the air
and groaning inwardly. There is no smell quite as expensive as that of
burned generators. He could hear the Old Man repeating over and over
again--as if Allspace was not one of the richest companies in
existence--"burned generators, boy, is burned _money_, and don't you
forget it!" Fat chance me forgetting it, Travis thought gloomily,
twitching his nostrils. But a moment later he did.

For Diomed III was below him.

And Diomed III was an Open Planet.

It happened less often, nowadays, that the Mapping Command ran across
intelligent life, and it was even less often that the intelligent life
was humanoid. But when it happened it was an event to remember. For
space travel had brought with it two great problems. The first was
Contact, the second was Trade. For many years Man had prohibited
contact with intelligent humanoids who did not yet have space travel,
on the grounds of the much-discussed Maturity Theory. As time went by,
however, and humanoid races were discovered which were biologically
identical with Man, and as great swarms of completely alien, often
hostile races were also discovered, the Maturity Theory went into
discard. A human being, ran the new slogan, is a Human Being, and so
came the first great Contact Law, which stated that any humanoid race,
regardless of its place on the evolutionary scale, was to be
contacted. To be accepted, "yea, welcomed," as the phrase went, into
the human community. And following this, of course, there came Trade.
For it was the businessmen who had started the whole thing in the
first place.

Hence the day of the Open Planet. A humanoid race was discovered by
the Mapping Command, the M.C. made its investigation, and then sent
out the Word. And every company in the Galaxy, be it monstrous huge or
piddling small, made a mad rush to be first on the scene. The
Government was very strict about the whole business, the idea being
that planets should make their contracts with companies rather than
the government itself, so that if any shady business arose the company
at fault could be kicked out, and there would be no chance of a
general war. Also, went the reasoning, under this system there would
be no favorites. Whichever company, no matter its resources, had a
ship closest at the time of the call, was the one to get first
bargaining rights. Under this setup it was very difficult for any one
company to grow too large, or to freeze any of the others out, and
quite often a