Where are you, Mr. Biggs?

By NELSON S. BOND
That gangling frame, that easy, fluent grin—lost in the nameless depths of the crypts of space!
We're supposed to be an Earth-Mars lugger, but when we got to Mars Central spaceport, the bug-pounder there gave me this solar-gram from Terra. It said:
PROCEED URANUS IMMEDIATELY PICK UP CARGO GALLIUM.
So I shoved a frantic for the Old Man over the ship audio, and pretty soon he came lumbering up to my radio room, picking his teeth and scowling like a man with only a half a tummyfull of victuals.
It's a fine state of affairs, he snarled, when a skipper can't even finish his dinner in peace! Well, what's the matter now, Sparks? You seeing pink rhinoceroses again? 'Cause if you are—
Well, what's the matter now, Sparks? Seeing pink rhinoceroses again?
I'm not, I told him with quiet dignity, and they aren't pink rhinos, they're lavender lobsters, and anyway, I haven't had a drink for months. Or maybe it's since yesterday? Anyhow, here's the grief. And I gave him the wire.
He read it. Read it, your Aunt Nelly—he screamed it out loud.
Uranus! he bellowed. This crate make that trip? They must be stark, staring mad!
Them, I agreed, or me. Flip a coin. What shall I do, Skipper? Tell 'em we can't do it? Tell 'em—?
No, wait a minute. Cap Hanson's brow looked like a freshly ploughed field. I knew why. The Saturn is an old lugger. And by old, I do mean ancient. It was built before the turn of the century, and by all laws of logic and reason should have been taken off the spaceways long ago, only that Cap Hanson and our screwball First Mate, Lancelot Biggs, had demonstrated time and time again, and in startlingly devious ways, that the old scow was still spaceworthy.