Daylight showed me four little trees, nothing like the usual scraggy vegetation of Alvarla. They _must_ be perfume trees, I thought. But they were too young to have blossoms or pods. I didn't go too near them, remembering what Rene had said. And, remembering that, I began to figure out how they grew here. * * * * * This place was a little valley. No, a crater. Several feet deeper than my height, with sloping sides. The birds apparently kept it warm with their body heat, plus the heat the rocky sides would store. Since it was a crater, the winds wouldn't reach it. The crater made a basin to catch the snow which I could see beginning to melt at the edges and ooze down the slope. The birds provided more than ample fertilizer and Uncle Izzy had apparently trained at least one of them to cultivate the soil under the trees. I climbed out of the crater to see that I was indeed in the regions of snow. To the north were huge drifts, and far off loomed towering glaciers. To the south, the hills tapered off from white to spotted brown. That was the reason for Uncle Izzy's crazy setup. Rene and I would never have come across this crater in an ordinary search. Of course, the setup needn't have been _quite_ so crazy. That was the personal equation of which Uncle Izzy was so fond. The trees would, I assumed, poke their heads up over the crater as they grew, reaching toward the cold, and finally getting the frostbite to fill their pods properly. At two thousand dollars an ounce. I had neglected to ask Rene how many pods a tree could be expected to produce or how big the pods were. But, say, half an ounce in each pod and a conservative fifty pods on each tree. A hundred thousand dollars. I slid back into the crater, sat leaning against a somnolent dodo and ate a lunch package with a cupful of melted snow. All sorts of thoughts were jostling my brain. But I was bone-weary. I hadn't slept since we hit Alvarla and the ride last night had been a tremendous strain, because I wasn't in the habit of getting any exercise at all. Therefore, I fell asleep in mid-thought. It was the noon sun that woke me. I wasn't just warm. I was _hot_. And I was very reluctant to let go of my dream; I kept grabbing at the tag ends of it with both hands. It was the most exciting dream I'd had since the one about succeeding Mr. Picks. Only _very_ different. I'd made a fortune cultivating perfume trees. My dream was full of perfume. Some of it came from the exotic plants of my African estate. Some of it was from a long-legged, pink-haired girl, the kind African millionaires have. It was the sort of dream, I mused, unable to keep it in mood any longer, as large-minded men have. Men like--Uncle Isadore! I sat up suddenly. Uncle Isadore--large-minded? Why hadn't he had the avuncular decency to leave me his fortune the usual way? Why? * * * * *