When she looked up finally, he asked, "Can you make much sense of it?"

"Not very much," Trigger admitted. "It just states what seems to have happened. Not how or why. Apparently they did get me to develop a total recall of that knocked-out period in the last interview—I even reported hearing you and Doctor Azol moving around and talking in the next compartment."

He nodded. "I remember enough of my conversation with Azol to be able to verify that part of it."

"Then, some time before I actually fell down," said Trigger, "I was apparently already in that mysterious coma. Getting deeper into it. It started when I walked away from Mantelish's group, without having any particular reason for doing it. I just walked. Then I was in another compartment by myself and still walking, and the stuff kept getting deeper, until I lost physical control of myself and fell down. Then I lay there a while until you came down that aisle and saw me. And after you'd picked me up and put me in that chair—just like that, everything clears up! Except that I don't remember what happened and think I've just left Mantelish to go looking for you. I don't even wonder how I happen to be sitting there in a chair!"

The Commissioner smiled briefly. "That's right. You didn't."

Her slim fingers tapped the pages of the report, the green stone in the ring he'd given her to wear reflecting little flashes of light. "They seem quite positive that nobody else came near me during that period. And that nobody had used a hypno-spray on me or shot a hypodermic pellet into me—anything like that—before the seizure or whatever it was came on. How do you suppose they could be so sure of that?"

"I wouldn't know," Holati said. "But I think we might as well assume they're right."

"I suppose so. What it seems to boil down to is they're saying I was undergoing something like a very much slowed-down, very profound emotional shock—source still undetermined, but profound enough to knock me completely out for a while. Only they also say that—for a whole list of reasons—it couldn't possibly have been an emotional shock after all! And when the effect left, it went instantaneously. That would be just the reverse to the pattern of an emotional shock, wouldn't it?"

"Yes," he said. "That occurred to me too, but it didn't explain anything to me. Possibly it's explained something to the Psychology Service."

"Well," Trigger said, "it's certainly all very odd. Very disagreeable, too!" She laid the report down on the arm of her chair and looked at the Commissioner. "Guess I'd better run now," she said. "But there was something you said before that made me wonder. There was really very little of Doctor Azol left after that plasmoid got through with him."

He nodded. "True."

"It wasn't Azol, was it?"

"No."

"Man, oh, man!" Trigger jumped up, bent over his chair and gave him a quick peck on an ear tip. "If I ask one more question, we'll be sitting here the next two hours. I'll run instead! See you around lunchtime, Commissioner!"

"Right, Trigger," he said, getting up.

He closed the door behind her and went back to the transmitter. He looked rather unhappy.

"Yes?" said a voice in the transmitter.

"She just left," Commissioner Tate said. "Get on the beam and stay there!"