by accident," the Commissioner said. "It was in connectionwith our second lead."
"That's me, huh?" she said unhappily.
"Yes."
"Why would anyone want to grab me? I don't know anything."
He shook his head. "We haven't found out yet. We're hoping we will, in avery few days."
"Is that one of the things you can't tell me about?"
"I can tell you most of what I know at the moment," said theCommissioner. "Remember the night we stopped off at Evalee on the way infrom Manon?"
"Yes," she said. "That big hotel!"
Legacy Page 7
