"How do you know?"

"They'd started closing in for the grab in Ceyce when Quillan's group
located you. So Quillan grabbed you first."

She flushed. "I wasn't as smart as I thought, was I?"

The Commissioner grunted. "Smart enough to give us a king-sized
headache! But _they_ didn't have any trouble finding you. We discovered
tonight that some kind of tracer material had been worked into all your
clothes. Even the flimsies. Somebody may have been planted in the school
laundry, but that's not important now." He looked at her for a moment.
"What made you decide to take off so suddenly?" he asked.

Trigger shrugged. "I was getting pretty angry with you," she admitted.
"More or less with everybody. Then I applied for a transfer, and the
application bounced--from Evalee! I figured I'd had enough and that I'd
just quietly clear out. So I did--or thought I did."

"Can't blame you," said Holati.

Trigger said, "I still think it would have been smarter to keep me
informed right from the start of what was going on."

He shook his head. "I wouldn't be telling you a thing even now," he
said, "if it hadn't been definitely established that you're already
involved in the matter. This could develop into a pretty messy
operation. I wouldn't have wanted you in on it, if it could have been
avoided. And if you weren't going to be in on it, I couldn't go spilling
Federation secrets to you."

"I'm in on it, definitely, eh?"

He nodded. "For the duration."

"But you're still not telling me everything?"

"There're a few things I can't tell you," he said. "I'm following orders
in that."

Trigger smiled faintly. "That's a switch! I didn't know you knew how."

"I've followed plenty of orders in my time," the Commissioner said,
"when I thought they made sense. And I think these do."

Trigger was silent a moment. "You said a while ago that most of the heat
was to go off me tonight. Can you talk about that?"

"Yes, that's all right." He considered. "I'll have to tell you something
else again first--why we're going to Manon."

She settled back in her chair. "Go ahead."

"Somebody got the idea that one of the things Gess Fayle might have done
is to arrange things so he wouldn't have to come back to the Hub for a
while. If he could set up shop on some outworld far enough away, and
tinker around with that plasmoid unit for a year or so until he knew all
about it, he might do better for himself than by simply selling it to
somebody."