"
"I think so."
"D'you suppose that was Cam's secret?" speculated Astrogator Steen
Wilcox.
"If it was," Jellico cut in, "he certainly kept it! If we had only known
this earlier--"
They were all thinking of that, of their storage space carefully packed
with useless trade goods. Where, if they had known, the same space could
have carried herbs with five or twenty-five times as much buying power.
"Maybe now that their sales' resistance is broken, we _can_ switch to
some of the other stuff," Tang Ya, torn away from his beloved
communicators for the conference, said wistfully. "They like color--how
about breaking out some rolls of Harlinian moth silk?"
Van Rycke sighed wearily. "Oh, we'll try. We'll bring out everything and
anything. But we could have done so much better--" he brooded over the
tricks of fate which had landed them on a planet wild for trade with no
proper trade goods in either of their holds.
There was a nervous little sound of a throat being apologetically
cleared. Jasper Weeks, the small wiper from the engine room detail, the
third generation Venusian colonist whom the more vocal members of the
Queen's complement were apt to forget upon occasion, seeing all eyes upon
him, spoke though his voice was hardly above a hoarse whisper.
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