The Second Fredric Brown Megapack by Fredric Brown

Author:Fredric Brown [Brown, Fredric]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Space Opera, Sci-Fi, Pulp fiction
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2014-02-06T18:30:00+00:00

AND THE GODS LAUGHED

You know how it is when you’re with a work crew on one of the asteroids. You’re there, stuck for the month you signed up for, with four other guys and nothing to do but talk. Space on the little tugs that you go in and return in, and live in while you’re there, is at such a premium that there isn’t room for a book or a magazine nor equipment for games. And you’re out of radio range except for the usual once-a-terrestrial-day, system-wide newscasts.

So talking is the only indoor sport you can go in for. Talking and listening. You’ve plenty of time for both because a work-day, in space-suits, is only four hours and that with four fifteen-minute back-to-the-ship rests.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that talk is cheap on one of those work crews. With most of the day to do nothing else, you listen to some real whoppers, stories that would make the old-time Liars Club back on Earth seem like Sunday-school meetings. And if your mind runs that way, you’ve got plenty of time to think up some yourself.

Charlie Dean was on our crew, and Charlie could tell some dillies. He’d been on Mars back in the old days when there was still trouble with the bolies, and when living on Mars was a lot like living on Earth back in the days of Indian fighting. The bolies thought and fought a lot like Amerinds, even though they were quadrupeds that looked like alligators on stilts—if you can picture an alligator on stilts—and used blow-guns instead of bows and arrows. Or was it crossbows that the Amerinds used against the colonists?

Anyway, Charlie’s just finished a whopper that was really too good for the first tryout of the trip. We’d just landed, you see, and were resting up from doing nothing en route, and usually the yarns start off easy and believable and don’t work up to real depth-of-space lying until along about the fourth week when everybody’s bored stiff.

“So we took this head bolie,” Charlie was ending up, “and you know what kind of flappy little ears they’ve got, and we put a couple of zircon-studded earrings in its ears and let it go, and back it went to the others, and then darned if—” Well, I won’t go on with Charlie’s yarn, because it hasn’t got anything to do with his story except that it brought earrings into the conversation.

Blake shook his head gloomily and then turned to me. He said, “Hank, what went on on Ganymede? You were on that ship that went out there a few months ago, weren’t you—the first one that got through? I’ve never read or heard much about that trip.”

“Me either,” Charlie said. “Except that the Ganymedeans turned out to be humanoid beings about four feet tall and didn’t wear a thing except earrings. Kind of immodest, wasn’t it?”

I grinned. “You wouldn’t have thought so if you’d seen the Ganymedeans. With them, it didn’t matter.

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