C6 6

THE POINT OF IT, Holati Tate explained, was that this had been more activity than 113-A normally displayed over a period of a week. And 113-A was easily the most active plasmoid of them all nowadays.

“It is, of course, possible,” Mantelish said, arousing from deep thought, “that it was attracted by your body odor.”

“Thank you, Mantelish!” said Trigger.

“You’re welcome, my dear.” Mantelish had pulled his chair up to the table; he hitched himself forward in it. “We shall now,” he announced, “try a little experiment. Pick it up, Trigger.”

She stared at him. “Pick it up! No, Mantelish. We shall now try some other little experiment.”

Mantelish furrowed his Jovian brows. Holati gave her a small smile across the table. “Just touch it with the tip of a finger,” he suggested. “You can do that much for the professor, can’t you?”

“Barely,” Trigger told him grimly. But she reached out and put a cautious finger tip to the less lively end of 113-A. After a moment she said, “Hey!” She moved the finger lightly along the thing’s surface. It had a velvety, smooth, warm feeling, rather like a kitten. “You know,” she said surprised, “it feels sort of nice! It just looks disgusting.”

“Disgusting!” Mantelish boomed, offended again.

The Commissioner held up a hand. “Just a moment,” he said. He’d picked up some signal Trigger hadn’t noticed, for he went over to the wall now and touched something there. A release button apparently. The door to the room opened. Trigger’s grabber came in. The door closed behind him. He was carrying a tray with a squat brown flask and four rather small glasses on it.

He gave Trigger a grin. She gave him a tentative smile in return. The Commissioner had introduced him: Heslet Quillan—Major Heslet Quillan, of the Subspace Engineers. For a Subspace Engineer, Trigger had thought skeptically, he was a pretty good grabber. But there was a qualified truce in the room. It would last, at least, until Holati finished his explaining. There was no really good reason not to include Major Quillan in it.

“Ah, Puya!” Professor Mantelish exclaimed, advancing on the tray as Quillan set it on the table. Mantelish seemed to have forgotten about plasmoid experiments for the moment, and Trigger didn’t intend to remind him. She drew her hand back quietly from 113-A. The professor unstoppered the flask. “You’ll have some, Trigger, I’m sure? The only really good thing the benighted world of Rumli ever produced.”

“My great-grandmother,” Trigger remarked, “was a Rumlian.” She watched him fill the four glasses with a thin purple liquid. “I’ve never tried it; but yes, thanks.”

Quillan put one of the glasses in front of her.

“And we shall drink,” Mantelish suggested, with a suave flourish of his Puya, “to your great-grandmother!”

“We shall also,” suggested Major Quillan, pulling a chair up to the table for himself, “Advise Trigger to take a very small sip on her first go at the stuff.”

Nobody had invited him to sit down. But nobody was objecting either. Well, that fitted, Trigger thought.

She sipped. It was tart and hot. Very hot. She set the glass back on the table, inhaled with difficulty, exhaled quiveringly. Tears gathered in her eyes.

“Very good!” she husked.

“Very good,” the Commissioner agreed. He put down his empty glass and smacked his lips lightly. “And now,” he said briskly, “let’s get on with this conference.”

Trigger glanced around the room while Quillan refilled three glasses. The small live coal she had swallowed was melting away; a warm glow began to spread through her. It did look like the dining room of a hunting lodge. The woodwork was dark, old-looking, worn with much polishing. Horned heads of various formidable Maccadon life-forms adorned the walls.

But it was open season now on a different kind of game. Three men had walked briskly past them when Quillan brought her in by the front door. They hadn’t even looked at her. There were sounds now and then from some of the other rooms, and that general feeling of a considerable number of people around—of being at an operating headquarters of some sort, which hummed with quiet activity.

One of the things, Holati Tate said, which had not become public knowledge so far was that Professor Mantelish actually succeeded in getting some of the plasmoids on the Old Galactic base back into operation. One plasmoid in particular.

The reason the achievement hadn’t been announced was that for nearly six weeks no one except the three men directly involved in the experiments had known about them. And during that time other things occurred which made subsequent publicity seem very inadvisable.

Mantelish scowled. “We made up a report to the League the day of the initial discovery,” he informed Trigger. “It was a complete and detailed report!”

“True,” Holati said, “but the report the U-League got didn’t happen to be the one Professor Mantelish helped make up. We’ll go into that later. The plasmoid the professor was experimenting with was the 112-113 unit.”

He shifted his gaze to Mantelish. “Still want me to tell it?”

“Yes, yes!” Mantelish said impatiently. “You will oversimplify grossly, of course, but it should do for the moment. At a more leisurely time I shall be glad to give Trigger an accurate description of the processes.”

Trigger smiled at him. “Thank you, Professor!” She took her second sip of the Puya. Not bad.

“Well, Mantelish was dosing this plasmoid with mild electrical stimulations,” Holati went on. “He noticed suddenly that as he did it other plasmoids in that section of Harvest Moon were indicating signs of activity. So he called in Doctor Fayle and Doctor Azol.”

The three scientists discovered quickly that stimulation of the 112 part of the unit was in fact producing random patterns of plasmoid motion throughout the entire base, while an electrical prod at 113 brought everything to an abrupt stop again. After a few hours of this, 112 suddenly extruded a section of its material, which detached itself and moved off slowly under its own power through half the station, trailed with great excitement by Mantelish and Azol. It stopped at a point where another plasmoid had been removed for laboratory investigations, climbed up and settled down in the place left vacant by its predecessor. It then reshaped itself into a copy of the predecessor, and remained where it was. Obviously a replacement.

There was dignified scientific jubilation among the three. This was precisely the kind of information the U-League—and everybody else—had been hoping to obtain. 112-113 tentatively could be assumed to be a kind of monitor of the station’s activities. It could be induced to go into action and to activate the other plasmoids. With further observation and refinement of method, its action undoubtedly could be shifted from the random to the purposeful. Finally, and most importantly, it had shown itself capable of producing a different form of plasmoid life to fulfill a specific requirement.

In essence, the riddles presented by the Old Galactic Station appeared to be solved.

The three made up their secret report to the U-League. Included was a recommendation to authorize distribution of ten per cent of the less significant plasmoids to various experimental centers in the Hub—the big and important centers which had been bringing heavy political pressure to bear on the Federation to let them in on the investigation. That should keep them occupied, while the U-League concluded the really important work.

“Next day,” said Holati, “Doctor Gess Fayle presented Mantelish with a transmitted message from U-League Headquarters. It contained instructions to have Fayle mount the 112-113 unit immediately in one of the League ships at Harvest Moon and bring it quietly to Maccadon.”

Mantelish frowned. “The message was faked!” he boomed.

“Not only that,” said Holati. “The actual report Doctor Fayle had transmitted the day before to the League was revised to the extent that it omitted any reference to 112-113.” He glanced thoughtfully at Mantelish. “As a matter of fact, it was almost a month and a half before League Headquarters became aware of the importance of the unit.”

The professor snorted. “Azol,” he explained to Trigger, “had become a victim of his scientific zeal. And I—”

“Doctor Azol,” said the Commissioner, “as you may remember, had his little mishap with the plasmoid just two days after Fayle departed.”

“And I,” Mantelish went on, “was involved in other urgent research. How was I to know what that villain Fayle had been up to? A vice president of the University League!”

“Well,” Trigger said, “what had Doctor Fayle been up to?”

“We don’t know yet,” Holati told her. “Obviously he had something in mind with the faked order and the alteration of the report. But the only thing we can say definitely is that he disappeared on the League ship he had requisitioned, along with its personnel and the 112-113 plasmoid, and hasn’t shown up again.

“And that plasmoid unit now appears to have been almost certainly the key unit of the entire Old Galactic Station—the unit that kept everything running along automatically there for thirty thousand years.”

He glanced at Quillan. “Someone at the door. We’ll hold it while you see what they want.”