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company someone at
some stage must have decided to stay on a second year at the last moment, but
the trainee replacement would have learned the same crucial fact that Kynance had grown to accept: just as the Zygra Company had given up misleading its rivals by making
them think the pelts were animal skins, so it had given up worrying about how
much an outsider knew of the technicalities involved. There was no place in the
universe where the data were of value except on Zygra itself. Launching an attack on the planet with a view to taking it over was
still a possibility—there were other operators in this sector of the galaxy
capable of mounting one or even two assaults fierce enough to defeat the Zygra Company's best efforts. But the main station and
substations were all boobytrapped ; if they ceased to
receive a signal being broadcast by the orbital guardposts ,
they released a flood of poison into the water, and for at least the next fifty
years, until the pelts reestablished themselves, there would be no crop worth
harvesting. And without destroying all the guardposts there was no chance of making a landing.
    Moreover,
there was nowhere to land in the literal sense, so
that a ship designed to put down on the marshes instead of aboard the deck of
the main station was bound to be a somewhat peculiar vessel, bulging with
flotation chambers and equipped with some sort of seagoing propulsion. As part
of her training Kynance had been shown the record of
one ill-starred venture along these lines: the Zygra Company's spies had discovered the preparations being made to adapt a ship
belonging to a company on Loki, had waited till the work had been almost
done—involving the expenditure of half the rival company's capital—and then had
blandly notified the Nefertitian government, which
had a considerable stake itself in the Zygra operation, through the tax bills it imposed on the company's headquarters.
    There had followed a protest to the Lokian authorities, a swoop by a team of inspectors from
the Bureau of Interstellar Trade, and a huge claim for damages which had
bankrupted the would-be pirates.
    It
was with something of a shock that, towards the end of the didactic recital, Kynance had recognized a case which had been dinned into
her many times in college. "Manufacture of a device or devices uniquely
fitted to conditions pertaining on a world not legally accessible to the
manufacturer is prima
facie evidence of piratical
intent"—the Zygra Company and the Government of
Nefertiti versus Wade, Wang and Hoerbiger , 2113,
otherwise irreverently known as the smile on the face of the zygra .
    At
first she had wondered why the company didn't simply assign members of its own
staff to hold down the chair for a year at a time, perhaps on a rota basis. Later she had realized this was contrary to outworld psychology; anyone making a career with the
company was trained for work far more important than sitting on Zygra and watching a lot of machines tending a lot of moss.
Any casual applicant, reasonably greedy and moderately intelligent, would
suffice, and would cost no more than salary for a year and ship-room to and from
the Zygra system plus a course of training that
occupied a mere fraction of the computers' attention, and would be dismissable on his return without the company having to
worry any more about him.
    If
someone with inside information about harvesting the pelts wanted to sell out
to another company, he'd have to have experience at the headquarters end as
well as on Zygra , and if he worked well enough to
rise in the firm to a level where his knowledge was likely to be useful to a
third party, he'd have to be either a fool or a maniac to risk the gamble.
    Kynance was coming to admire the Zygra Company in an upside-down fashion. There was no denying the efficient cynicism
with which they conducted their operations.
    As
the reluctant admiration grew, so her original doubts subsided. This was no
chiseling two-bit undertaking