e until the others had been at it a decade or
so. They would have been quite eager...."

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 w