“I did put in a trade inquiry,” Cheryl Michaelsdotr said. “They’re willing to offer purified elements, recordings of music, novels, pretty pictures of tourist sites that no one here can visit, and the like.” The people around the table rolled their eyes. The Imperial supply of recorded music was so large that no one would ever finish reading the list of the pieces, let alone listening to them. “There was one minor peculiarity. There is a recent record of Teruwhon. Ten years ago, an Altai Lines freighter had a jump discontinuity and decided to force drop into their system. Any port in a storm, and Altai is scrupulous about the non-contact regulations. However, they did download a complete data dump from the masked Imperial observation satellites. Ten years ago, the locals were attempting to invent the internal combustion engine, not stunningly successfully. They had half-decent steam engines, meaning reciprocating pistons, not turbines. Suddenly, these people have a starship. And it seems to have been locally made. Immigration made their usual surreptitious sampling of various things they brought along, and all of the isotopic compositions match precisely what you would expect from Teruwhon.”
“Now, that’s quaint. How did they pull that off?” Senior Researcher Waters asked.
“Teruwhon is at the far end of the Observation Zone,” Sachenbacher said. “It’s absolutely amazing we have recent data on it.”
“The Teruwhon ship, the Peaceful Harmony, had two extra crewmen,” Abraham Fullmer observed. “They were Parsnipians. They stayed on board out of sight. They explained they had been stranded on another system way out there, where the Peaceful Harmony first stopped, and were helping with practical space navigation in exchange for being taken home near the end of the trip. No one in Immigration seems to have noticed that no one has ever heard of Parsnipians before. So I did a search. They’ve never been seen before in our sector. But if I go across frontier sectors, all the way across the Empire, in the last few years there have been some dozens of cases in which a ship from a more or less new world would show up with a couple of Parsnipian crewmen. Their alibis were all different.”
“Imperial Immigration Service didn’t pick up on this?” Waters asked.
“Officially, they stayed on board out of sight,” Marjorie Quan said. “The ship showed up with a considerable number of Imperial credits, and I suspect left rather poorer, even not counting the Imperial map and survey they purchased. Indeed, if we send off to our Planetary government for the immigration visitation report — those are public documents — I will happily bet ten credits that the Parsnipians don’t get mentioned. Long live the Empire!”
“In theory we’re also supposed to be supporting our friends who insure starships,” Waters said. “After all, there are only a modest fraction of a quadrillion star ships in the Empire. Did these folks give us any data?”
“Curiously,” Quan said, “they didn’t even charge for it. For a modest number of warp points we now have improved measurements. Actually, they did a precise job of measuring things, assuming their instruments are any good.”
