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it’s just like this all over.”
    â€œWe better call in all the boys,” said Sheridan. “This is a situation that needs some talking over. We’ll have to plan a course of action. We can’t go flying off at a dozen different angles.”
    â€œAnd we’d better pull up a hill of podars,” Abraham suggested, “and see if they are podars or something else.”
    III
    Sheridan inserted a chemist transmog into Ebenezer’s brain case and Ebenezer ran off an analysis.
    He reported to the sales conference seated around the table.
    â€œThere’s just one difference,” he said, “The podars that I analyzed ran a higher percentage of calenthropodensia—that’s the drug used as a tranquilizer—than the podars that were brought in by the first and second expeditions. The factor is roughly ten per cent, although that might vary from one field to another, depending upon weather and soil conditions—I would suspect especially soil conditions.”
    â€œThen they lied,” said Abraham, “when they said they weren’t growing podars.”
    â€œBy their own standards,” observed Silas, “they might not have lied to us. You can’t always spell out alien ethics—satisfactorily, that is—from the purely human viewpoint. Ebenezer says that the composition of the tuber has changed to some extent. Perhaps due to better cultivation, perhaps to better seed or to an abundance of rainfall or a heavier concentration of the protozoan in the soil—or maybe because of something the natives did deliberately to make it shift …”
    â€œSi,” said Gideon, “I don’t see what you are getting at.”
    â€œSimply this. If they knew of the shift or change, it might have given them an excuse to change the podar name. Or their language or their rules of grammar might have demanded that they change it. Or they may have applied some verbal mumbo-jumbo so they would have an out. And it might even have been a matter of superstition. The native told Steve at the village that they’d had bad luck with podars . So perhaps they operated under the premise that if they changed the name, they likewise changed the luck.”
    â€œAnd this is ethical?”
    â€œTo them, it might be. You fellows have been around enough to know that the rest of the Galaxy seldom operates on what we view as logic or ethics.”
    â€œBut I don’t see,” said Gideon, “why they’d want to change the name unless it was for the specific purpose of not trading with us—so they could tell us they weren’t growing podars.”
    â€œI think that is exactly why they changed the name,” Maximilian said. “It’s all a piece with those nailed-up barns. They knew we had arrived. They could hardly have escaped knowing. We had clouds of floaters going up and down and they must have seen them.”
    â€œBack at that village,” said Sheridan, “I had the distinct impression that they had some reluctance telling us they weren’t growing podars . They had left it to the last, as if it were a final clincher they’d hoped they wouldn’t have to use, a desperate, last-ditch argument when all the other excuses failed to do the trick and—”
    â€œThey’re just trying to jack up the price,” Lemuel interrupted in a flat tone.
    Maximilian shook his head. “I don’t think so. There was no price set to start with. How can you jack it up when you don’t know what it is?”
    â€œWhether there was a price or not,” said Lemuel testily, “they still could create a situation where they could hold us up.”
    â€œThere is another factor that might be to our advantage,” Maximilian said. “If they changed the name so they’d have an excuse not to trade with us, that argues that the whole village feels a moral obligation and has to justify its