Spinneret

"I would have thought some of their knowledge would have survived with them."

"But the material base did not. Too much of their metal was already in forms too difficult for a primitive technology to extract."

Meredith swallowed. Metal again; metal, and lack of same. Just what his lowflying morale needed to hear about.

"Other more advanced races are reputed to exist," Beaeki continued. "But they are far away and few have seen them. They show as little interest in us as we do in the non-space-going peoples within this region."

"Um." Probably, Meredith thought, just as well.

He probed for information about the other nearby races, too, but here he had somewhat less success. Whether Beaeki simply wasn't interested in talking about their trading partners or whether the Rooshrike had learned the folly of giving away useful information for free Meredith didn't know. Still, he managed to get the races' names and general locations and, in a couple of instances, a brief physical description. Of those, the most interesting was that of the Poms, seagoing creatures that sounded something like dolphins equipped with manipulative tentacles. Meredith had often heard that a mechanical culture was impossible without fire, but Beaeki wouldn't say what the Poms had discovered as a substitute.

"That's something else that seems odd about this whole setup," Meredith commented. The tour over, Beaeki had brought his vehicle back to the ship and set it down expertly beneath its davits. "You said the edge of the Poms' territory is only a couple of light-years away. Since you're only interested in hot, Mercurytype worlds and the Poms live in liquid water, why haven't your two empires interpenetrated? Surely each of you has planets the other could use; it seems a perfectly reasonable deal for both sides."

"You will learn that there are only two things of value in an interstellar community: information and resources," Beaeki said as they left the vehicle and walked around to the ship's entry ramp. "All the solid bodies in a nation's territory, whether useful for colonization or not, can be exploited for mineral wealth and are thus guarded carefully."

"I would think asteroid mining would be cheaper than hauling cargo out of a planet's gravity well, though," Meredith suggested.

"Certainly. But asteroid belts are rare."

"Oh." A stray fact clicked in Meredith's mind: the Ctencri mission to Earth had rather offhandedly brought up the subject of mining rights. He would have to send back a warning with the next ship to watch out for a possible swindle. "As I recall, our lease includes the rights to this system's asteroids."

"Correct. But you may be disappointed. The belt is curiously deficient in the highdensity, heavy-metal asteroids which are most profitable for mining."

Meredith grimaced. How much of the eighty million dollars, he wondered, had gone for those mining rights? "You people seem to have learned the principles of cutthroat business without much trouble."

"The Ctencri are good teachers; but their lessons have been expensive."

"Thanks for the warning. We humans are supposed to be pretty good businessmen ourselves."

"Perhaps." Beaeki paused at the edge of the ramp and made a sweeping gesture across the torso of his spacesuit. "If you would be interested in buying metal from us, our refinery here may be able to supply small amounts."

"We would certainly be interested in discussing the matter," Meredith nodded.

"And you should consider buying the sulphur and other minerals we will soon be producing."

"I will pass your offer to the proper reviewers. Farewell."

Turning, the Rooshrike walked up the ramp and disappeared back into his ship.

Meredith's escort, which had parked a respectful fifty meters back, drove forward to pick him up, and within half a minute they were speeding toward the control tower and the safety of distance. They needn't have worried; Beaeki waited until they were well clear before withdrawing the ramp and starting the plasma compression cycle.

The launch, a few minutes later, was more spectacular than even the landing had been. The ship drifted almost leisurely upward at first, its repulsers muted in obvious consideration for the permcrete; but at a hundred meters the white spears abruptly became a pillar of fire, and the ship shot up like a fly off a table. Five seconds later the drive repulsers added forward motion; a minute after that it was lost to sight past the hazy cone of Mt. Olympus to the east.

Seated next to Meredith in the car, Lieutenant Andrews let out a low whistle.

"Either the Rooshrike have one hell of a technology," he commented, "or else the repulsers the Ctencri sold us are about five generations behind state of the art."

"Probably both." Meredith felt drained, as if he'd just spent the morning before a hostile congressional committee. "Well, I guess that's our taste of diplomacy for the week. Let's get back to work, shall we?"

Chapter 5

Beaeki's departure coincided with the begi

News from other fronts was somewhat less encouraging. The fields at Crosse had finally been enriched enough for planting to begin, but they were still losing metals too fast. Proposals for countermeasures began to clog Meredith's desk, and he had to pull two of Major Brown's engineers off construction work to do cost/practicality studies on all of them. The offshore mining had begun, but it was quickly becoming evident that unless the Rooshrike could be induced to buy some of the final products, the whole scheme was going to be a gigantic waste of money. Given the lackluster support the UN was giving the colony already, a failure of its one potential money-making project might induce them to simply throw in the towel. To Meredith that would be nearly equivalent to losing a war, a scenario of national dishonor that he had no desire to preside over. But if there were any other way for the colony to help support itself, neither he nor any of the scientists he'd put the problem to had been able to find it.

The only real bright spot amidst the gloom was that by the end of the week the two remaining flyers were back in the air again. The techs at Martello had finally concluded that Hafner's earlier guess was correct, that some outside electric field in exact resonance with the repulser confinement fields had allowed the plasma to leak out. Where such a field could possibly have come from was a question no one could answer; but as the flyers continued to crisscross the area without the slightest hint of trouble, even Meredith was finally able to hear their characteristic whistle overhead without wincing.

And on the tenth day the quiet was shattered.

"Now you listen to me, Major: you will stay put. Is that clear? No sweeps, no stu

Sitting in Meredith's office. Carmen waited for the colonel to finish his conversation, her fury at Cristobal Perez a churning knot in her stomach. Yes, the colonel's phone had an unlisted number, and yes, her office was just down the hall from his— but Perez still should have called the listed duty officer number instead of putting her in the middle of something that wasn't any of her business.

"Not unless they start breaking more than windows," Meredith growled into his phone. "Just go back to observing and keep me informed, okay? … Right; out."

Muttering a curse, the colonel flipped off his phone. "Idiot," he growled, shaking his head. "The planet's practically made of silicon and he's worried about a few windows." Looking back at Carmen he almost visibly shifted gears. "Right, now.