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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Traders Risk, by Roger Dee
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Traders Risk
+
+Author: Roger Dee
+
+Illustrator: Martin
+
+Release Date: October 20, 2007 [EBook #23103]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRADERS RISK ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TRADERS RISK
+
+By ROGER DEE
+
+ _Keeping this cargo meant death--to
+ jettison it meant to make flotsam
+ and jetsam of a world!_
+
+Illustrated by MARTIN
+
+
+The Ciriimian ship was passing in hyperdrive through a classic
+three-body system, comprising in this case a fiercely white sun circled
+by a fainter companion and a single planet that swung in precise
+balance, when the Canthorian Zid broke out of its cage in the specimen
+hold.
+
+Of the ship's social quartet, Chafis One and Two were asleep at the
+moment, dreaming wistful dreams of conical Ciriimian cities spearing up
+to a soft and plum-colored sky. The Zid raged into their communal rest
+cell, smashed them down from their gimbaled sleeping perches and, with
+the ravening blood-hunger of its kind, devoured them before they could
+wake enough to teleport to safety.
+
+Chafis Three and Four, on psi shift in the forward control cubicle,
+might have fallen as easily if the mental screamings of their fellows
+had not warned them in time. As it was, they had barely time to teleport
+themselves to the after hold, as far as possible from immediate danger,
+and to consider the issue while the Zid lunged about the ship in search
+of them with malignant cries and a great shrieking of claws on metal.
+
+Their case was the more desperate because the Chafis were professional
+freighters with little experience of emergency. Hauling a Zid from
+Canthorian jungles to a Ciriimian zoo was a prosaic enough assignment so
+long as the cage held, but with the raging brute swiftly smelling them
+out, they were helpless to catch and restrain it.
+
+When the Zid found them, they had no other course but to teleport back
+to the control cubicle and wait until the beast should snuff them down
+again. The Zid learned quickly, so quickly that it was soon clear that
+its physical strength would far outlast their considerable but limited
+telekinetic ability.
+
+Still they possessed their share of owlish Ciriimian logic and hit soon
+enough upon the one practical course--to jettison the Zid on the nearest
+world demonstrably free of intelligent life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They worked hurriedly, between jumps fore and aft. Chafi Three, while
+they were still in the control cubicle, threw the ship out of hyperdrive
+within scant miles of the neighboring sun's single planet. Chafi Four,
+on the next jump, scanned the ship's charts and identified the system
+through which they traveled.
+
+Luck was with them. The system had been catalogued some four Ciriimian
+generations before and tagged: _Planet undeveloped. Tranquil marine
+intelligences only._
+
+The discovery relieved them greatly for the reason that no Ciriimian,
+even to save his own feathered skin, would have set down such a monster
+as the Zid among rational but vulnerable entities.
+
+The planet was a water world, bare of continents and only sparsely
+sprinkled with minor archipelagoes. The islands suited the Chafis'
+purpose admirably.
+
+"The Zid does not swim," Chafi Four radiated. "Marooned, it can do no
+harm to marine intelligences."
+
+"Also," Chafi Three pointed out as they dodged to the control cubicle
+again just ahead of the slavering Zid, "we may return later with a
+Canthorian hunting party and recover our investment."
+
+Closing their perception against the Zid's distracting ragings, they set
+to work with perfect coordination.
+
+Chafi Three set down the ship on an island that was only one of a
+freckling chain of similar islands. Chafi Four projected himself first
+to the opened port; then, when the Zid charged after him, to the
+herbivore-cropped sward of tropical setting outside.
+
+The Zid lunged out. Chafi Four teleported inside again. Chafi Three
+closed the port. Together they relaxed their perception shields in
+relief--
+
+Unaware in their consternation that they committed the barbarous lapse
+of vocalizing, they twittered aloud when they realized the extent of
+their error.
+
+Above the far, murmurous whisper of expected marine cerebration there
+rose an uncoordinated mishmash of thought from at least two strong and
+relatively complex intelligences.
+
+"Gas-breathing!" Chafi Four said unbelievingly. "Warm-blooded,
+land-dwelling, mammalian!"
+
+"A Class Five culture," Chafi agreed shakenly. His aura quivered with
+the shock of betrayal. "The catalogue was _wrong_."
+
+Ironically, their problem was more pressing now than before. Unless
+checked, the Zid would rapidly depopulate the island--and, to check it,
+they must break a prime rule of Galactic protocol in asking the help of
+a new and untested species.
+
+But they had no choice. They teleported at once into the presence of the
+two nearby natives--and met with frustration beyond Ciriimian
+experience.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Jeff Aubray glimpsed the Ciriimian ship's landing because the morning
+was a Oneday, and on Onedays his mission to the island demanded that he
+be up and about at sunrise.
+
+For two reasons: On Onedays, through some unfailing miracle of Calaxian
+seamanship, old Charlie Mack sailed down in his ancient _Island Queen_
+from the township that represented colonial Terran civilization in
+Procynian Archipelago 147, bringing supplies and gossip to last Jeff
+through the following Tenday. The _Queen_ would dock at Jeff's little
+pier at dawn; she was never late.
+
+Also on Onedays, necessarily before Charlie Mack's visit, Jeff must
+assemble his smuggled communicator--kept dismantled and hidden from
+suspicious local eyes--and report to Earth Interests Consulate his
+progress during the cycle just ended. The ungodly hour of transmission,
+naturally, was set to coincide with the closing of the Consul's field
+office halfway around the planet.
+
+So the nacreous glory of Procyon's rising was just tinting the windows
+of Jeff's cottage when he aligned and activated his little communicator
+on his breakfast table. Its three-inch screen lighted to signal and a
+dour and disappointed Consul Satterfield looked at him. Behind
+Satterfield, foreshortened to gnomishness by the pickup, lurked Dr.
+Hermann, Earth Interests' resident zoologist.
+
+"No progress," Jeff reported, "except that the few islanders I've met
+seem to be accepting me at last. A little more time and they might let
+me into the Township, where I can learn something. If Homeside--"
+
+"You've had seven Tendays," Satterfield said. "Homeside won't wait
+longer, Aubray. They need those calm-crystals too badly."
+
+"They'll use force?" Jeff had considered the possibility, but its
+immediacy appalled him. "Sir, these colonists had been autonomous for
+over two hundred years, ever since the Fourth War cut them off from us.
+Will Homeside deny their independence?"
+
+His sense of loss at Satterfield's grim nod stemmed from something
+deeper than sympathy for the islanders. It found roots in his daily
+rambles over the little island granted him by the Township for the
+painting he had begun as a blind to his assignment, and in the gossip of
+old Charlie Mack and the few others he had met. He had learned to
+appreciate the easy life of the islands well enough to be dismayed now
+by what must happen under EI pressure to old Charlie and his handful of
+sun-browned fisherfolk.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Unexpectedly, because Jeff had not considered that it might matter, he
+was disturbed by the realization that he wouldn't be seeing Jennifer,
+old Charlie Mack's red-haired niece, once occupation began. Jennifer,
+who sailed with her uncle and did a crewman's work as a matter of
+course, would despise the sight of him.
+
+The Consul's pessimism jolted Jeff back to the moment at hand.
+
+"Homeside will deny their autonomy, Aubray. I've had a warp-beam message
+today ordering me to move in."
+
+The situation was desperate enough at home, Jeff had to admit. Calaxian
+calm-crystals did what no refinement of Terran therapeutics had been
+able to manage. They erased the fears of the neurotic and calmed the
+quiverings of the hypertensive--both in alarming majority in the
+shattering aftermath of the Fourth War--with no adverse effects at all.
+Permanent benefit was slow but cumulative, offering for the first time a
+real step toward ultimate stability. The medical, psychiatric and
+political fields cried out for crystals and more crystals.
+
+"If the islanders would tell us their source and let us help develop
+it," Satterfield said peevishly, "instead of doling out a handful of
+crystals every Tenday, there wouldn't be any need of action. Homeside
+feels they're just letting us have some of the surplus."
+
+"Not likely," Jeff said. "They don't use the crystals themselves."
+
+Old Dr. Hermann put his chin almost on the Consul's shoulder to present
+his wizened face to the scanner.
+
+"Of course they don't," he said. "On an uncomplicated, even
+simple-minded world like this, who would need crystals? But maybe they
+fear glutting the market or the domination of outside capital coming in
+to develop the source. When people backslide, there's no telling what's
+on their minds and we have no time to waste negotiating or convincing
+them. In any case, how could they stop us from moving in?" Abruptly he
+switched to his own interest. "Aubray, have you learned anything new
+about the Scoops?"
+
+"Nothing beyond the fact that the islanders don't talk about them," Jeff
+said. "I've seen perhaps a dozen offshore during the seven cycles I've
+been here. One usually surfaces outside my harbor at about the time old
+Charlie Mack's supply boat comes in."
+
+Thinking of Charlie Mack brought a forced end to his report. "Charlie's
+due now. I'll call back later."
+
+He cut the circuit, hurrying to have his communicator stowed away before
+old Charlie's arrival--not, he thought bitterly, that being found out
+now would make any great difference.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Stepping out into the brief Calaxian dawn, he caught his glimpse of the
+Ciriimian ship's landing before the island forest of palm-ferns cut it
+off from sight. Homeside hadn't been bluffing, he thought, assuming as a
+matter of course that this was the task force Satterfield had been
+ordered to send.
+
+"They didn't waste any time," Jeff growled. "Damn them."
+
+He ignored the inevitable glory of morning rainbow that just preceded
+Procyon's rising and strode irritably down to his miniature dock. He was
+still scowling over what he should tell Charlie Mack when the _Island
+Queen_ hove into view.
+
+She was a pretty sight. There was an artist's perception in Jeff in
+spite of his drab years of EI patrol duty; the white puff of sail on
+dark-green sea, gliding across calm water banded with lighter and darker
+striae where submerged shoals lay, struck something responsive in him.
+The comparison it forced between Calaxia and Earth, whose yawning Fourth
+War scars and heritage of anxieties made calm-crystals so desperately
+necessary, oppressed him. Calaxia was wholly unscarred, her people
+without need of the calm-crystals they traded.
+
+Something odd in the set of the _Queen's_ sails puzzled him until he
+identified the abnormality. In spite of distance and the swift approach
+of the old fishing boat, he could have sworn that her sails bellied not
+with the wind, but against.
+
+They fell slack, however, when the _Queen_ reached his channel and
+flapped lazily, reversing to catch the wind and nose her cautiously into
+the shallows. Jeff dismissed it impatiently--a change of wind or some
+crafty maneuver of old Charlie Mack's to take advantage of the current.
+
+Jeff had just set foot on his dock when it happened. Solid as the
+planking itself, and all but blocking off his view of the nearing
+_Island Queen_, stood a six-foot owl.
+
+It was wingless and covered smoothly with pastel-blue feathers. It stood
+solidly on carefully manicured yellow feet and stared at him out of
+square violet eyes.
+
+Involuntarily he took a backward step, caught his heel on a sun-warped
+board and sat down heavily.
+
+"Well, what the devil!" he said inanely.
+
+The owl winced and disappeared without a sound.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Jeff got up shakily and stumbled to the dock's edge. A chill conviction
+of insanity gripped him when he looked down on water lapping smooth and
+undisturbed below.
+
+"I've gone mad," he said aloud.
+
+Out on the bay, another catastrophe just as improbable was in progress.
+
+Old Charlie Mack's _Island Queen_ had veered sharply off course, left
+the darker-green stripe of safe channel and plunged into water too
+shallow for her draft. The boat heeled on shoal sand, listed and hung
+aground with wind-filled sails holding her fast.
+
+The Scoop that had surfaced just behind her was so close that Jeff
+wondered if its species' legendary good nature had been misrepresented.
+It floated like a glistening plum-colored island, flat dorsal flippers
+undulating gently on the water and its great filmy eyes all but closed
+against the slanting glare of morning sun.
+
+It was more than vast. The thing must weigh, Jeff thought dizzily,
+thousands or maybe millions of tons.
+
+He thought he understood the _Queen's_ grounding when he saw the
+swimmer stroking urgently toward his dock. Old Charlie had abandoned his
+boat and was swimming in to escape the Scoop.
+
+But it wasn't Charlie. It was Jennifer, Charlie's niece.
+
+Jeff took the brown hand she put up and drew her to the dock beside her,
+steadying her while she shook out her dripping red hair and regained her
+breath. Sea water had plastered Jennifer's white blouse and knee-length
+dungarees to her body like a second skin, and the effect bordered on the
+spectacular.
+
+"Did you see it?" she demanded.
+
+Jeff wrestled his eyes away to the Scoop that floated like a purple
+island in the bay.
+
+"A proper monster," he said. "You got out just in time."
+
+She looked at once startled and impatient. "Not the Scoop, you idiot.
+The owl."
+
+It was Jeff's turn to stare. "Owl? There was one on the dock, but I
+thought--"
+
+"So did I." She sounded relieved. "But if you saw one, too.... All of a
+sudden, it was standing there on deck beside me, right out of nowhere. I
+lost my head and grounded the _Queen_, and it vanished. The owl, I
+mean."
+
+"So did mine," Jeff said.
+
+While they stood marveling, the owls came back.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Chafis Three and Four were horribly shaken by the initial attempt at
+communication with the natives. Nothing in Ciriimian experience had
+prepared them for creatures intelligent but illogical, individually
+perceptive yet isolated from each other.
+
+"Communication by audible symbol," Chafi Three said. He ruffled his
+feathers in a shudder. "Barbarous!"
+
+"Atavistic," agreed Chafi Four. "They could even _lie_ to each other."
+
+But their dilemma remained. They must warn the natives before the
+prowling Zid found them, else there would be no natives.
+
+"We must try again," Three concluded, "searching out and using the
+proper symbols for explanation."
+
+"Vocally," said Chafi Four.
+
+They shuddered and teleported.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+The sudden reappearance of his hallucination--doubled--startled Jeff no
+more than the fact that he seemed to be holding Jennifer Mack tightly.
+Amazingly, his immediate problem was not the possibility of harm from
+the owls, but whether he should reassure Jennifer before or after
+releasing her.
+
+He compromised by leaving the choice to her. "They can't be dangerous,"
+he said. "There are no land-dwelling predators on Calaxia. I read that
+in--"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Nothing like _that_ ever hatched out on Calaxia," said Jennifer. She
+pulled free of him. "If they're real, they came from somewhere else."
+
+The implication drew a cold finger down Jeff's spine. "That would mean
+other cultures out here. And in all our years of planet-hunting, we
+haven't found one."
+
+Memory chilled him further.
+
+"A ship landed inland a few minutes ago," he said. "I took it for an EI
+consulate craft, but it could have been--"
+
+The Ciriimians caught his mental image of the landing and intervened
+while common ground offered.
+
+"The ship was ours," said Chafi Three. He had not vocalized since
+fledgling days and his voice had a jarring croak of disuse. "Our Zid
+escaped its cage and destroyed two of us, forcing us to maroon it here
+for our own safety. Unfortunately, we trusted our star manual's
+statement that the planet is unpopulated."
+
+The Terrans drew together again.
+
+"Zid?" Jeff echoed.
+
+Chafi Four relieved his fellow of the strain by trying his own rusty
+croak. "A vicious Canthorian predator, combing the island at this moment
+for prey. You must help us to recapture it."
+
+"So that you may identify it," Chafi Three finished helpfully, "the Zid
+has this appearance."
+
+His psi projection of the Zid appeared on the dock before them with
+demoniac abruptness--crouched to leap, twin tails lashing and its
+ten-foot length bristling with glassy magenta bristles. It had a lethal
+pair of extra limbs that sprang from the shoulders to end in taloned
+seizing-hands, and its slanted red eyes burned malevolently from a
+snouted, razor-fanged face.
+
+It was too real to bear. Jeff stepped back on suddenly unreliable legs.
+Jennifer fainted against him and the unexpected weight of her sent them
+both sprawling to the dock.
+
+"We lean on weak reeds," Chafi Three said. "Creatures who collapse with
+terror at the mere projection of a Zid can be of little assistance in
+recapturing one."
+
+Chafi Four agreed reluctantly. "Then we must seek aid elsewhere."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Jeff Aubray pulled himself up from the planking, the apparitions
+were gone. His knees shook and perspiration crawled cold on his face,
+but he managed to haul Jennifer up with him.
+
+"Come out of it, will you?" he yelled ungallantly in her ear. "If a
+thing like that is loose on the island, we've got to get help!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Jennifer did not respond and he slapped her, until her eyes fluttered
+angrily.
+
+"There's an EI communicator in my cabin," Jeff said. "Let's go."
+
+Memory lent Jennifer a sudden vitality that nearly left Jeff behind in
+their dash for the cottage up the beach.
+
+"The door," Jeff panted, inside. "Fasten the hurricane bolt. Hurry."
+
+While she secured the flimsy door, he ripped through his belongings,
+aligning his EI communicator again on his breakfast table. Finding out
+where the islanders got their calm-crystals had become suddenly
+unimportant; just then, he wanted nothing so much as to see a well-armed
+patrol ship nosing down out of the Calaxian sunrise.
+
+He was activating the screen when Jennifer, in a magnificent rage in
+spite of soaked blouse and dungarees, advanced on him.
+
+"You're an Earth Interests spy after all," she accused. "They said in
+the Township you are no artist, but Uncle Charlie and I--"
+
+Jeff made a pushing motion. "Keep away from me. Do you want that devil
+tearing the cabin down around us?"
+
+She fell quiet, remembering the Zid, and he made his call. "Aubray,
+Chain 147. Come in, Consulate!"
+
+There was a sound of stealthy movement outside the cabin and he flicked
+sweat out of his eyes with a hand that shook.
+
+"EI, for God's sake, come in! I'm in trouble here!"
+
+The image on his three-inch screen was not Consul Satterfield's but the
+startled consulate operator's. "Trouble?"
+
+Jeff forced stumbling words into line. The EI operator shook his head
+doubtfully.
+
+"Consul's gone for the day, Aubray. I'll see if I can reach him."
+
+"He was about to send out an EI patrol ship to take over here in the
+islands," Jeff said. "Tell him to hurry it!"
+
+He knew when he put down the microphone that the ship would be too late.
+EI might still drag the secret of the calm-crystal source out of the
+islanders, but Jeff Aubray and Jennifer Mack wouldn't be on hand to
+witness their sorry triumph. The flimsy cabin could not stand for long
+against the sort of brute the owls had shown him, and there was no sort
+of weapon at hand. They couldn't even run.
+
+"There's something outside," Jennifer said in a small voice.
+
+Her voice seemed to trigger the attack.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Zid lunged against the door with a force that cracked the wooden
+hurricane bolt across and opened a three-inch slit between leading edge
+and lintel. Jeff had a glimpse of slanted red eyes and white-fanged
+snout before reflex sent him headlong to shoulder the door shut again.
+
+"The bunk," he panted at Jennifer. "Shove it over."
+
+Between them, they wedged the bunk against the door and held it in
+place. Then they stood looking palely at each other and waiting for the
+next attack.
+
+It came from a different quarter--the wide double windows that
+overlooked the bay. The Zid, rearing upright, smashed away the flimsy
+rattan blinds with a taloned seizing-hand and looked redly in at them.
+
+Like a man in a dream, Jeff caught up his communicator from the table
+and hurled it. The Zid caught it deftly, sank glistening teeth into the
+unit and demolished it with a single snap.
+
+Crushed, the rig's powerful little battery discharged with a muffled
+sputtering and flashing of sparks. The Zid howled piercingly and dropped
+away from the window.
+
+That gave Jeff time enough to reach the storm shutters and secure
+them--only to rush again with Jennifer to their bunk barricade as the
+Zid promptly renewed its ferocious attack on the door.
+
+He flinched when Jennifer, to be heard above the Zid's ragings, shouted
+in his ear: "My Scoop should have the _Queen_ afloat by now. Can we
+reach her?"
+
+"Scoop?" The Zid's avid cries discouraged curiosity before it was well
+born. "We'd never make it. We couldn't possibly outrun that beast."
+
+The Zid crashed against the door and drove it inches ajar, driving back
+their barricade. One taloned paw slid in and slashed viciously at
+random. Jeff ducked and strained his weight against the bunk,
+momentarily pinning the Zid's threshing forelimb.
+
+Chafi Three chose that moment to reappear, nearly causing Jeff to let go
+the bunk and admit the Zid.
+
+"Your female's suggestion is right," the Ciriimian croaked. "The Zid
+does not swim. Four and I are arranging escape on that premise."
+
+The Zid's talons ripped through the door, leaving parallel rows of
+splintered breaks. Both slanted red eyes glared in briefly.
+
+"Then you'd damn well better hurry," Jeff panted. The door, he
+estimated, might--or might not--hold for two minutes more.
+
+The Ciriimian vanished. There was a slithering sound in the distance
+that sounded like a mountain in motion, and with it a stertorous
+grunting that all but drowned out the Zid's cries. Something nudged the
+cottage with a force that all but knocked it flat.
+
+"_My Scoop!_" Jennifer exclaimed. She let go the barricade and ran to
+the window to throw open the storm shutters. "Never mind the door. This
+way, quick!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She scrambled to the window sill and jumped. Numbly, Jeff saw her
+suspended there, feet only inches below the sill, apparently on empty
+air. Then the door sagged again under the Zid's lungings and he left the
+bunk to follow Jennifer.
+
+He landed on something tough and warm and slippery, a monstrous tail
+fluke that stretched down the beach to merge into a flat purplish
+acreage of back, forested with endless rows of fins and spines and
+enigmatic tendrils. The Scoop, he saw, and only half believed it, had
+wallowed into the shallows alongside his dock. It had reversed its
+unbelievable length to keep the head submerged, and at the same time had
+backed out of the water until its leviathan tail spanned the hundred-odd
+yards of sloping beach from surf to cabin.
+
+Just ahead of him, Jennifer caught an erect fin-spine and clung with
+both arms. "Hang on! We're going--"
+
+The Scoop contracted itself with a suddenness that yanked them yards
+from the cottage and all but dislodged Jeff. Beyond the surf, the
+shallows boiled whitely where the Scoop fought for traction to draw its
+grounded bulk into the water.
+
+Jeff looked back once to see the Zid close the distance between and
+spring upward to the tail fluke behind him. He had an instant conviction
+that the brute's second spring would see him torn to bits, but the Scoop
+at the moment found water deep enough to move in earnest. The Zid could
+only sink in all six taloned limbs and hold fast.
+
+The hundred-odd yards from cabin to beach passed in a blur of speed. The
+Scoop reached deeper water and submerged, throwing a mountainous billow
+that sent the _Island Queen_ reeling and all but foundered her.
+
+Jeff was dislodged instantly and sank like a stone.
+
+He came up, spouting water and fighting for breath, to find himself a
+perilous twenty feet from the Zid. The Zid, utterly out of its element,
+screamed hideously and threshed water to froth, all its earlier ferocity
+vanished under the imminent and unfamiliar threat of drowning. Jeff sank
+again and churned desperately to put distance between them.
+
+He came up again, nearly strangled, to find that either he or the Zid
+had halved the distance between them. They were all but eye to eye when
+Jennifer caught him and towed him away toward the doubtful safety of the
+_Island Queen_.
+
+Chafis Three and Four appeared from nowhere and stood solemnly by while
+the Zid weakened and sank with a final gout of bubbles.
+
+"We must have your friend's help," Chafi Three said to Jennifer then,
+"to recover our investment."
+
+Jeff wheeled on him incredulously. "_Me_ go down there after that
+monster? Not on your--"
+
+"He means the Scoop," Jennifer said. "They brought it ashore to help us
+out of the cabin. Why shouldn't it help them now?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Scoop came up out of the water so smoothly that the _Island Queen_
+hardly rocked, dangling the limp form of the Zid from its great rubbery
+lips like a drowned kitten.
+
+"Here," Jennifer said.
+
+The Scoop touched its vast face to the _Queen's_ rail and dropped the
+unconscious body to the deck. The Zid twitched weakly and coughed up
+froth and water.
+
+Jeff backed away warily. "Damn it, are we going through all that again?
+Once it gets its wind back--"
+
+Chafi Three interrupted him this time. "The crystal now. We must have it
+to quiet the Zid until it is safely caged again."
+
+Jennifer turned suddenly firm. "No. I won't let this EI informer know
+about that."
+
+The Ciriimians were firmer.
+
+"It will not matter now. Galactic Adjustment will extend aid to both
+Calaxia and Terra, furnishing substitutes for the crystals you deal in.
+There will be no loss to either faction."
+
+"No loss?" Jennifer repeated indignantly. "But then there won't be any
+demand for our crystals! We'll lose everything we've gained."
+
+"Not so," Chafi Three assured her. "Galactic will offer satisfactory
+items in exchange, as well as a solution to Terra's problems."
+
+The Scoop, sensing Jennifer's surrender, slid its ponderous bulk nearer
+and opened its mouth, leaving half an acre of lower jaw resting flush
+with the _Island Queen's_ deck. Without hesitation, Jennifer stepped
+over the rail and vanished into the yawning pinkish cavern beyond.
+
+Appalled, Jeff rushed after her. "Jennifer! Have you lost your mind?"
+
+"There is no danger," Chafi Three assured him. "Scoops are benevolent as
+well as intelligent, and arrived long ago at a working agreement with
+the islanders. This one has produced a crystal and is ready to be
+relieved of it, else it would not have attached itself to a convenient
+human."
+
+Jeff said dizzily, "The Scoops make the crystals?"
+
+"There is a nidus just back of a fleshy process in its throat,
+corresponding to your own tonsils, which produces a crystal much as your
+Terran oyster secretes a pearl. The irritation distracts the Scoops from
+their meditations--they are a philosophical species, though not
+mechanically progressive--and prompts them to barter their strength for
+a time to be rid of it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Jennifer reappeared with a walnut-sized crystal in her hand and vaulted
+across the rail.
+
+"There goes another Scoop," she said resignedly. "The _Queen_ will have
+to tack with the wind for a while until another one shows up."
+
+"So that's why your sails bellied backward when you came in to harbor,"
+said Jeff. "The thing was _towing_ you."
+
+A thin, high streak of vapor-trail needling down toward them from the
+sunrise rainbow turned the channel of his thought.
+
+"That will be Satterfield and his task force," Jeff told the Chafis. "I
+think you're going to find yourselves in an argument over that matter of
+squeezing Terra out of the crystal trade."
+
+They reassured him solemnly.
+
+"Terra has no real need of the crystals. We can offer a tested genetics
+program that will eliminate racial anxiety within a few generations, and
+supply neural therapy equipment--on a trade basis, of course--that will
+serve the crystals' purpose during the interim."
+
+There should be a flaw somewhere, Jeff felt, but he failed to see one.
+He gave up trying when he found Jennifer eying him with uncharacteristic
+uncertainty.
+
+"You'll be glad to get back to your patrol work," she said. It had an
+oddly tentative sound.
+
+Somehow the predictable monotony of consulate work had never seemed less
+inviting. The prospect of ending his Calaxian tour and going back to a
+half-barren and jittery Earth appealed to Jeff even less.
+
+"No," he said. "I'd like to stay."
+
+"There's nothing to do but fish and sail around looking for Scoops ready
+to shed their crystals," Jennifer reminded him. "Still, Uncle Charlie
+has talked about settling in the Township and standing for Council
+election. Can you fish and sail, Jeff Aubray?"
+
+The consulate rocket landed ashore, but Jeff ignored it.
+
+"I can learn," he said.
+
+                                                           --ROGER DEE
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+    This etext was produced from _Galaxy_ February 1958. Extensive
+    research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on
+    this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical
+    errors have been corrected without note.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Traders Risk, by Roger Dee
+
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