He nodded. "It's an animal," he said. "A very large animal. From Earth."
"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.