rder; warmed further on his pipe bowl, it fairly blazed.
Better than a thousand sols, he told himself. Good color, too. Getting his
gloves off, he drew out the little leather bag from under his shirt,
loosening the drawstrings by which it hung around his neck. There were a
dozen and a half stones inside, all bright as live coals. He looked at
them for a moment, and dropped the new sunstone in among them, chuckling
happily.

* * * * *

Victor Grego, listening to his own recorded voice, rubbed the sunstone on
his left finger with the heel of his right palm and watched it brighten.
There was, he noticed, a boastful ring to his voice--not the suave,
unemphatic tone considered proper on a message-tape. Well, if anybody
wondered why, when they played that tape off six months from now in
Johannesburg on Terra, they could look in the cargo holds of the ship that
had brought it across five hundred light-years of space. Ingots of gold
and platinum and gadolinium. Furs and biochemicals and brandy. Perfumes
that defied synthetic imitation; hardwoods no plastic could copy. Spices.
And the steel coffer full of sunstones. Almost all luxury goods, the only
really dependable commodities in interstellar trade.

And he had spoken of other things. Veldbeest meat, up seven per cent from
last month, twenty per cent from last year, still in demand on a dozen
planets unable to produce Terran-type foodstuffs. Grain, leather, lumber.
And he had added a dozen more items to the lengthening list of what
Zarathustra could now produce in adequate quantities and no longer needed
to import. Not fishhooks and boot buckles, either--blasting explosives and
propellants, contragravity-field generator parts, power tools,
pharmaceuticals, synthetic textiles. The Company didn't need to carry
Zarathustra any more; Zarathustra could carry the Company, and itself.

Fifteen years ago, when the Zarathustra Company had sent him here, there
had been a cluster of log and prefab huts beside an improvised landing
field, almost exactly where this skyscraper now stood. Today, Mallorysport
was a city of seventy thousand; in all, the planet had a population of
nearly a million, and it was still growing. There were steel mills and
chemical plants and reaction plants and machine works. They produced all
their own fissionables, and had recently begun to export a little refined
plutonium; they had even started producing collapsium shielding.