"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.