And so it was decided.
Exactly as we had planned.
There was an amphitheater which the inhabitants of Eros had been using for ballets, string quartets and lectures by such of the longhairs as got stuffed so full of long words that they couldn't keep them to themselves. I had ringposts and ropes set up on the platform, saying I needed them to illustrate my talk. I got into the ring with Gorgeous Gordon and Zbich, who were dressed in trunks and bathrobes.
The wit and beauty of Eros was assembled there, the beauty being represented by the girls, and the wit—such as it was—by the council of elders. The rest of the seats were filled with other forms, some of them tolerably easy to look at.
I had picked out the subject of anatomy in the belief that none of the inhabitants of Eros knew anything about it.
The men didn't notice and the women had nothing at all to look at, anyway.
I went into my act.
"Kind hosts, friends and unfortunate incidents," I said. "My topic is the science of anatomy. Now, the science of anatomy is copacetic to the point of mopery. The cerebellum is distended and the duodenum goes into a state of e pluribus unum. Incalculably, thrombosis registers and the ectoplasm becomes elliptic. Or, in the vernacular, the eight ball in the side pocket."
The crowd sat stunned. Here and there, a flower sniffer looked down at his own rack of bones to check my statement.
"Let me illustrate," I said. I drew the bathrobes off the wrestlers.