el 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. "Plasmoids generally, you feel about them now as
you feel about potatoes ... rocks ... neutral things like that?"

"That's about it," Trigger said. She still looked puzzled.

"We'll go over what seems to have changed your attitude there in a
minute or so. Here's another thing--" Pilch paused a moment, then said,
"Night before last, about an hour after you'd gone to bed, you had a
very light touch of the same pattern of mental blankness you experienced
on that plasmoid station."

"While I was asleep?" Trigger said, startled.

"That's right. Comparatively very light, very brief. Five or six
minutes. Dream activity, etcetera, smooths out. Some blocking on various
sense lines. Then, normal sleep until about five minutes before you woke
up. At that point there may have been another minute touch of the same
pattern. Too brief to be actually definable. A few seconds at most. The
point is that this is a continuing process."

She looked at Trigger a moment. "Not particularly alarmed, are you?"

"No," said Trigger. "It just seems very odd." She added, "I got rather
frightened when Commissioner Tate was first telling me what had been
going on."

"Yes, I know."

20

Pilch was silent for some moments again, considering the wall-screen as
if thinking about something connected with it. "Well, we'll drop that
for now," she said finally. "Let me tell you what's been happening these
months, starting with that first amnesia-covered blankout on Harvest
Moon. The Maccadon Colonial School has sound basic psychology courses,
so there won't be much explaining to do. The connection between those
incidents I mentioned and your earlier feeling of disliking plasmoids is
obvious, isn't it?"

Trigger nodded.

"Good. When you got the first Service check-up at Commissioner Tate's
demand, there was very little to go on. The amnesia didn't lift
immediately--not very unusual. The blankout might be interesting
because of the circumstances. Otherwise the check showed you were in a
good deal better than normal condition. Outside of total therapy
processes--and I believe you know that's a long haul--there wasn't much
to be done for you, and no particular reason to do it. So an
amnesia-resolving process was initiated