The Science Fiction anthology - Andre Norton

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“Hm. Maybe we can do something there too.”

      His own metamorphosis took a lot longer than five hours; he had a much bigger job of alterations to finish. It was nearly two months before he got back to the plant.

      He peered in through the window at Detrick, who’d inherited Amos’ old office. Detrick was chewing out a salesman. Amos knew what would be happening now; Derrick’s ambitious but unsound expansion would have gotten the division all tangled up. In fact, with his sharp new eyes, Amos could read part of a letter from Buffalo that lay on the desk. It was quite critical of Detrick’s margin of profit.

      The salesman Detrick had on the carpet was a good man, and Amos wondered if he was to blame for whatever it was about. Maybe Detrick was just preparing to throw him to the wolves. A man could hang on a long time like that, shifting the blame to his subordinates.

      The salesman was finally excused, and Detrick sat alone with all the frustration and selfish scheming plain on his face. No, Amos thought, I’m not going to turn this drug loose on the world for a while. Not while there are people like Detrick around.

      There were no other pigeons on the window ledge except himself and Alice; the rest had stopped coming when Amos disappeared and the feeding ended. For that matter, they tended to avoid him and Alice, possibly because of the abnormal size, especially around the head, and the other differences.

      He noticed that Alice was changing the color of her feet again. Just like a woman, he thought fondly.

      “Come on, Pigeon,” he said, “let’s go somewhere else. This tightwad Detrick isn’t going to give us anything to eat.”

      A delta class freighter isn’t pretty to look at, but it can be adapted to carry most anything, and occasionally even to carry it profitably. So when I saw one I didn’t recognize sitting under the gantry at Helmholtz Spaceport, I hurried right over to Operations.

      It looked as if I might be able to get my Gasha root off-planet before it started to spoil, after all.

      It was the Delta Crucis, they told me. She was a tramp, and she hadn’t yet been signed for a cargo. The skipper was listed as his own agent. They told me where they thought I could find him, so I drifted over to the Spaceport bar, and looked around.

      I found my man quickly enough. He had the young-old look of a deep spacer. He wore a neat but threadbare blue uniform, with the four broad gold rings of command—rather tarnished—on each sleeve. He had a glass of rhial—a liquor that was too potent for my taste—in front of him at ten o’clock in the morning, and that wasn’t a good sign. But he looked sober enough.

      So I picked up a large schooner of beer at the bar and strolled over to his table in the far corner away from the window.

      “Mind if I join you?” I asked casually. “I hate to drink alone.”

      He 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.

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