“I was a little hesitant about letting you see any of us personally before having your final acceptance of our offer; but I don’t see that it can do much harm, after all. I scarcely ever visit Sarr nowadays, and the chance of your encountering me if we fail to reach a final agreement is small.”
“Then you are engaged in something illegal?” Ken felt that there could be little harm in mentioning a fact the other’s speech had made so obvious. After all, they would not expect him to be stupid.
“Illegal, yes, if the law be interpreted — strictly. I feel, however, and many agree with me, that if someone finds an inhabited planet, investigates it at his own expense, and opens relations with the inhabitants, that he has a moral right to profit from the fact. That, bluntly, is our situation.”
Ken’s heart sank. It began to look as though he had stumbled on the very sort of petty violation he had feared, and was not going to be very useful to Rade.
“There is certainly some justice in that viewpoint,” he said cautiously. “If that is the case, what can I do for you? I’m certainly no linguist, and know next to nothing of economic theory, if you’re hitting trading difficulties.”
“We are having difficulties, but not in that way. They stem from the fact that the planet in question is so different from Sarr that personal visits are impossible. We have had the greatest difficulty in establishing contact of a sort with even one group of natives — or perhaps a single individual; we can’t tell.”
“Can’t tell? Can’t you send a torpedo down with television apparatus, at least?”
“You’ll see.” The still nameless individual gave a rather unpleasant smile. “At any rate, we have managed to do a little trading with this native or natives, and found that they have something we can use. We get it, as you can well imagine, in trickles and driblets. Basically, your problem is — how do we get more of it? You can try to figure out some way of landing in person if you like, but I know you’re not an engineer. What I thought you could do was get a good enough analysis of the planet’s conditions — atmosphere, temperature, light, and so on — so that we could reproduce them in a more convenient location and grow our own product. That way, we wouldn’t be forced to pay the price the native asks, too.”
“That sounds simple enough. I notice you don’t seem to want me to know what the product is — except that it seems to be of vegetable nature — but that doesn’t bother me. I had a friend in the perfume business once, and the way he tried to keep secrets in elementary chemistry was a scandal. I’m certainly willing to try — but I warn you I’m not the Galaxy’s best chemist by a long shot, and I’ve brought no apparatus with me, since I didn’t know what you wanted me to do. Have you anything here in the ship?”
“Not in the ship. We discovered this place around twenty years ago, and have built a fairly comfortable base on the innermost planet of this system. It keeps the same hemisphere facing the sun all the time, and we’ve been able to concentrate enough sunlight in a small valley to make the temperature quite bearable. There’s a fairly respectable laboratory and shop there, with a very good mechanic named Feth Allmer; and if you find yourself in need of something we don’t have, we can probably afford to get it for you. How does that sound?”