"I'm Bill Olger," the Earth man began without preliminaries. "This is my friend, D'ulio, one of the smartest scientists Mars has ever produced. We know about you. You're George Mallard, owner of the Space Lark."
"If you're getting ready to make a touch you can save your breath," Mallard said sourly. "I haven't got a hundred credits to my name."
"We're not getting ready to make a touch, Mallard," Olger said. "We're getting ready to let you in on the chance of a lifetime. Now, do you want to let us buy you a drink of something decent while we tell you about it, or would you rather keep on sitting here alone drinking this slop?"
Mallard looked from his hard face to the spidery red mask of the Martian, then shrugged his shoulders and pushed out his empty glass. Olger beckoned to the Venusian waiter and presently Mallard was sipping a glass of pale green brandy that soothed his raw nerves like the almost forgotten touch of an Earth woman's hands. Bill Olger yanked his chair closer and bent his head over the table.
"Look, Mallard, I'm not going to beat around the bush with you. I've kept pretty close tabs on you since you were kicked out of the Patrol and I know you're at the end of your rope. You've been picked up twice by the Patrol, on suspicion of piracy and, both times, you got away by the skin of your teeth. So our proposition is made to order for you, if you've got as much nerve as I think you have. The proposition is rhizoids."
Mallard whistled softly. Rhizoids! Those incredible gems brought back from the fringes of the impenetrable swamp belt of Mercury. Gems that grew, layer upon layer, like a pearl growing within an oyster, in the heart of a fungus shrub that looked like a dead, white stump. There were less than a dozen of those gems in all the Galaxy and they were worth upwards of a hundred thousand credits each.
Mallard had seen one only once and that had been at a distance. It was worn by a Martian desert queen and he had never forgotten the exquisite beauty of the thing. Even yards away he could see the sultry fires imprisoned in that incredible stone and it made every other jewel he had ever seen look like a piece of cheap cut glass.
"Sounds very nice, Olger," he said slowly. "There's just one little catch to it. The fungus stumps where those things grow are loaded with spores and those spores are the deadliest things in all the System. A friend of mine, First Mate on the Jupiter run, went on an expedition to bring back some of those rhizoids a few years back and he told me what it was like.
"They wear glassite suits while they're hacking the stumps apart to get at the rhizoids. The instant one of those stumps is touched it sends out a fine cloud of spores and when those spores settle down on a glassite suit it looks like the man was covered by hoar frost. They throw the suits away when they leave the scene.
"One of the men, this mate said, happened to step on a piece of one of those stumps, after he'd gotten out of his glassite suit. I got kind of sick listening to the mate tell about what happened then. Ever see an Earth wasp sting another insect and then lay its eggs in that insect's body, Olger? Well, it was like that. The man was paralyzed the minute the spores settled on him and he started screaming. A couple of minutes and the spores had paralyzed his vocal chords and after that he stopped screaming. He—well, he just kept screaming with his eyes, the mate said. They put a blaster to the poor devil's head before they left.