y
best to give him the fatherly advice he occasionally needed, although he
would have been better off half the time if he hadn't taken it.

"Well, what's the trouble now?" I asked. "From the look on your face it
must be unpleasant. Or maybe you're just suffering from indigestion."

"It's not indigestion, Chief."

"Well, don't keep me in suspense. Tell me so I can worry too."

I didn't like the way he looked. Of course, I'd been expecting trouble
for the past year. Things had been going far too smoothly.

"Oysters!" Bergdorf said laconically.

"Oysters?"

I looked at him incredulously. Bergdorf sat straight up in his chair and
faced me. There was no humor in his eyes. "For God's sake! You
frightened me for a moment. You're joking, I hope."

"Far from it," Bergdorf replied. "I said oysters and I mean oysters.
It's no joke! Just who was the unutterable idiot who planted them here?"

It took a minute before I remembered. "Hartmann," I said. "Of the BIT.
He ordered them delivered at the request of Kron Avar and Tovan Harl. I
suppose Harl planted them. I never paid very much attention to it."

"You should have. It would have been better if they had imported Bengal
tigers! How long ago did this infernal insanity happen?"

"Right after the Agreement was signed, I guess. I'm sure it was no
earlier than that, because Niobians met up with oysters for the first
time at that affair." I still didn't get it, but there was no doubt that
Heinz was serious. I tried to remember something about oysters, but
other than the fact that they were good to eat and produced pearls I
could think of nothing. Yet Bergdorf looked like the end of the world
was at hand. There was something here that didn't add up. "Well, get on
with it," I said. "As far as marine biology is concerned I'm as innocent
as a Lyranian virgin. Tell me--what's wrong with the oysters?"

"Nothing! That's the trouble. They're nice healthy specimens of
terrestrial _Ostrea lurida_. We found a floating limb with about a dozen
spat clinging to it."

"Spat?"

"Immature oysters."

"Oh. Is that bad?"

"Sure it's bad. I suppose I'd better explain," Bergdorf said. "On Earth
an oyster wouldn't be anything to worry about, even though it produces
somewhere between sixteen and sixty million fertile eggs every year. On
Earth this tremendous fertility is necessary for survival, but here on
Niobe where there are no natural enemies to speak of, it's absolutely
deadly!

"Just