it around and giggle a bit, and out comes some ungodly suggestion."

"So they helped you find me?" she said cautiously. It was clear that the
major had strong feelings about computers.

"Oh, sure," he said. "It usually turns out it was a good idea to do what
those CCs say. Anything unusual that shows up in the area you're working
on gets chunked into the things as a matter of course. We were on the
liners. Dawn City reports back a couple of murders. 'Dawn City to the
head of the list!' cry the computers. Nobody asks why. They just plow
into the ticket purchase records. And right there are the little Argee
thumbprints!"

He looked at Trigger. "My own bet," he said, somewhat accusingly, "was
that you were one of those that had just taken off. We didn't know about
that ticket reservation."

"What I don't see," Trigger said, changing the subject, "is why two
murders should seem so very unusual. There must be quite a few of them,
after all."

"True," said Quillan. "But not murders that look like catassin
killings."

"Oh!" she said startled. "Is that what these were?"

"That's what Ship Security thinks."

Trigger frowned. "But what could be the connection--"

Quillan reached across the table and patted her hand. "You've got it!"
he said with approval. "Exactly! No connection. Some day I'm going to
walk down those rows and give them each a blast where it will do the
most good. It will be worth being broken for."

Trigger said, "I thought that catassin planet was being guarded."

"It is. It would be very hard to sneak one out nowadays. But somebody's
breeding them in the Hub. Just a few. Keeps the price up."

Trigger grimaced uncomfortably. She'd seen recordings of those swift,
clever, constitutionally murderous creatures in action. "You say it
looked like catassin killings. They haven't found it?"

"No. But they think they got rid of it. Emptied the air from most of the
ship after they surfaced and combed over the rest of it with life
detectors. They've got a detector system set up now that would spot a
catassin if it moved twenty feet in any direction."

"Life detectors go haywire out of normal space, don't they?" she said.
"That's why they surfaced then."

Quillan nodded. "You're a well-informed doll. They're pretty certain
it's been sucked into space or disposed of by its owner, but they'll go
on looking till we dive beyond Garth."

"Who got killed?"

"A Rest Warden and a Security officer. In the rest c