Trigger went curiously over to the cabinet. It opened at her touch and she sat down before it, glancing over its panels. A remarkable number of uses were indicated, which might make it confusing to the average Hub citizen. But she had been trained in communications, and the service cabinet was as simple as any gadget in its cla.s.s could get.

She punched in the ship's location diagram. The Dawn City was slightly more than an hour out of Ceyce Port, but it hadn't yet cleared the subs.p.a.ce nets which created interlocking and impenetrable fields of energy about the Maccadon System. A ship couldn't dive in such an area without risking immediate destruction; but the nets were painstakingly maintained insurance against a day when subs.p.a.ce warfare might again explode through the Hub.

Trigger glanced over the diagrammed route ahead. Evalee.... Garth. A tiny green spark in the far remoteness of s.p.a.ce beyond them represented Manon's sun.

Eleven days or so. With the money to afford a rest cubicle, the time could be cut to a subjective three or four hours.

But it would have been foolish anyway to sleep through the one trip on a Hub luxury liner she was ever likely to take in her life.

She set the cabinet to a review of the Dawn City's pa.s.senger facilities, and was informed that everything would remain at the disposal of waking pa.s.sengers throughout all dives. She glanced over bars, fashion shows, dining and gaming rooms. The Cascade Plunge, from the looks of it, would have been something for Mihul.... "Our Large Staff of Traveler's Companions"--just what she needed. The Solido Auditorium "... and the Inferno--our Sensations Unlimited Hall." A dulcet voice informed her regretfully that Federation Law did not permit the transmission of full SU effects to individual cabins. It did, however, permit a few sample glimpses. Trigger took her glimpses, sniffed austerely, switched back to the fashions.

There had been a neat little black suit on display there. While she didn't intend to start roaming about the ship until it dived and the majority of her fellow travelers were immersed in their rest cubicles, she probably still would be somewhat conspicuous in her Automatic Sales dress on a boat like the Dawn City. That little black suit hadn't looked at all expensive--

"Twelve hundred forty-two Federation credits?" she repeated evenly a minute later. "I see!"

Came to roughly eight hundred fifty Maccadon crowns, was what she saw.

"May we model it in your suite, madam?" the store manager inquired.

"No, thanks," Trigger told her. "Just looking them over a bit." She switched off, frowned absently at a panel labeled "Your Selection of Personalized Illusion Arrangements," shook her head, snapped the cabinet shut and stood up. It looked like she had a choice between being conspicuous and staying in her cabin and playing around with things like the creation of illusion scenes.

And she was really a little old for that kind of entertainment.

She opened the door to the narrow pa.s.sageway outside the cabin and glanced tentatively along it. It was very quiet here. One of the reasons this was the cheapest cabin they'd had available presumably was that it lay outside the main pa.s.senger areas. To the right the corridor opened on a larger hall which ran past a few hundred yards of storerooms before it came to a stairway. At the head of the stairway, one came out eventually on one of the pa.s.senger levels. To the left the corridor ended at the door of what seemed to be the only other cabin in this section.

Trigger looked back toward the other cabin.

"Oh," she said. "Well ... h.e.l.lo."

The other cabin door stood open. A rather odd-looking little person sat in a low armchair immediately inside it. She had lifted a thin, green-sleeved arm in a greeting or beckoning gesture as Trigger turned.

She repeated the gesture now. "Come here, girl!" she called amiably in a quavery old-woman voice.

Well, it couldn't do any harm. Trigger put on her polite smile and walked down the hall toward the open door. A quite tiny old woman it was, with a head either shaved or naturally bald, dressed in a kind of dark-green pajamas. Long gla.s.sy earrings of the same color pulled down the lobes of her small ears. The oddness of the face was due mainly to the fact that she wore a great deal of make-up, and that the make-up was a matching green.

She twisted her head to the left as Trigger came up, and chirped something. Another woman appeared behind the door, almost a duplicate of the first, except that this one had gone all out for pink. Tiny things.

They both beamed up at her.

Trigger beamed back. She stopped just outside the door.

"Greetings," said the pink one.

"Greetings," Trigger replied, wondering what world they came from. The style wasn't exactly like anything she'd seen before.

"We," the green lady informed her with a not unkindly touch of condescension, "are with the Askab of Elfkund."

"Oh!" said Trigger in the tone of one who is impressed. Elfkund hadn't rung any bells.

"And with whom are you, girl?" the pink one inquired.

"Well," Trigger said, "I'm not actually _with_ anybody."

The smiles faded abruptly. They glanced at each other, then looked back at Trigger. Rather severely, it seemed.

"Did you mean," the green one asked carefully, "that you are _not_ a retainer?"

Trigger nodded. "I'm from Maccadon," she explained. "The name is Birna Drellgannoth."

"Maccadon," the pink one repeated. "You are a commoner then, young Birna?"

"Of course she is!" The green one looked offended. "Maccadon!" She got out of her chair with remarkable spryness and moved to the door. "It's quite drafty," she said, looking pointedly past Trigger. The door closed on Trigger's face. A second later, she heard the lock snap shut. A moment after that, the don't-disturb sign appeared.

Well, she thought, wandering back to her cabin, it didn't look as if she were going to be bothered with excessively friendly neighbors on this trip.

She had a bath and then discovered a mechanical stylist in a recess beside the bathroom mirror. She swung the gadget out into the room, set it for a dye removal operation and sat down beneath it. A redhead again a minute or so later, she switched the machine to Orado styles and left it to make up its electronic mind as to what would be the most suitable creation under the circ.u.mstances.

The stylist hovered above her for over a minute, muttering and clucking as it conducted an apparently disapproving survey of the job. Then it went swiftly and silently to work. When it shut itself off, Trigger checked the results in the mirror.

She wasn't too pleased. An upswept arrangement which brought out the bone structure of her face rather well but didn't do much else for her.

Possibly the stylist had included the Automatic Sales dress in its computations.

Well, it would have to do for her first tour of the ship.

11

The bedside ComWeb warned her politely that it was now ten minutes to dive point. Waking pa.s.sengers who experienced subs.p.a.ce distress in any form could obtain immediate a.s.sistance by a call on any ComWeb. If they preferred, they could have their cabins kept under the continuous visual supervision of their personal steward or stewardess.

The Dawn City's pa.s.senger areas still looked rather well populated when Trigger arrived. But some of the pa.s.sengers were showing signs of regretting their decision to stay awake. Presently she became aware of a faint queasiness herself.

It wasn't bad--mainly a sensation as if the ship were trying continuously to turn over on its axis around her and not quite making it--and she knew from previous experience that after the first hour or so she would be completely free of that. She walked into a low, dimly lit, very sw.a.n.k-looking gambling room, still well patronized by the hardier section of her fellow travelers, searching for a place where she could sit down un.o.btrusively for a while and let the subs.p.a.ce reaction work itself out.

A couch beside a closed door near the unlit end of the room seemed about right for the purpose.

Trigger sat down and glanced around. There were a variety of games in progress, all unfamiliar to her. The players were mostly men, but a remarkable number of beautiful women, beautifully gowned, stood around the tables as observers. Traveler's Companions, Trigger realized suddenly--the Dawn City's employees naturally would be inured to subs.p.a.ce effects. From the sc.r.a.ps of talk she could pick up, the stakes seemed uniformly high.

A swirl of vertigo suddenly built up in her again. This one was stronger than most; for a moment she couldn't be sure whether she was going to be sick or not. She stood up, stepped over to the door a few feet away, pulled it open and went through, drawing it shut behind her.

There had been a shielding black-light screen in the doorway. On the other side was bottled sunshine.

She found herself on a long balcony which overlooked a formal garden enclosure thirty feet below. There was no one else in sight. She leaned back against the wall beside the door, closed her eyes and breathed slowly and deeply for some seconds. The sickish sensation began to fade.

When she opened her eyes again, she saw the little yellow man.

He stood motionless at the far end of the garden, next to some flowering shrubbery out of which he might have just stepped. He seemed to be peering along the sand path which curved in toward the balcony and vanished beneath it, below the point where Trigger stood.