eyes widened only slightly. Duty on the Dawn
City produced hardened men.

Neither Quillan nor Trigger could offer the slightest explanation as to
what had started the extinguishers. The engineers apologized and
withdrew. The door closed again.

Quillan switched on the viewer. Their voices came back into the cabin as
they climbed into their car.

"So that's how it happened," one of the assistants was saying
reflectively.

"Right," said the ship's engineer. "Like to burst into flames myself."

"Ha-ha-ha!" They drove off.

Trigger flushed. She looked at Quillan.

"Perhaps I ought to get into something else," she said. "Now that the
party's over."

"Perhaps," Quillan admitted. "I'll have Gaya bring something down. We
want to stay out of your cabin for an hour or so till everything's been
checked. There'll be a few conferences to go through now."

Gaya arrived next, with clothes. Trigger retired to the cabin's bathroom
with them and came out a few minutes later, dressed again. Meanwhile the
Dawn City's First Security Officer also had arrived and was setting up a
portable restructure stage in the center of the cabin. He looked rather
grim, but he also looked like a very much relieved man.

"I suggest we run your sequence off first, Major," he said. "Then we can
put them on together, and compare them."

Trigger sat down on a couch beside Gaya to watch. She'd been told that
the momentary view of the little demon-shape in the cabin had been
deleted from Security's copy of their own sequence and wasn't to be
mentioned.

Otherwise there really was not too much to see. What the attacking
creature had used to blur the restructure wasn't clear, except that it
wasn't a standard scrambler. Amplified to the limits of clarity and
stepped down in time to the limit of immobility, all that emerged was a
shifting haze of energy, which very faintly hinted at a dwarfish human
shape in outline. A rather unusually small and heavy catassin, the
Security chief pointed out, would present such an outline. That
something quite material was finally undergoing devastating structural
disorganization on the gravity mine was unpleasantly obvious, but it
produced no further information. The sequence ended with the short blaze
of heat which had set off the extinguishers.

Then they ran the restructure of the preceding double killing. Trigger
watched, gulping a little, till it came to the point where the haze
shape actually was about to tou