"Anything the matter with 'em?" Grady asked. He was watching the tall, yellow-pale shapes of natives loading bales into the Berenice's cargo slings.
"Nothing much," Jansen said. "Sane as any primitives. All kinds of complicated rules and taboos, and naturally they'll get as mad as hell at you if you scratch a single rule. Most of the data on that is in the agent's notebooks. You add anything to the record that seems to be worth putting down, the way the rest of us have."
"And if they get mad at you, they stop packing plants," the Berenice's mate put in. "Which will make the Mallor Company mad at you, too. This place is a regular bargain basement for drug materials. At least eight different drug plants, all of them worth as much as uranium. More, in some ways."
"Mm." The ex-agent picked up a handful of brown leaves from a table. "This, for instance. It's a distant relation of coca. The natives chew it for fun, but it's the source of a first class anesthetic. And this. If your kidneys ever break down, the doctors use this stuff to keep you alive. Kerosin, it's called. Anyway, you'll find price lists and descriptive material in the files. You've worked for Mallor before, haven't you?"
"Yes," Grady said. "I put in three years on Tengo, in Port City. Then I quit for a while. Had something else to do."
"Oh? What?"
Grady's face cracked into a slight grin. "Little bit of an argument. The Mutiny. I joined the local army, if you could call it that. I had my own gun, so they made me a major on the spot."
"The Mutiny?" The Berenice's mate had heard of that brief and savage war, in which a handful of settlers and local militia had beaten off the troops of a powerful state, and had actually won. The mate hastily readjusted his opinion of Grady upward. A trader's agent was one thing; a man who had fought through the Mutiny was something more than that. The mate opened his mouth to ask more of the story; but the Berenice's air-horn cut him off with a long wail.
"Take-off in twenty minutes," the mate said, as the noise subsided. "You ready, Jansen?"
The ex-agent nodded, and shook hands with Grady. "Good luck," he said, and started for the ship, the mate following.