"Incidentally," she said, "I did take the opportunity to apologize to Major Quillan for clipping him a couple this morning. I shouldn't have done that." "He didn't seem offended," said Holati. "No, not really," she agreed. "And I explained to him that you had a very good reason to feel disturbed." "Thanks," said Trigger. "By the way, was he really a smuggler at one time? And a hijacker?" "Yes--very successful at it. It's excellent cover for some phases of Intelligence work. As I heard it, though, Quillan happened to scramble up one of the Hub's nastier dope rings in the process, and was broken two grades in rank." "Broken?" Trigger said. "Why?" "Unwarranted interference with a political situation. The Scouts are rough about that. You're supposed to see those things. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you do and go ahead anyway. They may pat you on the back privately, but they also give you the axe." "I see," she said. She smiled. "Just how far did we get in bringing you up to date yesterday?" the Commissioner asked. "The remains that weren't Doctor Azol," Trigger said. If it hadn't been for the funny business with Trigger, Holati said, he mightn't have been immediately skeptical about Doctor Azol's supposed demise by plasmoid during a thrombosis-induced spell of unconsciousness. There had been no previous indications that the U-League's screening of its scientists, in connection with the plasmoid find, might have been strategically loused up from the start. But as things stood, he did look on the event with very considerable skepticism. Doctor Azol's death, in that particular form, seemed too much of a coincidence. For, beside himself, only Azol knew that another person already had suddenly and mysteriously lost consciousness on Harvest Moon. Only Azol therefore might expect that the Commissioner would quietly inform the official investigators of the preceding incident, thus cinching the accidental death theory in Azol's case much more neatly than the assumed heart attack had done. The Commissioner went on from there to the reflection that if Azol had chosen to disappear, it might well have been with the intention of conveying important information secretly back to somebody waiting for it in the Hub. He saw to it that the remains were preserved, and that word of what could have happened was passed on to a high Federation official whom he knew to be trustworthy. That was all he was in a position to do, or interested in doing, himself. Security men presently came and took the supposed vestiges of Doctor Azol's body back to the Hub. "It wasn't until some months later, when the works blew up and I was put on this job, that I heard any more about it," Holati Tate said. "It wasn't Azol. It was part of some unidentifiable cadaver which he'd presumably brought with him for just such a use. Anyway, they had Azol's gene patterns on record, and they didn't jibe." His desk transmitter buzzed and Trigger took it on an earphone extension.