More slowly now, and with increasing grease, two more eggs passed. Then, after a labored pause of several minutes, a couple of chunks of odoriferous fecal matter and a seventh egg.

"You longtongued cuntlicker!" Plymouth exclaimed with admiration. "You packed an extra!"

"Going to shit for the record one of these trips," Clucker said, pleased.

"You sure got a voluminous intestine! Five's the best I can manage. I'm afraid of breakage. What if I took a jumpstep on the pass and they knocked together?"

"Occupational hazard," Clucker said, wincing. "I thought sure I'd cracked one, once, but I guess I hadn't, 'cause here I am today."

"But what's the point of it?" Prior demanded. "Cramming eggs into your ass!"

"Who the fuck is this turd?" Clucker inquired politely.

"Oubie sent him along. Says he got pekker-rolled."

"Oh—another dope who'd lose his cock every time if it wasn't screwed on! And it wasn't, eh?" He laughed unkindly. "But I s'pose if she speaks for him, must be hokay." He turned to Prior. "Hokay, you wanna know what's the fit, shit, I'll tell you. We pick 'em up on Beetlejuice VII and smuggle 'em past customs and take 'em through the pass. There's a fence here on Earth who retails 'em for the standard markup or more. Layers like us make good loot, long's we're careful. I figure to retire next year, if I don't bust an egg goin' for the record."

"Good money?" This always interested Prior.

"Thirteen seventy-five per eeg viable," Clucker said. "Makes ninety-six twenty-five this trip, my cut."

"Cut-cut-cut-daCU-U-UT!" Plymouth put in, sounding so perfectly like a cackling hen that Prior had to laugh. But he remained amazed.

"Almost fourteen dollars for an egg?"

"Thirteen hundred and seventy five dollars, sterling," Clucker said curtly. "Eegs ain't cheap."

Prior couldn't digest this figure, so he didn't try. "Where'd you say they came from?"

"Beetlejuice VII. You know, seventh habitable planet of Betelgeuse, the red giant. Long trip."

"I guess so. Just how far away is it? I thought the stars were several million miles."

"Several hundred quintillion miles," Clucker corrected him. "Give or take a decimal."

"Uh, sure." Prior regretted having made the inquiry.

" 'Bout 650 light years," Plymouth said helpfully. "Be 'un 'ell of a trip if we didn't use the pass."

" 'Ell of a trip," Prior echoed. He still didn't understand what was going on. "I didn't know we had space travel. From star to star, faster than light, I mean."

"I told you. We use the pass. Cuts it way down."

"You told me," Prior agreed. Some things he just wasn't fated to grasp.

"Any more due this week?" Clucker inquired. "Rhose Island Red tomorrow. That's all on the schedule, until the fence comes next week."

"Rhose Island Red, huh? Red's a good fuck. I like her." Until that last word, Prior had not been certain of the sex of Red.

"Yeah," Plymouth agreed. " 'Cept for the way she slips an extra eeg up her front hole."

"Whatsamatter with that? If I had a woman-hole, I'd use it too. Cop the record for sure!"

"Stretches her honeypot all outa shape. Got to wait a good hour 'fore it's tight. Anything I hate, it's a loose woman. 'How's the hunt, cunt?' I asks her, and she says 'Take yer pick, prick.' Then she's too loose for me to get a good lodging. And even after a day or so, she still ain't exactly in Oubie's league."

Prior perked up. "You Eggers have intercourse with Oubliette?"

"Huh?" Two blank stares.

"You know. Cohabitation."

Plymouth squinted at him suspiciously. "You a Communist?"

"Sex!" Prior yelled. "Did you ever screw her?"

"Whyinhell didn't you say so! Sure we fucked her. Never got to the bottom of that well, though; deepest dame you ever fingered."

"Course usually she's too busy," Clucker admitted. "So we leave her be unless she comes out here. Which she does, every month or so. Great gal!"

"Sometimes she hardly gets by the statues," Plymouth said, inspecting the last two eegs. "All tuckered and fuckered out, can't screw mor'n three-four times before she nods off, and once or twice after that."

"She spends time looking at the statues?" Did she find them as dismayingly fascinating as he had?

"Yeah, and they look at her!" Both men laughed crudely. Prior didn't get the point of the joke, so he ignored it.

"Hey, Cluck!" Plymouth called suddenly. "Listen here."

"What's the word, turd?"

"I think it's bad luck, fuck."

Cluck joined him at the incubator-nests. "Great flying shit and little blivets on the halfshell!" he cried. "One of 'em's pippin'!"

"That's night hatching!"

Clucker listened more carefully. "Not yet. The pips are still pretty far apart. Might be two days 'fore the shell breaks."

"But the fence ain't comin' for five days!"

"Thirteen seventy-five down the shittin' tube!" Clucker moaned. "We sure can't fence it."

They paced the floor gloomily. "That damned ET!" Clucker exclaimed. "Looked me up the nose with all three eyeballs and swore on his kingfeather those eegs were fresh! I'll piss a river down his windpipe!"

"That ET don't have a windpipe," Plymouth reminded him.

"He'll have a couple when I get through with him! It ain't just the cash. What if it'd hatched up my ass?"

"It's stuff like that, makes me think 'bout retirin' early."

"Early hatch—that's retirin' the hard way!"

They paced some more, in obvious distress. "Say," Plymouth said. "Oubie always wanted an eeg. You think—?"

"Hey, that's a real birdbrained notion!" From the tone, that was a compliment. "We owe her a lot. We'll give it to her!"

"Except neither one of us can take the chance of going to her place. If we got caught in realtime—"

"Fartin' cunts!" Clucker exclaimed, chagrined. "I forgot. She'll have to come here for it."

"Might not be time. If we miscalculated—"

"Yeah. Can't risk it. Not with her."

Then they both looked at Prior, struck by a common thought. "He's going back there anyway, and he's mundane," Plymouth said. "No timespace barrier."

"Sure, I can carry an egg to Oubliette," Prior said agreeably. He was glad for the pretext to get away from these odd, gutty, lowbrow, foulmouthed, foulassed, indecipherable men.

"Good enough," Clucker said, visibly relieved. "First thing in the mornin', we'll load you up and send you back. Be a real nice surprise for her."

Only as he drifted to sleep in the midst of a surprisingly comfortable bed of straw did Prior begin to wonder why, if it were so chancy for Oubliette to carry her eeg back before it hatched, it should be safe for him to do so. Was it because no one cared if he met calamity?

Chapter Fourteen

One detail they had neglected to mention. The eeg, in a delicate condition, had to be maintained at body temperature, kept in darkness, and insulated against all severe jostles. It could not be transported in any external basket.

Well, they knew how to handle that. Plymouth Rock held Prior down while Clucker pried apart his tensed buttocks and greased his rectum with a horny finger. Then Clucker dipped the eeg in tallow and then in slippery oil, and applied the narrow end to Prior's pursed sphincter. "Open up," he complained. "We got to slide it in without cracking."

"It hurts!" Prior protested, objecting on more than one level to the violation of his anus. "My operation—"

"Can't be helped. Just think of it as shittin' backwards. This ain't fairy stuff, now; this is an eeg." He rapped on Prior's lower spine with a calloused knuckle. Prior jumped—and in the moment his sphincter loosened, the eeg slurped in.

"Easy as bittin' a balky horse," Clucker said, satisfied.

"Work it around in there so it's comfortable," Plymouth remarked. "You don't want it down too close to the asshole, case you sit down hard or pop it out with a fart. Up around the curve of the gut is better."