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It was again Lyad who had given Mantelish his call to bemused duty via a transmitted verbal cue on her arrival in Manon, and instructed him to get lost from his League guards for a few hours in Manon's swamps. There she had met and conferred with him and pumped him of all he could tell her.
They came walking back into the ship around half an hour later. Both faces looked rather white and strained. "Lyad has something she wants to tell you, Holati," Trigger said. "Where's Mantelish?" "In his lab. Taking a nap, I believe." "That's good. We don't want him here for this. Go ahead, Lyad. Just the important stuff. You can give us the details after we've left."
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.
They let him work off his rage while he was still under partial control. Then the Ermetyne woke him up. He stared at her coldly. "You are a deceitful woman, Lyad Ermetyne!" he declared. "I don't wish to see you about my labs again! At any time. Is that understood?" "Yes, Professor," Lyad said. "And I'm sorry that I believed it necessary to " Mantelish snorted. "Sorry! Necessary!
"The actual report Doctor Fayle had transmitted the day before to the League was revised to the extent that it omitted any reference to 112-113." He glanced thoughtfully at Mantelish. "As a matter of fact, it was almost a month and a half before League Headquarters became aware of the importance of the unit." The professor snorted.
"Azol," he explained to Trigger, "had become a victim of his scientific zeal. And I " "Doctor Azol," said the Commissioner, "as you may remember, had his little mishap with the plasmoid just two days after Fayle departed." "And I," Mantelish went on, "was involved in other urgent research. How was I to know what that villain Fayle had been up to? A vice president of the University League!"
"Think she was fibbing a bit?" "Sure. Mainly she'd decided in advance how much to tell and how much not. She thinks fast in action though! No slips. What she told of what she knows makes a solid story, and with angles we can check on fast. So it's bound to have plenty of information in it. It'll do for the moment." "She's already started buttering up Mantelish," said Trigger.
Unless his tail goofed, he's still up there, apparently staying on as a guest." "Are you having these other Devagas watched?" "Not individually. Too many of them, and they're scattered all over the place. Mantelish got back. He checked in an hour ago." "You mean he's upstairs in his quarters now?" she asked. "Right.
Much less comfortably than she might have, too." "I think she'd agree with you there," Trigger said. Lyad's first assignment after Professor Mantelish came out of the dope was to snap him back into trance and explain to him how he had once more been put under hypno control and used for her felonious ends by the First Lady of Tranest.
"It seems to be," Mantelish said unhappily. "But we have, at least, a solvent which will remove it from the equipment." Trigger came sliding out from under the transmitters, the detached black box under one arm. "Better use it then before the stuff gets to the rest of the ship. It won't help the black box." She shook it. It tinkled. "Shot!" she said.
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