"Did he know, at the time, that I'm out here hunting for him?"
"If he did, nobody else on Jagannath did. I didn't hear about it, myself, till six months afterward."
That evening, he played off the recording he had made of the conversation for Harkaman and Valkanhayn and Karffard and some of the others. Somebody instantly said:
"That temple stuff came from Chermosh. They're Buddhists, there. That checks with the Gilgamesher's story."
"He got the furs on Imhotep; he traded for them," Harkaman said. "Nobody gets anything off Imhotep by raiding. The planet's in the middle of a glaciation, the land surface down to the fiftieth parallel is iced over solid. There is one city, ten or fifteen thousand, and the rest of the population is scattered around in settlements of a couple of hundred all along the face of the glaciers. They're all hunters and trappers. They have some contragravity, and when a ship comes in, they spread the news by radio and everybody brings his furs to town. They use telescope sights, and everybody over ten years old can hit a man in the head at five hundred yards. And big weapons are no good; they're too well dispersed. So the only way to get anything out of them is to trade for it."
"I think I know where he was," Alvyn Karffard said. "On Imhotep, silver is a monetary metal. On Agni, they use silver for sewer-pipe. Agni is a hot-star planet, class B-3 sun. And on Agni they are tough, and they have good weapons. That could be where the Enterprise took that combat damage."
That started an argument as to whether he'd gone to Chermosh first. It was sure that he had gone to Agni and then Imhotep. Guatt Kirbey tried to figure both courses.
"It doesn't tell us anything, either way," he said at length. "Chermosh is away off to the side from Agni and Imhotep in either case."
"Well, he does have a base, somewhere, and it's not on any Terra-type planet," Valkanhayn said. "Otherwise, what would he want with all that air-and-water and hydroponic and carniculture stuff?"
The Old Federation area was full of non-Terra-type planets, and why should anybody bother going to any of them? Any planet that wasn't oxygen-atmosphere, six to eight thousand miles in diameter, and within a narrow surface-temperature range, wasn't worth wasting time on. But a planet like that, if one had the survival equipment, would make a wonderful hideout.