And here is another dramatic change of scene:
on Merseia, Chee Lan has been abducted;
there is a double space between paragraphs;
the following paragraph is a beautiful description of morning on Merseia (see here).
This tells us that the night has been spent in a fruitless search for Chee Lan. Sure enough, in the next paragraph after that, Morruchan Long-Ax says:
"'I am weary...and we are on a barren trail.'" (David Falkayn: Star Trader, p. 242)
Falkayn cannot pretend that the League will not help Merseia if Chee is not returned. Scientists want knowledge. Merchants want profits. But Falkayn and Adzel are present and can take an initiative, which they are used to doing as a trader team. Their problems now are how to get the Merseians to cooperate enough to receive help and how to rescue Chee Lan. Poul Anderson's heroes are problem-solvers, "trouble twisters":
"...we're a new breed. Not troubleshooters. Trouble twisters. I suspect our whole career is going to be a sequence of ghastly situations that somehow we twist around to our advantage." (1)
-copied from here.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
And I like the ingenious solution found by Falkayn for forcing Merseian leaders to look MUCH harder for finding and rescuing Chee Lan!
And, alas, the era of the trouble twisting trader teams was not to last long. Within a generation the Polesotechnic League was to be fatally ruptured by the Mirkheim crisis.
Sean
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