The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

Venusian vine. And each little animal or reptile lay encased in a soft dab of frothy white—frosh weed—the perfumed seed casing of the Martian canal plants. One or two figures on the second tray were of a red-brown wood and these Van Rycke sniffed at appreciatively.
    “Cedar—Terran cedar,” he murmured.
    Weeks nodded eagerly, his eyes alight. “I am waiting now for sandalwood—it is also good for carving—”
    Jellico stared at the array in puzzled wonder. “You have made these?”
    Being an amateur xenobiologist of no small standing himself, the shapes of the carvings more than the material from which they fashioned held his attention.
    All those on board the Queen had their own hobbies. The monotony of voyaging through hyper-space had long ago impressed upon men the need for occupying both hands and mind during the sterile days while they were forced into close companionship with few duties to keep them alert. Jellico’s cabin was papered with tri-dee pictures of the rare animals and alien creatures he had studied in their native haunts or of which he kept careful and painstaking records. Tau had his magic, Mura not only his plants but the delicate miniature landscapes he fashioned, to be imprisoned forever in the hearts of protecting plasta balls. But Weeks had never shown his work before and now he had an artist’s supreme pleasure of completely confounding his shipmates.
    The Cargo-master returned to the business on hand first. “You’re willing to transfer these to ‘cargo’?” he asked briskly. “How many do you have?”
    Weeks, now lifting a third and then a fourth tray from the box, replied without lookingup.
    “Two hundred. Yes, I’ll transfer, sir.”
    The Captain was turning about in his fingers the beautifully shaped figure of an Astran duocorn. “Pity to trade these here,” he mused aloud. “Will Paft or Halfer appreciate more than just their scent?”
    Weeks smiled shyly. “I’ve filled this case, sir. I was going to offer them to Mr. Van Rycke on a venture. I can always make another set. And right now—well, maybe they’ll be worth more to the Queen, seeing as how they’re made out of aromatic woods, then they’d be elsewhere. Leastwise the Eysies aren’t going to have anything like them to show!” he ended in a burst of honest pride.
    “Indeed they aren’t!” Van Rycke gave honor where it was due.
    So they made plans and then separated to sleep out the rest of the night. Dane knew that his lapse was not forgotten nor forgiven, but now he was honestly too tired to care and slept as well as if his conscience were clear.
    But morning brought only a trickle of lower class clansmen for trading and none of them had much but news to offer. The storm priests, as neutral arbitrators, had divided up the Koros grounds. And the clansmen, under the personal supervision of their chieftains were busy hunting the stones. The Terrans gathered from scraps of information that gem seeking on such a large scale had never been attempted before.
    Before night there came other news, and much more chilling. Paft, one of the two major chieftains of this section of Sargol—while supervising the efforts of his liege men on a newly discovered and richly strewn length of shoal water—had been attacked and killed by gorp. The unusual activity of the Salariki in the shallows had in turn drawn to the spot battalions of the intelligent, malignant reptiles who had struck in strength, slaying and escaping before the Salariki could form an adequate defense, having killed the land dwellers’ sentries silently and effectively before advancing on the laboring main bodies of gem hunters.
    A loss of a certain number of miners or fishers had been preseen as the price one paid for Koros in quantity. But the death of a chieftain was another thing altogether, having repercussions which carried far beyond the fact of his death. When the news reached the Salariki about the Queen they melted away into the grass forest and for the first time the Terrans felt free of spying eyes.
    “What happens now?” Ali inquired. “Do they declare all deals off?”
    “That might just be the unfortunate answer,” agreed Van Rycke.
    “Could be,” Rip commented to Dane, “that they’d think we were in some way responsible—”
    But Dane’s conscience, sensitive over the whole matter of Salariki trade, had already reached that conclusion.
    The Terran party, unsure of what were the best tactics, wisely decided to do