Free Date Night on Union Station by E. M. Foner

for the exit. It wasn’t until he was in the corridor that he realized how relieved he was to be out of the room. A woman with a collapsible easel and a stack of posters, the first of which showed a large pie chart, was waiting in the hall.
    “Rough audience, huh?” she asked sympathetically. “What do you do?”
    “I’m a recycling, I mean, junk man.”
    “Oh, kids like stuff like that. Do you have a dog?”
    Joe nodded in the affirmative.
    “I wish we had a dog,” the woman continued mournfully. “I’m an economic historian. How am I going to explain monetary policy and fiat currency to kids who believe that barter is better?”
    The door slid open, a little girl came out, and she looked up and down the hall.
    “Where’s Daddy?” the girl asked the woman.
    “Daddy ran away,” her mother answered grimly, then she picked up her easel and followed her daughter into the room.

Eight
     
    Armed with twenty creds from petty cash, Kelly installed her nose plugs, snorted through them once or twice to activate the filters, and set off for the importers market. The embassy had recently been inundated by complaints from human merchants that the station was being flooded with counterfeit kitchen gadgets, and even worse, that they were junk. So not only were the legitimate merchants getting undercut on pricing, they were worried that Earth’s carefully nurtured brand value was being destroyed.
    The humans on Union Station referred to the importers market as the “Shuk”, after the famous Jerusalem market with its piles of goods and noisy, often aggressive, vendors. But the Shuk was probably the busiest meeting point for species that could tolerate the atmosphere on the deck, with or without the aid of filters, and human vendors occupied less than five percent of the floor area.
    There were no corridors or rooms in the Shuk. The deck was wide open except for the structural members, or spokes, that pierced the floor and ceiling at regular intervals on all of the decks. Food stalls were mixed in amongst the dry goods and vendors selling everything from clothing and rugs to advanced weaponry. But for the main part, the Shuk vendors specialized in selling imported goods from their home worlds to buyers from other species.
    Even the least observant visitor to the human area of the Shuk would quickly realize that the main products for sale were gadgets and games. As a backwards world only recently arrived on the galactic stage, Earth couldn’t export any high technology products, since they looked like crude antiques in comparison to the poorest offerings from the next world up the pecking order.
    But the galaxy was full of game players, and it turned out that human war games translated well to many cultures. And then there were the flashy kitchen gadgets, a phenomenon unique to Earth that had caught the eyes and imaginations of many species.
    Kelly heard that the most complicated and expensive gadgets had even started selling to aliens who didn’t eat, in any normal sense of the word. Some saw the gleaming stainless steel hardware with gears, spinning handles and pincers as a form of primitive artwork, others might have been purchasing can openers as torture devices. The important thing was that Earth had finally begun to move towards a more balanced trade, but it was being undermined by counterfeits.
    Kelly quickly located the stand of Peter Hadad, one of the Earth Merchants Council members who had attended the meeting at the embassy the previous week. Peter was the proprietor of Kitchen Kitsch, a sprawling collection of shelves and tables manned by his extended family, including at least one daughter who obviously shared his lung capacity.
    “Can openers, bottle openers, cork screws and juicers. That’s right, Kitchen Kitsch has them all at the best prices on the station. Did I say on the station? I meant in the galaxy. Come see the miraculous egg slicer in action, Kitchen Kitsch offers demonstrations every ten minutes