Chapter 22

The blackness in the room was complete. She spun the Denton to kill. There was silence around her and then a soft rustling at some distance. It might have been the cautious shuffle of a heavy foot over thick carpeting. It stopped again. Where was Lyad?

Her eyes shifted about, trying to pierce the darkness. Black-light, she thought. She said, “Lyad?”

“Yes?” Lyad’s voice came easily in the dark. She might be standing about thirty feet away, at the far end of the room.

“Call your animal off,” Trigger said quietly. “I don’t want to kill it.” She began moving in the direction from which Lyad had spoken.

“Pilli won’t hurt you, Trigger,” the Ermetyne said. “He’s been sent in to disarm you, that’s all. Throw your gun away and he won’t even touch you.” She laughed. “Don’t bother shooting in my direction either! I’m not in the room any more.”

Trigger stopped. Not because of what that hateful, laughing voice had said. But because in the dark about her a fresh, pungent smell was growing. The smell of ripe apples.

She moistened her lips. She whispered, “Pilli--keep away!” Eyeless, the dark would mean nothing to it. Seconds later, she heard the thing breathing.

She faced the sound. It stopped for a moment, then it came again. A slow animal breathing. It seemed to circle slowly to her left. After a little it stopped. Then it was coming toward her.

She said softly, almost pleadingly, “Pilli, stop! Go back, Pilli!”

Silence. Pilli’s odor lay heavily all around. Trigger heard her blood drumming in her ears, and, for a second then, she imagined she could feel, like a tangible fog, the body warmth of the monster standing in the dark before her.

It wasn’t imagination. Something like a smooth, heavy pad of rubber closed around her right wrist and tightened terribly.

The Denton went off, two, three, four times before she was jerked violently sideways, flung away, sent stumbling backward against some low piece of furniture and, sprawling, over it. The gun was lost.

As she scrambled dizzily to her feet, Pilli screamed. It was a thin, high, breathless sound like the screaming of a terrified human child. It stopped abruptly. And, as if that had been a signal, the room came full of light again.

Trigger blinked dazedly against the light. Virod stood before her, looking at her, a pair of opaque yellow goggles shoved up on his forehead. Black-light glasses. The golden-haired thing lay in a great shapeless huddle on the floor twenty feet to one side. She couldn’t see her gun. But Virod held one, pointing at her.

Virod’s other hand moved suddenly. Its palm caught the side of her face in a hefty slap. Trigger staggered dumbly sideways, got her balance and stood facing him again. She didn’t even feel anger. Her cheek began to burn.

“Stop amusing yourself, Virod!” It was Lyad’s voice. Trigger saw her then, standing in a small half-opened door across the room, where a wall hanging had been folded away.

“She appeared to be in shock, First Lady,” Virod explained blandly.

“Is Pilli dead?”

“Yes. I have her gun. He got it from her.” Virod slapped a pocket of his jacket, and some part of Trigger’s mind noted the gesture and suddenly came awake.

“So I saw. Well--too bad about Pilli. But it was necessary. Bring her here then. And be reasonably gentle.” Lyad still sounded unruffled. “And put that gun in a different pocket, fool, or she’ll take it away from you.”

She looked at Trigger impersonally as Virod brought her to the little door, his left hand clamped on her arm just above the elbow.

She said, “Too bad you killed my expert, Trigger! We’ll have to use a chemical approach now. Flam and Virod are quite good at that, but there will be some pain. Not too much, because I’ll be watching them. But it will be rather undignified, I’m afraid. And it will take a great deal longer.”

Tanned, tall, sinuous Flam stood in the small room beyond the door. Trigger saw a long, low, plastic-covered table, clamps and glittering gadgetry. That would have been where cold-fish Balmordan hadn’t been able to make it against his mind-blocks finally. There was still one thing she could do. The yacht was orbiting.

“That sort of thing won’t be at all necessary!” she said shakily. Her voice shook with great ease, as if it had been practicing it all along.

“No?” Lyad said.

“You’ve won,” Trigger said resignedly. “I’ll play along now. I’ll show you how to open that handbag, to start with.”

Lyad nodded. “How do you open it?”

“You have to press it in the right places. Have them bring it here. I’ll show you.”

Lyad laughed. “You’re a little too eager. And much too docile, Trigger! Considering what’s in that handbag, it’s not at all likely it will detonate if we brightly hand it to you and let you start pressing. But something or other of a very undesirable nature would certainly happen! Flam--”

The tall redhead nodded and smiled. She went over to a wall cabinet, unlocked it and took out Repulsive’s container.

Lyad said, “Put it on that shelf for the moment. Then bring me Virod’s gun, and hers.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to go up on that table now, Trigger,” she said. “If you’ve really decided to cooperate, it won’t be too bad. And, by and by, you’ll start telling us very exactly what should be done with that handbag. And a few other things.”

She might have caught Trigger’s expression then. She added drily, “I was informed a few nights ago that you’re quite an artist in rough-and-tumble tactics. So are Virod and Flam. So if you want to give Virod an opportunity to amuse himself a little, go right ahead!”

At that point, the graceful thing undoubtedly would have been to just smile and get up on the table. Trigger discovered she couldn’t do it. She gave them a fast, silent, vicious tussle, mouth clenched, breathing hard through her nose. It was quite insanely useless. They weren’t letting her get anywhere near Lyad. After Virod had amused himself a little, he picked her up and plunked her down on the table. A minute later, she was stretched out on it, face down, wrists and ankles secured with padded clamps to its surface.

Flam took a small knife and neatly slit the back of the Precol uniform open along the line of her spine. She folded the cloth away. Then Trigger felt the thin icy touches of some vanilla-smelling spray walk up her, ending at the base of her skull.

It wasn’t so very painful; Lyad had told the truth about that. But presently it became extremely undignified. Then her thoughts were speeding up and slowing down and swirling around in an odd, confusing fashion. And at last her voice began to say things she didn’t want it to say.

After this, there might have been a pause. She seemed to be floating up out of a small pool of sleep when Lyad’s voice said somewhere, with cold fury in it: “There’s nothing inside?”

A whole little series of memory-pictures popped up suddenly then, like a chain of firecrackers somebody had set off. They formed themselves into a pattern; and there the pattern was in Trigger’s mind. She looked at it. Her eyes flew open in surprise. She began to laugh weakly.

Light footsteps came quickly over to her. “Where is that plasmoid, Trigger?”

The Ermetyne was in a fine, towering rage. She’d better say something.

“Ask the Commissioner,” she said, mumbling a little.

“It’s wearing off, First Lady,” said Flam. “Shall I?”

Trigger’s thoughts went eddying away for a moment, and she didn’t hear Lyad’s reply. But then the vanilla smell was there again, and the thin icy touches. This time, they stopped abruptly, halfway.

And then there was a very odd stillness all around Trigger. As if everybody and everything had stopped moving together.

A deep, savage voice said, “I hope there’ll be no trouble, folks. I just want her a lot worse than you do.”

Trigger frowned in puzzlement. Next came an angry roar, some thumping sounds, a sudden crack.

“Oops!” the deep voice said happily. “A little too hard, I’m afraid!”

Why, of course, Trigger thought. She opened her eyes and twisted her head around.

“Still awake, Trigger?” Quillan asked from the door of the room. He looked pleasantly surprised. There was a very large bellmouthed gun in his hand.

That was an odd-looking little group in the doorway, Trigger felt. On his knees before Quillan was a fat, elderly man, blinking dazedly at her. He wore a brilliantly purple bath towel knotted about his loins and nothing else. It was a moment before she recognized Belchik Pluly. Old Belchy! And on the floor before Belchy, motionless as if in devout prostration, Virod lay on his face. Dead, no doubt. He shouldn’t have got gay with Quillan.