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she blubbered. “I want to work for you.”
    “It’s nothing to cry about. There wouldn’t be anything for you to do if I kept you on.”
    “I’m not crying about that.”
    “Then why are you crying?”
    “That’s the first time you ever called me Schluppy!”
    Darzek picked up a box of money, hefted it thoughtfully, and put it down again. “I don’t like this at all. But I made a bad joke, and Smith called me on it, and I feel obligated to take his job. I wonder what it is.”

Chapter 3

    There were seventeen new passengers in the ship’s day lounge and three in the night lounge, and none of them possessed a time segment’s worth of solvency. The captain alternately cursed the world of Quarm and all of its workings for inflicting these unwanted passengers on him and pleaded with those who occupied compartments to make room for them.
    “They can’t live in the lounges,” the captain said.
    “Why not?” asked Gul Brokefa, a wealthy trader whose family was occupying two compartments.
    “Because,” the captain said gloomily, “the Quarmers say I have to take at least a hundred more passengers before they’ll release the ship. And if these stay in the lounges, where will I put a hundred more?”
    Gul Brokefa rudely suggested a place, and the captain snarled back. There was a spirited exchange before Gul Brokefa flounced away disdainfully.
    Biag-n, settled unobtrusively in a remote corner, enjoyed the altercation tremendously. So did the other passengers. They had little enough to occupy themselves. The viewing screen had been turned off at their request; there was nothing to see except the looming silhouette of the transfer 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