"I bet you're wondering how I got like this," Sam chuckled.
"Why—yes," the barber murmured. "That thought did occur to me. Ah—I don't suppose—ah—there are many barbers where you come from."
"That's the funny part of it," Sam replied. "We used to have a barber, a darn good one, too. Yup, he was one of the best in the business. I guess that was Roy's trouble. He was too good."
"But—but—how?" the barber interrupted.
"The hair?" Sam asked. "I was coming to that. It all started three years ago when we first landed on Procyon IV. A meteorite had plowed in there some time in the past and that was what we were after. The original survey had found fragments of nearly pure iridium in a crater and you know how hard that stuff is to get. The survey figured that the whole meteorite was composed of iridium and, as it turned out, they were right."
"Mr. Thurwinker, the government agent," Sam continued, "started out right away dickering with the natives. It wasn't too hard to do cause they look a lot like us, considering what most of the inhabitants of other planets look like. Anyway, Thurwinker traded off half a ship load of gew-gaws and we got the crater.
"Our supplies started coming in and on the first ship was Roy, the barber. We built up a little town, the typical mining settlement, and got things pretty much underway. It took us about two months to get our soundings all lined up and then we found that the meteorite had struck the planet at quite an angle. It hadn't gone too far down but it had gone so far to one side that the thing was completely outside the crater. Mr. Thurwinker tried to bargain with the natives for the ground directly over the meteorite, but he didn't get very far. They didn't like him much and I can't say as I blame them. The natives let him know that they wanted to be left alone so we stayed in our little town.
"Well, there wasn't much of anything to do, so most of us just sat around, waiting for Thurwinker to make some kind of a bargain. He finally persuaded the Chief of the natives to talk the situation over with him."
Goma growled deeply in his barrel chest. "You have land. Why want you more?"