"In that case," Trigger said, "let's check out its container now." The Commissioner took Repulsive's container out of a desk safe and handed it to her. Its outer appearance was that of a neat modern woman's handbag with a shoulder strap. It had an antigrav setting which would reduce its overall weight, with the plasmoid inside, down to nine ounces if Trigger wanted it that way. It also had a combination lock, unmarked, virtually invisible, the settings of which Trigger already had memorized. Without knowing the settings, a determined man using a high-powered needle blaster might have opened the handbag in around nine hours. A very special job. Trigger ran through the settings, opened the container and peered inside. "Rather cramped," she observed. "Not for one of them. We needed room for the gadgetry." "Yes," she said. "Subspace rotation." She shook her head. "Is that another Space Scout invention?" "No," said Holati. "They stole it from Subspace Engineers. Engineers don't know we have it yet. Far as I know, nobody else has got it from them. Go ahead--give it a try." "I was going to." Trigger snapped the container shut, slipped the strap over her shoulder and stood straight, left hand closed over the lower rim of the purselike object. She shifted the ball of her thumb and the tip of her middle finger to the correct spots and began to apply pressure. Then she started. Handbag and strap had vanished. "Feels odd!" She smiled. "And to bring it back, I just have to be here--the same place--and say those words." He nodded. "Want to try that now?" Trigger waved her left hand gently through the air beside her. "What happens," she asked, "if the thing surfaces exactly where my hand happens to be?" "It won't surface if there's anything bulkier than a few dust motes in the way. That's one improvement the Sub Engineers haven't heard about yet." "Well...." She glanced around, picked up a plastic ruler from the desk behind her, and moved back a cautious step. She waved the ruler's tip gingerly about in the area where the handbag had been. "Come, Fido!" she said. Nothing happened. She drew the ruler back. "Come, Fido!" Handbag and strap materialized in mid-air and thumped to the floor. "Convinced?" Holati asked. He picked up the handbag and gave it back to her. "It seems to work. How long will that little plasmoid last if it's left in subspace like that?" He shrugged. "Indefinitely, probably. They're tough. We know that twenty-four hours at a stretch won't bother it in the least, so we've set that as the limit it's to stay rotated except in emergencies." "And you--and one other person I'm not to know about, but who isn't anywhere near here--can also bring it back?" "Yes. If we know the place from which it's been rotated. So the agreement is that--again except in absolute emergencies--it will be rotated only from one of the six points specified and known to all three of us."