stared at me for a minute out of those pale-blue spacer’s eyes of his, until I figured he thought he had me catalogued.
Then he motioned me to the chair across from his at the small table. We sat for a few minutes in silence, sizing each other up.
“That’s a mighty nice looking freighter out there on pad seven,” I said at last. “Yours?”
He uncapped his glass, took a sip of rhial, snicked the cover back, and let the heady stuff evaporate in his mouth. He breathed in sharply in the approved manner, but he didn’t even shudder. He just nodded slowly, once.
That appeared to pass the conversational ball back to me. “I might have a cargo for you, if you can handle it,” I said. “I hear these Delta class ships can manage almost anything, but this is a rough one. The Annabelle is the only ship in the area built to take my stuff, and she’s grounded with transposer troubles.”
He cocked one sandy eyebrow at me. I interpreted this to be a request for the nature of my cargo, so I told him, and let him ponder about it for a while.
“Gasha root,” he said at last, and nodded once. “I can handle it. That’ll be easy, for Delta Crucis. Like you said, she can handle anything. Her last cargo was a live elephant.”
We completed our deal without much trouble. He drove a hard bargain, but a fair one, and he had plenty of self-confidence. He signed a contingent-on-satisfactory-delivery contract, and that’s unusual for a ship that’s handling Gasha. Hadn’t thought I’d be so lucky. Gasha is tricky stuff.
We went over to the Government office to complete the deal—customs arrangements, notarizations, posting bonds and so forth—but we finally signed the contract, all legal and binding. His name turned out to be Bart Hannah.
Then, by unspoken consent, we went back to the bar.
It was after noon, by that time, so I had a Scotch, and then I had another. I was so relieved to have found a ship for my cargo that I didn’t even think about lunch.
I got more and more mellow and talkative as time went by, but the skipper just sat there, breathing rhial. He didn’t seem to change a bit.
Something had been bothering me, though, and I finally figured out what it was. So I stopped talking about my farming troubles, and asked Captain Hannah a direct question.
“You say you carried an elephant?” I asked. “A live elephant? In a space ship?”
He nodded. “It’s an animal,” he said. “A very large animal. From Earth.”
“I know all about that,” I said. “We’re civilized here. We’re not just a bunch of back-planet hicks, you know. We study all about the Home Planet at school. But why—and how—would anyone take an elephant into space?”
He stared at me for a while, then took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “After all, it’s nothing to be really ashamed of.” He pondered for a full minute. “It all started just a few standard months ago, on Condor—over in Sector Sixty-four W.”
“Sixty-four W?” I broke in. “That’s clear over on the other side of the Galaxy.”
He looked at me for awhile, and then went on just as if I hadn’t spoken.
“I’d been doing all right with Delta Crucis,” he said, “and salting away plenty of cash, but I wasn’t satisfied. It was mostly short-haul stuff—ten or twenty light years—and it was mostly run-of-the-mill loads. Fleeder jewels, kharran, morab fur—that sort of thing, you know. I was getting bored. They said a Delta class freighter could carry just about anything, and I wanted to prove it. So when I heard that a rich eccentric, one planet out, on Penguin, might have an interesting job for me, I flitted right over.
“The Prinkip of Penguin wasn’t just rich. He was rich rich. Penguin has almost twice the diameter of this planet, but it’s light enough to have about the same surface gravity. To give you an idea, its two biggest bodies of water are about the size of the Atlantic Ocean, back on the Earth you’ve studied so much about. On Penguin they call them lakes. And the Prinkip owns the whole planet—free and clear. I should be so lucky with Delta Crucis.
“The Prinkip is a little skinny man, but that doesn’t keep him from having a large-size hobby to go with his large-size planet. The Prinkip collects animals—one from each planet in his sector. He had a zoo with nearly three hundred monsters in it—always a sample of the largest kind from whatever planet it came from.
“He showed me around. It was the damndest sight you ever saw. He had one animal called a pfleeg. It was almost two hundred feet long; it walked around on two legs and sang like a bird. He had another one that had two hundred and thirty-four legs on a side. I counted them. It had four sides. Didn’t care which one was up. He had animals under glass that didn’t breathe at all. He had one animal under a microscope that was about a thousandth of an inch long, but he told me that it was the biggest one on Fartolp. He had a big satellite stuck up overhead in a one-revolution-a-day orbit for animals that needed light gravity. He had thirty-seven more beasts in that. All in all, he had one animal from every planet in Sector Sixty-four W that had life. He figured that he needed just one more animal to complete his collection. He wanted a sample of a creature from the Home Planet; one live and healthy sample of Earth’s biggest animal. And he wanted to know if I could ship it to him.
“Well, I didn’t give the matter too much thought. After all, I said to myself, if somebody had managed a three hundred ton monster almost two hundred feet long, I ought to be able to manage a little bitty elephant. So I said yes, and I gave him a contingent-on-satisfactory-delivery contract, for one adult specimen of Earth’s largest animal, male or female, in good condition.
“It wasn’t until about that time that the Prinkip told me how that biggest monster had been shipped. It had arrived in a cardboard box, wrapped in cotton. It seems that pfleeg eggs weigh just a little under three ounces. Well, I’d been done but I still figured I could make delivery.”
He lapsed into silence for a moment, thinking deeply. “Did you know that there are two kinds of elephants on Earth, the African and the Indian, and that they aren’t exactly the same size?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Our schools don’t go that far,” I said.
He nodded. “Neither do ours. So I immediately bought an Indian elephant. They’re the kind, back on the Home planet, that you can find tame and easy to handle. They’re also the wrong kind. The only reason I didn’t head right back with it is that I was having trouble figuring out how to carry it in the Crucis. Even an Indian elephant weighs about six tons. At least, mine did. In itself, that’s not a very big load, but the trip back would take a good many months of subjective time, and of course elephants eat on subjective time. And how they eat! The food I carried would weigh the same as the elephant.
“I wondered how elephants would like weightlessness, so I took my Indian elephant up on a little jaunt around Earth’s satellite. The Moon, they call it. Elephants don’t like weightlessness at all.” He paused, and signaled the bartender for another drink. “I hope you never have to clean up after a space-sick elephant,” he said darkly.
“That meant that I’d have to put spin on the Crucis for the entire trip back to Penguin. It’s hard enough to try to navigate in hyperspace with spin on your ship, but that wasn’t the worst of
