A big man who stood over six feet tall, and weighed more than two hundred pounds, Jock had the potential for doing damage when he got angry.  His coal black hair looked like a shroud over his gray eyes at times like those.  If he had decided to take it out on the exploration ship bridge, he would have found lots of opportunities; the padded plastic command chair, the dozen video display screens that flanked it in a semi-circle, the carpeting under his feet -- in a rage, he could have trashed it all.
    But, Jock loved this ship.  Even if it had had windows to kick out, he wouldn't have done it.  Simply put, it was his life; the only thing he truly cared about in the universe.
    The only physical thing, anyway.
    He also loved his work.
    Unfortunately, at the moment it looked like he was about to
lose both.  So, what had gone wrong?  The navigation computer, again?  It did that, now and then.   Mostly, Jock liked surprises. He'd been married five times in his thirty-six years to prove it.
He'd once married a woman fifteen minutes after he'd met her, in fact.  That had been a drunk to remember.  Homeric, it was.

   To him, the NavCom was female.  It often took him places he hadn't planned to go.  Some of them were dangerous, some merely uncomfortable.  And some were interesting.   In any event, unlike women, the NavCom had a feedback  loop that was of some use.  If the re-entry clearance field Couldn't sweep out a sector big enough for the ship because the sector was in the center of a planet, the loop sensed the resistance and jumped ten more thousand kilometers.  Eventually, a jump or three down the sequence the ship would be in relatively clear space and could pop back to what was considered reality.
    That couldn't have happened this time.  Nothing that close out there.  There were two objects, though, some way  off. So, the NavCom had burped or something; missed the target by a country light-millennium.
    He punched up a visual mat to take a look at his present home away from home.  It wasn't his, Sol's galaxy, at least. That was all to the good.  He didn't want to go back there until he was at the end of his rope.  He smiled at the thought.  This was the end of his rope.  He'd had enough supplies for one, at most two, more jumps, and had programmed the hop from Messier 83 in Hydra to The Whirlpool in hopes of dredging up an opportunity on the way back.

    After a while, he found M33, then M31.       Triangulating, he got his position -- Maffei One, in the Local Group.  Now he took a look at his friendly neighborhood star with the baby Hubble.
It was an odd system.  The oddest he'd ever seen.  The sun was Sol-type, but there was only one planet!  It was a bit larger than Earth, with a foggy atmosphere, very much like a gas giant except the swirls weren’t the temperature of liquid helium.
It was a blaster in infra red.  Not quite as hot as hell.  But, only One planet?
    They'd hypnofed him lots of planetary system mechanics back at the academy, but nothing to explain this.  Finally, he invented a theory of his own. This, he decided was
an example of a double star system in which one of the stars ended up without the mass to switch on.  There must have been a transfer of material from one to the other at one time.
One hell of a lot of mass.  They were orbiting, no doubt, around some mathematical gravity center, like Earth and its moon.
    He centered the sun on his scope, gave the NavCom a minute, until it twanged, then punched in a short jump.  Bing!  He was there.  Three hundred A.U.s in no time at all.
It just felt like he'd eaten an overcooked steak.

    The planet now filling a video screen was pretty enough: all orange and pink and yellow. He brought up the imaging systems and got a snap of it all. Might be a sale to one of the sci-fi film companies in it. The swirls looked like the slice of cigar smoke you see when it passes through a sunbeam in a nice, cool, dark saloon.  Gassers usually had cores, but this was a tiny bugger as such things went.  Nevertheless, there might have been enough compression to create something solid down there.
    Something worth finding.
    It was a long shot, almost a ludicrous proposition, but it was all he had.  The odds are unimportant if you're betting your last dime, and that was exactly what Jock was doing.

Jock was the grandson of the last hardrock miner on Earth.  He had been bounced on the knee of a man who had dynamited quartz-bearing shows looking for gold.  That was why Jock had been bounced on only one knee.  The whole other leg had been blown off when a set of cracking powder went off a little early.
    He grinned at the memory of the story he'd heard so often.  Old Mac had been hauled off to the hospital, patched up and released in three weeks.  Then, he had hobbled back into the hills on a crutch and sluiced the show! On top of that, he'd found his leg,
wrapped it up and kept in the cooler until he came out.  Had it preserved and mounted like a trophy trout, and hung it over the mantle in his den.
    Tough old bastard.  He hadn't liked women, either, Lord bless him.

    Jock touched a symbol on the screen, backing the planet up. The image mat revealed several things about the place that had not been obvious before.  For one, it had a fine ring system; two great circular rainbows that wrapped around it in a bizarre manner. If he had been viewing it from above either of the poles, he wouldn't have been aware of it, but from his almost equatorial latitude, the rings looked like wings!
    He would have compared them to a dragonfly's double set but for the colors. Even though they were of equal length, because of the spectacular hues he couldn't help
but see them as the wings of a butterfly.
    A planet-sized butterfly!
    It was almost painful to tear himself away from just staring at the image of it on the screen.  And, even as he began to run his exploratory systems, he found himself
glancing back and back at it.  Not one of the planets in a thousand systems he'd visited had even compared to this. He began to feel irritated about it, in fact, though he couldn't imagine why.  When the read-outs began to chatter across the other screens, he turned to them in gratitude. He didn't want to feel whatever it was he was feeling.
    It was an interesting place, his instruments said.  The bands and swirls were silicas and sulfur compounds.  Not much free oxygen, though all that sand no doubt contained
plenty of it in bondage.  He noted a hint of bluish-white towards the poles.  Some kind of ice.  Let's see ... ammonium hydrosulphide crystals in the atmosphere, methane,
helium.  What the hell were those teardrop-shaped pale blue spots?

    Then the depth finder caught his eye.  It had been shooting a wide range of frequencies straight down through the soup.  Lots of plate movement.  The tremors gave him an
x-ray of the interior.  The innermost core had iron ... the liquid core was similar to earth's, too.  The mantle was nothing special.  And the crust was paydirt!
    It was 20% chromium.
    Jock was not a man to gasp, but he was one to whoop, and he did.  He'd just broken the bank.  This ball was the biggest bumper guard in the galaxy.  Nickel and iron by the
boxcar were to be had in the asteroid belt at home.  But the grayish-white crystalline element, atomic weight of 51.996, with a melting point of 1890 degrees centigrade, well, that didn't come in free sample bags in the mail.
    To a culture interested in corrosive-resistant, super strong metals -- a culture just beginning to go down to the stars in ships of steel --  this dwarf gasser was the answer to a prayer.  On the spot, he named the planet Buick.
    Old Mac had had one.  A 1953 three-holer, completely restored.  Yup, Buick was the name.
    The read-outs on the rings were coming in now.  He grudgingly turned back to them.  Now, he discovered why they looked like wings.  There were two sets, equatorially canted at opposite angles, and so in some kind of ridiculous balance with the gravitational field.
They actually threaded through each other. He could almost see them flapping.

    Right.  And some people heard the Horsehead Nebula whinny just before they flew into a sun.  Jock shook his head.  He didn't like this planet.  He loved this planet, but he didn't like it.  Best to get the job done and get the hell out of here.
    He punched in a set of coordinates near the equator and boosted out of orbit.  He was going to take a closer look.  The atmosphere got a bit gooey near the surface.  It  was like flying through a London fog.  But, down close, he got a topographical display that showed Buick wasn't just a big ball bearing.  It had pits and bumps.  The bumps were volcanoes.  Some of them had calderas the size of Rhode Island, and were active.
    There were, it turned out, large pockets of sulfur.  Some of them were mixed with the stuff erupting through the chromium-laden strata, which explained the blue spots
he had seen from orbit.  Magma-hot sulfur exploded into flame when it came in contact with the sparse free oxygen, or maybe the sand.  The volcanoes were bunsen burners big enough to melt New York.
    He found a quiet one that stuck out of the syrup and put his ship down on the rim.  Then he got to work in earnest.  He sent out some disposable probes to fly down the maw
s of active volcanoes or burrow in the ground.  Before they died, they sent back the information he needed.

    He had indeed found more chromium than his species could use in a thousand years, even if it found a way to turn the sun into a smelter.  They'd probably put his picture on a
one billion dollar bill.  They'd need an ore freighter to deliver all the one billion dollar bills his bonus would come to.
    It couldn't have come at a better time.

    Twelve years ago, when he had begun working the asteroid belt for IMC, his future had been bright.  Besides being a fanatic about work, Jock had displayed that rare nose for minerals that his grandfather had had.  Most people called it luck, but the old timers knew better.  Jock could smell paydirt a thousand parsecs away.
    When Sheckley invented the FTL drive in 2060, IMC bought the rights, built a Star Scout and sent their miracle worker, Jock, to the stars.  The result?  Every time Jock
popped back, IMC was richer.  But, then things had changed.  Following his fifth divorce, he lost it.  During the next two years, he had puked his guts out searching every system within a million light-years.
    What he found was nothing.
    The company was at first surprised, then sympathetic, then concerned.  This last time, they had been abrupt.
“These jaunts aren't cheap, Jarvis,” the chief of IMC's operations division had said.  “Find a way to get lucky, or you`re back on Earth.”
    He was not, they said, just going to be dumped, but rather retired.  He would receive enough to afford a simple life-style in Kentucky, at the end of a dirt road.  It was a determined Jock Jarvis who had leaped toward the stars following that conference.  But, up until now, his nose hadn't sniffed a load-bearing ore.

    Up until now.
    He went to a small locker and took out a bottle of two hundred year old scotch.  While Jock stayed drunk as long as he was adjacent to civilization, and any time he was near a woman, he drank for only one reason on the job --  when he had made a find.  As this was the find of all finds, he poured himself a serious blast, sat down in his pilot's couch and began to consider what country he wanted to buy.  He had finished the drink, and was about to close up shop and head for the barn when the critter screen pinged.  He blinked, wondering if it had been playing electronic footsy with the navigation computer.
    Life here?
    "Jesus!" he said when the thing emerged out of the soup.  What if it were dangerous?  What if it ate chromium steel for lunch?
    The image cleared as the beast approached.  It came trundling out of the quiescent caldera, heading directly towards the ship.  It was three meters long, segmented, dirty gray, stump-legged and hideous.  On what he took to be its head were dozens of bumps.  Probably whatever it used for eyes. When it got to within ten meters of the ship, it stopped.  After a moment, it arched back, raising the front half of its body.  Four spikes
emerged from the head.  They began waving around.  At first, the waving seemed random, like willows swaying in a wind. Then, he began to see a repetitive pattern.

    That's when it hit him.  What if the damned thing was intelligent?
    "Jesus," he said, again, stabbing a finger at the critter console
keyboard. "Even I can't be that unlucky."
    He didn't believe anything could develop audio communications ability in an atmosphere like this, and he was right.  Nothing but howling came from the speaker.  Next, he tried the spectrum analyzer.  At 7 kilohertz, he found what he was looking for. When the thing stopped its squawking for a moment, he sent a few quick bursts at the same frequency from the ship's radio dish.  He had no idea, of course, what he was saying, but the creature reacted with agitated antennas.
    Well, that didn't prove a damn thing.  Maybe he had just sounded like food. They played this game for a while, the thing echoing each new emission pattern that Jock sent.  Finally, Jock gave it up.  He sat back and refilled his glass.  The creature fell silent, too, though its antennas remained extended.  Jock studied it, thoughtfully sipping his scotch.  A test.  He needed a test. Something that would prove it one way or the other.
    First, he tried moving the ship a little.  The critter moved with it.
That didn't prove anything, either.  So, it parroted his radio honks and followed the ship around.  A monkey might do as well. How the hell could you tell an intelligent being from an animal?

    In the next hour, he ran through a hundred ideas, none of which would be conclusive.  He was staring at the scotch bottle when the answer hit him.  The label said the booze was a hundred and thirty proof.
    Mathematics.
    With trembling fingers, he sent out a series of blasts from the dish.  One burst, pause, two bursts, pause, three bursts.  There was a brief silence after he ceased, then the
beast emitted exactly the same series, finishing up with four blasts.  Would a parrot mimic someone like that the first time?
    Jock tried to swallow, but couldn't.  If he read the situation right, he had a disaster on his hands.
    Governments would come in on a thing like this.  Jock Jarvis would be a media hero, but out of the picture. Picture!  Cursing his laggard brain, Jock set the digital cameras in gear.  The sci-fi cinemaniacs would pay through the nose for this one! But, that was small potatoes compared to the chromium. With governments involved, there would be
treaties, modes of exchange, all that.  Jock's commissions came out of service to a private enterprise.  Governments give medals, not bonuses.  And, even if some of those gloriously
graft-minded  politicos would have a mind to work this show, they wouldn't dare.
    The damned greenies would have a field day with this!

It was the environmentalist movement that had shut down the last mining operation on earth-over a rare flea!  If they got wind of this, they'd close Buick down tighter than Old Mac's purse.
    Suddenly, he understood what he had to do.  He had to make a deal, himself.  He had to get this bugger's signature on the dotted line before the United Solar System got in on it.
The question was how?  He set down his scotch and replayed the "conversation."  He filtered it through first one than another of the ship's instruments.  He got whizzing sounds on one, sine waves on another, light patterns on the third.  After being lost in
concentration for a long time, he looked at the critter screen and discovered the creature was disappearing over the caldera rim.  Frantically, he punched out a pair of blasts from the radio dish. Two identical blasts came back, and the thing was gone.
    Jock sat back and stared at the empty screen.  Well, he thought finally, maybe it'll come back tomorrow.   "Tomorrow" being roughly ten hours away, Jock closed  everything down to monitor level and retired to his bunk  with his bottle. He leaned back and let his eyes rest on the picture of Patricia hanging over his feet, on the bulkhead.

     Patricia.
    Soft brown hair, eyes like Fall and a personality like a  whiff of distant perfume.  He had fallen into her pit on  the spot, and by the time she had finished with him and moved on to her next demolition project he was a disgusting,  weeping wreck.  He raised his glass and toasted her eternal twenty-six year old beauty.  He felt a great debt to her.  She had made him into a man.  If not for her, he wouldn't have learned that a woman's love is for sale to the highest bidder.  If not for her, he wouldn't have wandered the country in a drunken fog for a year-and ended up in a brawl in Pittsburgh.

They had let him out of jail after he posted a big enough bail to cover the damages to the saloon, the police car and the two cops.  It had taken every dime he had.  Sober for the moment, he had wandered the streets, looking for a way to kill himself.  Then, he saw a sight that changed his life.  A public monument.  It was all that was left of the glory days; a gigantic smokestack from an ancient steel foundry.
    It was so beautiful, it brought tears to his eyes.
    Then, he had noticed the tiny kiosk at the base of the stack.  The sign said: CAREERS IN MINING.  He walked over to the kiosk and took one of the brochures.

-----------------------------------------------------------
YOUR FUTURE IS IN THE STARS!
We are looking for adventurous men to mine the stars.  If
you have the equivalent of a high-school education and can
pass rigorous physical and psychological tests, you might be six
months away from a top paying, prestigious career in
off-planet mineral exploration and mining. The work is
hard, and sometimes dangerous, but the benefits are
outstanding.  Free life insurance, free health benefits,
orbiting recreational facilities, a month's shore
leave on the planet of your choice and a salary
most men only dream about.

If the worst thing you can think of is sitting behind a
desk, this is the life for you!

Contact:
INTERPLANETARY MINING CORPORATION
  2001 Asteroid Street
    Pittsburgh, PA

-----------------------------------------------------------
    A shiver had run through every inch of Jock's six foot frame.  He had always thought only engineers got to go to space.  He read the brochure again, just to be sure.  Now
he noticed a patch of small type at the bottom:  INTERPLANETARY MINING CORPORATION is an equal opportunity employer, but for reasons of potential physical damage to females during reproductive years, must restrict all actual mining operations to men only.
     For Jock, that had been it.  A dream come true.  The IMC staff said they had never seen a more dedicated student in their lives.  Jock was bright, but that alone didn't account for the rare honor he received.  It was his maniacal determination and commitment that earned him the exploration ship-a five level jump that normally took years of freighter and landing craft work to achieve.  Jock, the first in history to do it, got his crossed silver pick and shovel with four stars on graduation day!
    Now, relaxing on the bunk of his star-cruising coffin, with the acid, alien winds howling outside, he raised his glass to Patricia`s photo.
    "Thanks, Darlin'," he said.  "I owe it all to you."

    For the next four days, Jock tried to talk to the thing, or more to the point, figure out what they were saying to each other.  Each day, it crawled out of the volcano, sat up and waved its antennas.  Each day, Jock ran the incoming signals through every piece of equipment he had.  The main computer, a magbub unit now linked with all the electronic gadgetry in the ship, damned near smoked itself trying to figure out what the signals
meant, and got exactly nowhere.
    On the fifth night, Jock was ready to admit defeat.  He went to bed with his bottle and tried to convince himself that fame was more important than fortune.  He failed, but he finally fell into a disturbed, soggy sleep.
    Like so many ideas that came to Jock, this one popped out of nowhere-in this case in a dream.  He was running a sloop on the starboard tack between Io and Callisto, the sails billowing to the solar trade winds when he passed another craft, a twenty gunner with Gregory Peck pacing the quarter  deck.  High up in the rigging, a signalman was wigwagging  with two hand held flags.
    Jock woke up and sat up.
    Semaphores!  A third language!  By the time the critter showed up the next day, Jock and the main computer had come up with some ideas on the subject.  As the thing clomped into view, stopped and "stood" up, it did just what he had expected it to do.  It gave out two blasts like the ones Jock had sent the evening before.
    "Aloha," said Jock, out loud.  Hello and good-by.
    By the time the creature's rear end was dropping over the caldera rim, ten ship's hours later, the computer had broken the electric hoots down into component sine waves, and, wigwagging the few motile appendages on the ship,  managed to come up with
agreed upon electromagnetic patterns for each.  They had the beginnings of a vocabulary.   Three days later, with the computer acting as translator, they were talking!  This critter was a quick study.

    "Well, Ralph," said Jock, "can we make a deal, or not?"
    "I Jock," said Ralph, "still have difficulty understanding the point."
    "Money for property rights, mining rights, Ralph.  That's all."
    "Explain again what is money, Jock," said Ralph.
    Jock sighed. "Listen, Ralph, money is a medium of exchange.  When you want something, you give money to someone who has it, and they in turn give you the thing."
    "What would a person want, Jock?"
    "Christ, Ralph!  TV sets, a vacation in the Bahamas, tickets to a Broadway opening, women ... anything at all!"
    "I see," said Ralph, and was silent.  Then, it said, "And, you will give me this medium of exchange for the right to dig holes in my planet, is that correct?"
    "Exactly!" exclaimed Jock.

    "Where, Jock?"
    "Huh?" said Jock.  "Whatd'ya mean?"
    "The holes.  They will be dug where?"
    "In the ground-the physical surface of the planet."
    "I see," said Ralph.  "Or, at least I begin to see.  This place I live is a hole, is it not?"
     "The caldera?  The crater?  Why, yes, I suppose so.  A kind of hole.  A very big one, in fact."
    "Well," said Ralph.  "Well, well.  Now I understand this thing in part.  It would be good for my species.  Most of the holes on my planet throw out magma.  These holes of yours, Jock, would they also throw out magma?"
    Jock smiled.  "Not most of them.  We might hit a fissure now and then, but most of the time no magma."
    "That is good, then," said Ralph.  "It would provide more living space for the primaries.  Living space has been a problem.  Yes, we will discuss this with the secondaries, Jock.  I will tell you of their decision tomorrow."

With Jock's hopes riding on its segmented back, Ralph then turned and walked over the rim, hooting twice as it disappeared.  Jock rubbed his hands together in glee.  He
felt a little guilty, of course.  He hadn't mentioned that the hole would grow until all there was was a hole.
     He caught himself in mid-thought.
    Now, where did that idea come from?  IMC didn’t eat worlds.  Most of this globe was worthless and would go untouched.  But, ten percent of this planet – the prime sites - would be chewed up and spit into space, wouldn’t they?  And, they ought to be! Business is business.   It would leave Ralph and friends some legendary holes, all right.  Well, that wasn't his problem.  They, whoever they were, could figure that one out later.  Take Ralph and his friends to a preserve someplace; maybe find a similar, but less valuable planet for them.
    That night, after drinking enough scotch to dull the strange images that had passed through his mind, Jock slept the peaceful sleep of the sure-to-be-wealthy.  The next day,
Ralph came with the good news.  The secondaries would, indeed like more holes on Buick!  How, they wanted to know, did one perform the ritual of agreement to a business contract?

    "All I need is the audio signature of the honcho on the ship recorder's dotted line, Ralph, and you're going to have more holes than you know what to do with," said Jock.
    "By 'honcho,'" asked Ralph, "do you mean the leader?"
    "Right," said Jock. How the hell did he figure that out?
    "We don't have one," said Ralph.
    That stopped Jock for a moment.  "Don't have-a leader?  What do you mean?  You govern by a committee?  Direct vote?"
    "We do not have a government, Jock."
    "No government?"  Jock had never heard of such a thing.  "Well, how do you get things done?  Settle disputes, organize trade, all that stuff?"
    "We do not do those things, Jock," said Ralph.
    "Well, what about these 'secondaries?'" said Jock. "The way you check things out with them, they must be in charge."
    "In charge?" said Ralph.  "No, Jock.  I cannot speak with them as I can with the others ... not at any distance.  One of us must be in close proximity to communicate with
them, therefore. It does not matter which one of us."

    Ralph had a kind of telepathy!  His brain had some sort of duplexer, some kind of harmonic cavities, that allowed radio-based as well as another kind of networking!  No wonder he was a linguistic genius-he was thinking in parallel with an entire species!
    "You can think with those of your own kind?" he asked.
    "With the primaries, yes," said Ralph. "Not, as I have said, fully with the secondaries."
    Jock mulled it over.  Ralph waited patiently.  Finally, Jock said, "Can the secondaries do that with each other?  Telepathic communication, I mean?"
    "Yes, Jock."
    "And the one you talked to agreed to my terms?"
    "Basically, yes, Jock."
    "Well, then!" exclaimed Jock.  "We have a deal.  If one telepathic agrees to terms, it must mean that by definition they all do!  And, since they said yes to you, you can sign
the papers, so to speak.  For everybody!"
    "What are papers, Jock?  Your computer has a reference to a different kind of storage than its own--hardcopy, it calls it."

    Was Ralph holding separate conversations with the magbub, now?  He must be.  That meant everything in there was accessible to him, and by definition to all the "primaries and secondaries," wherever they were.  The location of Earth, the history of mining, everything.
    "Just a figure of speech," said Jock, suddenly eager to hurry on.  "They used to make contracts out of the pulp of trees-plants, uh, non-sentient living things.  We do it
with recordings, now.  So, I am recording this.  Do you agree to the terms as proposed, Ralph?"
    "No, Jock, we don't."
    For some reason, Jock was pleased by that answer. He frowned and went on.
    "Uh, well, what's your counter offer?  What do you want?"
    "We have decided that we shall have no use for the money, Jock.  Would you like to keep our share?"
    "Don't feel right about it, Ralph, and I can't believe I'm saying that, but it's true.  But, if you say so, I'll find some good use for it."
    "Fine, Jock.  Now, the last requirement we have is simple."
    "Good.  And, that is?"
    "Will you marry us?"

    Jock's mouth dropped open, very slowly.  Then a chuckle began in the pit of his soul and began to build. Eventually, it burst out as a full blown laughter.  He started banging his
knee and shaking his head.  Tears came to his eyes and he laughed on.  Finally, he began to subside.
    "That was an indication of emotional joy, was it not, Jock?" said Ralph.  "Is that your manner of assent to such requests?"
    Jock shook his head and started laughing again.  It was a long time before he could calm down enough to speak. 
    "Lord, Lord, Ralph!" he said through gasps of breath. "As the most widely traveled man of my species, I thought I'd heard damned near everything-but you take the cake.  Honest to God, Ralph, I never will be surprised at anything, again."
    "Thank you, I believe," said Ralph.  "Do we have a deal?"
    "Uh," began Jock, "well, nothing personal Ralph.  You're about the handsomest looking bug that ever proposed to me.  If I could ever marry an alien insect, it would sure as hell be you.  No doubt of it."
    Jock fell silent.  Some of his marriages were looking less complicated than this situation at the moment. Come to think of it, he had married a couple of alien insects. Ralph was waiting, patiently.
    "Hell, Ralph," Jock said, finally, "You're a guy!"

    "Just a second," said Ralph.  "I am receiving a message from my kind.  They are communicating with the secondaries. Yes.  Oh, can that be done?  I see.  All right.  Jock?"
    "Here, Ralph."
    "I have just been informed that the secondaries have a rarely utilized method for prematurely elevating me to secondaryhood.  I would be female, then.  Does that satisfy
your requirements?"
    "A sex change operation?" asked Jock.
    "No, Jock," said Ralph, "it is not a medical procedure.  It is a-becoming, is the closest term of yours that I have run across.  I will search your computer memory for a more
accurate term, if you wish."
    "No!" exclaimed Jock.  "Uh, I get the idea.  Let me think for a minute."
    "As you wish, Jock."
    What, Jock suddenly wondered, would Old Mac do in a situation like this?  If this thing began to rummage around in the computer, all sorts of nasty things could happen.  Cross references to history, read warfare, would be bad enough, but if Ralph ever hit pest control, it would certainly be the end of Jock Jarvis, trillionaire.
    "Listen, Ralph-" he began impulsively.  "About this marriage.  You're not thinking about any, oh, physical contact, are you?"

    "Sex?" said Ralph.  ~Oh, no, of course not.  That would be impossible even if it wasn`t lethal, which it would be."
    So, it was some sort of platonic thing, then.  Maybe a ritual bonding.  It was, Jock realized suddenly, a kind of contract.  Actually, marriage had been a business
arrangement for more years than it had involved love, whatever that was.  He made up his mind.
    "Okay, Ralph.  We'll do it.  But, I would like the answer to one question, though."
    "Certainly, Jock.  What is it?"
    "Why?"
    "The marriage?  Oh, of course.  You remember how difficult it was for me to understand your currency system?"
    "Sure."
    "Well, with the help of the secondaries, I finally understood.  They realized it had a parallel in our culture."
    "Money?  I thought you didn't use it."
    "We don't.  Not the kind you use.  But, we do have something that we barter for-various, well, things.  That's about as close as I could get to it.  We have a medium of
exchange."
    "I'll be damned," said Jock.  "What is it?"
    "Love."

    Jock was speechless.
    "We'll be married tomorrow," said Ralph.  "Will you come to the ... special place?  I believe I have sufficient rapport with your computer to transmit a map."
    "Sure," said a numb Jock.  "Wouldn't miss it for love nor money."  He grinned.  In this case, there wasn't any difference between the two.  Not, he further reflected, that there ever had been, except in the minds of fools.
    "Good," said Ralph.  "Until tomorrow, then."

    Jock watched the giant bug disappear.  Then, he headed for the cupboard and got out the emergency scotch.  After that, he got out the emergency, emergency scotch.  He never
did go to sleep, as far as he knew.  When morning dawned, he was still roaring drunk.  At the appointed hour, he crawled into his EVA suit and left the ship.
    Being drunk helped under the circumstances.  The swirling kaleidoscopic fog he walked in reminded him of other drunks, not to mention an acid trip he took with a bunch of weirdos, once, in San Francisco.  He made his way over the rim and down the gentle slope of the extinct volcano.  About a kilometer down, he came to an outcrop of rock that looked
like a bunch of bananas.  At the base of it he found the trail, and followed it downwards for some distance, to the mouth of a cave.
    He stopped there.  He started to turn around and leave.  He stopped again.  He growled inside the helmet and moved forward. Whistling "Here comes the bride" he stepped inside.
    The cave glowed.  It was so large he couldn't tell how large it was.  Reference points that looked like nearby stalactites could just as easily be hanging cones the size of a skyscraper some kilometer hence.  As he walked ever more deeply, however, it began to narrow down.  The dimensions about him came clear when, a half a kilometer in, he came to the back of it.
    They were waiting for him.

    The glow was soft, but enough to make them out.  Hundreds of them, all segmented, clod-footed beasties like Ralph.  Their antennas were up and wiggling.  Then they stopped. Jock switched on his helmet communications system.  He had aimed the ship dish at the far side of the volcano, figuring to bounce a signal in and out of this cave.  It worked.
    "Ralph?" he said.
    "Hello, Jock," came the reply.
    "Which one are you, Ralph?" said Jock.
    "Right in front of you, my darling," said Ralph.  His voice was changing.  It was growing softer, sweeter.  Jock looked around, but there was no one in front of him.  Then, he looked up, and there was Ralph.  He was hanging from one of those stalactites, all wrapped in what Jock took to be some kind of ceremonial robe.  It glistened, as if it were made of silk.
    Now, the assembled bug throng began to gently wiggle their antennas.  It translated through the computer as a rising and falling buzz-yet, not a buzz, exactly.  A humming buzz was as close as Jock could get to it.  After a few minutes of this, they stopped.  As one, they all aimed their antennas at Ralph.  The robe around Ralph began to split down the middle.  With a shock, Jock suddenly realized what it actually was: a cocoon!  And, as he watched, the cocoon fell away,  revealing a metamorphosed wad of bright colors, like Christmas tissue paper all wet and rolled up.

    Now, it began to stickily unfold. Transfixed, Jock stared, only vaguely aware of the resurgent chanting from the multitude of bugs.  Like a series of sequential cartoon pages flipped by hand, Ralph's new body, apparently filling with liquid, unwrapped itself.  In a few minutes, it was finished.  Ralph had become the most beautiful butterfly Jock had ever seen.  He was, no, she was a flying rainbow, with wings like the rings around the planet.  The colors were  irridescent, shimmering, flowing.  They shifted and twisted  like the colored storms in the atmosphere above.
    It was lovely.  Ralph was lovely.
    Now, whispers began to echo in Jock's brain.  Then, the whispers turned to colors, then to scents, then to sounds, then to sensations.  They merged into a symphony of  memories, and Jock, like a drowning man, began to see his life pass before him. His mother, long dead, his father, old Mac, the fights, the drunks, the women, the places-God, the places!  Arctic summer midnight fogs, Kansas wheat fields, Arizona deserts--and on into space.  The hundred planet system of Dubhe, the blue-white nursery of the Crab, seas of molten mercury on a planet without a name in the Virgo Cluster ... all of it, everything, flashed by.  He saw himself waking up from a jump.  He saw the planet with butterfly wings.  He retraced the journey to the cave.

    They were back.
    "Thank you, my husband," said Ralph.  That was the last thing Jock remembered until he woke up next to the ship. Within an hour of that, he was once more floating above the planet.

"When will you be returning to receive your end of the bargain?" said Ralph's lovely new voice through the computer.  Jock, feeling very calm, looked at the biggest bonanza he would ever likely find.  A chromium planet.
    "Ralph?" he said.
    "Yes, Jock?"
    "Was that--was what happened, well, like you are?  Like it is to be telepathic, I mean?"
    "Yes, Jock."
    "I didn't see any of, your memories."
    "No, you didn't.  We thought it might damage you."
    "But," said Jock, "you did let me, well, feel it a little, didn't you?  You’ve been letting me do that since we met, haven’t you?  But, more, this time."
    "Yes."
    "It was--it wasn't, lonely."
    "We are glad," said Ralph.
    Jock stared at the beautiful planet.  In his mind's eye, he could see the fantastic fleet approaching, watch the giant cargo ships disgorge their machines, feel the roar and heat of the rockets as the blasters and diggers and scoopers and conveyors crashed into the atmosphere, their jaws opening hungrily.
    "Ralph," he said, softly and tenderly, "I want a divorce."

(C) copyright 1999 Larry Leonard