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Three minutes after she'd followed Mihul's floating stretcher into the hospital, she quietly left the building again by a street entrance. Mihul's wallet had contained two hundred and thirteen crowns. It was enough, barely. She got a complete change of clothes in the first Automatic Service store she came to and left the store in them, carrying the sporting outfit in a bag.
Trigger stood there, shaking violently, looking down at Mihul and fighting the irrational conviction that she had just committed cold-blooded murder. The gun-pup trotted up with the one downed bird. He placed it reverently by Mihul's outflung hand. Then he sat back on his haunches and regarded Trigger with something of the detached compassion of a good undertaker.
Mihul stretched a little more for the next shot. Trigger wheeled matter-of-factly, dropping the Yool, left elbow close in to her side. Her left fist rammed solidly into Mihul's bare brown midriff, just under the arch of the rib cage. That punch, in those precise circumstances, would have paralyzed the average person. It didn't quite paralyze Mihul.
"I don't think I really had much choice, did I?" "Afraid not," he admitted. "It's one of those things that just have to be done. But you won't find it all bad. Your companion, by the way, for the next three days will be Mihul." "Mihul!" Trigger exclaimed. "Right there," said Mihul's voice. Trigger swung around in her chair. Mihul stood in a door which had appeared in the full wall of the room.
He was close to eighty pounds heavier than Trigger, and it was still mostly muscle. But it was nearly four years now since he had bothered himself with drills. And he hadn't been put through Mihul's advanced students' courses lately. He stayed conscious a little less than nine seconds. The plasmoids were in a small electronic safe built into a music cabinet.
Truckers who dealt with the Colonial School knew, or learned in one or two briefly horrid lessons, that Mihul's commando-trained charges were prone to ungirlish methods of discouragement when argued with too urgently. The view screen switched on. The transportation clerk's glance flicked over Trigger's street dress when she told him her destination. His expression remained bland.
"Eight hours, ten minutes. You woke up on schedule. I had breakfast sent up thirty minutes ago. I've already eaten mine took one sniff and plunged in. It's good!" Mihul's hair, Trigger saw, had been cropped short and a streak of gray added over the right side; and they'd changed the color of her eyes to hazel. She wondered what had been done to her along that line. "Want to come in?" Mihul said.
She gave Trigger a smile. Trigger looked back at the Commissioner. "I don't get it," she said. "Oh, Mihul's in Scout Intelligence," he said, "wouldn't be here if she weren't." "Been an agent for eighteen years," Mihul said, coming forward. "Hi, Trigger, surprised?" "Yes," Trigger admitted. "Very."
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