The casting was the most spectacular stage. Dillingham had decided to use gold, though he worried that its high specific gravity would overbalance the Gleep jaw. It was impossible under present conditions to arrange for a gold-plated, matching-density filling, and he was not familiar enough with other metals to be sure they were adaptable to his purpose. The expansion coefficient of his investment matched that of gold exactly, for example; anything else would solidify into the wrong size.
Gold, at any rate, was nothing to the muckamuck; his people refined it through their gills, extracting it from the surrounding water on order in any quantity.
The crucible arrived: a self-propelled boilerlike affair. They piled hundred-pound ingots of precise gold alloy into the hopper, while the volcanic innards of the crucible rumbled and belched and melted everything to rich bright liquid.
A line of Enens carried the smaller investments, which were shaped inside exactly like the original impressions, to the spigot and held them with tongs while the fluid fortune poured in. These were carefully deposited in the vat, now filled with cold water.
The last cast, of course, was the colossal vat-shaped one. This was simply propped up under the spigot while the tired crew kept feeding in ingots.
By the time this cast had been poured, twenty-four tons of gold had been used in all.
While the largest chunk was being hauled to the ocean inside the front of the mouth, Dillingham broke open the smaller investments and laid out the casts according to his chart of the cavity. He gave each a minimum of finishing; on so gross a scale, it could hardly make much difference.
The finished casts weighed more than twenty times as much as the original colloid impressions had, and even the smallest ones were distinctly awkward to maneuver into place. He marked them, checked off their positions on his chart, and had the Enens ferry them up with the derrick. At the other end, he manhandled each into its proper place, verified its fit and position and withdrew it to paint it with cement. No part of this filling would come loose in action.
Once again the branching cavern lost its projections, this time permanently, as each segment was secured and severed from its projecting sprue. He kept the sprues—the handles of gold, the shape of the original plastic handles—on until the end, because otherwise there would have been no purchase on the weighty casts. He had to have some handle to adjust them.
The derrick lowered the crevice-piece into the cavity. Two Enens pried it in with power crowbars. Dillingham stood by and squirted cement over the mass as it slid reluctantly into the hole.
It was necessary to attach a heavy weight to the derrick-hook and swing it repeatedly against the four-ton cast in order to tamp it in all the way.
At last it was time for the major assembly. Nineteen tons of gold descended slowly into the hole while they dumped quarts of liquid cement into a pool below. The cast touched bottom and settled into place, while the cement bubbled up around the edges and overflowed.
They danced a little jig on top of the filling—just to tamp it in properly, Dillingham told himself, wishing that a fraction of its value in Earth terms could be credited to his purchase-price. The job was over.
"A commendable performance," the high muckamuck said. "My son is frisking about in his pen like a regular tadpole and eating well."
Dillingham remembered what he had seen during the walk along the occlusive surfaces. "I'm afraid he won't be frisking long. In another year or two he'll be feeling half a dozen other caries. Decay is rampant."
"You mean this will happen again?" The tentacles waved so violently that the transcoder stuttered.
Dillingham decided to take the fish by the tail. "Are you still trying to tell me that no member of your species has suffered dental caries before this time?"
"Never."
This still did not make sense. "Does your son's diet differ in any important respect from yours, or from that of other children?"
"My son is a prince!"
"Meaning he can eat whatever he wants, whether it is good for him or not?"
The Gleep paused. "He gets so upset if he doesn't have his way. He's only a baby—hardly three centuries old."
Dillingham was getting used to differing standards. "Do you feed him delicacies—refined foods?"
"Naturally. Nothing but the best."
He sighed. "Muckamuck, my people also had perfect teeth—until they began consuming sweets and overly refined foods. Then dental caries became the most common disease among them. You're going to have to curb your boy's appetite."
"I couldn't." He could almost read the agitation of the tentacles without benefit of translation. "He'd throw a terrible tantrum."
He had expected this reaction. He'd encountered it many times on Earth. "In that case, you'd better begin training a crew of dentists. Your son will require constant attention."
"But we can't do such work ourselves. We have no suitable appendages, externally."
"Import some dentists, then. You have no alternative."
The creature signaled a sigh. "You make a convincing case." The tentacles relaxed while it thought. Suddenly they came alive again. "Enen—it seems we need a permanent technician. Will you sell us this one?"
Dillingham gaped, horrified at the thought of all that garbage in the patient's jaw. Surely they couldn't—
"Sell him!" the Enen chief replied angrily. Dillingham wondered how he was able to understand the words, then realized that his transcoder was picking up the Gleep signals translated by the other machine. From Enen to Gleep to English, via paired machines. Why hadn't he thought of that before?
"This is a human being," the Enen continued indignantly. "A member of an intelligent species dwelling far across the galaxy. He is the only exodontist in this entire sector of space, and a fine upstanding fellow at that. How dare you make such a crass suggestion!"
Bless him! Dillingham had always suspected that his hosts were basically creatures of principle.
"We're prepared to offer a full ton of superlative-grade frumpstiggle..." the muckamuck said enticingly.
"A full ton?" The Enens were aghast. Then, recovering, "True, the Earthman has taught us practically all he knows. We could probably get along without him now..."
"Now wait a minute!" Dillingham shouted; but the bargaining continued unabated.
After all—what is the value of a man, compared to frumpstiggle?
BEAK BY BEAK
For a time we had parakeets, starting with Cinnamon, passed along to us by my wife's sister. Naturally our second was Nutmeg, and then Clove, and Ginger, Saffron and Angelica—a pretty spicy flock. We constructed a cage a yard across so they could fly, as they weren't hand-tame and we felt they should have some reasonable freedom. We liked them very well; each bird had his/her personality. Then they started dying—heart-attack, tumor, the same ailments mankind suffers. We could do nothing, and it tore us up. When the last one passed on, after several years, we didn't get any more. So I wrote this story, and my heart is in it though it is all fiction. And the editor changed my spelling of "parakeet" to "parrakeet." Apparently he just assumed my spelling was wrong.
The red bird was perched fetchingly on the mailbox as Humbert ambled out in slippers and tousled iron hair to pick up the morning newspaper. A gust of wind blew the front door open behind him, and a squawk came from inside.