a couple this morning. I shouldn't have
done that."

"He didn't seem offended," said Holati.

"No, not really," she agreed.

"And I explained to him that you had a very good reason to feel
disturbed."

"Thanks," said Trigger. "By the way, was he really a smuggler at one
time? And a hijacker?"

"Yes--very successful at it. It's excellent cover for some phases of
Intelligence work. As I heard it, though, Quillan happened to scramble
up one of the Hub's nastier dope rings in the process, and was broken
two grades in rank."

"Broken?" Trigger said. "Why?"

"Unwarranted interference with a political situation. The Scouts are
rough about that. You're supposed to see those things. Sometimes you
don't. Sometimes you do and go ahead anyway. They may pat you on the
back privately, but they also give you the axe."

"I see," she said. She smiled.

"Just how far did we get in bringing you up to date yesterday?" the
Commissioner asked.

"The remains that weren't Doctor Azol," Trigger said.

If it hadn't been for the funny business with Trigger, Holati said, he
mightn't have been immediately skeptical about Doctor Azol's supposed
demise by plasmoid during a thrombosis-induced spell of unconsciousness.
There had been no previous indications that the U-League's screening of
its scientists, in connection with the plasmoid find, might have been
strategically loused up from the start.

But as things stood, he did look on the event with very considerable
skepticism. Doctor Azol's death, in that particular form, seemed too
much of a coincidence. For, beside himself, only Azol knew that another
person already had suddenly and mysteriously lost consciousness on
Harvest Moon. Only Azol therefore might expect that the Commissioner
would quietly inform the official investigators of the preceding
incident, thus cinching the accidental death theory in Azol's case much
more neatly than the assumed heart attack had done.

The Commissioner went on from there to the reflection that if Azol had
chosen to disappear, it might well have been with the intention of
conveying important information secretly back to somebody waiting for it
in the Hub. He saw to it that the remains were preserved, and that word
of what could have happened was passed on to a high Federation official
whom he knew to be trustworthy. That was all he was in a position to do,
or interested in doing, himself. Security men presently came and took
the supposed vestiges