Lancelot Biggs cooks a pirate

By NELSON S. BOND
Cooking, explained Biggs, is simply a matter of chemistry. But he didn't expect that he'd have to prove that statement!
The whole trouble started with Slops. Slops wasn't a bad cook, you understand. He just wasn't a cook at all, rightly speaking. He had what you might call a tapioca complex. It was tapioca for breakfast, tapioca for lunch, tapioca for dinner. Every day. Boiled tapioca, stewed tapioca, even fricasseed tapioca—
Ugh! When you hop gravs twice a month on a lugger shuttling between Earth and Venus, you can't get by forever on a diet of ta—that stuff!
Anyhow, it finally got to be too much for even an iron-bellied old spacedog like Cap Hanson. So when we pulled into the Sun City airport, Cap said firmly, You're through, Slops. And I do mean through! And he kicked our (alleged) chef off the Saturn , along with his clothing, his back pay, his harmonica and his ta—you know what.
Which left us way out on the end of a limb, for it turned out that there wasn't a single spaceriding cook dry-docked in Sun City. While the Saturn was taking on its cargo for Earth, pepsin and medical supplies, mostly, with one or two holds full of mekel and clab , the Skipper did his doggonedest to scare up a grub-wrangler. But no soap.
An hour before we were scheduled to blast off, he ambled up to my control turret. He plumped himself into my easy chair and scratched his gray pate nervously.
Damn it, Sparks, he complained, I thought I was doin' the right thing when I fired Slops, but—
You were, I told him. By chucking that grease-ball off the ship you saved fourteen lives. The crew. They were planning on either mutiny or murder, they didn't care which, if they had to eat one more dish of that goo.
But, he continued worriedly, in another hour we throw lugs for Earth. And we don't have no cook. What the blue space are we goin' to do?
Our First Mate, Lancelot Biggs, had entered as the skipper was talking. Now he offered, helpfully, I'll ask Slops to come back if you want me to, Captain. I saw him at the Palace Bar—