Holy shit. That was characteristically brilliant. Typical Asimov.

That Merchant, though. He sounded... happy.

Funny I may not have read that one... but maybe I did. Who knows, all of his short, and not so short stories were prized by me back in the day. That could have been in one of the short story collections I read so many decades ago; it had familiar tropes... but I still pretty much hung on every word. If I read it once long ago, it was still new now.

Damn,

you don't tug on superman's cape

you don't spit into the wind

you don't pull the mask of the old lone ranger

and you don't mess around with slim