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captain stated his problem, and E-Wusk quivered with laughter. “Oh, ho ho! A hundred more? I didn’t even know there were so many foreigners on Quarm! Where were they hiding?”
    “Under rocks, with the rest of the slime,” the captain said gloomily.
    “Oh, ho ho! Take my compartment. There’s room for twenty there if I stay out of it. Take Gul Meszk’s, too, and send him back to Quarm. He’s a Quarmer at heart—they didn’t even burn his warehouses!”
    Gul Meszk, an angular sexrumane, was shuffling past with a look of constrained boredom on his pebbly face. He said resentfully, “Is it my fault that I don’t stock combustibles? Anyway, they did burn them. They burned all of them. You just didn’t happen to see it.”
    E-Wusk delivered a long, gargling laugh. “You saw my warehouse burn. I hope the rascals singed their knobs.”
    Meszk looked at him slyly. “Now that you mention it, your warehouse did produce an unusual smudge.”
    “Smudge! You saw the flames. The Quarmers had to run home for their light shields. Oh, ho ho!” Rippling waves of laughter encircled his body. “I saw it coming. You can’t say I didn’t warn you. I cleared out my warehouse ten days ago. I told you then—”
    “You told me,” Meszk agreed resignedly. “I thought it was another of your jokes.”
    “Oh, ho ho!” E-Wusk flopped out supinely, gasping for breath. “Thought it was a joke!” He gurgled helplessly. “Oh, ho ho! That is a joke!”
    “I hadn’t forgotten that gag of yours about the frunl,” Meszk grumbled. “I dumped my whole stock at a loss. So did everyone else.”
    ‘That wasn’t my gag,” E-Wusk said. “It was Gul Rhinzl’s. I saw what he was doing and cut myself in on it.”
    “Anyway, the two of you cornered every scrap of Quarm, and then you doubled the price. With operators like you fleecing them at every turn, no wonder the Quarmers revolted.”
    E-Wusk shook with merriment.
    “So when you came around with that tale of doom and disaster, naturally I didn’t believe it. All I did was check through my inventory to try to figure out what items you were after that time. Tell me something. If you cleared out your warehouse ten days ago, what made it burn so spectacularly?”
    “I leased my warehouse—oh, ho ho—to a native! He just got it filled with mron oil in time for the fire!”
    The undertraders laughed uproariously; Meszk seemed puzzled. “If it was native oil, why did the Quarmers burn it?”
    “Quarmer reasoning,” E-Wusk gasped. “It was a foreigner’s warehouse, don’t you see, so they had to burn it. But they were careful to set fire only to the building. They didn’t disturb the contents at all!”
    The joke spread through the lounge in widening circles. Meszk laughed and moved away, and Biag-n edged closer to E-Wusk. He was smitten with a severe palpitation of the conscience. He had his full report indited and ready to send at the earliest opportunity, and he suddenly realized that he knew nothing at all about the critical question, the only one he had been specifically instructed to investigate. He had forgotten the Weapon.
    The wealth of detail provided by a world in revolt had overburdened his senses. He had eagerly inventoried every aspect of the Quarmers’ behavior except the one that mattered. He had not once asked himself why.
    He said timorously, “Excuse me, Excellency, but you—you say that you— saw it coming?”
    E-Wusk regarded him curiously. “I don’t believe that we’ve met.”
    “Biag-n, at Your Excellency’s service,” Biag-n said, with a sweeping genuflection.
    “Biag-n. I don’t seem to recall—what is your line?”
    “Textiles, Sire,” Biag-n said humbly.
    “Textiles? I still can’t place you. Where was your office?”
    “I—I sold direct,” Biag-n stammered, face suffused with humiliation.
    “Ah! But you needn’t be apologetic about it. One must start somewhere. I, too, have ‘sold direct.’ Don’t look so startled. I sold