"What _have_ you gotten us into now, Titus?" "Honest, Love--I don't know." Suddenly his ears were splitting with the thunderous roar of a thousand ships plunging down to the surface as far as he could see around the perimeter of his small world. Each pulled to a halt a few feet from the ground, opened its sides and disgorged vast mounds of crates and sacks, boxes and barrels, naked hills of coarse material that hissed like gravel as it spewed from chutes, gleaming masses of machinery. Confounded, Titus seized one of the slips of paper. It was an invoice listing two hundred earth movers, seventy-five instant pavers, five hundred concrete mixers. Matching his frown, Edna read a second sheet and demanded, "What on earth do you expect to do with a hundred thousand barrels of wheat germ oil? Four thousand kegs of eight-penny nails? Forty-five hundred tons of soybeans?" * * * * * At his secluded villa, Prime Minister Netath was entertaining his foreign minister, Ugaza Bataul. Netath leaned against the terrace bar and proposed a toast. "To an era of plenty." Bataul smiled. "At the expense of the Western Cluster." They gulped the drinks and Netath stared down into his empty glass. "We're quite fortunate that the Western Cluster's aspirations are extending to this sector." "As long as we can be sure that there won't be any _military_ advances." Bataul added the qualification with misgiving. "Oh, there's no danger of that. Actually, we're lucky we didn't try to get on the Eastern Cluster's gravy train. We'd have had to make a lot of concessions." Heralding its own approach with a sputtering rumble, the station 'copter came in low over the trees and dropped down on the lawn. Netath walked over as his chauffeur climbed out of the cab and used antigrav grapples to float a large crate out of the freight compartment. "Just picked it up at the space terminal," the man explained. "Must be that aid shipment." Bataul laughed. "You mean the first batch of credit certificates, maybe." The chauffeur pressed the "unpack" stud. The sides of the crate fell outward. "What _is_ it?" Netath drew back, surveying the ivory, tanklike thing with its sparkling fixtures and flexible appendages. Bataul bent and read the words on the inscription plate: "Deluxe Automatic Bather--4678-25C." By then, Netath had found the torn, soiled delivery tag. He read the part of the writing that was still legible: "... _sincerely hope this expression of Western amity meets with your satisfaction. If we can serve you again, please don't hesitate._..." Infuriated, he imparted a vindictive kick to the crate and crumpled the paper. "_That's_ the cosmic aid we were expecting?" Bataul sputtered. "Capitalist Western dogs!" Netath exclaimed. "They were just trifling with our planetary honor!"