Sam stepped up and tapped Dar on the shoulder. “What happened to all the ‘ums’ on the ends of their verbs?”

“Hm?” Dar looked up. “Oh, they know me, y’ see. No need to put on a show anymore.”

“All right, all right!” Hirschmeir grumbled. “We take three rubies, three barrels, ten power supplies, and template assembly for lathe.”

“Gotcha.” Dar pressed a button on the scale, and it murmured, “Total for goods, 4235.50 BTUs.”

Dar nodded. “And the total for your pipeweed is 5337.50. You can spend another 1102, Hirschmeir.”

“No got any more goods we want,” Slotmeyer grunted.

Hirschmeir nodded, holding out a palm. “Cash be nice.”

“You could put it on deposit at the bank,” Dar offered. “Cholly’s starting up a new kind of account.”

Hirschmeir shook his head. “Only pays lousy five percent per annum. We do better use it for stake for playing poker with soldiers.”

“But this is a new kind of account,” Dar reminded. “The interest is compounded quarterly.”

Hirschmeir’s head lifted a little, and his frown deepened. “ ‘Interest compounded’? What that mean?”

“That means that, at the end of every five months, the interest is paid into your account, and figured as part of the principal for the next quarter.”

“So for second quarter, Cholly pay interest on 1157.125?”

Dar nodded. “And for the third quarter, he’ll be paying you interest on 1162.48. You’re getting an effective annual yield of twenty-one and a half percent.”

“Cholly go broke,” Slotmeyer snapped.

“No, he’ll make a profit—if enough of you open up these accounts. If he gets five thousand for capital, he can buy Bank of I.D.E. bonds that pay twenty-three percent effective.”

Slotmeyer’s head lifted slowly, his eyes widening.

He whirled to Hirschmeir. “Take it!”

“You sure?” Hirschmeir looked decidedly uncomfortable.

“Sure? When Cholly making profit, too? Gotta be straight deal!”

Hirschmeir looked at the ground for a few minutes; then he looked up at Dar, face firming with decision. “Right. We open new account.”

“Right here.” Dar whipped out the papers and handed them to Hirschmeir; but Slotmeyer intercepted them. He scanned the pages quickly, muttering to himself, then nodded and passed them on to Hirschmeir. Hirschmeir made his sign and added his signature after it in parentheses. Dar took the papers back, fed them into a slot in the sled. It chuckled to itself, then fed out a copy of the forms, and spat out a small flat blue booklet. Dar checked the passbook to make sure the deposit was recorded properly, then nodded and passed the bundle to Hirschmeir. The Wolman folded them away, straightening and grinning. “Okay, Dar Mandra. Is good doing business with you.”

“Always a pleasure.” Dar held up the bottle. “One for the trail?”

 

Sam watched the Wolman troop move off into the night, while Dar reloaded the grav-sled and fastened the tarp down again. Finally she turned back to him. “Why do they call it ‘pipeweed’?”

“Hm?” Dar looked up. “Take a look at it.”

Sam stepped over and fingered one of the bales. “Long, thin, hollow stems.” She nodded. “Little pipes.”

Dar covered the bale and fastened down the last corner of the tarp. “Good quality, too. Not a bad night’s trading.”

“But how can you say that?” Sam erupted. “You’ve scarcely made any profit at all!”

“About one and a half percent.” Dar picked up a plastic cube and stood up. “Which is pretty good. Cholly’s happy if I just break even.”

“Oh, he is, huh?” Sam jammed her fists on her hips. “What is he, a philanthropist?”

“A teacher,” Dar reminded, “and Shacklar’s a politician. All Cholly really cares about is how much the Wolmen learn from the trading; and all Shacklar cares about is tying the Wolmen into an economic unit with the soldiers. And the good will that goes with both, of course.”

“Of course,” Sam echoed dryly. “And I suppose you manage to pick up a few items about Wolman culture on every trip.”

“Which I faithfully report back to Cholly, who makes sure it winds up as beer-gossip.” Dar grinned. “Give us ten years, and the soldiers and Wolmen’ll know each other’s culture almost as well as their own.”

“Well, they do seem to have a pretty thorough grasp of basic finance.”

“And Slotmeyer’s getting some ideas about law,” Dar said with a critical nod. “He’s coming along nicely.”

Sam frowned. “You sound like a teacher gloating over a prize pupil… Oh!”

Dar gave her a wicked grin.

“Of course; I should have realized,” she said dryly. “Cholly doesn’t hire traders; he recruits teachers.”

“Pretty much,” Dar confirmed. “But we do have to have an eye for profit and loss.”

“How about the loss to the Army?”

“Hm?” Dar looked up. “What loss?”

“Those laser parts—they’re military issue, aren’t they?”

Dar stared at her while his smile congealed.

“Come on,” Sam wheedled, “you can trust me. I mean, after all, I know enough to sink you already, if I really wanted to.”

Dar’s smile cracked into a grin. “How? We’re already sunk here.”

Sam frowned, nonplussed. “But how do you know I’m not a BOA spy? Or an Army spy, trying to find out what Shacklar’s really doing here? For all you know, when I get back to Terra, I might issue a report that would get him pulled off this planet.”

Dar nodded. “Yeah. You could be.”

Sam inched away from him, watching him as a mouse watches a waking cat.

“But you obviously aren’t,” Dar finished.

Sam frowned indignantly. “How the hell could you tell?”

“Well, in the first place, I don’t believe anybody on Terra really cares about what happens out here—not in the Army, and not in BOA either.”

“Shacklar is building a power base,” Sam pointed out.

“Power to do what? He can’t even conquer the Wolmen.”

“But he is trying to weld them into one solid unit with his convicts.”

Dar smiled, amused. “And just what do you think he’ll do with that unit? Build a very long ladder, and climb to Terra?” He shook his head. “There’s no way Shacklar can be a threat to anybody off this planet—and the boys on Terra don’t care what kind of threat he is to anybody on this planet.” He tossed the plastic cube in the air and caught it, grinning. “Not that I think you really are a spy. Of course, you could be a reporter, looking for a little bit of muck to rake, but why would you come all this way for it?”

“To find something to report,” Sam said with a vindictive smile. “Nothing ever happens on Terra.”

Dar shrugged. “Okay—let’s say you really are that hard up. What could you actually do? Turn in a ten-minute report for a 3DT show about the horrible, crooked, scandalous doings out here on Wolmar?”

“Sure. You’re far enough away to have a touch of the exotic. It might really catch on for a while. We’re really bored on Terra.”

Dar shrugged. “So we’d be a six-day wonder”

“Nine.”

“Nine. And the Army would say, ‘My Heavens! We didn’t realize that was going on!’ And they’d send a formal, official notice to Shacklar that would say, ‘You naughty, naughty boy! How dare you do all these horrible things! The way you’re treating your convicts is criminal!’ And Shacklar, I’m sure, would give them fifty excellent reasons, and finish by saying, ‘But of course, since this isn’t what you want, I’ll be glad to do it your way.’ And Central HQ would say, ‘Fine. You do it our way.’ Which they would go tell the media, and the media would tell it to the people in another show, and the people would sit back with that nice, solid feeling that they’d actually managed to accomplish something. And everybody would forget about it.”

“And Shacklar wouldn’t actually do anything?”

“Oh, sure—he’d give me a week of chores for shooting off my mouth. Which is okay; it’s restful to do something that doesn’t involve any responsibility, now and then.”