pen season now on a different kind of game. Three men had
walked briskly past them when Quillan brought her in by the front door.
They hadn't even looked at her. There were sounds now and then from some
of the other rooms, and that general feeling of a considerable number of
people around--of being at an operating headquarters of some sort, which
hummed with quiet activity.

One of the things, Holati Tate said, which had not become public
knowledge so far was that Professor Mantelish actually succeeded in
getting some of the plasmoids on the Old Galactic base back into
operation. One plasmoid in particular.

The reason the achievement hadn't been announced was that for nearly six
weeks no one except the three men directly involved in the experiments
had known about them. And during that time other things occurred which
made subsequent publicity seem very inadvisable.

Mantelish scowled. "We made up a report to the League the day of the
initial discovery," he informed Trigger. "It was a complete and detailed
report!"

"True," Holati said, "but the report the U-League got didn't happen to
be the one Professor Mantelish helped make up. We'll go into that later.
The plasmoid the professor was experimenting with was the 112-113 unit."

He shifted his gaze to Mantelish. "Still want me to tell it?"

"Yes, yes!" Mantelish said impatiently. "You will oversimplify grossly,
of course, but it should do for the moment. At a more leisurely time I
shall be glad to give Trigger an accurate description of the processes."

Trigger smiled at him. "Thank you, Professor!" She took her second sip
of the Puya. Not bad.

"Well, Mantelish was dosing this plasmoid with mild electrical
stimulations," Holati went on. "He noticed suddenly that as he did it
other plasmoids in that section of Harvest Moon were indicating signs of
activity. So he called in Doctor Fayle and Doctor Azol."

The three scientists discovered quickly that stimulation of the 112 part
of the unit was in fact producing random patterns of plasmoid motion
throughout the entire base, while an electrical prod at 113 brought
everything to an abrupt stop again. After a few hours of this, 112
suddenly extruded a section of its material, which detached itself and
moved off slowly under its own power through half the station, trailed
with great excitement by Mantelish and Azol. It stopped at a point where
another plasmoid had been removed for laboratory investigations, climbe