"Huh?" I gasped. "Then what are they? What other kinds of—?"
"Why—er—" said Lance, "they're flower seeds."
I said, "Flower seeds! Sweet howling serpents of Sirius! Curl my hair and call me a chrysanthemum! Has the whole darned I.P.S. gone lah-dee-dah? Why in the name of—"
Biggs said soberly, "Now don't get upset, Sparks. It's not so silly as it sounds. As a matter of fact, it's one of the most intelligent moves I've ever known the stuffed sh—I mean, the officials of our company to make. You see, flower seeds are a great deal more valuable than vegetable seeds."
"Oh, yeah! Sure! That's easy to prove, too. When a man's starving, just give him his choice between a loaf of bread and an orchid corsage—"
"No, Sparks, that's not the situation at all. You see, the problem here is not one of feeding the Iapetan colonists. They have plenty to eat. The satellite is so near its mother planet that edible supplies can be imported in great quantities. And even though food concentrates are not always particularly tempting to the palate—"
"Like," I told him, "dead fish ain't always particularly pleasing to the nostrils—"
"Nevertheless," continued Lancelot Biggs, "the Iapetan miners will have plenty of food. But to borrow an expression from a wise old book, 'Man does not live by bread alone.' There is such a thing, you know, as maintaining public morale, and one of the best ways of doing this is to offer people some small but tender fragment of beauty. Something to delight the eye with its color, soften the air with its fragrance. In short—flowers.
"You know, it's like some old Indian philosopher said way back in the 20th Century: If a man has but two coins in his pocket, he should take one of them and buy 'hyacinths wherewith to feed the soul'."