 What did the Kallerian and the Stortulian have in common?
My three staff men, Auchinleck, Stebbins and Ludlow, walked shieldwise in front of me. The aliens came in every shape and form, in all colors and textures—and all of them eager for a Corrigan contract. The Galaxy is full of bizarre beings, but there's barely a species anywhere that can resist the old exhibitionist urge. The name of the planet was MacTavish IV (if you went by the official Terran listing) or Ghryne (if you called it by what its people were accustomed to calling it). I thought of it privately as MacTavish IV and referred to it publicly as Ghryne. It's the best of its kind, the only really decent place where Earthmen can get a gander at the other species of the universe. There was a lidless eye at the top of his head and five lidded ones, one above each arm. "Before we begin, I'll need certain information about—" "I am a being of Regulus II," came the grave, booming reply, even before I had picked up the blank. We needed a green Regulan in our show; the last one had quit four years ago. But just because we needed him didn't mean we had to be extravagant in hiring him. A Terraphile alien who goes to the extent of rechristening himself with a Terran monicker would work for nothing, or even pay us, just so long as we let him get to Earth. 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. Ghryne is in the heart of the Caledonia Cluster, where the interstellar crossroads meet. It was the isolationism of the late 29th 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.
 they did not like being turned down
 they did not like being turned down  they both desired a place in the zoo  they were unique creatures  they planned to kill the narrator if he refused them