What The Okies Do IV

In James Blish's Earthman, Come Home (Cities In Flight, London, 1981), when the germanium standard collapses and the impoverished Okie cities gather in a "jungle" around a red dwarf star in the Acolyte Cluster, a trader in a spaceship protected by police craft comes to hire:

several grade A cities for a temporary development project, requiring at least one pressure specialist, on the planet Hern Six;

twenty class B cities to work "...low-grade carnotite lies on a small planet too near a hot star." (p. 366)

A class C desperate for work claims to be a mining town that can refine the carnotite by gaseous diffusion, mass spectography or mass chromatography.

I hoped to learn more about the work that Okies do from this hiring and bidding session in the jungle but this is as much information as I have been able to extract from the text. New York accepts two jobs in A Life For The Stars which I have yet to reread so some more information will emerge there. It is good that Blish added that extra volume to the series because Okie society ends far too quickly in Earthman, Come Home.