"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."

p.164

"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.

p.165

"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.

p.166

"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."

p.167

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.

p.168

"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.

Quillan's group stayed out of sight for the time being. He'd barely got the mine put away, along with a handful of warped metal slugs, which was what the mine had left of their attacker's mechanical equipment, and Trigger's cabin door locked again, when three visitors came zooming down p.169 the storerooms hall in a small car. A ship's engineer and two assistants had arrived to check on what had started the extinguishers.

"They may," Quillan said hopefully, "just go away again." He and Trigger were watching the engineers through the viewer which had been extended to cover their end of the passage.

They didn't just go away again. They checked the extinguishers, looked at the floor, still wet but rapidly absorbing the last drops of the brief deluge. They exchanged puzzled comment. They checked everything once more. Finally the leader made use of the door announcer and asked if he might intrude.

Quillan switched off the viewer. "Come in," he said resignedly.

The door opened. The three glanced at Quillan, and then at Trigger-plus-Beldon. Their eyes widened only slightly. Duty on the Dawn City produced hardened men.

Neither Quillan nor Trigger could offer the slightest explanation as to what had started the extinguishers. The engineers apologized and withdrew. The door closed again.

Quillan switched on the viewer. Their voices came back into the cabin as they climbed into their car.

"So that's how it happened," one of the assistants was saying reflectively.

"Right," said the ship's engineer. "Like to burst into flames myself."

"Ha-ha-ha!" They drove off.

Trigger flushed. She looked at Quillan.

p.170

"Perhaps I ought to get into something else," she said. "Now that the party's over."

"Perhaps," Quillan admitted. "I'll have Gaya bring something down. We want to stay out of your cabin for an hour or so till everything's been checked. There'll be a few conferences to go through now."

Gaya arrived next, with clothes. Trigger retired to the cabin's bathroom with them and came out a few minutes later, dressed again. Meanwhile the Dawn City's First Security Officer also had arrived and was setting up a portable restructure stage in the center of the cabin. He looked rather grim, but he also looked like a very much relieved man.

"I suggest we run your sequence off first, Major," he said. "Then we can put them on together, and compare them."

Trigger sat down on a couch beside Gaya to watch. She'd been told that the momentary view of the little demon-shape in the cabin had been deleted from Security's copy of their own sequence and wasn't to be mentioned.

Otherwise there really was not too much to see. What the attacking creature had used to blur the restructure wasn't clear, except that it wasn't a standard scrambler. Amplified to the limits of clarity and stepped down in time to the limit of immobility, all that emerged was a shifting haze of energy, which very faintly hinted at a dwarfish human shape in outline. A rather unusually small and heavy catassin, the Security chief pointed out, would present such an outline. That something p.171 quite material was finally undergoing devastating structural disorganization on the gravity mine was unpleasantly obvious, but it produced no further information. The sequence ended with the short blaze of heat which had set off the extinguishers.

Then they ran the restructure of the preceding double killing. Trigger watched, gulping a little, till it came to the point where the haze shape actually was about to touch its victims. Then she studied the carpet carefully until Gaya nudged her to indicate the business was over. Catassins almost invariably used their natural equipment in the kill; it was a swift process, of course, but shockingly brutal, and Trigger didn't care to remember what the results looked like in a human being. Both men had been killed in that manner; and the purpose obviously was to conceal the fact that the killer was not a catassin, but something even more efficient along those lines.

It didn't occur to the Security chief to question Trigger. A temporal restructure of a recent event was a far more reliable witness than any set of human senses and memory mechanisms. He left presently, reassured that the catassin incident was concluded. It startled Trigger to realize that Security did not seem to be considering seriously the possibility of discovering the human agent behind the murders.

Quillan shrugged. "Whoever did it is covered three ways in every direction. The chief knows it. He can't psych four thousand people on general suspicions, and he'd hit mind-blocks in every p.172 twentieth passenger presently on board if he did. Anyway he knows we're on it, and that we have a great deal better chance of nailing the responsible characters eventually."

"More information for the computers, eh?" Trigger said.

"Uh-huh."

"You got this little chunk the hard way, I feel," she observed.

"True," Quillan admitted, "But we have to get it any way we can till we get enough to move on. Then we move." He looked at her, with an air of regarding a new idea. "You know," he said, "you don't do badly for an amateur!"

"She doesn't do badly," Gaya's voice said behind Trigger, "for anybody. How do you people feel about a drink? I thought I could use one myself after looking at the chief's restructure."

Trigger felt herself coloring. Praise from the cloak and dagger experts! For some reason it pleased her immensely. She turned her head to smile at Gaya, standing there with three glasses on a tray.

"Thanks!" she said. She took one of the glasses. Gaya held the tray out to Quillan and took the third glass herself.

It was some five minutes later when Trigger remarked, "You know, I'm getting sleepy."

Quillan looked around the viewer equipment he and Gaya were dismantling. "Why not hit the couch over there and take a nap?" he suggested. "It'll be about an hour before the boys can get down here for the real conference."

p.173

"Good idea." Trigger yawned, finished her drink, put the glass on a table, and wandered over to the couch. She stretched out on it. A drowsy somnolence enveloped her almost instantly. She closed her eyes.

Ten minutes later, Gaya, standing over her, announced, "Well, she's out."

"Fine," said Quillan, packaging the rest of the equipment. "Tell them to haul in the rest cubicle. I'll be done here in a minute. Then you and the lady warden can take over."

Gaya looked down at Trigger. There was a trace of regret in her face. "I think," she said, "she's going to be fairly displeased with you when she wakes up and finds she's on Manon."

"Wouldn't doubt it," said Quillan. "But from what I've seen of that chick, she's going to get fairly displeased with me from time to time on this operation anyway."

Gaya looked at his back.

"Major Quillan," she said, "would you like a tip from a keen-eyed operator?"

"Go ahead, ole keen-eyed op!" Quillan said in kindly tones.

"Not that you don't have it coming, boy," said Gaya. "But watch yourself! This one is dangerous. This one could sink you for keeps."

"You're going out of your mind, doll," said Quillan.

p.174