Business -- Fiction; Extrasolar planets -- Fiction; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Love stories; Science fiction; Short stories
He moved, and Miss Featherpenny moved. Between them, they unsettled a
large woman eating an orange. When the juice had been mopped up and the
woman apologized to, Miss Featherpenny squeezed in beside Andy.
"Is that the information on the case?" She indicated the dope sheet
crumpled under Andy's arm.
"Yes." Andy tried to pull it out. "Were you issued one?" He moved his
elbow and tried again.
The orange woman glared at him.
Miss Featherpenny shook her head. "Miss Ellis told me you'd tell me
everything I needed to know."
Andy felt obscurely flattered. "It doesn't look too promising," he
admitted.
Miss Featherpenny glanced at the dope sheet and found a ray of hope.
"The Federation only requires that the Felician exports are nearly as
valuable as their imports," she pointed out. "'Nearly' is a nice vague,
maneuverable word."
"But," said Andy, "if the Felicians can't think of anything to sell,
how do they expect me to?"
"Maybe they're too isolated to know what's in demand," Miss
Featherpenny comforted him. "It says they won't authorize ships to
land on the planet except by invitation."
"It might be isolation, I suppose," Andy doubted. He felt an urge to
confide in Miss Featherpenny. She did, after all, look as if there
might be something besides fluff in her head.
"Look," he said. "This is my first assignment, on my fourth job, on my
second career. I've got to make good. My father is beginning to get
impatient."
Miss Featherpenny's eyes grew softer. "Fathers are usually more patient
than their children think," she encouraged.
"But," Andy added morosely, "I have a brother, a salesman with
Universal Products. He keeps getting promoted, and I keep getting
fired. Dad must be conscious of the contrast."
"Maybe," Miss Featherpenny suggested, "your brother's been lucky. You
know, being assigned jobs that were easier than they sound."
Andy glanced at her to see if he was being humored. He decided he
was not, or not much. "I've tried to believe that," he admitted.
"Unfortunately, Lloyd keeps proving me wrong. He got his last promotion
for selling fancy food products to the Mahridgians."
Miss Featherpenny had obviously never even heard of Mahridge.
"They have a strong taboo against eating," Andy explained. "They
swallow concentrates to keep alive, but it's still not quite decent. On
Mahridge, it's the dining room, not the bathroom, that has a door with
a lock on it for privacy.
"Is he married?" asked Miss Featherpenny, who didn't intend to be a
steno all her life. "I mean," she added quickly, "his wife would get
anxious about his selling something like that, that could get him put
in prison, or killed. How did he do it?"
There was a certain coolness in Andy's voice. "He took a lead from the
dope peddlers. He converted the adolescent Mahridgians first. It's all
right to eat on Mahridge now."
Miss Featherpenny diplomatized. "I don't think that's ethical.
Convincing people to do what they think is wrong."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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