Free The World Swappers by John Brunner

Leeuwenhoek went to lean out of the bridge port and discuss his cargo manifest and unloading arrangements. There was something about buyers coming around in an hour or two. Enni did not follow all that was said.
    Leeuwenhoek finished his discussion and turned inboard with a tired but satisfied expression. “Well, we might as well step ashore for a few hours,” he said. “Enni, you’d best come along and we’ll fit you out with some things you need. Like the idea?”
    Enni nodded.
    Petr Tomlin had been a buyer for Bassett’s for more than ten years. His beat included the Rio docks; sometimes off-world cargoes included miscellanea that could be resold at a ridiculously large profit after a suitable advertising campaign to drive home the glamorous aspect of their colonial origin.
    When the Amsterdam’s details went up on the main arrivals board, he scanned them with an expert eye. Ymir, last port of call. A God-forsaken, one-propulsor world, that. In all his experience, he’d never seen a decent cargo come off Ymir. Still, for some reason, during the past few days, interest had been growing in the firm; and, after all, the previous ports of call included two reliable worlds with occasional respectable exports.
    Better drop by and take a look, he decided.
    The cargo-master was a stranger to him, but he was expert at making friends quickly, and within the half-hour they were chatting amiably together. None of the competing buyers had yet made up their minds to inspect the Amsterdam; Tomlin allowed the cargo-master to expand a little before they settled down to serious business.
    “We don’t see you often in Rio,” he suggested. “Does your beat usually include Earth?”
    The cargo-master shook his head. “We work the outworlds most of the time. Nothing fancy–seeds, cattle stock in embryo, processed reactor fuels, that sort of thing. Only we had a special reason for calling on Earth this trip–last-minute change of plan, in fact.”
    Some instinct made Tomlin prick up his ears. “You don’t say!” he prompted. The cargo-master decided to elucidate.
    “Some girl from Ymir got herself in trouble with the local authorities. The agent there is a friend of the skipper’s. He agreed to ship the girl out of the elders’ reach as a favor to him.”
    “Pretty expensive sort of favor!” Tomlin commented.
    “Not really. We figured it out before we started, and I think when you look at what we’ve got you’ll see it would have been worth our while to make the trip anyway.”
    That was the signal for the start of serious business; all the time that Tomlin was haggling and making his offers, though, the question of why a single Ymiran girl should have been brought to Earth as a favor irked him. He mentioned it to his chief, Lecoq, when he reported in that night, and the reaction which the news provoked startled him.
    “An Ymiran girl? Here in Rio? What’s she like? How old is she? Where is she right now?”
    Tomlin stammered feebly that he hadn’t bothered to ask. Lecoq slammed his fist down on his desk and ordered him harshly to get out and find her. Then he countermanded the order and rang Bassett.
    Bassett had been poring over yet another file of information on Ymir. It seemed to him that he was thinking of nothing else these days. And the more he studied the question, the more he suspected Lecoq had been right all along. Ymir was a ridiculous planet to try and reopen to immigration! It would take more than the impending crisis in living standards to drive Earthborn to Ymir; it would take a disaster.
    Therefore, if they weren’t completely off-beam, they were still asking the wrong questions.
    It was a job for a social psychologist. He had recruited the best available to his staff, but they had nothing to work on. None of them had been to Ymir; there was no opportunity to meet and talk with members of the embassy staff in Rio, except on the most formal footing; Ymirans had no spacefleet and seldom visited other