them for a bucket of Phobonian sele-stones. Had to hold up his pants with a piece of rope for the rest of the trip, but when he got back to Earth he was rich. Me, I was wearing a belt. I've worn suspenders ever since, but I never got back to Phobos. Not that it would matter if I did; Interplanet's doing a regular trade in rubber there now, and it's down to twenty credits a pound or thereabouts."

Blake shook his head gloomily and then turned to me. He said, "Hank, what went on Ganymede? You were on that ship that went out there a few months ago, weren't you—the first one that got through? I've never read or heard much about that trip."

"Me either," Charlie said. "Except that the Ganymedeans turned out to be humanoid beings about four feet tall and didn't wear a thing except earrings. Kind of immodest, wasn't it?"

I grinned. "You wouldn't have thought so if you'd seen the Ganymedeans. With them, it didn't matter. Anyway, they didn't wear earrings."

"You're crazy," Charlie said. "Sure, I know you were on that expedition and I wasn't, but you're still crazy, because I had a quick look at some of the pictures they brought back. The natives wore earrings."

"No," I said. "Earrings wore them."

Blake sighed deeply. "I knew it, I knew it," he said. "There was something wrong with this trip from the start. Charlie pops off the first day with a yarn that should have been worked up to gradually. And now you say—Or is there something wrong with my sense of earring?"

I chuckled. "Not a thing, Skipper."

Charlie said, "I've heard of men biting dogs, but earrings wearing people is a new one. Hank, I hate to say it—but just consider it said."

Anyway, I had their attention. And now was as good a time as any.

I said, "If you read about the trip, you know we left Earth about eight months ago, for a six-months' round trip. There were six of us in the M-94; me and two others made up the crew and there were three specialists to do the studying and exploring. Not the really top-flight specialists, though, because the trip was too risky to send them. That was the third ship to try for Ganymede and the other two had cracked up on outer Jovian satellites that the observatories hadn't spotted from Earth because they are too small to show up in the scopes at that distance.

"When you get there you 

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