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“Well, I didn’t give the matter too much thought. After all, I said to myself, if somebody had managed a three hundred ton monster almost two hundred feet long, I ought to be able to manage a little bitty elephant. So I said yes, and I gave him a contingent-on-satisfactory-delivery contract, for one adult specimen of Earth’s largest animal, male or female, in good condition.

“It wasn’t until about that time that the Prinkip told me how that biggest monster had been shipped. It had arrived in a cardboard box, wrapped in cotton. It seems that pfleeg eggs weigh just a little under three ounces. Well, I’d been done but I still figured I could make delivery.”

He lapsed into silence for a moment, thinking deeply. “Did you know that there are two kinds of elephants on Earth, the African and the Indian, and that they aren’t exactly the same size?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Our schools don’t go that far,” I said.

He nodded. “Neither do ours. So I immediately bought an Indian elephant. They’re the kind, back on the Home planet, that you can find tame and easy to handle. They’re also the wrong kind. The only reason I didn’t head right back with it is that I was having trouble figuring out how to carry it in the Crucis. Even an Indian elephant weighs about six tons. At least, mine did. In itself, that’s not a very big load, but the trip back would take a good many months of subjective time, and of course elephants eat on subjective time. And how they eat! The food I carried would weigh the same as the elephant.