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

really had a way with the creatures, all right. He made us look like fumbling amateurs, and I had been operating in this business more than fifteen years.
    Somehow Higgins managed to be on the spot whenever trouble broke out. A high-strung Norvennith started a feud with a pair of Vanoinans over an alleged moral impropriety—Norvennithi can be very stuffy sometimes. But Gorb convinced the outraged being that what the Vanoinans were doing in the washroom was perfectly proper. Well, it was, but I’d never have thought of using that particular analogy.
    I could list half a dozen other incidents in which Gorb-Higgins’ special knowledge of outworld beings saved us from annoying hassles on that trip back. It was the first time I had ever had another man with brains in the organization, and I was getting worried.
    When I first set up the Institute back in the early 2920s, it was with my own capital, scraped together while running a comparative biology show on Betelgeuse IX. I saw to it that I was the sole owner. And I took care to hire competent but unspectacular men as my staffers—men like Stebbins, Auchinleck, and Ludlow.
    Only now I had a viper in my bosom, in the person of this Ildwar Gorb-Mike Higgins. He could think for himself. He knew a good racket when he saw one. We were birds of a feather, Higgins and I. I doubted if there was room for both of us in this outfit.
    I sent for him just before we were about to make Earthfall, offered him a few slugs of brandy before I got to the point. “Mike, I’ve watched the way you handled the exhibits on the way back here.”
    “The other exhibits,” he pointed out. “I’m one of them, not a staff man.”
    “Your Wazzenazzian status is just a fiction cooked up to get you past the immigration authorities, Mike. But I’ve got a proposition for you.”
    “Propose away.”
    “I’m getting a little too old for this starcombing routine,” I said. “Up to now, I’ve been doing my own recruiting, but only because I couldn’t trust anyone else to do the job. I think you could handle it, though.” I stubbed out my cigarette and lit another. “Tell you what, Mike—I’ll rip up your contract as an exhibit, and I’ll give you another one as a staffman, paying twice as much. Your job will be to roam the planets finding new material for us. How about it?”
    I had the new contract all drawn up. I pushed it toward him, but he put his hand down over mine and smiled amiably as he said, “No go.”
    “No? Not even for twice the pay?”
    “I’ve done my own share of roaming,” he said. “Don’t offer me more money. I just want to settle down on Earth, Jim. I don’t care about the cash. Honest.”
    It was very touching, and also very phony, but there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t get rid of him that way—I had to bring him to Earth.
    The immigration officials argued about his papers, but he’d had the things so clearly faked that there was no way of proving he wasn’t from Wazzenazz XIII. We set him up in a key spot of the building.
    The Kallerian, Heraal, is one of our top attractions now. Every day at two in the afternoon, he commits ritual suicide, and soon afterward rises from death to the accompaniment of a trumpet fanfare. The four other Kallerians we had before are wildly jealous of the crowds he draws, but they’re just not trained to do his act.
    But the unquestioned number-one attraction here is confidence man Mike Higgins. He’s billed as the only absolutely human life form from an extraterrestrial planet, and though we’ve had our share of debunking, it has only increased business.
    Funny that the biggest draw at a zoo like ours should be a home-grown Earthman, but that’s show business.
    A couple of weeks after we got back, Mike added a new wrinkle to the act. He turned up with a blond showgirl named Marie, and now we have a woman from Wazzenazz too. It’s more fun for Mike that way. And downright clever.
    He’s too clever, in fact. Like I said, I