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.

"I was watching it," Major Quillan said reassuringly from the end of the table. "I would have warned you, but it stopped when it got as far as it is now. That was around five minutes ago."

Trigger reached back and gave old Repulsive a cautious pat. "Very lively character! He does feel pleasant to touch. Kitty-cat pleasant! How did you get a lead through him?"

"Mantelish brought it back to Maccadon with him, mainly because of its similarity to 113. He was curious because he couldn't even guess at what its function was. It was just lying there in a cubicle. So he did considerable experimenting with it while he waited for Gess Fayle to show up—and League Headquarters fidgeted around, hoping to get the kind of report from Mantelish and Fayle that Mantelish thought they'd already received. They were wondering where Fayle was, too. But they knew Fayle was Security, so they didn't like to get too nosy."

Trigger shook her head. "Wonderful! So what happened with 113-A?"

"Mantelish began to get results with it," the Commissioner said. "One experiment was rather startling. He'd been trying that electrical stimulation business. Nothing happened until he had finished. Then he touched the plasmoid, and it fed the whole charge back to him. Apparently it was a fairly hefty dose."

She laughed delightedly. "Good for Repulsive! Stood up for his rights, eh?"

"Mantelish gained some such impression anyway. He became more cautious with it after that. And then he learned something that should be important. He was visiting another lab where they had a couple of plasmoids which actually moved now and then. He had 113-A in his coat pocket. The two lab plasmoids stopped moving while he was there. They haven't moved since."

"Like the Harvest Moon plasmoids when they stimulated 113?"

"Right. He thought about that, and then located another moving plasmoid. He dropped in to look it over, with 113-A in his pocket again, and it stopped. He did the same thing in one more place and then quit. There aren't that many moving plasmoids around. Those three labs are still wondering what hit their specimens."

She studied 113-A curiously. "A mighty mite! What does Mantelish make of it?"

"He thinks the 112-113 unit forms a kind of self-regulating system. The big one induces plasmoid activity, the little one modifies it. This 113-A might be a spare regulator. But it seems to be more than a spare—which brings us to that first lead we got. A gang of raiders crashed Mantelish's lab one night."

"When was that?"

"Some months ago. Before you and I left Manon. The professor was out, and 113-A had gone along in his pocket as usual. But his two lab guards and one of the raiders were killed. The others got away. Gess Fayle's defection was a certainty by then, and everybody was very nervous. The Feds got there, fast, and dead-brained the raider. They learned just two things. One, he'd been mind-blocked and couldn't have spilled any significant information even if they had got him alive. The other item they drew from his brain was a clear impression of the target of the raid—the professor's pal here."

"Uh-huh," Trigger said, lost in thought. She poked Repulsive lightly. "That would be Fayle and his associates then. Or somebody who knew about them. Did they want to kill it or grab it?"

The Commissioner looked at her. "Grab it, was the dead-brain report. Why?"

"Just wondering. Would make a difference, wouldn't it? Did they try again?"

"There've been five more attempts," he said.

"And what's everybody concluded from that?"