ity were
indicated.

The preserve hotel was startled but reassuring. That the mother should
be afflicted with the same ailment as the daughter was news to them but
plausible enough. Within eight minutes, a police ambulance was flying
Mihul and Trigger at emergency speeds towards a small Uplands City
behind the mountains.

Trigger never found out the city's name. Three minutes after she'd
followed Mihul's floating stretcher into the hospital, she quietly left
the building again by a street entrance. Mihul's wallet had contained
two hundred and thirteen crowns. It was enough, barely.

She got a complete change of clothes in the first Automatic Service
store she came to and left the store in them, carrying the sporting
outfit in a bag. The aircab she hired to take her to Ceyce had to be
paid for in advance, which left her eighty-two crowns. As they went
flying over a lake a while later, the bag with the sporting clothes and
accessories was dumped out of the cab's rear window. It was just
possible that the Space Scouts had been able to put that tracer material
idea to immediate use.

In Ceyce a short two hours after she'd felled Mihul, Trigger called the
interstellar spaceport and learned that the Dawn City was open to
passengers and their guests.

Birna Drellgannoth picked up her tickets and went on board, mingling
unostentatiously with a group in a mood of festive leave-taking. She
went fading even more unostentatiously down a hallway when the group
stopped cheerfully to pose for a solidopic girl from one of the news
agencies. She located her cabin after a lengthy search, set the door to
don't-disturb, glanced around the cabin and decided to inspect it in
more detail later.

She pulled off her slippers, climbed on the outsized divan which passed
here for a bunk, and stretched out.

She lay there a while, blinking at the ceiling and worrying a little
about Mihul. Even theoretically a stunner-max blast couldn't cause Mihul
the slightest permanent damage. It might, however, leave her in a
fairly peevish mood after the grogginess wore off, since the impact
wasn't supposed to be pleasant. But Mihul had stated she would hold no
grudges over a successful escape attempt; and even if they caught up
with her again before she got to Manon, this attempt certainly had to be
rated a technical success.

They might catch up, of course, Trigger thought. The Federation must
have an enormous variety of means at its disposal when