Chapter 15

“She,” said Trigger, “is a remarkable woman.”

“Yeah,” said Quillan. “Remarkable.”

“May I ask you, finally, a few pertinent questions?” Trigger inquired humbly.

“Not here, sweet stuff,” said Quillan.

“You’re a bossy sort of slob, Heslet Quillan,” she said equably.

Quillan didn’t answer. They had come down the stairway to the storerooms level and were walking along the big lit hallway toward their cabins. Trigger felt pleasantly relaxed. But she did have a great many pertinent questions to ask Quillan now, and she wanted to get started on them.

“Oh!” she said suddenly. Just as suddenly, Quillan’s hand was on her shoulder, moving her along.

“Hush now,” he said. “And keep walking.”

“But you saw it, didn’t you?” Trigger asked, trying to look back to the small open door into the storerooms they’d just passed.

Quillan sighed. “Certainly,” he said. “Guy in space armor.”

“But what’s he doing there?”

“Checking something, I suppose.” His hand left her shoulder; and, for just a moment, his finger rested lightly across her lips. Trigger glanced up at him. He was walking on beside her, not looking at her.

All right, she thought--she could take a hint. But she felt tense and uncomfortable now. Something was going on again, apparently.

They turned into the side passage and came up to her cabin. Trigger started to turn to face him, and Quillan picked her up and went on without a noticeable break in his stride. Close to her ear, his voice whispered, “Explain in a moment! Dangerous here.”

As the door to the end cabin closed behind them, he put her back on her feet. He looked at his watch.

“We can talk here,” he said. “But there may not be much time for conversation.” He gestured toward a table against the wall. “Take a look at the setup.”

Trigger looked. The table was littered with instruments, like an electronic workbench. A visual screen showed a view of both her own cabin and a section of the passage outside it, up to the point where it entered the big hall.

“What is it?” she asked uncertainly.

“Essentially,” said Quillan, “we’ve set up a catassin trap.”

“Catassin!” Trigger squeaked.

“That’s right. Don’t get too nervous though. I’ve caught them before. Used to be a sort of specialty of mine. And there’s one thing about them--they’ll blab their pointed little heads off if you can get one alive and promise it its catnip...” He’d shucked off his jacket and taken out of it a very large handgun with a bell-shaped mouth. He laid the gun down next to the view screen. “In case,” he said, unreassuringly. “Now just a moment.”

He sat down in front of the view screen and did something to it.

“All right,” he said then. “We’re here and set. Probability period starts in three minutes, continues for sixty. Signal on any blip. Otherwise no gabbing. And remember they’re fast. Don’t get sappy.”

There was no answer. Quillan did something else to the screen and stood up again. He looked broodingly at Trigger. “It’s those damn computers again!” he said. “I don’t see any sense in it.”

“In what?” she asked shakily.

“Everything that’s happening around here is being fed back to them at the moment,” he said. “When they heard about our invite to Lyad’s dinner party, and who was to be present, they came up with a honey. In the time period I mentioned a catassin is supposed to show up at your cabin. They give it a pretty high probability.”

Trigger didn’t say anything. If she had, she probably would have squeaked again.

“Now don’t worry,” he said, squeezing her shoulder reassuringly between a large thumb and four slightly less large fingers. “Nice muscle!” he said absently. “The cabin’s trapped and I’ve taken other precautions.” He massaged the muscle gently. “Probably the only thing that will happen is that we’ll sit around here for an hour or so, and then we’ll have a hearty laugh together at those foolish computers!” He smiled.

“I thought,” Trigger said without squeaking, “that everybody was pretty sure it was dead.”

Quillan frowned. “Well, that’s something else again! There are at least two ways I know of to sneak it past that search. Jump it out and in with a subtub is one--they could have done that from their own cabin as soon as they had its pattern. So I don’t really think it’s dead. It’s just--”

“Quillan,” a tiny voice said from the viewer.

He turned, took two steps, and sat down fast before the viewer. “Go ahead!”

“Fast motion in B section. Going your way.”

Fast motion. A thought flicked up. “Quillan--” Trigger began.

He raised a shushing hand. “Get a silhouette?” he asked. His hands went to a set of control switches and stayed there.

“No. Pickup shows a haze like in the reconstruct.” An instant’s pause. “Leaving B section.”

“Motion in C section,” said another voice.

Quillan said, “All right. It’s coming. No more verbal reports unless it changes direction. If you want to stay alive, don’t move unless you’re in armor.”

There was silence. Quillan sat unmoving, eyes fixed on the screen. Trigger stood just behind him. Her legs had begun to tremble. She’d better tell him.

“Quillan--”

For an instant, in the screen, there was something like heat shimmer at the far end of the passage. Then she saw her cabin door pop open.

The interior of the cabin showed in a brief flare of blue light. In it was a shape. It vanished instantly again.

She heard Quillan make a shocked, incredulous sound. His left hand slashed at a switch on the panel.

Twenty feet from them, just behind the closed door to the passage, was a splatting noise like a tremendous slap. Then another noise, strangely like a brief cloudburst. Then silence again.

She realized Quillan was on his feet beside her, the oversized gun in his hand. It was pointed at the door. His eyes switched suddenly from the door to the screen and back again. She felt him relaxing slowly. Then she discovered she was clutching a handful of his shirt along with a considerable chunk of tough skin. She went on clutching it.

“Fly swatter got it!” he said. “Whew!” He looked down and patted the clutching hand. “No catassin! The trap in the cabin just wasn’t fast enough. Had a gravity mine outside our door, just in case. That was barely fast enough!” For once, Quillan looked almost awed.

“L-l-l-like--” Trigger began. She tried again. “Like a little yellow man--”

“You saw it? In the cabin? Yes. Never saw anything just like it before!”

Trigger pressed her lips together to make them stay steady.

“I have,” she said. “That’s what I was trying to tell you.”

Quillan stared at her for an instant. “You’ll tell me about it in a couple of minutes. I’ve got some quick work to do first.” He checked himself. A wide grin spread suddenly over his face. “Know something, doll?”

“What?”

“The damn computers!” Major Quillan said happily. “They goofed!”

The gravity mine would have reduced almost any life-form which moved into its field to a rather thin smear, but there wasn’t even that left of the yellow demon-shape. Something, presumably something it was carrying, had turned it into a small blaze of incandescent energy as the mine flattened it out. Which explained the sound like a cloudburst. That had been the passage’s automatic fire extinguishers going into brief but correspondingly violent action.