"Shut up. Heraal, you're hired--$75 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 rung 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 400-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 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 highly 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 cleverly 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 blonde 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 appreciate a good confidence
man, the way some people appreciate fine wine. But I wish I had left
Ildwar Gorb back on Ghryne, instead of signing him up with us.
Yesterday he stopped by at my office after we had closed down for the
day. He was wearing that pleasant smile he always wears when he's up to
something.
He accepted a drink, as usual, and then he said, "Jim, I was talking to
Lawrence R. Fitzgerald yesterday."
"The little Regulan? The green basketball?"
"That's the one. He tells me he's only getting $50 a week. And a lot of
the other boys here are drawing pretty low pay too."
My stomach gave a warning twinge. "Mike, if you're looking for a raise,
I've told you time and again you're worth it to me. How about twenty a
week?"