"They
did get a better cabin though."

"Might have been less trouble to get me to move," Trigger remarked.

"Might have been. I didn't know what mood you'd be in."

Trigger decided to let that ride. This cocktail lounge was a very
curious place. By the looks of it, there were thirty or forty people in
their immediate vicinity; but if one looked again in a couple of
minutes, there might be an entirely different thirty or forty people
around. Sitting in easy chairs or at tables, standing about in small
groups, talking, drinking, laughing, they drifted past slowly; overhead,
below, sometimes tilted at odd angles--fading from sight and presently
returning.

In actual fact she and Quillan were in a little room by themselves, and
with more than ordinary privacy via an audio block and a reconstruct
scrambler which Quillan had switched on at their entry. "I'll leave us
out of the viewer circuit," he remarked, "until you've finished your
questions."

"Viewer circuit?" she repeated.

Quillan waved a hand around. "That," he said. "There are more commercial
and industrial spies, political agents, top-class confidence men and
whatnot on board this ship than you'd probably believe. A good
percentage of them are pretty fair lip readers, and the things you want
to talk about are connected with the Federation's hottest current
secret. So while it's a downright crime not to put you on immediate
display in a place like this, we won't take the chance."

Trigger let that ride too. A group had materialized at an oblong table
eight feet away while Quillan was speaking. Everybody at the table
seemed fairly high, and two of the couples were embarrassingly amorous;
but she couldn't quite picture any of them as somebody's spies or
agents. She listened to the muted chatter. Some Hub dialect she didn't
know.

"None of those people can see or hear us then?" she asked.

"Not until we want them to. Viewer gives you as much privacy as you
like. Most of the crowd here just doesn't see much point to privacy.
Like those two."

Trigger followed his glance. At a tilted angle above them, a matched
pair of black-haired, black-gowned young sirens sat at a small table,
sipping their drinks, looking languidly around.

"Twins," Trigger said.

"No," said Quillan. "That's Blent and Company."

"Oh?"

"Blent's a lady of leisure and somewhat excessively narcissistic
tendencies," he explained. He gave the matched pair another brief study.
"Perhaps o