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won’t let me really exploit a being, but I don’t believe in throwing money away, either.
    The next applicant was a beefy ursinoid from Aldebaran IX. Our outfit has all the ursinoids it needs or is likely to need in the next few decades, and so I got rid of him in a couple of minutes. He was followed by a roly-poly blue-skinned humanoid from Donovan’s Planet, four feet high and five hundred pounds heavy. We already had a couple of his species in the show, but they made good crowd-pleasers, being so plump and cheerful. I passed him along to Auchinleck to sign at anything short of top rate.
    Next came a bedraggled Sirian spider who was more interested in a handout than a job. If there’s any species we have a real oversupply of, it’s those silver-colored spiders, but this seedy specimen gave it a try anyway. He got the gate in half a minute, and he didn’t even get the handout he was angling for. I don’t approve of begging.
    The flow of applicants was steady. Ghryne is in the heart of the Caledonia Cluster, where the interstellar crossroads meet. We had figured to pick up plenty of new exhibits here and we were right.
    It was the isolationism of the late twenty-ninth century that turned me into the successful proprietor of Corrigan’s Institute, after some years as an impoverished carnival man in the Betelgeuse system. Back in 2903, the World Congress declared Terra off bounds for non-terrestrial beings, as an offshoot of the Terra for Terrans movement.
    Before then, anyone could visit Earth. After the gate clanged down, a non-terrestrial could only get onto Sol III as a specimen in a scientific collection—in short, as an exhibit in a zoo.
    That’s what the Corrigan Institute of Morphological Science really is, of course. A zoo. But we don’t go out and hunt for our specimens; we advertise and they come flocking to us. Every alien wants to see Earth once in his lifetime, and there’s only one way he can do it.
    We don’t keep too big an inventory. At last count we had 690 specimens before this trip, representing 298 different intelligent life forms. My goal is at least one member of at least 500 different races. When I reach that, I’ll sit back and let the competition catch up—if it can.
    After an hour of steady work that morning, we had signed on eleven new specimens. At the same time, we had turned away a dozen ursinoids, fifty of the reptilian natives of Ghryne, seven Sirian spiders, and no less than nineteen chlorine-breathing Procyonites wearing gas masks.
    It was also my sad duty to nix a Vegan who was negotiating through a Ghrynian agent. A Vegan would be a top-flight attraction, being some four hundred feet long and appropriately fearsome to the eye, but I didn’t see how we could take one on. They’re gentle and likable beings, but their upkeep runs into literally tons of fresh meat a day, and not just any old kind of meat either. So we had to do without the Vegan.
    “One more specimen before lunch,” I told Stebbins, “to make it an even dozen.”
    He looked at me queerly and nodded. A being entered. I took a long close look at the life form when it came in, and after that I took another one. I wondered what kind of stunt was being pulled. So far as I could tell, the being was quite plainly nothing but an Earthman.
    He sat down facing me without being asked and crossed his legs. He was tall and extremely thin, with pale-blue eyes and dirty-blond hair, and though he was clean and reasonably well dressed, he had a shabby look about him. He said, in level Terran accents, “I’m looking for a job with your outfit, Corrigan.”
    “There’s been a mistake. We’re interested in non-terrestrials only.”
    “I’m a non-terrestrial. My name is Ildwar Gorb, of the planet Wazzenazz XIII.”
    I don’t mind conning the public from time to time, but I draw the line at getting bilked myself. “Look, friend, I’m busy, and I’m not known for my sense of humor. Or my generosity.”
    “I’m not