“Pretty!” said Thana.
She helped him with his burden. They had to make two trips, filling up the saddlebags. They remounted and headed down the valley again. Thana said interestedly:
“They’re beautiful! I never saw anything like that before!” They went on. And on. And on. When the hills were well behind, Link said:
“Thistlethwaite, you welded up everything, including the lifeboat blister. Where’s the oxygen torch?”
Thistlethwaite sputtered a reply.
“We can’t use the ship,” said Link cheerfully. “With at least one hull-plate torn off and general structural weakness all over, we’ll have to use the lifeboat.”
Thistlethwaite mumbled. A faint, faint light glowed, far away.
“That’s the Household,” said Link. “Harl’s Household.”
“Y-yes,” said Thana in a singularly small voice.
“We can take you there.”
“Do you want to?”
“No!” said Link explosively. “No!”
The feeble light in the Household was a guide. Presently they came to the ufft city and the unicorns’ night-vision helped them avoid both the burrows and the mounds of dirt dug out from them. They heard querulous, frightened voices around them. Link stopped.
“My friends,” he said profoundly, “this is Link Denham, escaped from your oppressors. I go to function as a government in exile and to prepare for the resurgence of the Ufftian race! I will be back with the means to resume the struggle of the uffts to attain that recognition, that status, that independence of humanity which is their justified aspiration!”
There were cheers, but they were only half-hearted.
“Meanwhile,” boomed Link, “follow us. In the ship there are gifts and treasures. You might call them the treasury of the Ufftian Republic. We will distribute them. You may use them in bargains with men! Follow us!”
To Thistlethwaite he said cheerfully:
“I’ll pay for the cargo.”
Thistlethwaite said bitterly:
“If I can’t get it away, I don’t want Old Man Addison to have it!”
They went across the city. They were accompanied, escorted, surrounded by a swarm of uffts. They went beyond the city to the ship. Thistlethwaite, swearing corrosively, produced the oxygen torch.
There came squealings from the distance. Men on unicorns were headed for the ship. They would be, of course, pursuers of Link and Thistlethwaite, who hadn’t spent any time in a diversion like a trip to the Ufftian National Capital. Link reassumed command. He ordered the uffts to bite the heels of the riding-unicorns, to try to disperse and in any case to delay their pursuers. With a fine, brisk competence he took the oxygen torch and cleared the lifeboat blister so it could be entered and the lifeboat used. He heaved the saddlebags into the boat. He began to open the cargo compartments for the uffts. They swarmed into the ship. As a compartment door came open, they rushed in. They would be rich. They could make beautifully insulting bargains with the humans of Sord Three. They could—
There was faint, faint gray light to the east. Link cut his way into the control room to get the Galactic Directory. He came back.
“Where’s Thana? Where’s Thana?” He grew alarmed. She appeared, scared but smiling.
“I… wanted to be sure you’d… miss me.”
He bundled her into the spaceboat with the directory. He shoved Thistlethwaite in after her. He opened the outer doors of the lifeboat blister and shouted to the swarming uffts below.
“I shall return! I shall return!”
There was a knot of riding-animals coming from the west. Uffts scurried and raced about them. The men on the unicorns advanced only very slowly in consequence.
Link leaped into the spaceboat. He pressed appropriate buttons and moved appropriate levers. The lifeboat seemed to topple outward. Its rockets roared furiously; it surged ahead.
It was a near thing. Lifeboats are designed to be launched in space. But the nose of this one swung skyward, and its rockets thrust steadily and violently upward, and presently their roaring changed in that subtle fashion indicating pure emptiness outside the spaceboat. Then it leaped toward the star-filled firmament.
Days later Thistlethwaite worked zestfully, with a portentous scowling, upon a new contract he proposed to Link. It was to form a new organization, the Sord Three Development Corporation. Link was to provide the entire working capital. Thistlethwaite was to have the final say in all business decisions. The details of the operation had been thrashed out in conversation, and Thistlethwaite was putting them into business phraseology, with at least one booby-trap in each two paragraphs of the contract. Link would purchase and lead up a first-class modern spaceship. He would carry back to Sord Three samples of all needed alloying materials. He would establish a duplier by the seashore to remove from flowing sea water—as raw material—the rare minerals needed to duply the large inventory of new, currently undupliable objects and instruments needed on Sord. Link, privately, had designed beer making equipment intended to be run by uffts. There would be enormous dislocations of the present economy when uffts didn’t need to trade with humans for beer. Humans would start to grow vegetation. They would, in fact, start to grow crops. Their dupliers would be more valuable extracting alloying metals than duplying roots, barks, herbs, berries, blossoms and flowers.
There would be hell to pay on Sord Three when Link went back. It would provide novel experiences. Exciting ones. From time to time there would doubtless be tumult. But if no other ship landed on Sord Three for just a very few years, when another ship landed there’d be no disaster. There’d be no dupliers in action. Nobody would recognize the galaxy-wide disaster that could be brought about if certain mineral-extracting devices, working on sea water, were put to other uses. Everything would be swell!
Link pointed out a small crescent against the stars to be seen from the lifeboat’s ports.
“We’re going to land there?” asked Thana.
Link nodded. Thana said in a low tone:
“Link, are you going to sign that contract he’s drawing up?”
“Of course not!” said Link. “But it makes him happy to write it. Actually, he’ll like the deal I’ll give him better than the trick one he’s contriving.”
Thana said uneasily:
“When we land—”
“I’ll go to see a jeweler,” said Link mildly. “I’ll sell him a few carynths, a quart or so. I’ll start things working for our return trip. And then—Do you mind a quiet wedding?”
“N-not at all.”
He nodded. They held hands as the lifeboat headed for the planet before them. There were seas, and continents, and ice-caps. There were cities. Four saddlebags full of carynths would hardly all be sold on one planet without breaking the price, but a discreet distribution by spaceship to responsible jewelers in other worlds…
“We can start back,” Link promised, “in a month or so.”
And they did. But they were delayed a few days, at that. Link had arranged for something special and they had to wait for Thana’s second carynth necklace to be finished. It was said that she was the only woman in the galaxy who owned more than one.