Hank was spinning quite a space lie--something
about earrings wearing their owners. The crew got
a boot out of the yarn--until they got to thinking.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Spring 1944.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
You know how it is when you're with a work crew on one of the
asteroids. You're there, stuck for the month you signed up for, with
four other guys and nothing to do but talk. Space on the little tugs
that you go in and return in, and live in while you're there, is at
such a premium that there isn't room for a book or a magazine nor
equipment for games. And you're out of radio range except for the usual
once-a-terrestrial-day, system-wide newscasts.
So talking is the only indoor sport you can go in for. Talking and
listening. You've plenty of time for both because a work-day, in
space-suits, is only four hours and that with four fifteen-minute
back-to-the-ship rest periods, so you actually work only three hours
and spend half that time getting in and out the airlock. But those are
union rules, and no asteroid mining outfit tries to chisel on them.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that talk is cheap on one of those
work crews. With most of the day to do nothing else, you listen to some
real whoppers, stories that would make the old-time Liars Clubs back on
earth seem like Sunday-school meetings. And if your mind runs that way,
you've got plenty of time to think up some yourself.
Charlie Dean was on our crew, and Charlie could tell some dillies. He'd
been on Mars back in the old days when there was still trouble with
the _bolies_, and when living on Mars was a lot like living on Earth
back in the days of Indian fighting. The _bolies_ thought and fought a
lot like Amerinds, even though they were quadrupeds that looked like
alligators on stilts--if you can picture an alligator on stilts--and
used blow-guns instead of bows and arrows. Or was it crossbows that the
Amerinds used against the colonists?
Anyway, Charlie's just finished a whopper that was really too good
for the first tryout of the trip. We'd just landed, you see, and were
resting up from doing nothing en route, and usually the yarns start
off easy and believable and don't work up to real depth-of-space lying
until along about the fourth week when everybody's bored stiff.
"So we took this head _bolie_," Charlie was ending up, "and you know
what kind of flappy little ears they've got, and we put a couple of
zircon-studded earrings in its ears and let it go, and back it went to
the others, and then darned if--" Well, I won't go on with Charlie's
yarn, because it hasn't got anything to do with this story except that
it brought earrings into the conversation.
When Charlie'd finished, Zeb Werrah stood up and sniffed.
"Air's getting kind of bad in here," he said. "Reckon I'll go out and
get my first shift over with. Anybody want to come?"
Ray went with him--our tug had equipment for only two men to work
outside at a time--and the rest of us helped them into suits and
out the lock, and then settled down for some more talk, there being
nothing else to do. Zeb's remark about the air had been just a crack at
Charlie's story, of course.
"How'd you happen to have zircon earrings along?" Blake Powers asked
Charlie, when things had quieted down again. Blake was skipper for the
voyages, but now that we were anchored down on our asteroid, he was
just one of the boys, until we took off again.
"In with the slum for trading," Charlie said. "When you're going to
any place in the system that might be inhabited and you don't know
by what kind of critters, you take a little of almost everything.
You never know what's going to strike the fancy of any civilized or
semi-civilized race you might hit.
"It might be mirrors--I've known dime-store mirrors to bring in twice
their weight in radium salt--or it might be paper clips or harmonicas,
or salted peanuts or plaster statuettes." He turned to me and said,
"You know that, Hank. You've been on a 'first' trip or two. So have
you, Blake."
* * * * *
Blake nodded. "I remember I was on the crew of the ship that landed
first on Phobos. You know what the Phobonians turned out to be like, of
course. They had about everything we had, and damned if we could do a
lick of trading until the captain of our ship put something back in a
box and happened to put a rubber band around the box. They went nuts;
they'd never seen anything that had _elasticity_. Rubber or anything
like it simply wasn't known on Phobos. We managed to find a few dozen
rubber bands in the ship's office and practically bought out Phobos
with them.
"One of the crew was wearing old-fashioned suspenders with elastic in
them, and he traded them for a bucket of Phobonian sele-stones. Had to
hold up his pants with a piece of rope for the rest of the trip, but
when he got back to Earth he was rich. Me, I was wearing a belt. I've
worn suspenders ever since, but I never got back to Phobos. Not that it
would matter if I did; Interplanet's doing a regular trade in rubber
there now, and it's down to twenty credits a pound or thereabouts."
Blake shook his head gloomily and then turned to me. He said, "Hank,
what went on Ganymede? You were on that ship that went out there a few
months ago, weren't you--the first one that got through? I've never
read or heard much about that trip."
"Me either," Charlie said. "Except that the Ganymedeans turned out to
be humanoid beings about four feet tall and didn't wear a thing except
earrings. Kind of immodest, wasn't it?"
I grinned. "You wouldn't have thought so if you'd seen the Ganymedeans.
With them, it didn't matter. Anyway, they didn't wear earrings."
"You're crazy," Charlie said. "Sure, I know you were on that expedition
and I wasn't, but you're still crazy, because I had a quick look at
some of the pictures they brought back. The natives wore earrings."
"No," I said. "Earrings wore _them_."
Blake sighed deeply. "I knew it, I knew it," he said. "There was
something wrong with this trip from the start. Charlie pops off the
first day with a yarn that should have been worked up to gradually. And
now you say--Or is there something wrong with my _sense of earring_?"