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as it always has. It has not been exploited; there are not enough people in its economy to exploit it. The only exploiter that I know is a man by the name of Thomas Decker. Decker is a strange character. He lives alone in a cabin at the outskirts of the settlement.”
    â€œYou are a friend of Decker’s?”
    â€œNot a friend. We have a small business arrangement. Almost every trip he brings me a small sack of semiprecious stones. You know the kind—garnets, aquamarines, amethyst, topaz. Nothing very rare, seldom really valuable. Low-grade opal now and then. Once a couple of emeralds we did rather well on. No great deal. No possibility of great wealth. I have a feeling he doesn’t do it for the money, although I may be wrong about that. A man of mystery. No one knows a single thing about him, although he’s been there for years. I think he does his gem hunting for the fun of it. He brings me the gems and I sell them to a contact I have in Gutshot. He pays me a ten-percent fee.”
    â€œWhere does he get the stones?” asked Tennyson.
    â€œSomewhere out in the wilds. He goes back into the mountains and picks them out of streambeds, working the gravels.”
    â€œYou said you doubt he does it for the money,” said Jill. “What does he do it for, then?”
    â€œI’m not sure,” the captain responded. “Maybe it’s just something to do, a hobby to keep him busy. One thing I, didn’t tell you. He does not bring me all the gems he finds. The better pieces he holds out. Some of them he carves. There is one good-sized piece of jade. All by itself, it would be worth a lot of money. The way he has carved it makes it worth a fortune. But he won’t let loose of it. Says that it’s not his, that it doesn’t belong to him.”
    â€œWho else could it belong to?”
    The captain shook his head. “I wouldn’t know. Perhaps no one. It’s just his way of talking. Lord knows what he means. You must understand that in many ways he is a strange man—a strangely private person and old-fashioned, as if he’d stepped out of another age, as if he did not quite belong in the present. The funny thing is that I can say this, but I can’t tell you why I say it. It’s not anything he does or the way he talks; it’s just a feeling that I get. I say he’s strange and even tell you in what ways he is strange, but I can’t cite a single example of behavior that would make me say that.”
    â€œYou must be a close friend of his. To know this much about the man, I mean.”
    â€œNo, not a close friend. No one is a close friend of his. The man’s pleasant enough, in many ways he’s charming, but he does not associate with the other humans at End of Nothing. By that, I don’t mean he repels them, or even that he avoids them, but he does not seek them out. He never joins the crowd at the bar at Human House; he almost never ventures into town. He’s got an old beat-up vehicle, one of those cars that can cover tough terrain. He bought it off someone in the settlement. I don’t remember who, if I ever knew. He does some traveling around in that, but always by himself. When he goes back into the wilderness to hunt for gems, he doesn’t take it. He walks. It’s as if he needs no one, as if he has all he needs back there in the wilderness and in his cabin at the edge of town. I’ve been at his cabin once—that’s when I saw the carvings he had made. I wasn’t invited, but I went and he seemed glad enough to see me. He was friendly. We sat in front of the fire and talked, but there were times when I thought he wasn’t really there, that he wasn’t with me, that he scarcely was aware of me. As if—and this may sound strange—that while he was talking with me and listening to me he also was talking with and listening to someone else as well. Once again, there is absolutely nothing I