The Science Fiction anthology - Andre Norton

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he said. It seems he had had a book once and chewed up the first three chapters before he found put it wasn’t something to eat.

      I signaled to the boys. Zbich clamped a headlock on him. The Choker got a hammerlock. The Gorilla Man took him in a scissors. Gorgeous Gordon got a toehold and Barefoot Charley stood by to jump on his stomach.

      “Do you understand now?” I asked politely.

      “Sure, Jed, sure,” said the Faceless Wonder. “Why didn’t ya explain it to me in the first place?”

      So the next morning, we yelled for books. And for the following days, whenever anybody was around, we were busy sniffing flowers and reading. Between times, I tried to explain to the wrestlers why there weren’t more pictures in the books.

      A week later, we sprang the trap. I told the stablehand who brought us our fodder that I had taken in so much culture that I was breathing beauty. Zbich, gagging a little, asked for a second helping of flower roots. Gorgeous Gordon requested a needle and thread; he said he had fallen behind in his needlepoint.

      A report of the conversation got to the council of elders and it brought them to the lip of the pit, looking like something the glue factory had refused to accept. Aliana was with them.

      I bowed from the waist and made a speech. I thanked the elders for showing me the error of my ways. I said that, after staying in the lovely erydnium pit, I was enraptured with flowers, crazy about culture and practically engaged in five dimension calculus. I asked that I and the boys could have the priceless boon of walking freely around Eros, swapping beautiful thoughts with the local yokels.

      The elders went into a deep state of flutter. Most of them were for accepting our proposition out of hand—which was bad. Our old pal with the beard saved us.

      “But I saw these men romping,” he shrilled. He lowered his voice to a high alto. “Positively romping!”

      “Perhaps these men could prove their sincerity,” Aliana said, winking at me. “Perhaps one of them would consent to illustrate what he has learned here by giving a public talk on some scientific subject.”

      “I should be glad,” I answered, “to hack off a lecture for the good folk of Eros. Suppose I give it on anatomy.”

      And so it was decided.

      Exactly as we had planned.

      There was an amphitheater which the inhabitants of Eros had been using for ballets, string quartets and lectures by such of the longhairs as got stuffed so full of long words that they couldn’t keep them to themselves. I had ringposts and ropes set up on the platform, saying I needed them to illustrate my talk. I got into the ring with Gorgeous Gordon and Zbich, who were dressed in trunks and bathrobes.

      The wit and beauty of Eros was assembled there, the beauty being represented by the girls, and the wit—such as it was—by the council of elders. The rest of the seats were filled with other forms, some of them tolerably easy to look at.

      I had picked out the subject of anatomy in the belief that none of the inhabitants of Eros knew anything about it.

      The men didn’t notice and the women had nothing at all to look at, anyway.

      I went into my act.

      “Kind hosts, friends and unfortunate incidents,” I said. “My topic is the science of anatomy. Now, the science of anatomy is copacetic to the point of mopery. The cerebellum is distended and the duodenum goes into a state of e pluribus unum. Incalculably, thrombosis registers and the ectoplasm becomes elliptic. Or, in the vernacular, the eight ball in the side pocket.”

      The crowd sat stunned. Here and there, a flower sniffer looked down at his own rack of bones to check my statement.

      “Let me illustrate,” I said. I drew the bathrobes off the wrestlers.

      The boys’ muscles rippled as they strutted around the ring. From the women spectators came a long, deep sigh. From that moment, we had half the audience with us—the female half.

      “In anatomy,” I said, shaking my finger to emphasize the point, “the wingback shifts outward for a lateral. In the words of the great philosopher Hypocritus, the coil should always be kept clean between the barrel and the tap and all excess collar should be removed with a spatula.”

      Nobody was listening to me; they were looking at the wrestlers, which, of course, was what I’d figured on. Most of the men were comparing the grunters’ muscles to their own, and here and there a few were dropping their flowers onto the floor.

      I signaled and in a second the boys were an omelet of flying legs. The crowd gasped, then leaned forward intently. The shrieking began when Gordon got a headlock on Zbich. It grew when Zbich flipped Gorgeous with a flying mare. By the time Gordon got in a billygoat butt, the amphitheater sounded like feeding time at the zoo.

      But there was another sound, too. Old Whiskers was tottering down the aisle, shrieking, “This is romping! Mere romping!”

      I signaled and the boys stopped.

      “We need a third man to illustrate the next point,” I said. “Perhaps the gentleman in the aisle will volunteer.”

      Two wrestlers grabbed Old Whiskers and tossed him into the ring. Making fast double talk, I took off his shirt and he stood there, stripped to the waist, blinking in the sun and looking like a dehydrated squab.

      The crowd noted the contrast between his scrawniness and the muscles of the wrestlers. A roar of laughter swept it.

      “Perhaps,” I said, “the gentleman would like to romp.”

      Zbich made a grab for him and he scuttled out of the ring, falling over the lower rope. A woman in the first row slugged him with a gardenia.

      “Sit down, you old fool!” She turned to the wrestlers. “Break it off!” she shouted.

      The match went on.

      In my career, including my medicine show days, I’ve had lots of easy marks, but nothing to compare to the crowd at Eros’ first wrestling match. When Gorgeous took the first fall with a body scissors, they went mad; when Zbich evened it up, they went hysterical; when Zbich took the deciding fall, they were delirious. And at the end of the match between Choker Jonas and the Faceless Wonder, they were reduced to a jelly. We had to call off the third match for fear we would have to take them home in jars.

      At the end, we went in a body, led by the wrestlers, and threw the council of elders into the erydnium pit. We are keeping them now on a diet of raw meat.

      The amphitheater has been converted into a permanent wrestling arena. We’ve laid out a football and a baseball field in the lyceum grove, and next week we’ll start turning the botanical garden into a golf course.

      To carry out the full program, we shall have to buy some equipment and hire some talent. Whether we toss some of the business to Interplanetary depends, Hankus boy, entirely on what attitude Interplanetary takes toward you know who.

      When you write your crawling letter, you worm, address me as “Your Mightiness.” I am minister of athletics on Eros now and the second most important person on the planetoid.

      My work takes me close to the Princess Aliana. Very close.

      Come to think of it, I wish there was a moon on Eros. It’s not essential, but it helps.

      So long, peasant.

      JED

      Barnhart sauntered right into the middle of them. He covertly watched the crew close in around him and he never twitched an eyelash. Officers must never panic, he reminded himself, and manipulated the morning sighting on the nearest sun through the Fitzgerald lens. It was exactly 900:25:30, Galactic Time.

      He jotted the reading in, satisfied. The warm breath tickling the back of his neck was unnerving. If he showed fear and grabbed a blaster from the locker he could

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