The Robert Silverberg Science Fiction MEGAPACK® by Robert Silverberg Page A

idea, but a notion was forming in my showman’s mind. “No, I won’t destroy you. Tell me—how often can you do that trick?”
    “The tissues will regenerate in a few hours.”
    “Would you mind having to kill yourself every day, Heraal? And twice on Sundays?”
    Heraal looked doubtful. “Well, for the honor of my clan, perhaps—”
    Stebbins said, “Boss, you mean—”
    “Shut up. Heraal, you’re hired—seventy-five dollars a week plus expenses. Stebbins, get me a contract form—and type in a clause requiring Heraal to perform his suicide stunt at least five but no more than eight times a week.”
    I felt a satisfied glow. There’s nothing more pleasing than to turn a swindle into a sure-fire crowd-puller.
    “Aren’t you forgetting something, Corrigan?” asked Ildwar Gorb in a quietly menacing voice. “We had a little agreement, you know.”
    “Oh. Yes.” I moistened my lips and glanced shiftily around the office. There had been too many witnesses. I couldn’t back down. I had no choice but to write out a check for five grand and give Gorb a standard alien-specimen contract. Unless…
    “Just a second,” I said. “To enter Earth as an alien exhibit, you need proof of alien origin.”
    He grinned, pulled out a batch of documents. “Nothing to it. Everything’s stamped and in order—and anybody who wants to prove these papers are fraudulent will have to find Wazzenazz XIII first!”
    We signed and I filed the contracts away. But only then did it occur to me that the events of the past hour might have been even more complicated than they looked. Suppose, I wondered, Gorb had conspired with Heraal to stage the fake suicide, and run in the cops as well—with contracts for both of them the price of my getting off the hook?
    It could very well be. And if it was, it meant I had been taken as neatly as any chump I’d ever conned.
    Carefully keeping a poker face, I did a silent burn. Gorb, or whatever his real name was, was going to find himself living up to that contract he’d signed—every damn word and letter of it!
    We left Ghryne later that week, having interviewed some eleven hundred alien life forms and having hired fifty-two. It brought the register of our zoo—pardon me, the Institute—to a nice pleasant 742 specimens representing 326 intelligent life forms.
    Ildwar Gorb, the Wazzenazzian—who admitted that his real name was Mike Higgins, of St. Louis—turned out to be a tower of strength on the return voyage. It developed that he really did know all there was to know about alien life forms.
    When he found out I had turned down the four-hundred-foot-long Vegan because the upkeep would be too big, Gorb-Higgins rushed off to the Vegan’s agent and concluded a deal whereby we acquired a fertilized Vegan ovum, weighing hardly more than an ounce. Transporting that was a lot cheaper than lugging a full-grown adult Vegan. Besides which, he assured me that the infant beast could be adapted to a diet of vegetables without any difficulty.
    He made life a lot easier for me during the six-week voyage to Earth in our specially constructed ship. With fifty-two alien life forms aboard, all sorts of dietary problems arose, not to mention the headaches that popped up over pride of place and the like. The Kallerian simply refused to be quartered anywhere but on the left-hand side of the ship, for example—but that was the side we had reserved for low-gravity creatures, and there was no room for him there.
    “We’ll be traveling in hyperspace all the way to Earth,” Gorb-Higgins assured the stubborn Kallerian. “Our cosmostatic polarity will be reversed, you see.”
    “Hah?” asked Heraal in confusion.
    “The cosmostatic polarity. If you take a bunk on the left-hand side of the ship, you’ll be traveling on the right-hand side all the way there!”
    “Oh,” said the big Kallerian. “I didn’t know that. Thank you for explaining.”
    He gratefully took the stateroom we assigned him.
    Higgins