Chapter 7

The burly character who had appeared at the door said diffidently that Professor Mantelish had wanted to be present while his lab equipment was stowed aboard. If the professor didn’t mind, things were about that far along.

Mantelish excused himself and went off with the messenger. The door closed. 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 was empty. “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 the reaction. She hadn’t realized by now how keyed up she was! She sighed a small sigh. Then she smiled at Quillan.

“Major,” she said, “how about a tiny little refill on that Puya--about half?”

Quillan took care of the tiny little refill.

Commissioner Tate said, “By the way, Quillan does have a degree in subspace 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 tell Mantelish just as little as we can. To tell you the truth, Trigger, the professor is a terrible handicap on an operation like this. I understand he was a great friend of your father’s.”

“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 thousand Federation groups assigned to the same general job. 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 key unit is lost and stays lost. 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 a mess. 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.” 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 plasmoid process--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 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.