Rockabye, Grady
by DAVID MASON
Illustrated by TEMPLE
When on Pru'ut, you must do as the natives
do—and that includes dying as they do!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Infinity July 1957.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
On the charts, it's P-1345-AZ, and a thin blue line marked with cryptic letters indicates that a Mallor Lines cargo ship stops three times in each local year. The Guide will tell you a little more; that it's a small hot planet, covered with fern forests and swamps, and inhabited by one of the innumerable primate-human species of the universe. It was also inhabited, for a while, by one Terran, James Grady.
The natives call it Pru'ut, which, freely translated, means "the world." They refer to themselves as Kya, which means "people." James Grady, being a realist, called it the Mudhole, and added a descriptive adjective or two; but he did not find it nearly as unpleasant a place as a few others in which he had been in the course of forty years of wandering.
Pru'ut has no inclination, and only one season, which is rather like a rainy August on Earth. When Grady arrived, he stepped from the landing stage of the Mallor Lines' Berenice into six inches of gluey mud; the sun was seldom out long enough to harden the surface of Pru'ut.
"It's not an easy place," the departing agent, Jansen, told Grady. "Rain, and heat, and getting along with the locals."