station and Quarm’s distant, silvery crescent. The one was uninteresting and none of the refugees wanted to look at the other.
Biag-n was sharing a small compartment with four factors and their families. He considered himself fortunate, but this did not prevent him from finding the factors boring, their wives and mates disgusting, and their children an infernal nuisance. Eventually he would have to move in with them; in the meantime, he was living in the lounge. He liked it there.
He liked being alive. He had fully expected the rabid mob to tear him to pieces, but the proctors had marched him off to the Interstellar Trade Building, held him captive with other foreigners for three suspenseful days and nights, and finally transmitted the lot of them to a transfer station, where they were assigned to ships.
All cargos had been jettisoned and the ships’ hulls packed with passenger compartments, and these now held four times their planned capacity. No one knew how much longer the Quarmers would hold the ship in the paralyzing safety field of the transfer station. The captain, worried about his reserves of air and water and food, had imposed strict rationing.
Biag-n was hungry, but he made no complaint. Eventually they would reach safety, and he liked being alive. He even enjoyed the crowded lounge, where occasionally he could eavesdrop on the conversation of a colossus of interstellar trade, or watch his wife carelessly squandering solvency at a game of jwur. In normal circumstances he was not even privileged to glimpse such fabulous animates from afar. The warp of fortune was indeed crossed with both good and bad.
Biag-n quietly got to his feet and trailed after the captain, who was carrying the vain appeal for accommodations to the other end of the lounge. Gul E-Wusk, an enormous old trader and a giant even among the colossuses, sprawled near the entrance to the night lounge in a complicated ooze of arms and legs, proboscis dangling limply in a long-necked goblet of clear liquid. Common gossip had it that he drank water; Biag-n was curious, but lacked the temerity to ask him. The door to the night lounge lay open, and E-Wusk was conversing with a nocturnal invisible in the darkness beyond. An awed group of young undertraders stood nearby, listening with polite fascination.
The captain stated his problem, and E-Wusk quivered with laughter. “Oh, ho ho! A hundred more? I didn’t even know there were so many foreigners on Quarm! Where were they hiding?”
“Under rocks, with the rest of the slime,” the captain said gloomily.
“Oh, ho ho! Take my compartment. There’s room for twenty there if I stay out of it. Take Gul Meszk’s, too, and send him back to Quarm. He’s a Quarmer at heart—they didn’t even burn his warehouses!”
Gul Meszk, an angular sexrumane, was shuffling past with a look of constrained boredom on his pebbly face. He said resentfully, “Is it my fault that I don’t stock combustibles? Anyway, they did burn them. They burned all of them. You just didn’t happen to see it.”
E-Wusk delivered a long, gargling laugh. “You saw my warehouse burn. I hope the rascals singed their knobs.”
Meszk looked at him slyly. “Now that you mention it, your warehouse did produce an unusual smudge.”
“Smudge! You saw the flames. The Quarmers had to run home for their light shields. Oh, ho ho!” Rippling waves of laughter encircled his body. “I saw it coming. You can’t say I didn’t warn you. I cleared out my warehouse ten days ago. I told you then—”
“You told me,” Meszk agreed resignedly. “I thought it was another of your jokes.”
“Oh, ho ho!” E-Wusk flopped out supinely, gasping for breath. “Thought it was a joke!” He gurgled helplessly. “Oh, ho ho! That is a joke!”
“I hadn’t forgotten that gag of yours about the frunl,” Meszk grumbled. “I dumped my whole stock at a loss. So did everyone else.”
‘That wasn’t my gag,” E-Wusk said. “It was Gul Rhinzl’s. I saw what he was doing and cut myself in on it.”
“Anyway, the two of you cornered every scrap of Quarm, and then you doubled the price. With operators like you fleecing them at every turn, no wonder the Quarmers revolted.”
E-Wusk shook with merriment.
“So when you came around with that tale of doom and disaster, naturally I didn’t believe it. All I did was check through my inventory to try to figure out what items you were after that time. Tell me something. If you cleared out your warehouse ten days ago, what made it burn so spectacularly?”
“I leased my warehouse—oh, ho ho—to a native! He just got it filled with mron oil in time for the fire!”
The undertraders laughed uproariously; Meszk seemed puzzled. “If it was native oil, why did the Quarmers burn it?”
“Quarmer reasoning,” E-Wusk gasped. “It was a foreigner’s warehouse, don’t you see, so they had to burn it. But they were careful to set fire only to the building. They didn’t disturb the contents at all!”
The joke spread through the lounge in widening circles. Meszk laughed and moved away, and Biag-n edged closer to E-Wusk. He was smitten with a severe palpitation of the conscience. He had his full report indited and ready to send at the earliest opportunity, and he suddenly realized that he knew nothing at all about the critical question, the only one he had been specifically instructed to investigate. He had forgotten the Weapon.
The wealth of detail provided by a world in revolt had overburdened his senses. He had eagerly inventoried every aspect of the Quarmers’ behavior except the one that mattered. He had not once asked himself why.
He said timorously, “Excuse me, Excellency, but you—you say that you—saw it coming?”
E-Wusk regarded him curiously. “I don’t believe that we’ve met.”
“Biag-n, at Your Excellency’s service,” Biag-n said, with a sweeping genuflection.
“Biag-n. I don’t seem to recall—what is your line?”
“Textiles, Sire,” Biag-n said humbly.
“Textiles? I still can’t place you. Where was your office?”
“I—I sold direct,” Biag-n stammered, face suffused with humiliation.
“Ah! But you needn’t be apologetic about it. One must start somewhere. I, too, have ‘sold direct.’ Don’t look so startled. I sold direct on Jorund. I had to. I arrived there completely destitute of solvency, after having been evicted from Utuk. The natives took everything. I was also evicted from Jorund, but that didn’t cost me much. I may be old, but I haven’t forgotten how to learn. After Utuk, I had the good sense to record my surplus solvency in a safe place.”
“You’ve experienced the Dark three times?” Biag-n asked breathlessly.
“Four. After Jorund I went to Suur, with distressingly similar results. Now it’s Quarm. The Blight, or Dark, or whatever you choose to call it, seems to be pursuing me. But as I said, I’ve learned. On Quarm I lost almost nothing.”
“Excellency, what is it?”
“Who knows? Not I, certainly, but I don’t think it’s any thing. It’s merely a state of mind.”
“Ah! Mind!”
“It’s
