Chapter 1

It was the time of sunrise in Ceyce, the White City, placidly beautiful capital of Maccadon, the University World of the Hub.

In the Colonial School’s sprawling five-mile complex of buildings and tropical parks, the second student shift was headed for breakfast, while a larger part of the fourth shift moved at a more leisurely rate toward their bunks. The school’s organized activities were not much affected by the hour, but the big exercise quadrangle was almost deserted for once. Behind the railing of the firing range a young woman stood by herself, gun in hand, waiting for the automatic range monitor to select a new string of targets for release.

She was around twenty-four, slim and trim in the school’s comfortable hiking outfit. Tan shirt and knee-length shorts, knee stockings, soft-soled shoes. Her sun hat hung on the railing, and the dawn wind whipped strands of shoulder-length, modishly white-silver hair along her cheeks. She held a small, beautifully worked handgun loosely beside her--the twin-barrelled sporting Denton which gunwise citizens of the Hub rated as a weapon for the precisionist and expert only. In institutions like the Colonial School it wasn’t often seen.

At the exact instant the monitor released its new flight of targets, she became aware of the aircar gliding down toward her from the administration buildings on the right. Startled, she glanced sideways long enough to identify the car’s two occupants, shifted her attention back to the cluster of targets speeding toward her, studied the flight pattern for another unhurried half-second, finally raised the Denton. The little gun spat its noiseless, invisible needle of destruction eight times. Six small puffs of crimson smoke hung in the air. The two remaining targets swerved up in a mocking curve and shot back to their discharge huts.

The girl bit her lip in moderate annoyance, safetied and holstered the gun and waved her hand left-right at the range attendant to indicate she was finished. Then she turned to face the aircar as it settled slowly to the ground twenty feet away. Her gray eyes studied its occupants critically.

“Fine example you set the students!” she remarked. “Flying right into a hot gun range!”

Doctor Plemponi, principal of the Colonial School, smiled soothingly. “Eight years ago, your father bawled me out for the very same thing, Trigger! Much more abusively, I must say. You know that was my first meeting with old Runser Argee, and I--”

“Plemp!” Mihul, Chief of Physical Conditioning, Women’s Division, cautioned sharply from the seat behind him. “Watch what you’re doing, you ass!”

Confused, Doctor Plemponi turned to look at her. The aircar dropped the last four feet to a jolting landing. Mihul groaned. Plemponi apologized. Trigger walked over to them.

“Does he do that often?” she asked interestedly.

“Every other time!” Mihul asserted. She was a tall, lean, muscular slab of a woman, around forty. She gave Trigger a wink behind Plemponi’s back. “We keep the chiropractors on stand-by duty when we go riding with Plemp.”

“Now then! Now then!” Doctor Plemponi said. “You distracted my attention for a moment, that’s all. Now, Trigger, the reason we’re here is that Mihul told me at our prebreakfast conference you weren’t entirely happy at the good old Colonial School. So climb in, if you don’t have much else to do, and we’ll run up to the office and discuss it.” He opened the door for her.

“Much else to do!” Trigger gave him a look. “All right, Doctor. We’ll run up and discuss it.”

She went back for her sun hat, climbed in, closed the door and sat down beside him, shoving the holstered Denton forward on her thigh.

Plemponi eyed the gun dubiously. “Brushing up in case there’s another grabber raid?” he inquired. He reached out for the guide stick.

Trigger shook her head. “Just working off hostility, I guess.” She waited till he had lifted the car off the ground in a reckless swoop. “That business yesterday--it really was a grabber raid?”

“We’re almost sure it was,” Mihul said behind her, “though I did hear some talk they might have been after those two top-secret plasmoids in your Project.”

“That’s not very likely,” Trigger remarked. “The raiders were a half mile away from where they should have come down if the plasmoids were what they wanted. And from what I saw of them, they weren’t nearly a big enough gang for a job of that kind.”

“I thought so, too,” Mihul said. “They were topflight professionals, in any case. I got a glimpse of some of their equipment. Knockout guns--foggers--and that was a fast car!”

“Very fast car,” Trigger agreed. “It’s what made me suspicious when I first saw them come in.”

“They also,” said Mihul, “had a high-speed interplanetary hopper waiting for them in the hills. Two more men in it. The cops caught them, too.” She added, “They were grabbers, all right!”

“Anything to indicate whom they were after?” Trigger asked.

“No,” Mihul said. “Too many possibilities. Twenty or more of the students in that area at the time had important enough connections to class as grabber bait. The cops won’t talk except to admit they were tipped off about the raid. Which was obvious. The way they popped up out of nowhere and closed in on those boys was a beautiful sight to see!”

“I,” Trigger admitted, “didn’t see it. When that car homed in, I yelled a warning to the nearest bunch of students and dropped flat behind a rock. By the time I risked a look, the cops had them.”

“You showed very good sense,” Plemponi told her earnestly. “I hope they burn those thugs! Grabbing’s a filthy business.”

“That large object coming straight at you,” Mihul observed calmly, “is another aircar. In this lane it has the right of way. You do not have the right of way. Got all that, Plemp?”

“Are you sure?” Doctor Plemponi asked her bewilderedly. “Confound it! I shall blow my siren.”

He did. Trigger winced. “There!” Plemponi said triumphantly as the other driver veered off in fright.

Trigger told herself to relax. Aircars were so nearly accident-proof that even Plemponi couldn’t do more than snarl up traffic in one. “Have there been other raids in the school area since I left?” she asked, as he shot up out of the quadrangle and turned toward the balcony of his office.

“That was just under four years ago, wasn’t it?” Mihul said. “No, you were still with us when we had the last one ... Six years back. Remember?”

Trigger did. Two students had been picked up on that occasion--sons of some Federation official. The grabbers had made a clean getaway, and it had been several months later before she heard the boys had been redeemed safely.

Plemponi descended to a teetery but gentle landing on the office balcony. He gave Trigger a self-satisfied look. “See?” he said tersely. “Let’s go in, ladies. Had breakfast yet, Trigger?”

Trigger had finished breakfast a half-hour earlier, but she accepted a cup of coffee. Mihul, all athlete, declined. She went over to Plemponi’s desk and stood leaning against it, arms folded across her chest, calm blue eyes fixed thoughtfully on Trigger. With her lithe length of body, Mihul sometimes reminded Trigger of a ferret, but the tanned face was a pleasant one and there was humor around the mouth. Even in Trigger’s pregraduate days, she and Mihul had been good friends.

Doctor Plemponi removed a crammed breakfast tray from a wall chef, took a chair across from Trigger, sat down with the tray on his knees, excused himself, and began to eat and talk simultaneously.

“Before we go into that very reasonable complaint you made to Mihul yesterday,” he said, “I wish you’d let me point out a few things.”

Trigger nodded. “Please do.”

“You, Trigger,” Plemponi told her, “are an honored guest here at the Colonial School. You’re the daughter of our late friend and colleague Runser Argee. You were one of our star pupils--not just as a small-arms medallist either. And now you’re the secretary and assistant of the famous Precolonial Commissioner Holati Tate--which makes you almost a participant in what may well turn out to be the greatest scientific event of the century ... I’m referring, of course,” Plemponi added, “to Tate’s discovery of the Old Galactic plasmoids.”

“Of course,” agreed Trigger. “And what is all this leading up to, Plemp?”

He waved a piece of toast at her. “No. Don’t interrupt! I still have to point out that because of the exceptional managerial abilities you revealed under Tate, you’ve been sent here on detached duty for the Precolonial Department to aid the Commissioner and Professor Mantelish in the University League’s Plasmoid Project. That means you’re a pretty important person, Trigger! Mantelish, for all his idiosyncrasies, is undoubtedly the greatest living biologist in the League. And the Plasmoid Project here at the school is without question the League’s most important current undertaking.”

“So I’ve been told,” said Trigger. “That’s why I want to find out what’s gone haywire with it.”