Part 22 (1/2)

”Oh?”

”Yes.” Major Quillan looked broodingly at his drink for a moment. ”There they sit,” he remarked suddenly, ”with their stupid plastic faces hanging out! Rows of them. You feed them something you don't understand.

They don't understand it either. n.o.body can tell me they can. But they kick it around and giggle a bit, and out comes some unG.o.dly 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. n.o.body 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 cata.s.sin killings.”

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

”That's what s.h.i.+p 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 cata.s.sin 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, const.i.tutionally murderous creatures in action. ”You say it looked like cata.s.sin killings. They haven't found it?”

”No. But they think they got rid of it. Emptied the air from most of the s.h.i.+p 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 cata.s.sin if it moved twenty feet in any direction.”

”Life detectors go haywire out of normal s.p.a.ce, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 cubicle area. It might have been sent after somebody there. Apparently it ran into the two men and killed them on the spot. The officer got off one shot and that set off the automatic alarms. So p.u.s.s.y cat couldn't finish the job that time.”

”It's all sort of gruesome, isn't it?” Trigger said.

”Cata.s.sins are,” Quillan agreed. ”That's a fact.”

Trigger took another sip. She set down her gla.s.s. ”There's something else,” she said reluctantly.

”Yes?”

”When you said you'd come on board to see I got to Manon, I was thinking none of the people who'd been after me on Maccadon could know I was on the Dawn City. They might though. Quite easily.”