"Why you old space-crawling—" Suddenly he looked around the table and saw the laughing faces of Tom, Roger, Astro, and Alfie.
"All right," he said, "but between your enlistment and your retirement, I'm going to make you polish every bit of brass on this space wagon, from the radar mast to the exhaust tubes!"
Shinny smiled his toothless smile and looked at Tom.
"Get the logbook, Tommy," he said. "This is official. I'm going to do something no other man in the entire history of the Solar Guard ever did before!"
"What's that, Mr. Shinny?" asked Tom with a smile.
"Enlist, serve time, and retire with a full pension, all on the same blasted spaceship, the Polaris!"
Transcriber’s Note
Typographical errors corrected:
- familarity changed to [familiarity]
- but's changed to [buts]
- word changed to [work]