“I have tried to keep my charts up to date,” he said as he settled down opposite the Flyer’s proxy. “I haven’t attempted to make any changes in the Bowl, though, because the new regions we mapped on the way up were not extensive enough to show. There is actually little I can show you in detail, but you wanted a general idea of where I planned to go when we could get out of here. “Well, actually I don’t care greatly. I can buy and sell anywhere, and at the moment I have little aboard but food. I won’t have much of that by the time winter is over, either; so I had planned, since our talk, to cruise for a time around the low-weight areas and pick up plant products which can be obtained here — materials that are valued by the people farther south because of their effect on the taste of food.”

“Spices?”

“If that is the word for such products, yes. I have carried them before, and rather like them — you can get good profit from a single shipload, as with most commodities whose value depends less on their actual usefulness than on their rarity.”

“I take it, then, that once you have loaded here you don’t particularly care where you go?”

“That is right. I understand that your errand will carry us close to the Center, which is fine — the farther south we go, the higher the prices I can get; and the extra length of the journey should not be much more dangerous, since you will be helping us as you agreed.”

“Right. That is excellent — though I wish we had been able to find something we could give you in actual payment, so that you would not feel the need to take time in spice-gathering.”

“Well, we have to eat. You say your bodies, and hence your foods, are made of very different substances from ours, so we can’t use your foodstuffs. Frankly, I can’t think of any desirable raw metal or similar material that I couldn’t get far more easily in any quantity I wanted. My favorite idea is still that we get some of your machines, but you say that they would have to be built anew to function under our conditions. It seems that the agreement we reached is the best that is possible, under those circumstances.”