The Indulgence Of Negu Mah

In his garden, Negu Mah, the Callisto uranium merchant, sat sipping a
platinum mug of molkai with his guest, Sliss the Venusian.

Nanlo, his wife, pushing before her the small serving cart with its
platinum molkai decanter, paused for an instant as she entered the
shell of pure vitrite which covered the garden, giving it the illusion
of out-of-doorness.

Negu Mah sat at his ease, his broad, merry, half-Oriental face
good-humored, his features given a ruddy tinge by the light of rising
Jupiter, the edge of whose sphere was beginning to dominate the
horizon. Sliss, the intelligent amphibian, squatted across from him in
the portable tub of water which he carried with him whenever absent
from the swamps of his native Venus.

The amphibian's popping eyes turned toward her, the wide frog-face
split in a smile of appreciation as Nanlo approached. She refilled
their mugs deftly and withdrew. But before she reentered the house she
could not resist hesitating to glance toward rising Jupiter and the
slim shaft of the rocketship silhouetted now against its surface.

The ship was the cargo rocket Vulcan, newest and swiftest of Negu Mah's
freighter fleet. Fully fueled and provisioned, storage space jammed
with refrigerated foods that in space the cold of the encompassing void
would keep perfectly for generations were it necessary, she would take
off in the morning from the close-by landing port for Jupiter's other
satellites, then go on to the Saturnian system, returning finally with
full holds of uranium for Negu Mah's refineries on Callisto.

She was a beautiful craft, the Vulcan, and one man could manage her,
though her normal crew was seven. She had cost a great sum. But Negu
Mah was wealthy.

Nanlo's face, sylph-like in its beauty, hardened. Negu Mah was wealthy
indeed. Had he not bought her, and had she not cost him more, much
more, than the Vulcan?

But no, it was not quite accurate to say that Negu Mah had bought her.
However, since time immemorial beautiful daughters had been, if not
sold, yet urged into marriages to wealthy men for the benefit of their
impoverished families. And though science had made great strides,
conquering the realms of the telescope and invading those below the
level of the microscope, finding cures for almost every disease the
flesh of man was heir to, there was one ailment it had not yet
conquered--poverty.

Nanlo's father had been a rocket port attendant. Once he had been a
pilot, but a crash had crippled him for life. Thereafter, his wages had
been quite insufficient to sustain him, his brood of half a dozen
children, and their hard-working mother.