"In other words, we're being asked to sign an essentially blank agreement?" one of the newer syndics asked.

"Not really." Governor Jor Hemner shook his head, the movement looking risky on one so frail. "There are lots of intermediate possibilities, including buying the Baliu's data or sending our own survey team out to take a look. Standard

Troft trade procedure assumes we'll come up with these suggestions ourselves.

What I'm worried about is whether setting a precedent of this kind is a good idea."

"Why not?" someone else spoke up from Corwin's side of the room. "It's the fear of the Cobras that keeps the Trofts friendly, isn't it? How better to show them that kind of caution is good policy?"

"And if we lose?" Hemner asked stiffly.

"The Cobras haven't lost anything yet."

Corwin glanced at Governor Howie Vartanson of Caelian, wondering if he'd comment. But the other merely curled his lip slightly and kept silent.

Politicians from Caelian tended to adopt that low-profile position when they came to Aventine, Corwin had noticed; but the point, he felt, ought to be made.

Subtly, if possible.... "I'd like to point out," he spoke up, "that one or more new planets would enable us to solve the problem of Caelian without depriving the 19,000 people there of the right to their "own" world."

"Only if they'd be willing to leave," Stiggur said; but the mention of Caelian, as Corwin had planned, seemed to bring the members' thoughts to the current stalemate between the Cobras and that strange world's hostile ecology. "Fluid genetic adaptation," the official reports elegantly called, it. The Caelians' own term was considerably cruder: Hell's Blender. Every species on the planet, from the simplest lichen to the largest predator, seemed mindlessly determined to hold onto his ecological and territorial niche against all efforts to dislodge it.