ROCKET MAIL (Postage Due)
Mr. H. E. Horrocks
Dear Jellyhead:
What do you mean lucky? We are in jail.
Right after we got here, the boys decided they had been cramped in that local spaceship and needed a workout to limber up. As soon as they got started, they were surrounded by a bunch of scrawny males, all sniffing hollyhocks.
Their spokesman, a bald bird with rosebuds in his whiskers, touched me with a gold-headed cane and said that apparently we were not yet attuned to the high mental plane of the planetoid, and would we mind going into protective custody while they worked over our egos and cured our kineticism.
I said suppose we wouldn't. He looked shocked and waved his flower and said that then, although it had never happened before, he supposed he would have to call the space patrol and have us thrown into the hoosegow on Ganymede.
I translated that into basic wrestler for the boys and we agreed we'd better go along. We'd heard about the jail those tough space patrol babies operate on Ganymede.
The flower lovers took us to an old erydnium pit and asked us to please go down. Now they're perfuming us every hour and feeding us flower bulbs to make us gentle.
We could climb out of this rat-hole whenever we wanted, but that would be climbing straight into a striped spacesuit.