ed a bit wilted.

"What's been going on?" Trigger asked.

It was the wrong question. Mantelish took a deep breath and began
bellowing like a wounded thunder-ork. Trigger listened, with some
admiration. It was one of the best jobs of well-verbalized huffing she'd
heard, even from the professor. He ran down in less than five minutes,
though--apparently he'd already let off considerable steam.

Lyad had dehypnotized him, at the Commissioner's suggestion. It had been
a lengthy job, requiring a couple of hours, but it was a complete one.
Which was understandable, since it was the First Lady herself, Trigger
gathered gradually from the noise, who had put Mantelish under the
influence, back in his own garden on Maccadon, and within two weeks
after his first return from Harvest Moon.

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. As the final outrage, she had instructed him to lug her crated
cohorts, preserved like Pluly's harem ladies, into the Precol dome--to
care for them tenderly there and at the proper cued moment to release
them for action--all under the illusion that they were priceless
biological specimens!

Mantelish wasn't in the least appeased by the fact that--again at the
Commissioner's suggestion--Lyad had installed one minor new
hypno-command which, she said, would clear up permanently his tendency
toward attacks of dive sickness. But he just ran down finally and sat
there, glowering at the Ermetyne now and then.

"Well," the Commissioner remarked, "this might be as good a time as any
to ask a few questions. Got your little quizzer with you, Quillan?"

Quillan nodded. Lyad looked at both of them in turn and then, briefly
and for the first time, glanced in Trigger's direction.

It wasn't exactly an appealing glance. It might have been a questioning
one. And Trigger discovered suddenly that she felt just a little
sympathy for Lyad. Lyad had lost out on a very big gamble. And, each in
his own way, there were three very formidable males among whom she was
sitting. None of them was friendly; two were oversized, and the
undersized one had a fairly bloodchilling record for anyone on the wrong
side of law and order. Trigger decided to forget about beady stares for
the mo