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 

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