"Mmmph—grrmm!

"Grr-mm-mhm.... Hm-m-m ... mhm!"

They walked on along the trail, hand in hand. They came up over the last little rise. Trigger looked down on the camp. She frowned.

"Pretty dull!" she observed.

"Eh?" Quillan asked, startled.

"Not that, ape!" she said. She squeezed his hand. "Your morals aren't good, but dull it wasn't. I meant generally. We're just sitting here now waiting. Nothing seems to be happening."

It was true, at least on the surface. There were a great number of ships and men around and near Luscious, but they weren't in view. They were ready to jump in any direction, at any moment, but they had nothing to jump at yet. The Commissioner's transmitters hadn't signaled more than two or three times in the last two days. Even the short communicators remained mostly silent.

"Cheer up, Doll!" Quillan said. "Something's bound to break pretty soon."

That evening, a Devagas ship came zooming in on Luscious.

They were prepared for it, of course. That somebody came round from time to time to look over the local plasmoid crop was only to be expected. As the ship surfaced in atmosphere on the other side of the planet, four one-man Scout fighters flashed in on it from four points of the horizon, radiation screens up. They tacked holding beams on it and braced themselves. A Federation destroyer appeared in the air above it.

The Devagas ship couldn't escape. So it blew itself up.

They were prepared for that, too. The Devagas pilot was being dead-brained three minutes later. He didn't know a significant thing except the exact coordinates of an armed, subterranean Devagas dome, three days' run away.

The Scout ships that had been hunting for the dome went howling in toward it from every direction. The more massive naval vessels of the Federation followed behind. There was no hurry for the heavies. The captured Devagas ship's attempt to beam a warning to its base had been smothered without effort. The Scouts were getting in fast enough to block escape attempts.

"And now we split forces," the Commissioner said. He was the only one, Trigger thought, who didn't seem too enormously excited by it all. "Quillan, you and your group get going! They can use you there a whole lot better than we can here."

For just a second, Quillan looked like a man being dragged violently in two directions. He didn't look at Trigger. He asked, "Think it's wise to leave you people unguarded?"

"Quillan," said Commissioner Tate, "that's the first time in my life anybody has suggested I need guarding."

"Sorry sir," said Quillan.

"You mean," Trigger said, "we're not going? We're just staying here?"

"You've got an appointment, remember?" the Commissioner said.

Quillan and company were gone within the hour. Mantelish, Holati Tate, Lyad and Trigger stayed at camp.

Luscious looked very lonely.

"It isn't just the king plasmoid they're hoping to catch there," the Commissioner told Trigger. "And I wouldn't care, frankly, if the thing stayed lost the next few thousand years. But we had a very odd report last week. The Federation's undercover boys have been scanning the Devagas worlds and Tranest very closely of late, naturally. The report is that there isn't the slightest evidence that a single one of the top members of the Devagas hierarchy has been on any of their worlds in the past two months."

"Oh," she said. "They think they're out here? In that dome?"

"That's what's suspected."

"But why?"

He scratched his chin. "If anyone knows, they haven't told me. It's probably nothing nice."

Trigger pondered. "You'd think they'd use facsimiles," she said. "Like Lyad."

"Oh, they did," he said. "They did. That's one of the reasons for being pretty sure they're gone. They're nowhere near as expert at that facsimile business as the Tranest characters. A little study of the recordings showed the facs were just that."

Trigger pondered again. "Did they find anything on Tranest?"