Moe looked alarmed. "Miss Perkins," he warned, "don't let him talk you into it."
"You shut your trap," snapped Gus. "She wants us to play games, don't she. Well, polo is a game. A nice, respectable game. Played in the best society."
"It wouldn't be no nice, respectable game the way you fellows would play it," predicted Moe. "It would turn into mass murder. Wouldn't be one of you who wouldn't be planning on getting even with someone else, once you got him in the open."
Miss Perkins gasped. "Why, I'm sure they wouldn't!"
"Of course we wouldn't," declared Gus, solemn as an owl.
"And that ain't all," said Moe, warming to the subject. "Those crates you guys got wouldn't last out the first chukker. Most of them would just naturally fall apart the first sharp turn they made. You can't play polo in ships tied up with haywire. Those broomsticks you ring-rats ride around on are so used to second rate fuel they'd split wide open first squirt of high test stuff you gave them."
The inner locks grated open and a man stepped through into the room.
"You're prejudiced," Gus told Moe. "You just don't like space polo, that is all. You ain't got no blueblood in you. We'll leave it up to this man here. We'll ask his opinion of it."
The man flipped back his helmet, revealing a head thatched by white hair and dominated by a pair of outsize spectacles.
"My opinion, sir," said Oliver Meek, "seldom amounts to much."