"Laugh all you want. But for hopeless sinners like me, this is as close to the heavenly gates as I'm ever gonna get." Maybe he's right. Maybe smoking is some sort of religious thing. I remember the first time Sandoor smoked. We had just finished our first sweep. I'll never forget the day. Sandoor took off his helmet and literally poured the perspiration out of it. His face was as white as his helmet. He was trembling as he barked out orders for the cashier to give him a pack of cigarettes. He sat down and proceeded to chain smoke the entire pack.
I felt pity for this lone figure who sat gazing from one object to another, quietly trying to catch butterfly-like thoughts with a ragged net in his own private haze. Sandoor never could adjust to the mine-sweeping life. It twisted the cables inside the core of his being almost to the breaking point.

The plane was due to arrive in XOMA in twenty minutes. Sandoor told three of the monitors to brief me on the plan. The price of a stock price for the city of XOMA was currently 18 credits a share, down twenty points from its yearly high of 38 credits. As was shown to me with alarming clarity, a series of epidemics have taken close to fifteen-percent of the work force out of circulation. Sandoor's eyes started to bulge as the announcer described the increases in medical costs to the city.

"That there is the trick, my friend, look at these charts." Sandoor asked the monitor to display a graph comparing the increase in medical expenses along with the decrease in the stock price. "Do you see that? For every increase of 10,000 credits in medical expenses, the stock price has decreased one credit a week." Soon graphs were popping up all around me showing correlations all linking medical costs with the decrease in value of XOMA stock.

"So, its pretty clear, I said. "They are suffering from some sort of illness. We need to send in a medical team to sort it out; find a cure so these poor sons-of-bitches can go back to work." Sandoor snickered at what I considered to be a fairly reasonable solution.

"Who the hell's gonna sit around and wait? Do you think people are going to sit quietly and watch the stock price continue to dip while a team of medical experts analyzes the problem? Hell, no."

I crossed my legs and took out another tobacco tube as Sandoor showed me another set of graphs and charts (what Sandoor liked to call "G's and ch's" pronounced Geez and Cheeze).

"The basic scenario looks like this: as you can see, we figure the stock price will never go lower than 15 credits per share because that's the level which historically pushes the majority of the share holders to action: to taking the situation into their own hands. At 15 credits a share, the normal forces of correction take over. The share holders pull the problem out at its roots without our help. Someone's got to keep the guillotine operators employed, right? Okay, so what we do is we come in with a buy and resolve strategy: We buy a block of 1,000,000 shares at 18 while simultaneously taking care of their medical problems. We sit back and watch the share price shoot up with the combined effects of the increased buying and the resolution of their problems. As you can see within one week the stock should soar back to at least thirty points at which point we sell off the 1,000,000 shares and go to the Caribbean. Voila!"

"So it's buy low, sell dear," I said.