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"It ain't that I mind her being a nice girl," one of his mustachioed Darthians explained almost tearfully to Hoddan, "but she wants to make a nice girl out of me!" Hoddan, himself, cringed from her society. He could gladly have put her ashore on Krim with ample funds to return to Walden. But she was prettily, reproachfully helpless.
The stop-over on Krim had cost some delay, but Hoddan arrived back at a positive sight of Darth's sun within a day or so of standard space drive direct from Walden. Then there was little or no time lost in getting into orbit with the junk yard space fleet of the emigrants.
I was given quotations on the risk-insurance divisions of all Krim companies. Of course those are not very active stocks, but if there were a rumor of a pirate ship acting in this part of the galaxy, one might anticipate " "I do," said Hoddan. "Let's see. ... My cargo brought so much.... Hm-m-m.... My purchases will come to so much.
Time passed. Comets let out vast streamers like bridal veils and swept toward and around their suns. Some of them one in ten thousand, or twenty were possibly seen by human eyes. The liner bearing Hoddan sped through the void. In time it made a landfall on the Planet Krim. He went aground and observed the spaceport city.
But he finally agreed with the emigrants' leader now no longer fierce, but fiercely triumphant that he thought they could go on. And he would ask a favor. He propped his eyelids open with his fingers and wrote the letter to his grandfather that he'd composed in his mind in the liner on Krim.
Krim is a place of lively commercial activity, where an electronics engineer should easily find employment. It is said to be progressive and there is much organized research " "I wouldn't want to be a kept engineer, sir," said Hoddan apologetically. "I'd rather ... well ... putter on my own." "Impractical, but sensible," commented the ambassador. He turned a page. "There's Darth.
But enough of apology from me. Let us set about your affairs." He consulted the atlas. "Where would you like to go, since you must leave Walden?" "Not too far, sir " "The girl, eh?" The ambassador did not smile. He ran his finger down a page. "The nearest inhabited worlds, of course, are Krim and Darth.
A gray-haired man of infinite dignity said: "Well?" "I am," said Hoddan modestly, "a pirate. I have a ship in the spaceport with very convincing papers and a cargo of Rigellian furs, jewelry from the Cetis planets, and a rather large quantity of bulk melacynth. I want to dispose of the cargo and invest a considerable part of the proceeds in conservative stocks on Krim." The lawyer frowned.
Then he saw how things could be worked out so that there could be no doubt. He began to work out the details. He drifted off to sleep in the act of composing a letter in his head to his grandfather on the pirate planet Zan. When morning came on Krim, catawheel trucks came bringing gigantic agricultural machines of a sort that would normally never be shipped by space freight.
Hoddan found that he could make a fairly dispassionate guess of what advantage say Nedda's father would take of people who would not check on his good faith for two years and until they were two years' journey away. The business men on Krim would have some sort of code determining how completely one could swindle a customer. Don Loris, now "How badly were you cheated?" asked Hoddan.
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