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It was nice that old Holati Tate had made an almost indecently vast fortune out of his first-discovery rights to the things, because she was really very fond of the Commissioner when he wasn't being irritating. But in some obscure way she found the plasmoids themselves and the idea of unlimited plastic life which they embodied rather appalling. However, she was in a minority there.
He closed the door carefully behind him. "How's the little critter doing?" he asked. "Still absorbing the goop," Trigger said. She held Mantelish's small mystery plasmoid cupped lightly between thumbs and fingers, its bottom side down in a shallow bowl half full of something which Mantelish considered to be nutritive for plasmoids, or at least for this one.
"Good plasmoids and bad plasmoids?" Trigger shook her head. "No. It doesn't feel right." "What else feels right?" Pilch asked. "The farmer. The little old man who owned the farm where the mud pond was." "Liked him, didn't you?" "Very much! He knew a lot of fascinating things." She laughed again.
And now you're the secretary and assistant of the famous Precolonial Commissioner Holati Tate which makes you almost a participant in what may well turn out to be the greatest scientific event of the century.... I'm referring, of course," Plemponi added, "to Tate's discovery of the Old Galactic plasmoids." "Of course," agreed Trigger. "And what is all this leading up to, Plemp?"
So they're going to find one of those setups, all right. And they won't come back with any plasmoids. But they will come back with something they don't know about." Pilch looked at her for a moment. "You say it!" Trigger's grin widened. "A little green woman," she said.
A couple of workmen were guiding a dozen big cleaning robots around the Plasmoid Exhibition Hall, which wouldn't be open to students or visitors for another few hours. Trigger strolled across the floor of the huge area toward a couple of exhibits that hadn't been there the last time she'd come through. Life-sized replicas of two O.G. Plasmoids Numbers 1432 and 1433 she discovered.
She looked curiously at the Commissioner. "I didn't have a chance to talk to Major Quillan alone, so I'm wondering why Mantelish was told the I-Fleets in the Vishni area are hunting for planets with plasmoids on them. I thought you felt he was too woolly-minded to be trusted." "We couldn't keep that from him very well," Holati said. "He was the boy who thought of it."
"I just said I thought plasmoids were rather unpleasant. But that's the way I used to feel about them. I don't feel that way now." "Except again," said Pilch, "for that little monstrosity on the ship. If it was a plasmoid. You rather suspect it was, don't you?" Trigger nodded. "That would be pretty bad!" "Very bad," said Pilch.
"Like this one?" she asked. "He's got a large version of that type of detector with him too. But he thinks that if any wild plasmoids are around, they're likely to be along the lines of 113-A. So he's also constructed a detector which reacts to 113-A." "I see." Trigger was silent a moment.
As she remembered it, it was Azol who discovered that Plasmoids occasionally could be induced to absorb food. Almost any kind of food, it turned out, so long as it contained a sufficient quantity of protein. What had happened to Azol looked like a particularly unfortunate result of the discovery.
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