ake our own lumber, out of reeds
harvested in the swamps after sunrise and converted to pulpwood, and
we get some good hardwood from the native trees which only grow in
four periods of two hundred hours a year. We only use that for
furniture, gunstocks, that sort of thing. And there are a couple of
mining camps and smelters on the mainland; they employ about a
thousand of our people. But every millisol that's spent on this planet
is gotten from the sale of tallow-wax, at second or third hand if not
directly."

That seemed to interest him more. Maybe his book, if he was really
writing one, was going to be an economic study of Fenris. Or maybe his
racket, whatever it was, would be based on something connected with
our local production. I went on telling him about our hydroponic
farms, and the carniculture plant where any kind of animal tissue we
wanted was grown--Terran pork and beef and poultry, Freyan _zhoumy_
meat, Zarathustran veldtbeest.... He knew, already, that none of the
native life-forms, animal or vegetable, were edible by Terrans.

"You can get all the _pate de foie gras_ you want here," I said. "We
have a chunk of goose liver about fifty feet in diameter growing in
one of our vats."

By this time, we'd gotten across the bottom of the pit, Murell's
luggage and my equipment being towed after us, and had entered the
Bottom Level. It was cool and pleasant here, lighted from the ceiling
fifty feet overhead, among the great column bases, two hundred feet
square and two hundred yards apart, that supported the upper city and
the thick roof of rock and earth that insulated it. The area we were
entering was stacked with tallow-wax waiting to be loaded onto the
_Cape Canaveral_ when she came in; it was vacuum-packed in plastic
skins, like big half-ton Bologna sausages, each one painted with the
blue and white emblem of the Hunters' Co-operative. He was quite
interested in that, and was figuring, mentally, how much wax there was
here and how much it was worth.

"Who does this belong to?" he wanted to know. "The Hunters'
Co-operative?"

Tom had been letting me do the talking up to now, but he answered that
question, very emphatically.

"No, it doesn't. It belongs to the hunters," he said. "Each ship crew
owns the wax they bring in in common, and it's sold for them by the
Co-op. When the captain gets paid for the wax he's turned over to the
Co-op, he divides the money among the crew. But every scrap of this
belong