m in return. His eyes were
shining behind their spectacles, and he was swearing to himself in a
pleased monotone.

"Signal the ship and tell the Quack--if you can pry that hypochondriac
idiot away from his gargles and germicide sprays--to bring out a
live-specimen container," he called to Captain Corelli. "We've stumbled
onto something really new here, a conscious symbiosis between entirely
dissimilar life-forms! If the rest of the flora and fauna cooperate like
this...."

At the moment, Gibbons' discovery didn't register, because it was just
then that the first Balakian showed himself.

The native looked at first glance something like a wrinkled pink
octopus, standing three feet high and nearly as broad, and he walked in
a skip-a-step swing like a man on crutches because his three short legs
were set in a horizontal row. He had four arms to each side, the lower
ones meant for grasping and holding and the upper ones for manipulation.
He didn't have a head, exactly, but there was a face of sorts up near
the top of the body that looked like nothing so much as a politely
grinning Oriental's.

He wasn't armed, but I took no chances--I dropped my specimen kit and
yanked out the heat-gun that is a part of every S.E. field operative's
gear. Captain Corelli, who was on the point of calling the Quack at the
ship, took his thumb off the mike button and grabbed for his own
weapon. Gibbons, like a true scientist, stood by with his mouth open,
too interested to be scared.

Then the Balakian spoke, and Corelli and I gaped wider than Gibbons. As
I said before, Balak is some 20,000 light-years from Earth, and to our
knowledge we were the first human beings ever to come within a hundred
parsecs of the place.

"Please don't shoot, gentlemen," he said to us in Terran. "My name is
Gaffa, and I assure you that I am quite friendly."

* * * * *

I had to give Gibbons credit for being fast on his mental feet; he had
taken over before Corelli and I could get our mouths closed, and was
talking to the native as if this sort of thing happened every time we
made planetfall.

"You speak Terran fluently," Gibbons said. "Or is this some sort of
telepathic contact that creates the illusion of oral communication?"

The native grinned delightedly. "The contact is oral. We learned your
language from an independent planet-hunter named Haslop, who was
wrecked here some years ago."

In Solar Exploitations you lea