"I've worn myself thin," he yelled, "in all these years of service-" At that point I walked over and poked him in his big, fat stomach. Then I gathered my things together and walked out.
He puffed along behind me wanting to know what was the matter. "Gee, kid," he kept saying, "don't go home mad." 1 didn't say goodbye to him at all. A spider fell on him and it threw him into a hissy. The last I saw of him he was cursing the government because they hadn't sent him an exterminator.
Well, Prue, so much for the bogey man. Time travel in the …i raw'
Dear Mom:
Ancient Crete was nothing but politics,
You didn't have a single cause to worry.
Just as particular about girls as you are.
Love,
Laura
Monday not a bit exciting.
These people are
Love,
Laura
Dear Mr. Detbert Barnes:
Stop calling me or 1 will complain to your boss. You cad- I see it all now. You and your fine talk about how your Agency "fully protects its clients." That's a very high-sounding name for it. Tell me, how many girls do you talk into going to ancient Crete? And do you provide all of them with the same kind of insurance? Mr. Barnes, I don*t want any more insurance from you. But I'm going to send you a client for that trip-the baggiest old maid I know. She has buck teeth and whiskers. Insure her.
Laura
P.S. Just in case you're feeling smug about me, put this in your pipe and smoke it. The Minotaur knew, I can't imagine how, but you, Mr. Barnes, are no Minotaur.
Pegascis
One of the most enduring dreams of human beings is to fly. Ail sorts of spirits and monsters were pictured with wings, since flying seemed an obvious attribute of supernatural beings. In addition, there were various ways of enabling human beings toffy-flying carpets, for instance, are common in the stories included in The Arabian Nights."
The ancient Greeks came up with the most attractive of all flying creatures-Pegasus, the divine and immortal winged horse. The thought of a flying horse may well have arisen from the wonder of horseless human beings at the speed with which a horseman could cover the ground. To a man going no faster than an oxcart will carry him, the racing horse might as well have been flying.
Pegasus was supposed to have been born of the blood of the severed head of Medusa, the gorgon killed by the Greek hero Perseus. Another Greek hero, Bellerophon, rode Pegasus during the task of killing the chimera, and later in wars against the Amazons. Still later, Bellerophon tried to use Pegasus to scale Olympus, the home of the gods, but was thrown and badly hurt as punishment for this blasphemous attempt.
In later myths, Pegasus was associated with poetic inspiration. After all, the poet's fancy lifts him to the skies (so to speak) as though he were riding a flying horse. Pegasus was supposed to have landed on Mount Helicon near Thebes, and his hoof dug out a hollow from which emerged a spring called the Hippocrene (''fountain of the horse"). which was a legendary source of poetic inspiration.
It's almost a shame to have to point out that musclepowered wings could not support the weight of a man, let alone that of a horse. The following story, however, tackles that impossibility.
The Triumph Of Pegascis
by F.A. Javor
It was working out beautifully, just beautifully, and if Colin Hall had been a less dedicated young man he would have been rubbing his capable hands together and perhaps even pounding his equally young but no-so-sedate partner, Ed West, on his ample back.
Their entry in the jumper division of the horse show, Ato's Pride, so named from the initial letters of their fledgling company's name. Animals to Order, a gleaming black stallion with four perfectly matched white stockings and a diamondshaped blaze on his forehead, was just being led to the edge of the obstacle-planted ring and the roar of the crowd's approval was hackle-raising.
Instinctively Colin's eyes flew to the six-inch screen he*d jerry-rigged to monitor a select few bits of the information being sent by the dozens of micro-transmitters implanted under the skin, adjoining the organs, the nerves, even sampling the bloodstream of the animal waiting to go through its paces below them.
Information being transmitted and recorded on me slowly turning tapes to be fed later into the University's computer if they, he and Ed, wanted a more complete analysis and, more to the point, if they could scrape together the necessary service fee.
But me complex and shifting pattern of light on the jerryrigged screen, small though its sampling was, was enough to let Colin know how their animal was taking to what was by far the largest massing of people he'd ever been exposed to.
An emotional crowd that this, perhaps the greatest of the year's shows, never failed to attract.
A little loo much salivating… pain response a little high.
I told that rider he had a tender mouth. But all in all, Ato's Pride was taking this crowd's adulation as much in stride as he had that of the smaller shows around the country they'd had to enter him in to garner enough first ribbons to-allow him to qualify for this particular show.
This show that he and Ed had finally decided to aim at in a mixture of hope and desperation. Then the grinding press of work and doing without, in which the gingerly placing into its embryo tank of the cell that was to grow into the magnificent animal below them was almost an anticlimax.
An anticlimax to the arduous task of mapping its gene pattern and to the planning and the tailoring of the solutions that were to be so delicately, so precisely metered to it, but only a beginning of their gamble to save Animals to Order. their two-man partnership that gave promise but only of dying in the womb.
He had plucked the salmon-colored bank notice from the pile of due-chits that had just fallen from the vac-tube beside their office door.
"A lethal gene," he said wryly to Ed, sitting at what they'd hoped would be the desk of the receptionist they'd never been able to afford, straightening and rebending a paper clip. "A lethal gene. A fatal deficiency in the customerforming enzyme."
"I've been thinking about that," Ed said, his face deadly serious for once. "Animals to Order is basically a sound idea, but I think our trouble lies in the fact that nobody knows we're alive." He clenched his fist. "If we could only advertise."
The wryness in Colin's smile deepened. "It isn't ethical,'* Ed flung down his paper clip. "It isn't ethical," he parroted. "So we sit around and wait for recognition to come to us, and meanwhile we starve."
His voice went up a notch. "Ten seconds. Ten lousy seconds in the middle of somebody else's vid-cast. Ten lousy seconds."
"Relax," Colin said. "We couldn't scrape together the cash now even if we could advertise. Our equipment…"
Ed waved a hand. "You don't have to tell me how much the rental on our equipment is costing us- I signed the papers with you, remember?"
He stopped short and rubbed the back of his neck with his palm. "I'm sorry, Colin," he said. "I don't mean to snarl at you but it riles me. We've got a potentially great service here and the rules of our game make it something dirty for professional people like us to go out and holler in the crossroads for people to come buy it."
Ed held up a finger and went on talking. "One order. One solitary order all the while we've been in business. It'd gripe anybody.'* It was true. Although they'd been open for half a year, their business had produced little more than inquiries like the tentative one from a physician who was hoping they'd run across an enzyme, an acid, anything that might make the cells of an arm stump de-differentiate and then re-differentiate and grow to restore the amputated limb.