James H. Schmitz - Trigger & Friends

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Trigger & Friends

James H. Schmitz

Fout! Onbekende schakeloptie-instructie.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents

is purely coincidental.

“Harvest Time” was originally published in Astounding Science Fiction in September 1958. “Lion Loose” was originally published in Analog in October 1961. “Aura

of Immortality” was originally published in IF in June 1974. “Forget It” is an adaptation by Guy Gordon of a story originally published under the title “Planet of

Forgetting” in the February 1965 issue of Galaxy. Legacy was first published in 1962 by Torquil Books, under the title A Tale of Two Clocks. It was re-issued in 1979

by Ace Books under the title Legacy. “Sour Note on Palayata” was originally published in Astounding Science Fiction in November, 1956.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-671-31966-3

Cover art by Bob Eggleton

First printing, January 2001

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Produced by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

THE SECRETARIAL POOL

They went through the door and turned into a mirrored passageway. “Might keep that gun ready, Trigger,” Quillan

warned. “We just could get jumped here. Don’t think so, though. They’d have to get past the Commissioner.”

“Oh, he’s here, too?”

She didn’t hear what Quillan answered, because she had an after-effect from the drugs her recent captors had given her,

and things faded out around then. When they faded in again, the passageway with the mirrors had disappeared, and they

were coming to the top of a short flight of low, wide stairs and into a very beautiful room. This room was high and long,

not very wide. In the center was a small square swimming pool, and against the walls on either side was a long row of tall

square crystal pillars through which strange lights undulated slowly. Trigger glanced curiously at the nearest pillar. She

stopped short.

“Galaxy!” she said, startled.

Quillan reached back and grabbed her arm with his gun hand. “Keep moving, Trigger! That’s just how Belchik keeps

his harem grouped around him when he’s working. Not too bad an idea—it does cut down the chatter. This is his office.”

“Office!” Then she saw the large business desk with prosaic standard equipment which stood on the carpet on the other

side of the pool. They moved rapidly past the pool, Quillan still hauling at her arm. Trigger kept staring at the pillars they

passed. Long-limbed, supple and languid, they floated there in their crystal cages, in tinted, shifting lights, eyes closed, hair

drifting about their faces.

“Awesome, isn’t it?” Quillan said.

“Yes,” said Trigger. “Awesome. One in each—he is a pig! They look drowned.”

“He is and they aren’t,” said Quillan. “Very lively girls when he lets them out.”

IN THIS SERIES:

Telzey Amberdon

T ’n T: Telzey & Trigger

Trigger & Friends

The Hub: Dangerous Territories (forthcoming)

BAEN BOOKS BY ERIC FLINT:

Mother of Demons

1632

The Belisarius series, with David Drake:

An Oblique Approach

In the Heart of Darkness

Destiny’s Shield

Fortune’s Stroke

with Dave Freer:

Rats, Bats & Vats

Harvest Time

Senior Assistant Commissioner Holati Tate sat comfortably on a high green hill of the Precolonization world of Manon,

and watched Communications Chief Trigger Argee coordinating the dials of a bio-signal pickup with those of a recorder.

Trigger was a slim, tanned, red-haired girl, and watching her was a pleasure from which neither her moody expression nor

Holati Tate’s advanced years detracted much. She got her settings finally, swung around on her camp chair and faced him.

She smiled faintly.

“How’s it going?” the S.A.C. inquired.

“It’s going. Those bio-patterns aren’t easy to unscramble, though. That to be expected?”

He nodded. “They’re a mess. That’s why I had to borrow a communications expert from Headquarters.”

“Well,” said Trigger, “if you just want to rebroadcast the strongest individual signal, we’ll have a usable transcription in

another ten minutes.” She shielded her eyes and peered up at the late afternoon sky. “Can’t see more than a green tinge

from here. The Drift’s about nine miles up, isn’t it?”

“At nine miles you’re barely scratching the bottom layer,” Holati Tate told her. “The stuff floats high on this world.”

Trigger looked at him and smiled again, more easily now. She liked Holati, a weather-beaten little Precol veteran who’d

come in as a replacement on the Manon Project only six months before. Assistant commissioners were mostly Academy

graduates nowadays; he was one of the old guard the Academy was not too gradually shoving out of the supervisory field

ranks. Trigger had heard he’d been in the Space Scouts until he reached the early retirement age of that arduous service.

“What’s this beep pattern we’re copying supposed to be?” she inquired. “Sort of a plankton love call?”

Holati admitted that was as good a guess as any. “At the Bio Station we figure each of the various species keeps

broadcasting its own signal to help the swarms keep together. This signal is pretty strong because the Drift’s mainly

composed of a single species at the moment. When we set up the food-processing stations, we might be able to use signal

patterns like that as a lure.”

Trigger smoothed her red hair back and nodded. “Dirty trick!” she observed amiably.

“Can’t be sentimental about it, Trigger girl. Processed plankton could turn out to be Manon’s biggest export item by the

time it’s a colony. The Federation’s appetite gets bigger every year.” He added, “I’m also interested in the possibility it’s

the signals that attract those Harvester things we’d like to get rid of.”

“They been giving you trouble again?” Trigger’s duties kept her close to the Headquarters area as a rule, but she had

heard the Harvesters were thoroughly dangerous creatures capable of producing a reasonable facsimile of a lightning bolt

when disturbed.

“No,” he said. “I won’t let the boys fool with them. We’ll have to figure a way to handle them before we start collecting

the plankton, though. Put in a requisition for heavy guns last month.” He studied her thoughtfully. “Something the matter?

You don’t seem happy today, Trigger.”

Trigger’s thin brown brows slanted in a scowl. “I’m not! It’s that boss we’ve got, the Honorable Commissioner

Ramog.”

Holati looked startled. He jerked his head meaningfully at the recorder. Trigger wrinkled her nose.

“Don’t worry. My instruments are probably the only thing that isn’t bugged around the Manon Project Headquarters. I

pull the snoopies out as quick as Ramog can get them stuck in.”

“Hm-m-m!” he said dubiously. “What’s the commissioner doing to bother you?”

“He slung Brule Inger into the brig yesterday morning.” Brule was Trigger’s young man, Holati recalled. “He’ll be

shipped home on the next supply ship. And I don’t know,” Trigger added, “whether Ramog wants Brule out of the way

because of me, or because he really suspects Brule was out hunting Old Galactic artifacts on Project time. He wasn’t, of

course, but that’s the charge. Either way I don’t like it.”

“People are getting mighty touchy about that Old Galactic business,” Holati said. “Biggest first-discovery bonus the

Federation’s ever offered by now, just to start with.”

Trigger shrugged impatiently. “It’s a lot of nonsense. When the Project was moved out here last year, everyone was

saying the Manon System looked like the hottest bet in the Cluster to make the big strike. For that matter, it’s why Ramog

got the Manon Project assigned to him, and he’s been all over the planet with Essidy and those other stooges of his. They

haven’t found a thing.”

Holati nodded. “I know. Wouldn’t be at all surprised, though, if the strike were made right here on Manon eventually.

It’s in a pretty likely sector.”

Trigger regarded him skeptically. “So you believe in those Old Galactic stories, too? Well, maybe—but I’ll tell you one

thing: it wouldn’t be healthy for anyone but Commissioner Ramog to make that kind of discovery on Commissioner

Ramog’s Project!”

“Now, now, Trigger!” Holati began to look alarmed again. “There’s a way in which those things are handled, you

know!”

Trigger’s lip curled. “A foolproof way?” she inquired.

“Well, practically,” the S.A.C. told her defensively. He was beginning to sound like a man who wanted to convince

himself; and for a moment she felt sorry for disturbing him. “You make a strike, and you verify and register it with the

Federation over any long-range communications transmitter. After that there isn’t a thing anybody else can do about your

claim! Even the . . . well, even the Academy isn’t going to try to tangle with Federation Law!”

“The point might be,” Trigger said bleakly, “that you wouldn’t necessarily get near the transmitters here with that kind

of message. As a matter of fact, I’ve seen a couple of pretty funny accidents in the two years I’ve been working with

Ramog.” She shrugged. “Well, I’m heading back to the Colonial School when my hitch here is up—I’m fed up with the

way the Academy boys are taking over in Precol. And I’ve noticed nobody seems to like to listen when I talk about it. Even

Brule keeps hushing me up—” She turned her head to a rattling series of clicks from the recorder, reached out and shut it

off. A flat plastic box popped halfway out of the recorder’s side. Trigger removed it and stood up. “Here’s your signal

pattern duplicate. Hope it works—”

While Holati Tate was helping Trigger Argee load her equipment back into her little personal hopper, he maintained the

uncomfortable look of a man who had just heard an attractive young woman imply with some reason that he was on the

spineless side. After she had gone he quit looking uncomfortable, since it wasn’t impressing anybody any more, and began

to look worried instead.

He liked Trigger about as well as anyone he knew, and her position here might be getting more precarious than she

thought. When it became obvious a while ago that Commissioner Ramog had developed a definite interest in Trigger’s

slim good looks, the bets of the more cynical elements at the Bio Station all went down on the commissioner. No one had

tried to collect so far, but Brule Inger’s enforced departure from the Project was likely to send the odds soaring. While

Ramog probably wouldn’t resort to anything very drastic at the moment, he was in a good position to become about as

drastic as he liked, and if Trigger didn’t soften up on her own there wasn’t much doubt that Ramog eventually would help

things along.

Frowning darkly, Holati climbed into his own service hopper and set it moving a bare fifty feet above the ground,

headed at a leisurely rate down the slopes of a long green range of hills toward the local arm of Great Gruesome Swamp.

Two hundred miles away, on the other side of this section of Great Gruesome, stood the domes of Manon’s Biological

Station of which he was the head.

He had a good deal of work still to get done that evening, but he wanted to do some thinking first. Nothing Trigger had

told him was exactly news. The Precol Academy group had been getting tougher to work with year after year, and

Commissioner Ramog was unquestionably the toughest operator of them all. The grapevine of the Ancient and Honorable

Society of Retired Space Scouts, which counted slightly more than twelve thousand members scattered through Precol,

credited the commissioner with five probable direct murders of inconvenient Precol personnel, though none of these

actions stood any chance of being proved after the event. Two of the victims, including an old-time commissioner, had

been members of the Society. Ramog definitely was a bad boy to get involved with—

The hopper began moving out over the flat margins of Great Gruesome, a poisonous-looking wet tangle of purple and

green and brown vegetation, gleaming like a seascape in the rays of Manon’s setting sun. There were occasional vague

motions and sudden loud splashings down there, and Holati cautiously took the vehicle up a couple of hundred feet. The

great chains of swamp and marshy lakes that girdled two-thirds of the planet’s equator contained numerous unclassified

life-forms of a size and speed no sensible man would have cared to match himself against outside of full combat armor.

Precol personnel avoided unnecessary encounters with such brutes; their control would be left to the colonists of a later

year.

His immediate problem was the ticklish one of establishing the exact circumstances under which Commissioner Ramog

was to murder Holati Tate. It was an undertaking which could only too easily be fumbled, and he still wasn’t at all certain

of a number of details. Brow furrowed with worried thought, he kicked the hopper at last into a moderately rapid vertical

ascent and unpackaged the bio-signal record Trigger Argee had transcribed for him. He fed it carefully into the hopper’s

broadcast system.

Floating presently in the tinted evening air of the lower fringes of Manon’s aerial plankton zone, Holati Tate sat a while

scanning the area about and above him. A few hundred yards away a sluggishly moving stream of the Drift was passing

overhead. A few stars had winked on; and hardly a thousand miles out, a ribbon of Moon Belt dust drew thin glittering

bands of fire across the sky. Here and there, then, Holati began to spot the huge greenish images of mankind’s established

competitors for the protein of the Plankton Drift: the Harvesters of Manon.

In a couple of minutes he had counted thirty-six Harvesters within visual range. As he watched, two of them were rising

until they dwindled and vanished in the darkening sky. The others continued to hover not far from the streams of the Drift,

as sluggish at this hour as their prey. The sausage-shaped, almost featureless giant forms hardly looked menacing, but three

venturesome biologists had been electrocuted by a Harvester within a week after the Project was opened on the planet; and

the usual hands-off policy had been established until Project work advanced to the point where the problem required a

wholesale solution.

Holati tuned in the bio-receiver. Around midday both Harvesters and plankton were furiously active, but there was only

the barest murmur of signal now. He eased down the broadcast button on the set and waited.

He’d counted off eight seconds before he could determine any reaction. The plankton stream nearest him was losing

momentum, its component masses began curving down slowly from all directions towards the hopper. Holati was not sure

that the nearest Harvesters had stirred at all; keeping a wary eye on them, he gradually stepped up the signal strength by

some fifty per cent. The hopper was a solid little craft, spaceworthy at interplanetary ranges, but he was only slightly

curious about what would happen if he allowed it to accompany a mass of plankton into a Harvester’s interior. And he

wasn’t in the least interested in stimulating one of the giants into cutting loose with its defensive electronic blasts.

The Harvesters were definitely moving toward him when the first streamers of the plankton arrived, thumped squashily

upon the hopper’s viewplate receivers and generally proceeded to plaster themselves about the front part of the machine.

Blinded for the moment, Holati switched on a mass-scope, spotted an oncoming Harvester at five hundred yards and

promptly stopped the broadcast. Somewhat nervously, he watched the Harvester drift to a stop while the butterfly-sized

plankton life, dropping away from what had become an uninteresting surface again, made languid motions at clustering

into a new formation.

He hesitated, then eased the hopper backward out of the disturbed area. A mile off he stopped again and swept his

glance once more over what he could see of the gliding clouds of the Drift. Then he jammed down the broadcast button,

sending the bio-signal out with a bawling force the planet had never experienced before.

Throughout the area, the Drift practically exploded. Great banks of living matter came rolling down through the sky

toward the hopper. Behind, through and ahead of the sentient tides, moving a hundred times faster than the plankton,

rushed dozens of vast sausage shapes, their business ends opened into wide, black gapes.

Holati Tate hurriedly knocked off the hopper’s thunderous Lorelei song and went fast and straight away from there. Far

behind him, he watched the front lines of the plankton clouds breaking over a converged mass of Harvesters. A minute

later the giants were plowing methodically back and forth through the late evening snack with which he had provided them.

The experiment, he decided, had to be called a complete success. He got his bearings, turned the hopper and sent it

arrowing silently down through the shadowy lower air, headed for Warehouse Center on the southern side of the local arm

of Great Gruesome Swamp.

Supply Manager Essidy was a tall, handsome man with a small brown beard and a fine set of large white teeth, who was

disliked by practically everybody on the Project because of his unfortunate reputation as Commissioner Ramog’s Number

One stooge. Perhaps to offset the lonely atmosphere of his main office at Warehouse Center, Essidy was industriously

studying the finer points of a couple of girl clerks through his desk viewer when he was informed that Senior Assistant

Commissioner Tate had just parked his hopper at Dome Two.

Essidy clicked his teeth together alertly, lifted one eyebrow, dropped it again, cleared the viewer, clipped a comm-

button to his left ear and switched the comm-set to “record.” Of the eight hundred and thirty-seven people on the Manon

Project, there were nine on whom the commissioner wanted immediate reports concerning even routine supplies

withdrawals. Holati Tate was one of the nine.

Essidy’s viewer picked up the S.A.C. as he walked down the central corridor of Dome Two and followed him around a

number of turns, into a large storeroom and up to a counter. Essidy adjusted the comm-button.

“ . . . Not just for atmospheric use,” Holati was saying. “Jet mobility, of course. But I might want to use it under water.”

The counter clerk had recognized the S.A.C. and was being respectful. “Well, sir,” he said hesitantly, “if it’s a question

of pressure, that would have to be a Moon-suit, wouldn’t it?”

Holati nodded. “Uh-huh. That’s what I had in mind.”

Back in the office, Essidy lifted both eyebrows. He couldn’t be sure of the Bio Station’s current requirements, but a

Moon-suit didn’t sound routine. The clerk was dialing for the suit when Holati added, “By the way, got one of those things

outfitted with a directional tracker?”

The clerk looked around. “I’m sure we don’t, sir. It isn’t standard equipment. We can install one for you.”

Holati reflected, and shook his head. “Don’t bother with it, son. I’ll do that myself . . . Uh, high selectivity, medium

range, is the type I want.”

* * *

“ . . . That’s all he ordered,” Essidy was reporting to Commissioner Ramog fifteen minutes later, on the commissioner’s private beam.

“He checked the suit himself—seemed familiar with that—and took the stuff along.”

The commissioner was silent for almost thirty seconds and Essidy waited respectfully. He admired the boss and envied

him hopelessly. It wasn’t just that Commissioner Ramog had Academy training and the authority of the Academy and the

home office behind him; he also had three times Essidy’s brains and ten times Essidy’s guts and Essidy knew it.

When Ramog finally spoke he sounded almost absent-minded, and Essidy felt a little thrill because that could mean

something very hot indeed was up. “Well, of course Tate’s familiar with Moon-suits,” Ramog said. “He put in a sixteen-

year hitch with the Space Scouts before getting assigned to Precol.”

“Oh?” said Essidy.

“Yes.” Ramog was silent a few seconds again. “Thanks for the prompt report, Essidy.” He added casually, “Keep the

squad on alert status until further notice.”

Essidy asked no foolish questions. The matter might be hot right now, and it might not. He’d hear all he needed to know

in plenty of time. That was the way the boss worked; and if you worked the way he liked, another bonus would be coming

along quietly a little later to be quietly stacked away with previously earned ones. Essidy looked forward to retiring from

the service early.

Commissioner Ramog, in his private rooms at Headquarters, let the tiny beam-speaker slip back into a desk niche and

shifted his gaze toward a slowly turning three-dimensional replica of Manon which filled the wall across the room. The

commissioner was a slender man, not very big, with a wiry, hard-trained body, close-cropped blond hair and calm gray

eyes. At the moment he looked intrigued and a trifle puzzled.

The obvious first item here, he told himself, was that there simply wasn’t any spot on the surface of this planet where

the use of a Moon-suit was indicated. The tropical lakes were too shallow to present a pressure problem—and the fauna of

those lakes was such that he wouldn’t have cared to work there himself without both armor and armament. He could

assume therefore that Senior Assistant Commissioner Tate, having checked out neither armor nor armament, wasn’t

contemplating such work either.

The second item: a directional tracker had a number of possible uses. However, it had been developed as a space gadget,

and while it could be employed on a planet to keep a line on mobile targets, either alive or mechanical, it looked as if

Tate’s interest actually might be centered on something in space—

Nearby space, since the only vehicles available to personnel on Manon had a limited range.

Dropping that line for the moment, the commissioner’s reflections ran on, one came to the really interesting third

item—which was that Tate was an old-timer in Precol service. And as an old-timer, he knew that a requisition of this kind

would not escape notice on an Academy-conducted Project. In fact, he could expect it to draw a rather prompt inquiry. One

had to assume again that he intended to accomplish whatever he was out to accomplish with such equipment before an

inquiry caught up with him—unless, of course, he had a legitimate explanation to offer when the check was made.

In any event, Commissioner Ramog concluded, no check was going to be made. At least, none of the kind that the

senior assistant commissioner might be expecting.

Ramog stood up and walked over to the viewwall. There were two other planets in the system of Manon’s great green

sun. Giant planets both and impossible for a man in a hopper to approach. Neither of them had a moon. There would be

stray chunks of matter sprinkled through the system that nobody knew about, but Tate didn’t have the equipment for a

planned prospecting trip. He had the experience: his record showed he’d taken leave of absence a half dozen times during

his Precol service period to take part in private prospecting jaunts. But without equipment, and the time to use it,

experience wouldn’t help him much in sifting through the expanses of a planetary system.

And that left what really had been the most likely probability almost to start with. The commissioner switched off the

image of Manon and replaced it with that of Manon’s Moon Belt.

The planet had possessed a sizable satellite at one time; but the time lay far in Manon’s geological past. What was left

by now was debris, thick enough to provide both a minor navigational problem and an interesting night-time display, but

not heavy enough to represent a noteworthy menace to future colonists. So far there had been no opportunity to survey the

Belt thoroughly.

But anyone who was using a hopper regularly could have made an occasional unobserved trip up there.

He couldn’t, however, have left his vehicle. Neither to make a closer investigation, nor to pick up something he thought

he’d spotted. Not unless he had a Moon-suit.

The commissioner felt excitement growing up in him, and now he could allow it to come through. Because there was

really only one reason why an old-timer like Tate would violate Precol regulations so obviously. Only one thing big

enough! The thing that Commissioner Ramog had come to Manon to find. An Old Galactic artifact—

He noticed he was shaking a little when he switched on the communicator to the outer office of his quarters. But his

tone was steady. “Mora?”

“Right here.” A cool feminine voice.

“See what you got on Tate during the day.”

“The S.A.C.? He was out with Argee for two hours this afternoon. No coverage on that period.”

Ramog frowned a little, nodded. “I have her report here. A Project Five item. What else?”

“Afterwards—Warehouse Center . . .”

“Have that, too.”

“I’m scanning the tapes,” Mora said. And presently, “Seems to have been in his hopper alone since early morning.

Location checks to his station. Nothing of interest, so far. Hm-m-m . . . well, now!”

“What is it?”

“I think,” Mora told him, “I should bring this in to you. He’s going to be gone two or three days.”

“I’ll come out.” Ramog already was on his feet. “Get me a current location check on that hopper of his.”

Mora looked around as he came hurriedly into the office. “No luck, commissioner. Hopper can’t be traced. He’s gone

off-planet.”

Ramog’s eyes narrowed very briefly as he dropped into a chair at her desk. “Start up the playback. And don’t look so

pleased!”

Mora smiled. She was a slender quick-moving, black-haired girl with big eyes almost as dark as her hair. “That’s my

little blond tiger!” she murmured.

His face was flushed. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” she said, “that I feel very, very sorry for the S.A.C.” She started the playback. “The other one talking is

Chelly. Ecologist. Tate’s unofficial second-in-command at the station.”

Ramog nodded impatiently. There weren’t more than a dozen sentences to the conversation between Holati Tate and

Chelly. Mora shut off the playback. “That’s all there is to his tape.” She waited.

Ramog had had a bad moment. The S.A.C. had simply put Chelly in charge of station operations for the next two or

three days, until he returned. No explanation for his intended absence, and Chelly seemed only mildly surprised. But

obviously he wasn’t involved in what Tate was doing.

What had bothered Ramog was the sudden thought that Tate might have arranged for an off-planet rendezvous with an

FTL. But a second or two later he knew it wasn’t possible. The Precol patrol boat stationed off Manon would spot, report,

and challenge anything equipped with a space drive before it got close enough to the system for a hopper to meet it. The

patrol-boat’s job was a legitimate one: a planet undergoing orderly processing became a Federation concern and closed to

casual interlopers. But in this case it insured that wherever Holati Tate was heading, he would have to return to Manon

eventually.

The commissioner had relaxed a little. He smiled at Mora, his mind reverting to something she’d said a minute or so

ago. A thrill-greedy, sanguinary little devil, he thought, but it would be regrettable if he ever had to get rid of Mora. They

understood each other so well.

“You know,” he told her, “I seem to feel very sorry for the S.A.C., too!” He added, “Now.”

She gurgled excitedly and came over to him. “Are you going to tell me what it’s all about?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Commissioner Ramog said tolerantly. An operation like this was a game to Mora. But she wasn’t

stupid. She was the most valuable assistant he’d ever developed.

“How many possible lines of action?” she persisted.

Ramog already had considered that. “Three,” he said. “And I don’t think we’d better waste any time.”

* * *

As it happened, it was Ramog’s third line of action with which Holati Tate became involved when he dropped back into

Manon’s atmosphere two and a half planet days after his departure. Had he set the hopper down then in some wild section

of the planet it would have been a different story. Ramog had been obliged to consider the possibility that the S.A.C. would

be so lacking in human trustfulness that he might bury some item of value where it would never be found by anyone else.

An electronics specialist by the name of Gision was, therefore, on Holati’s tail in an armed hopper as soon as he was

spotted again, and he followed the S.A.C. around the curve of the planet as unobtrusively as one hopper could follow

another. However, Holati Tate was merely heading by the shortest route for his Bio Station. When he settled down there,

Gision took up a position halfway between Headquarters and the Bio domes and waited for developments.

At the Bio Station Essidy took over. For the past eighteen hours Essidy had been conducting an unhurried inventory of

the station, assisted by a small crew of husky warehouse men. Holati locked his hopper when he got out, and it wasn’t

Essidy’s job to do anything about that. He merely reported to Ramog that the S.A.C.—looking a little travel-worn and

towing a bulky object by a gravity tube—had gone to his personal quarters. The object appeared to be, and probably was,

the packaged Moon-suit. A few minutes later, Holati re-appeared at the hopper without the object, climbed in and took off.

Gision reported from his aerial vantage point that the S.A.C. was going toward Headquarters now and was told by Ramog

to precede him there.

Essidy was chattering over the private beam again before Gision signed off. Holati Tate had left his quarters sealed, but

that had been no problem. “We got the thing unwrapped,” Essidy said. “It’s the Moon-suit, all right, and nothing else. He’s

got the directional tracker installed. It’s activated. And that’s the only interesting thing in these rooms.”

“Go ahead,” Ramog said quietly. “What’s the reading on the tracker?”

Essidy checked again to make sure. “Locked on Object,” he reported. “At two to twenty thousand miles.”

And that was all Ramog had wanted to know. For a moment he was surprised to discover that his palms were slippery

with sweat.

“All right, Essidy,” he said. “Seal up his rooms and bring the suit over here, immediately.” He added with no change in

inflection, “If anyone has tampered with that reading before I see it, I’ll burn him and you personally.”

“Yes, sir,” Essidy said meekly. “Shall I have the boys go ahead with the inventory to make it look right?”

Ramog said that would be fine and cut him off. The commissioner was actually enormously relieved. His third line of

action was unreeling itself smoothly, and even if Tate got suspicious and panicked now it wouldn’t present a serious

problem, though it might still make the operation a little messy.

One could even hope for the S.A.C.’s own sake, Ramog thought, smiling very faintly now, that he wouldn’t panic. The

third line of action was not only the least risky, it was by far the most humane.

Holati Tate set the hopper down a hundred yards from the Headquarters vehicle shelter entrance. The service crew

chief’s voice said over the intercom, “Better bring her in, sir. We’re on storm warning.”

Holati obediently turned the hopper, slid her into the shelter and grounded her. The entrance door closed a hundred

yards behind him.

“Want her serviced, sir?”

“No, no; she doesn’t need it.” Holati set the hatch on lock, got out and let it snap shut behind him. He looked at the crew

chief. “I’ll be taking her out again in thirty minutes or so,” he said. Then he walked off up the dome tunnel toward the

office sections.

The crew chief looked around and saw the hopper’s hatch open. He frowned.

“Hey, you!” He went up to the hatch. “Who’s that in there? She don’t need servicing. How’d you get in?”

The man named Gision looked out. He was a large man with a round face and a sleepily ferocious expression.

“Little man,” he said softly, “just keep the mouth shut and take off.”

The crew chief stared at him. Gision was tagged with a very peculiar reputation among the best-informed Project

personnel, but the crew chief hadn’t had much to do with him personally and he habitually ignored Project rumors. Rumors

about this guy or that started up on almost any outworld operation; they could usually be put down to jumpy nerves.

He changed his mind completely about that in the few seconds he and Gision were looking at each other.

He turned on his heel and walked off, badly shaken. If something was going on, he didn’t want to know about it. Not a

thing. He wasn’t an exceptionally timid man, but he had just realized clearly that he was a long way from the police of the

Federation.

Mora was in temporary charge of the communications offices, though Holati Tate didn’t see her at first. He walked up

to a plump, giggly little clerk he’d talked to before. She was busy coding a section of the current Project reports which

presently would perform some fantastic loops through time and space and present themselves briskly at the Precol Home

Office in the Federation.

Holati looked around the big room. “Where’s Trigger Argee?” he inquired.

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摘要：

Trigger&FriendsJamesH.SchmitzFout!Onbekendeschakeloptie-instructie.Thisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelycoincidental.“HarvestTime”wasoriginallypublishedinAstoundingScienceFictioninSeptember1958.“LionLoose”wasori...

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