 What hit the narrator?
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. I thought of it privately as MacTavish IV and referred to it publicly as Ghryne. J. F. Corrigan will hold interviews in person on Ghryne from Thirdday to Fifthday of Tenmonth. His last visit to the Caledonia Cluster until 2937, so don't miss your chance! Broadsides like that, distributed wholesale in half a thousand languages, always bring them running. 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. I throttled my exclamation of surprise, concealing it behind a quick cough. The being closed his eyes and toddled around in a 360-degree rotation, remaining in place. "My Regulan name no longer matters. The spherical creature clapped his hands in joy, three hands clapping on one side, two on the other. He was followed by a roly-poly blue-skinned humanoid from Donovan's Planet, four feet high and five hundred pounds heavy. I passed him along to Auchinleck to sign at anything short of top rate. 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. 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. Every alien wants to see Earth once in his lifetime, and there's only one way he can do it. 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. I took a long close look at the life-form when it came in, and after that I took another one. Zero, in fact.
 Gorb
 the Stortulian's gun  the wall  a Ghrynian policeman  Gorb