 What does the Trading Commission want from the Altairians?
I've got three million credits sitting in the Terran Consulate on Altair V, just waiting for me to walk in and pick them up. And the Terran Consulate isn't willing to sell all the trading possibilities here down the river just to get you out of a mess. I'm here to keep you from botching things up still worse for the Trading Commission, that's all. Altair I had been recognized at once by the Trading Commission as a commercial prize of tremendous value, but early reports had warned of the danger of wildcat trading on the little, musty, jungle-like planet with its shaggy, three-eyed inhabitants—warned specifically against the confidence tactics so frequently used—but there was always somebody, Meyerhoff reflected sourly, who just didn't get the word. "If you hadn't been so greedy, you'd have found out what a chunk of land was to these natives before you started peddling it. They've built up the most confusing and impossible system of barter and trade imaginable, aimed at individual survival, with land as the value behind the credit. They have only the haziest idea what truth represents, and they've shrugged off the idea as impossible and useless." Encroachment on private property is legal grounds for murder on this planet, and twelve of them descended on the same chunk of land at the same time, all armed with title-deeds."
 Uranium
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