Mindswap by Robert Sheckley

fitted tolerably well except for the left front. He signed for and was given the tools of his new trade; a large plastic bag, dark glasses, a compass, a net, a pair of tongs, a heavy metal tripod, and a blaster.
    He and his fellow workers were then assembled in ranks, and received a hasty indoctrination lecture by the manager, a bored and supercilious Atreian.
    Flynn learned that his new home occupied an insignificant portion of space in the vicinity of Aldeberan. Melde (so named for its dominant race, the Meldens) was a thoroughly second-rate world. Its climate was rated 'intolerable' on the Hurlihan-Chanz Climatic Tolerance Scale; its natural-resource potentiality was classified 'submarginal', and its aesthetic-resonance factor (unweighted) was given as 'unprepossessing'.
    'Not the sort of place,' the manager said, 'that one would choose for a vacation, or indeed, for anything, except possibly the practice of extreme mortification.'
    His audience tittered uneasily.
    'Nevertheless,' the manager continued, 'this unloved and unlovely place, this solar misfortune, this cosmic mediocrity is home to its inhabitants, who consider it the finest place in the universe.'
    The Meldens, with a fierce pride in their only tangible asset, had made the best of their bad bargain. With the plucky determination of the eternally unlucky, they had farmed the edges of the rain forest and collected meagre low-yield ores from the vast blazing deserts. Their dogged persistence would have been inspiring had it not been so tedious; and their efforts might have been considered a tribute to the vaunting spirit of life had they not invariably ended in failure. Because, despite all their travail, the Meldens were able to achieve nothing better than slow starvation in the present, and the promise of racial degeneration and extinction in the future.
    'This, then, is Melde,' said the manager. 'Or rather, this is
what Melde would be
were it not for one additional factor. That factor spells the difference between success and failure. I refer, of course, to the presence of ganzer eggs.
    'Ganzer eggs!' the manager repeated. 'No other planet possesses them; no other planet so desperately needs them. Ganzer eggs! No object in the known universe so clearly epitomizes the quality of desirability. Ganzer eggs! Let us consider them, if you will.'
    Ganzer eggs were the sole export of the planet Melde. And luckily for the Meldens, the eggs were always in heavy use. On Orichades, ganzer eggs were utilized as love-objects; on Opiuchus II, they were ground up and eaten as a sovereign aphrodisiac; on Morichades, after consecration, they were worshipped by the irrational K'tengi. Many other uses could be cited.
    Thus, ganzer eggs were a vital natural resource, and the only one which the Meldens possessed. With them, the Meldens could maintain a tolerable degree of civilization. Without them, the race would surely perish.
    To acquire a ganzer egg, all one had to do was pick it up. But therein lay certain difficulties, since the ganzers, not unnaturally, objected to this practice.
    The ganzers were forest dwellers, remotely of lizard origin. They also were destroyers, clever at concealment, wily and ferocious, and completely untameable. These qualities rendered the collection of ganzer eggs extremely perilous.
    'It is a curious situation,' the manager pointed out, 'and not without its paradoxical overtones, that the main source of life on Melde is also the main cause of death. It is something for you all to think about as you begin your workday. And so I say, take good care of yourselves, keep guarded at all times, look before you leap, observe every precaution with your indentured lives, and also with the costly bodies which have been entrusted to your keeping. But in addition, remember that you must fulfill your norm, since every day's work unfulfilled by so much as a single egg is penalized by the addition of an additional week. Therefore, be careful, but not too careful,